Conceptual Metaphor Theory

[dr_mabeuse]

But words are symbols. And pictures can be symbols. Interchangeable surely? What else do we do when writing if not create pictures?

And it does work as written.

As the two bunk cabin plunged into darkness and their clawing passion rose the train penetrated the underground Stygian depths with electric speed.

Symbolic yes but easily metaphorical pron without the vulgar words.

Back to the AI.

This is from the subjective view that I've only ever used a smattering of 'high level' programming (basic on a Speccy*) but when 'modelling' an intelligence it seems to me that each part of a thinking machine is attached to relevant parts of the interior. A camera is attached to a display card, because the display card is what handles images as is the dvd player. The cd player is attached to the sound card for similar reasons. (Yes the DVD player plays sounds too which are also handled by the display card but you get my meaning)

But the brain (as far as I know) takes different parts from the input and scatters them about. The prime example I suppose being smell. Smells make pictures in the human mind. Pictures can re-create smells. And smells are deeply associated with words or symbols.

So we can take onions and get words, pictures, smells and textures but then we can also get events. Events are stories in themselves. An onion smell doesn't just remind us of onions it can create projection (which is what makes the human brain unique) and we can extrapolate sitting down in MacDonalds with our partner and kids anticipating the movie we are going to watch later from the word 'onion'.

*Spectrum 48k with the rubber keyboard and hardwired OS.

Seneory bleedover is known as synesthesia. When it's severe, it's a handicap: sufferers see sounds, hear smells, taste tactile sensationsm and it can make normal life a nightmare (see my unfinished novel "The Adventures of Lucky Ace") The link is though the happen through the amygdala, an ancient little almond-shapend wad of brain that's in charge of producing "emotionally-charged-memory". Apprently at one time that's what all memeories were, just emotiona-memories: tiger-stripe=fear, food-color=joy. Now we're more sophisticated and we can remember less important stuff but the amygdala stiff marks important events with shots of emotion to let us know they were important and somehow information passes over these emotional bridges.

OLiver Sachs (& if you're interested in this brain stuff, go check out any of his books. He's great), the neurologist-author writes about a man who suffered from synesthesthesia so severe that he had to leave a Beethoven concert because the colors of the music made him nauseous.

 

[xssve]

As the two bunk cabin plunged into darkness and their clawing passion rose the train penetrated the underground Stygian depths with electric speed.

Hmmm... perhaps, I'm not entirely sold, however, it may be subjective, I'm too literal minded to appreciate most poetry. I'll have to try and remember any examples of this I've seen.

Yes, words are symbols, but words and images are processed by different parts of the brain before they trigger the symbol, perhaps why I find the above formulation more jarring than erotic - I just don't think the fade out, or cut to shots work very well in literature - film has an entire vocabulary of it's own, mixing metaphors like this.

There are some analogs, but they work differently - in film, you might do a long crane shot (or birds eye), which depending, can convey remoteness and objectivity, i.e., it can reduce sympathy for a given actor, allow us to see him or her objectively, or it can be simply an establishing shot, walking along a quay, etc., depending on the cut.

In literature, you might do the same thing by detachedly describing a character as they walk along a quay, then cut to an intimate conversation with another character - this is a common scene in a spy film, the remoteness of the establishing shot contrasts with the sudden cut to a tense exchange between two characters - often the cut will be to a worms eye shot, which can be used to increase the threatening aspect of the characters, etc., and you can do the rough equivilent in prose, Dostoevsky liked to do something of the sort, a remote, almost humerous dissection of his characters frailties as they negotiate some scene.

But none of these things really use mixed literary/visual metaphors like that, generally the metaphors are more straightforeward: "hawklike nose", "Apelike strength" or whatever metaphor Bronté used for Heathcliff - the sort of symbolic displacement we're discussing is more common in poetry I'm thinking, ubiquitous in modern poetry one might even venture, but certainly a technique worth exploring.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Gather it, Baby! Gather it!

