Metaphor

Metaphors make sense. I mean that literally, metaphors make sense. Imagine a page of even the most eloquent book with its text leached of metaphor and you will see a terrible, dry husk. The image that comes to my mind is of a small log after the fire has burnt itself out -- it has the shape of a log, but nothing of the essence; tap it and it will crumble into dust.

If you read language carefully, you see that one metaphor shades into another, almost without break; indeed, there are layers of metaphor in the most mediocre prose. We may read left to right in lines of little symbols, but what we keep in our heads is the gift of metaphor.

You can always tell a poor thinker by the quality of his metaphors. I work in social science publishing, so I see horrible new examples every single day. A writer who does not know the value of words cannot be a good writer, and he cannot be a good thinker. One thinks, after all, in reformulations of the familiar, with a vocabulary of known sites. If not, how would one think at all?

Among the several books I am reading at the moment is one called The Praise Singer, by Mary Renault (1978). It is a historical novel about travelling bards in the world of the ancient Greeks of the Ionian islands. The work of a bard in the ancient world, where few things were written down, was the safeguarding and employment of memory. Just one elderly bard and his disciple could commit to memory and find new ways to tell the history of a hundred years. Then remember the master's master and the disciple's disciple, and hundreds of bards of varying skill. I bet the ancient Greeks learnt about time in such ways. We nowadays have almost no conception of long durations of time. Instead we have the urge to periodise: the Sixties, the Eighties, the Renaissance, the Great Mughals, the Dark Ages.

To my mind, a beautifully-written story about ancient bards by a modern author is ripe ground for rooting around in. Reading this book, I better understand myself through a story about others understanding themselves through song-stories about others understanding themselves and the universe through act and consequence. And now I am writing about it...

Vir

The Hindustan Times' Brunch section on Sundays is my favourite toilet reading. And that is because of Vir Sanghvi, the editorial boss of HT. In today's Brunch, for instance, 11 out of 24 pages were written by him. The first long article was on some hotelier who's extremely into his guests' sleep quality. I've never spent a night in a fancy hotel, and find it unlikely that I ever will. I really don't give a damn about hotels. But I enjoyed reading that piece.

Then there was another long piece about a wine tour of Burgundy, naturally by Vir Sanghvi himself. (I want his job.) Now, people, especially Indians, writing about wine can be terribly boring and uninformative. The train of unlikely adjectives regularly employed to explain a flavour often leaves me wondering how you could be drinking both tar and berries in the same cup -- Eeyuck. Like squashing grapes onto a gently steaming road in summer and then licking it.

But Sanghvi knows a bit about wine, and what he doesn't he doesn't pretend to. More than all the talk of wine is, of course, the almost unmanageable joy I feel at the thought that here are people (Frenchmen, to be sure) who make money making something beautiful, with a knowledge and practice that cannot really be studied. I think there is tremendous power in a land and occupation -- and product -- into which many, many centuries of work have sunk.

When I drink wine, I feel I am absorbing some of that power, some of that hard work and wisdom. It makes me older. It makes me pay attention.

Plug

Zzeblog is a frightfully tasteless and quite provocative new offering. For example: 'Why Men Love to Play with Balls.' Regrettably, I am related to this man.

Read attentively.

-19 July 2006, 12.31 am-
Correction, there are two people writing Zzeblog: the aforementioned bee-brain Zzebrain and Fadereu, a name that sounds like it should belong to a Harry Potter centaur (but more Continental). Both are sober, respectable men.

Oh!

Oh! oh! oh! Italy won! Oh happy day. Night. This is the way a match should be -- hard-bitten and hard-fought, with spectacular goals at the very last minute. It was late and the house was still, so I did my tribal victory dance on tiptoe and howled in pleasure very quietly. I don't care if it's just a game and the players are a ridiculously enthusiastic, primitive sweating grimacing thundering herd. Hallelujah! Forza Italia! Whoof, am not used to being so unabashedly partisan.

And then I had to read for an hour before my heart rate settled to normal cynic levels. Which allowed me a threadbare four hours of lively sleep.