I love America and all the creatures with spoon-shaped heads that represent its ideals.
“For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet
“A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.” – Kai Krause
The bald eagle is an enduring symbol of the United States. It represents vision, courage, freedom, power, and all that good stuff. Here some facts about the bald eagle.
-Bald eagles top out at 40 inches long and 15 pounds. They are much smaller and lighter than me and I could smush one with one hand.
-Bald eagles can live 30 years, a flash in the pan compared to humans like me.
-Bald eagles were once endangered.
-Bald eagles’ faces are locked in perpetual scowls, suggesting they are severely limited emotionally.
This is so asinine of me that I feel uncomfortable just writing it. I am missing the point by miles and miles. But hey, I was just going with the metaphor of America being a bald eagle, right?
Such is the inadequacy of metaphors. They are meant to ease the understanding of one trait of one situation, that’s it. Go any deeper and you’re stretching into allegory, and in the hustle and bustle of this social media-driven environment you won’t find many of those. You’re also stretching into “overanalysis”, you know, the reason people hated senior year English class in high school.
A lot of Fear.less contributors use metaphors and a lot of them have ideas about fear that boil down to semantics. Some of them speak of conquering fear outright, others acknowledge its invincibility without letting it take them over. Some people say that you should learn from your mistakes, other people say you have to push past them and never look back.
Few of these beliefs are truly mutually exclusive. Fear is a nebulous thing. What’s important is that all our contributors are heading for the same place – achieving their goals despite fear.
I notice these apparent contradictions myself, and they tempt me to lash out at what has worked for people. This can get kind of ridiculous. “Be the light in people’s lives? But light is blinding!”
I feel like pushing a metaphor about fear until it falls apart is a defense mechanism. I think it’s employed when people want to fend off a perceived persecution of their belief system, or they just want themselves to be right and someone else to be wrong.
You will not always identify with the stories you read in Fear.less. That’s okay and expected. If one story resonated with everybody, we would publish one issue with that one story and then discontinue the magazine. Our goal is, through the provision of many different avenues, to help all of our readers eventually reach the same special, courageous place. This involves presenting axioms that some people will accept and others will deny. Metaphors, symbols and turns of phrase that some people will cherish and other people will disregard. I think a fair and efficient approach is to go into a Fear.less story, or any experience really, looking for the value and at what’s there instead of projecting my own network of desperations onto it. (I wish I could do this better.)
How sad it would be if I actively campaigned against the bald eagle as a symbol of the United States on the grounds that I could beat the crap out of one? That doesn’t even matter. It’s not what the founding fathers meant. Fear.less founder Ishita likes to speak of a “toolbox” of techniques for overcoming fear. It doesn’t matter that a lot of toolboxes sit in dark garages collecting dust. She obviously wants us to stop at “wide, accessible repertoire”.
This, and life (ooh profound), is an experiment. We are testing things. Things we think can work. If they don’t, we will try again.
The experiment, in case you are wondering, is going rather well so far, judging from the feedback and the encouragement we’ve received. Thanks for that.
I’m thrilled to see fear.less acknowledging the contradictions that arise from offering tools for fighting personal fears. And for as contradictory as metaphors can be, the idea of offering a “toolbox” – many useful pieces in one place, to be pressed into service when their time is right – is a great way of describing the magazine. Love the first issue!
That’s why I’m hear. Good luck.
A lot of good things here. I would have to agree.
Also, I love the picture.
-Ethan
are you asking me to do the art for your game
cause i can do that bro
Metaphors and analogies can stimulate us to think differently about the world. But the enjoyment of a metaphor evaporates if you take it too seriously or too studiously. The connection may hold for a handful of characteristics of the two things being compared but never for all.
[...] is a lie. In reality, Arundhati Roy’s comment is just an example of the inadequacy of language to fully describe the battle against fear. Instead, her words illuminate a particular aspect of it [...]