A little don't-break-your-arm-slapping-yourself-on-the-back-here: I was first turned on to this Conceptual Metaphor Theory by an English Grad Student who was doing her thesis on "Desire" and wrote me to tell me that my stories contained more metaphors for orgasms than any other author she'd seen, specifically (a bit embarrassed now) in what my boorish men would yell to their female partners to encourage the women to climax.

The things the men said included things like: "Get it, Get on it, Get it for me, Give it to me, Do it for me, Do it on me, Do it with me, Do it to me, Fuck it, Fuck it out for me, Reach it, Go for it, On me. All over me, Push it, Shove it, Squeeze it, [nd my all-time favorite] (Oh God, do I have to?) "Go ahead, kill me with it! I don't fucking care!"

No, but (ahem) - it is interesting in that you can see how each of those terms implies that the woman achieves or reaches her orgasm through a different mechanism or in a different way, It's something she has to reach for, or grab at or seize, or take; something she pushes out, or gives, something she can kill with, They're all a long way from "Come for me!"

The girl also pointed out through some Latin root (no jokes) one of the terms that could also be used would be to "gather" your orgasm: "Come on, baby! Gather it! Gather that come for me! Gather it!"

Sounds pretty silly at first, but when you think of it, isn't that what it's like? Collecting those sensations from all over your body and focusing them on that one spot?

You see how important this stuff is, people? Here we might have be able to give people a new way of experiencing sex, just through the use of a words, through the creation of a new metaphor. Who in the world is doing work as important as that?

 

[BlackShanglan]

For some reason I have a weak spot for "bring me home" as an incitement from a partner near orgasm. Must be the romantic in me; it's not terribly body-focused or sensation-focused, but I like it.

(Edited to add the "not" that makes a considerable difference in meaning. )

 

[impressive]

For some reason I have a weak spot for "bring me home" as an incitement from a partner near orgasm. Must be the romantic in me; it's terribly body-focused or sensation-focused, but I like it.

"Let it go!" is what I use most often.

 

[BlackShanglan]

"Let it go!" is what I use most often.

I'm sure that there must be some deep, hidden meaning in the fact that your metaphor seems to evoke explosion outwards and mine reception inwards. I wish I knew what the devil it was.

 

[impressive]

I'm sure that there must be some deep, hidden meaning in the fact that your metaphor seems to evoke explosion outwards and mine reception inwards. I wish I knew what the devil it was.

Explosion ... or escape.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Explosion ... or escape.

What a fascinating illustration of Dr. M's point - that the same essential movement (out and away) becomes an entirely different thing depending on the metaphor used to describe it. Explosion and eruption seem to be powerful, and escape (to me) more sorrowful and soft.

 

[xssve]

True, the metaphorical image of a woman is like a flower: water her and she opens up and blossoms, wheras men are more inclined to "take" their pleasure, which is a direct metaphor for the aggressive act of penetration, wheras in practice, women "take" their orgasms as directly as a man - I recall vividly a description in Hardy's Jude the Obscure where he describes the vagina a "beak" - at least I read that somewhere, I cant seem to find the passage in the online text - but it does remind me of a woman trying to take an orgasm, angling the pelvis back so the pubic bone grinds against the base of the penis - one girlfreind almost broke it off, I swear.

Anyway, perhaps not exactly the same thing, but a far cry from the passive penetratee of romantic imagination.

 

[Pure]

one surprising metaphor i heard from a partner was 'did you go off?'-- like a gun, i suppose.

interesting variation from "come" or in french "j'arrive" [=i'm coming]

 

[lisa123414]

Thank you, Dr. Mabeuse. As always, your threads are so thought provoking. It all makes me wonder, about the written vice spoken word. What we write can be rewritten many times in order to transform a basic outline into a work of art*. In day to day life, most communication is spoken. The discourse in this forum has more of the flavor of the spoken word, although of course it is written.

Interesting also, the real things blurted out during sex. Certainly, they are more carefully thought out and chosen in fiction than what might be said in the heat of the moment. Perhaps the writer, or reader, of erotica has a great advantage in bed, because he or she has thought about these words and recognizes their importance.

