Alas, a Blog

I’ve heard more than a few jokes about men who, after finding the proverbial genie in a bottle, manage to screw up their three wishes. The one that comes to me now involves a man who walks into a bar with another man, who is about twelve inches tall, sitting on his shoulder. Without a word, the first man takes out of a case he is carrying a small piano and a stool that he places on the bar. The foot-high man climbs down from the other one’s shoulder, also without a word, sits down at the piano, and begins to play the most beautiful music that anyone in the place has ever heard. Inevitably someone asks the regular-sized where he found this musical treasure, and he explains that he was walking alone on a beach in the Mediterranean when found a bottle with a genie inside. The genie granted him three wishes. I don’t remember what the first two were, but the last one, the man explains, produced the piano player. Someone asks him why he wished for a twelve-inch tall piano player and he says, “Well, it was just my luck that the genie was hard of hearing. He thought I asked for a twelve-inch pianist.” Ba dum dum.

There’s another one, though I only remember the punchline, where the guy gets turned into a tampon because he doesn’t recognize the ambiguity in how he phrases his desire for heterosexual prowess, and there are at least two more hiding somewhere in the back of my brain, absolutely refusing to let me tease them out, so I’m not sure if they also poke fun at the absurdities of conventional male heterosexual desire or if they just poke fun at greed. I am, however, reasonably certain that their humor lies, just like the two examples I gave above, in marking the difference between asking for what you think will make your life easier or better or more immediately profitable and having the courage and honesty to ask for what you really want.

The thing is, of course, that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. A man with a small penis who has endured the teasing and humiliation that will inevitably fall on him in this society may truly believe he needs those twelve inches, if only to silence his tormentors, both past and future. More to the point, though, his desire to silence them, if he allows it to consume him, would very likely blind him to the fact that a large penis would still not guarantee him love or happiness or even good and frequent sex.

I am, though for reasons that have nothing to with sex, confronted with this distinction between what I think I need and what I really want right now. Like almost everyone else I know, I could use more money, not because I want more luxury in my life, but mostly because I have debt that I need to repay. It’s honest debt, in the sense that my wife and I incurred it to pay for things we could not afford at the time but that we could not put off doing any longer; but it is debt nonetheless, and it is heavy, and I spend more time and energy than I would like thinking about what we need to do to get ourselves out from under it as quickly as possible. Inevitably, this thinking leads to fantasies of all the ways that enough money to pay off the debt might fall, or that I might facilitate its fall, into my lap. These are not paralyzing fantasies, by which I mean they do not prevent me from doing what I need to do to pay the debt off responsibly, but I am conscious of how frequently they grow beyond the goal of balancing our budget to become stories about how “if only we had enough money, all our problems would be solved.”

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I have been fascinated by metaphor since I was an undergraduate linguistics major, when one of my professors assigned parts of Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In that book, Lakoff and Johnson argue that, as human beings, we use metaphor to give structure to the world around us. They point out, for example, that we describe the process of having or making an argument the same way we describe war. As examples, they offer this list of expressions:

1. Your claims are indefensible.
2. He attacked every weak point in my argument.
3. His criticisms are right on target.
4. I demolished his argument.

Lakoff and Johnson don’t stop there, though. They go on to show that we don’t just talk about argument as if it were war; we actually experience it that way as well. Like wars, for example, arguments are won or lost; and the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are doing battle with each other, taking different lines of attack, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To illustrate by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to

imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)

Other examples abound. One of my favorite classroom exercises is to ask my students to list all the slang expressions they know for for getting drunk and/or high (the latter, of course, being a metaphor in itself). Here are some of the more common ones they come up with:

• wasted
• bombed
• annihilated
• blasted
• blitzed
• polluted
• shitfaced
• embalmed
• hammered
• pickled
• plastered
• smashed

Inevitably, my students are surprised not just at how violent the list is, but at the way these expressions portray getting drunk or high as violence one does to oneself–a way of structuring what it means to alter one’s consciousness that is very different from cultures that use such substances in religious or other spiritual rituals.

