I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are nebulous concepts that will dance around my brain in a haze until someone literally asks me point-blank, "Hey, Claire, what do you think is the key figurative parallel between science and literature?"
Which is why blogs exist, I guess.
Science writing is difficult, as difficult as literary writing. At its worst, it can become crippled by its own material, which is by definition too steeped in jargon to be communicable; it can hover awkwardly between being too dense for its readership and too simple for its provenance, the scientific community. Good scientific writing, however, builds a little dinghy that steers a clear, straight, and small path through a sea of information, clarifying those incredibly vast and arcane concepts to people who wouldn't intuitively understand them.
Popular science writing contains, however, some essentially literary gestures. Take this example, as cited in Alan Lightman's marvelous compendium, Best Science Writing 2005. For years, students of astronomy (myself only vaguely included) struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center. After all, this is a notion which violently bucks against reason. Cosmologists, however, came up with an image -- a metaphor, if you will -- which lightens the load: imagine that the Universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it is also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of the known Universe, in one image.
If only Keats were so altruistic.
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Perhaps some poets aim for similar understoodness expansion, but often I find myself doing some serious metaphorical violence to the understandability of my subject matter in the name of tangential explorations. Perhaps as the internet has done to such a clutch of milieux.
But are there other legitimate criteria for success of literary use of metaphor? Or are those malevolent criteria?
Those are some good ideas. Way to calls em' like you thinks 'em. I just found this and think it's lovely:
"Progress follows the line of advantage, substituting always the better adapted; it never returns on itself, never substitutes fish-oil for kerosene, horse cars for trolley cars. Fashion on the other hand, moves in cycles."
From Edward Alsworth Ross' "Social Psychology" (1908).
"One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood."
Friedrich Nietzsche
nietzsche would make a shitty astronomer
"Structure is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence. Structure then can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but lability."
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
Metaphor as catenation seems like a good metaphor for the internet. This method of invasion may also be able to address simultaneity and expansion by allowing tangential exploration.
I don't have a Derrida quote, but I do like balloons!!