I know I am digressing all the more, but feel a discussion of passion evoked by words would not be complete without the mention of music. The gangly awkward teenager screaming his passion on a stage, to music, evokes the scenes of screaming women literally in tears, some perhaps orgasming (is that a word?), witnessing the Beatles in the early 60’s. Also, there is the deep voiced crooning encouragement of many songs written about seduction and making love.

Keep creating those metaphors! I love them, don't stop!


*In rereading this, I feel the need to mention that for some of us, myself included, no amount of rewriting will produce art, but only a more technically correct version.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Keep creating those metaphors! I love them, don't stop!

Thinking iof the extended metaphors I've used to describe orgasms themselves.

For men, they're always explosive, of course, eruptive, eructive, volcanos, geysers, guns and artillery... must be more, bt I'd rather thing of the

Female: Here I tend towards more elaborate things. Women who've commented on my descriptions tell me I'm often way the hell off base, but I di a lot with toppling waves and walls, going over waterfalls, falling, exploding, shattering, riding wild horses, being consumed by fires, electricity, flowering (lots of plants) gushing (lots of hydraulics. In fact my women manifest some remarkable hydraulic and energetic properties during orgasm)... No wind though. You don't want any wind blowing around there, metaphorical or not.Gives the wrng idea.

*In rereading this, I feel the need to mention that for some of us, myself included, no amount of rewriting will produce art, but only a more technically correct version.

 

[impressive]

In fact my women manifest some remarkable hydraulic and energetic properties during orgasm)... No wind though. You don't want any wind blowing around there, metaphorical or not.Gives the wrng idea.

BWAH!

 

[BlackShanglan]

"I'm sorry, darling, but not tonight. I have a touch of metaphorical wind."

 

[rgraham666]

"I'm sorry, darling, but not tonight. I have a touch of metaphorical wind."

That'll kill the mood, fer sure.

 

[shereads]

I am so full of shit.

Shit must be the single most useful word in the English language. Lord Byron, were he alive today, would occasionally blurt out, "Well, shit." Why, then, does the Predictive Text program on my cell phone default to the word "shiv?"

[/threadjack]

A metaphor happened to me.

I keep a few pots of milkweed in the garden for monarch butterflies, whose caterpillars eat the plants all the way down to the toughest part of the stem. In the years since I've been doing this, I've seen monarchs at every life-stage but one: the mysterious hours of transformation from caterpillar to crysallis.

Yesterday, I happened to see that for the first time. Pupation, they call it. It looked disturbingly painful. Lots of writhing and struggling, like something out of a Vincent Price movie. What had been a sturdy little creature with no natural enemies and nothing to do but eat, nap and shiv, had had enough of that life and crawled away to hang itself. Now it was in the grip of violent spasms as its outer skin transformed into a too-tight container, with used caterpillar parts being squeezed out the top.

Poor bastard. It seemed to be fighting for its life, and losing. The enemy was its future self.

It was as terrible to see as the end result will be wonderful. I've been fortunate to see the first flight, more than once, of monarch butterflies hatched in my garden. It always seems to happen by accident, as a breeze catches hold of the untried wings and lifts the startled creature off its perch. (If you listen closely, you can almost hear it squeak, "Holy shiv!" And "Where the hell are my legs?")

Then - unless a lizard snatches it up before it clears the shrubbery (unlike monarch caterpillars, whose milkweed diet makes them poisonous to predators, butterflies are prey animals) - there comes a moment when it ceases to struggle and begins to soar. You can't help thinking, It knows it flies.

Now it will dine on nectar, meet babes, have sex, deposit its progeny on the nearest milkweed bush, and fly to Mexico for the international convention. By its presence, it will transform ugly places into pieces of a garden. People will see it and smile; private smiles, heartfelt and affecting.

It will live briefly, but splendidly.

I already knew that part. What I didn't know was that something terrible has to happen first.

Now my head is full of metaphors. Questions, too. I'm dividing the human race into caterpillars and butterflies. And wondering how many of us, if we were offered the choice, would give up the caterpillar's fat, simple life and undergo the torture of metamorphosis, to be briefly spectacular.