The story from Golestan that I have chosen for this week’s Sa’di Says is about the structure of power in a monarchy, and I think the metaphors that Sa’di uses in telling this story are fascinating. Before you read it, you need to know that Hormuz was the son of King Nushirvan, whose name is synonymous with what it means to be a wise and just ruler. Hormuz, on the other hand, was cruel and tyrannical. Here is the story:

When he was asked what crime his father’s viziers had committed, Hormuz replied, “None. I put these men in jail because they feared my power without respecting it. I knew that to protect themselves from the capriciousness they saw in me and the harm they thought might come to them because of it, they might try to kill me. So I had no choice. I took the advice of the sages, who said:

The power to wipe out a hundred men
should not replace your fear of one who fears you.
Watch when a cat is fighting for its life;
it plucks the tiger’s eyes out with its claws.
To stop the stone the shepherd might throw down
to crush its head, the viper strikes, and lives.

Hormuz is unapologetic in his explanation, but you have to wonder just how aware he is of how much his metaphors reveal about him. Look closely at the metaphor in those last two lines. By having the king compare himself to a viper, while at the same time comparing his father’s viziers to a shepherd, Sa’di uses Hormuz’ self-justification to reveal not just the fear and weakness at the heart of any tyrannical rule, but also something about the nature of power itself. The shepherd’s authority to kill the viper comes from his role as protector of the flock, though he can choose not to use that power if he doesn’t have to. (Hence, “the stone the shepherd might throw down.”) The viper, on the other hand–and I am following here the logic of the metaphor, not commenting on the behavior of actual snakes–because of the poison that defines it and the threat it poses to those around it, cannot afford to wait for the shepherd to make that choice. It must assume that the shepherd has assumed that it will attack and so it has no alternative but to defend itself accordingly.

The viper’s power, in other words, is defined by its fear of the world, its sense that the world is arrayed against it, while the shepherd’s power is defined by the choice that is available to him. Not that the fact of this choice will make the shepherd a good and wise ruler by definition; but it does seem to me that awareness of the choice is a prerequisite for a wise and benevolent rule.

The cool thing about a metaphor is that no single reading will ever capture its entire meaning, and so I know the reading I have presented here is a partial one at best. I’d love to hear what you think.

Cross-posted.

You never know how people are going to find your work, and you never know how it’s going to touch them or why. Earlier this month, a man contacted me asking for a copy of the uncorrected proof of my Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, which I make available through my website to anyone who asks for it. All I ask in return is that they tell me a little bit about why they want it and how they intend to use it. I’ve gotten these requests from a wide range of people, including graduate students in Iran who are working on their MA in translation studies to people, a scholar in Russia who was preparing a multilingual anthology of selected works of classical Iranian literature, and several people from India who were studying Sa’di for their own purposes and preferred my translation to the ones that were available in their country.

The most touching request for a copy of this PDF, however, came this month from a man who, as he wrote, “happened upon [My Companion’s Scent Seeped Into Me] while reading The Male Privilege Checklist on Alas! A Blog.” I featured that poem on my blog on June 27th. Here it is again:

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”
“I was,” it said, “a loathsome lump of clay
till someone set me down beside a rose.
Then my companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.

That poem, he went on, “is a reflection of what happened to me.

I am a 46 year old male. I have recently been reunited with my ex-wife who I hadn’t spoken with for over twenty years. It has been a wonderful experience of learning and enlightenment thus far. She gave me a book to read by Don Miguel Ruiz called The Four Agreements which has had a profound impact on my life and the way I live it.  It is a book of wisdom. I would like to reciprocate by sharing this with her.

To know that my book has been a part of the experience this man describes–well, I can’t think of a better reason to write.

If you’d like to read this week’s “Sa’di Says,” it’s called “Creation Kills What It Was Made to Love.”

As usual, I’d love to know what you think.

Cross-posted.