We are familiar with the literary devices of similes and metaphors. In a simile, we may say something like, The summer air was as hot as a furnace, but in a metaphor we do not simply compare two things but describe one as the other, e.g. The fog crept in on little cats feet. [Nota bene: In the Italian film Il Postino (The Postman), a simple, poor, shy, love-besotten mailman learns to win the heart of a beautiful girl by being taught how to use metaphors by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who is staying on an Italian rustic island while in exile from the dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet. If you have not seen this movie and you do watch mundane movies, I recommend it. It kind of reminds me of the idea of Rostandes Cyrano de Bergerac, in which an ugly hero helps a handsome soldier win the heart of a beautiful girl through poetry, although in Cyrano the hero-poet actually also loves the girl.] In our modern culture, we think of metaphor as a poetic device, distinct from reality. We have a concept of prosaic reality and of the poet as a creative interpreter or describer of emotional aspects of reality that are less real, only imaginary. This is part of how modern people have learned to think about reality. Value and quality, personality, emotion and morality, have been bled from the real, leaving only mass and force and wavelengths and particles moving in space over time (or in space-time). In Srimad-Bhagavatam culture, there is not such a breakdown between prosaic reality and poetic metaphor. Actual reality is far more enchanted and magical and strange than our modern scientific, mechanistic, deracinated conception. Things that we think of as concepts -- like fear, love, intelligence, decay and so on -- are actually living beings who can interact with other, similar beings. The universe is full of demons, demigods, ghosts, goblins, sages, yogis, siddhas, gandharvas, caranas, apsaras, humans, animals, plants, and all kinds of mystical beings. In Greek mythology, originally the poets and composers of hymns and epics were supposed to be like seers or oracles who could explain such other-worldly (or super-earthly) affairs by virtue of their special sensitivity. However, there came a point in Greco-Roman classical culture where poets felt free to make creative use of the old stories of the Gods much in the way that modern novelists manipulate metaphors and allegorical works of art. European literary culture retained this tradition of mining the symbolism of the Pagan pantheons (not just Greek and Roman but Norse and Teutonic and so on) for this reason, long after or alongside Christendom, on down to the present day. Nobody thinks that Dante or Shakespeare or Milton or Shelley or Wagner are actual seers describing the sacred reality of gods and demons, but that they are talented artists who manipulate these symbols and metaphors in effective, powerful and aesthetically sophisticated ways, in the imaginative, imaginary world of literature. But Srimad-Bhagatavam culture is more profound. Here, reality and literature, science, history and religion intersect. Yes, there are allegorical and metaphorical passages, and there are also metaphorical or allegorical significance to things that actually happened (because life imitates art, or actually is art). But Vyasadeva, as Narada Muni explained in the First Canto, was endowed with the power to describe the lilas of the Personality of Godhead and His material creation in a way that brings reality to life for us, enlightens us, purifies our consciousness and clears away illusions and doubts. He is not merely a gifted artist or seer; he is an incarnation of God creating a literary work which is God in literary form, crafted in such a way to show the true face of the Absolute Truth to the sincere devotee-reader. Whereas our sense of so-called historical or scientific reality is very limited and faulty and imperfect, filtered, as it is, through our conditioned, contaminated consciousness.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:30:46 +0000
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