 

[CharleyH]

Conceptual Metaphor Theory comes out of the science of Neurolinguistics, which itself is a product mostly of AI and looks at how language shapes and is shaped by the mind. It now seems that language is not a product of intelligence but is an integral part of intelligence. (In this case, language is defined as the assignment of symbols to objects, not the vocalized reproduction of these symbols. If you want to get an idea of the kind of raw language the brain uses, consider your dreams. We don't have words for everything that happens in our dreams, but dreams occur in the mind's native language.)

It seems now that the hard part in building machines that think isn't a hardware problem, a case of putting the machinery together, but a software problem, a way of getting that machinery to do what we call "thiinking". The best ideas so far come out of psycholinguistics and involve manipulation of symbols according to some pretty simple basic rules.

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, all thinking happens in metaphors. In other words, a thought or a discovery is the creation of a metaphor. "A Man's Home is his Castle." is a metaphor. "Life is a journey" is a metaphor. "Every woman is a queen" is a metaphor, and what happens in those metaphors is an object (Home, Life, Woman,) is given new meaning through its redefinition in the metaphor. The metaphor gives us a new range of meanings for them, new consequences and references that spreads out like the limbs of a tree into an infinity of new possibilities.

The technique is amazingly powerful and robust. Just play with it and it';s not to score hits. "Every woman is a ...Castle...Journey...Hamburger...Goodbye...Thursday,,,Whatever" Our minds seem designed to work in this way and automatically seek out meanings like our eyes seek out meanings in jumbles of letters, and businesses are already using Metaphor Storming to generate ideas. Try it for coming up with plots. Put names, activities places, etc on slips of papers and pick them from a hat and see if you can't come up with stories. They already sell these kind of plot generators for authors and I think there's a free on available on the web somewhere, but it's not very good.

Metaphors aren't trivial either. Definitions are metaphors. Unless some sort of empirical scientific distinctions can be found, both "homosexuality is a vice" and "homosexuality is a disease" are basically metaphors Which one we choose to go with will determine how we look at homosexuality and the consequences homosexuality.

For writers, metaphors are our bread and butter. They're the stuff we build with. CMT has a special name for the one-word "metaphor", the effect of the connotations achieved depending on whether he "slides" his cock into her or "shoves" his cock into her but all writers (and readers) are aware of it. These basic one-word metaphors are how we describe the world in our stories, and they build into larger phrased metaphors, where our characters make love like wind through pines or two colliding locomotives and we feel the sweet sensuality of the pine needles or the hot iron spinning through the air. These metaphors build into larger metaphors—the scenes in our stories set in dingy apartments or flashy nightclubs where the lights and the sparkle say something about the human spirit as we see it at that moment, and even large till we have the entire piece as metaphor, the story from beginning to end, all the words, images, speech, flavor, our vision of the world and humanity at the point in time.

And it happens whether you intend it to or not. You might think I'm talking English Major stuff here, but everytime you write you're writing with content and style and theme, no matter how crude or asscrack-awful the piece is, it's something you're giving the world, something as yours as your fingerprint, a flavor that could only have come from your brain.

When I talk about writers and poets being the most important people in the world, that's what I mean. Without us, there's just raw experience. It''s through the weight of our work that people come to decide whether, say, erotic whipping is an expression of a man's contempt for a woman or his attempt to communicate the depth of his own desire for her, or both, or neither. We give people the words and the concepts they use to describe the world they live in, which means we give them the means to think about it.

For the people who visit Literotica, God have mercy on their poor minds.

"I kiked in the dor and camed rite in hur facse!"

Who'd have 'thunk' after all these years that you'd come to love semiotics! lol BIG of happiness from me (for those not familiar with the word, semiotics is the study of signs (symbols, icons, indexes, metaphors) indeed the study of language (letters, words, phrases to keep it short) depending on the field of inquiry of course and my speciality is film semiotics. Thanks for sharing, Doc - you are so right in your summary!

 

[CharleyH]

Just a bump for the mere importance of what Doc is saying in his first post.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Just a bump for the mere importance of what Doc is saying in his first post.

Fetish as conceptual metaphor, Charles? Have you tried that one?

 

[CharleyH]

Fetish as conceptual metaphor, Charles? Have you tried that one?

Like I said, my POV is always one of perception and every perception is conceptual. Lets narrow the topic - your choice, Doc.

 

[lisa123414]

Bump! 'cause i like the sound of conceptual perception, sensual perception, conceptual misperception, consensual misconception, sensual conception...


and going way back to the Doc's description of orgasm

"Women who've commented on my descriptions tell me I'm often way the hell off base, but I di a lot with toppling waves and walls, going over waterfalls, falling, exploding, shattering, riding wild horses, being consumed by fires, electricity, flowering (lots of plants) gushing (lots of hydraulics. In fact my women manifest some remarkable hydraulic and energetic properties during orgasm)... No wind though. You don't want any wind blowing around there, metaphorical or not.Gives the wrng idea."

I would add, not wind, per se, but flying and floating is what comes to my mind (yes, please forgive the pun, not intended.)

Also, to Shereads - I love your point of view with the caterpillar and the butterfly.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

There's a great Italian movie called "The Postman" about this little village where the poet Pablo Neruda comes to stay while in exile from his native Chile. The local pastman, a gangly country bumpkin, learns that the girl he loves is wild for poetry and that he can pick Neruda's brain for ideas on how to write poetry to impress the girl, and one day he and the poet are on thebeach and Neruda's explaining to him the idea of metaphor, how you can compare, say, a feeling to something in the world.

Neruda: Like your heart is like a cloud

Postman: Oh... I see! Or my heart... is like a dove! Or a seagull!

Neruda: Yes, yes. That's it!

Postman: So that's all? You just say your something is like something in the world?

Neruda: Well, yes. That's the basic idea

They walk along in silence for a while and the Postman says

Postman: Well, if all these things being like something in the world are metaphors, what's the world a metaphor for?

Neruda: ...

 

[xssve]

What movie was it where they milked every possible visual metaphor for sex?

Starts with the old train entering a tunnel, but then goes into an extended montage: I can't remember all of it, but bees sipping nectar from flowers, waves crashing on the beach, etc., it sort of builds and peaks, then I think it ends with a WWII fighter plane crashing or something, lots of crashing metaphors, and then cuts back to them lying bed smoking cigarettes.

Did I actually see that or is it something I made up? It had to be a Woody Allen movie - either than or Mel Brooks.

 

[Stella_Omega]

True, the metaphorical image of a woman is like a flower: water her and she opens up and blossoms, wheras men are more inclined to "take" their pleasure, which is a direct metaphor for the aggressive act of penetration, wheras in practice, women "take" their orgasms as directly as a man - I recall vividly a description in Hardy's Jude the Obscure where he describes the vagina a "beak" - at least I read that somewhere, I cant seem to find the passage in the online text - but it does remind me of a woman trying to take an orgasm, angling the pelvis back so the pubic bone grinds against the base of the penis - one girlfreind almost broke it off, I swear.

Anyway, perhaps not exactly the same thing, but a far cry from the passive penetratee of romantic imagination.

I like these sorts of views-- I prefer to write women's sexuality as active and aggressive, if only to counteract all the butterflies-and-curtains-in the-wind sex...

 

[Seattle Zack]

Some of the most interesting (and possibly unsettling) developments in gaming involve heuristic programming, where the internal algorithm assesses and learns from your responses to create a better experience for the "end-user" (the person who actually bought the product). It's a big buzzword in advertising, too, especially targeted online ads, where they would love to know your common search terms.

So, if you suck at aiming, but you buy a lot of FPS games, this algorithm would allow some latitude in your control, but still make it challenging enough that you enjoy the game and purchase more of their products. Aftar all, that's the goal, ain't it?

It's interesting how that algorithm applies to fiction. A set formula, imagine you were one of the writers laboring in the Tom Clancy stables. You know what the targets are, you just need to hit them. Know your audience and what they expect, and they won't be disappointed.