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07/24/08 - (1)
To Be or Not to Be a Bee Routine is the queen bee in my life-hive, And I'm but a mindless, lonely drone, Whose buzz is worse than his bite,
Whatever the fuck that means. After all, dogs and bears bite. Bees sting, don't they? At least, that's what I've always believed.
OK. Leaving all this meaningless quibbling aside, Let's ask ourselves why, in the first place, I'd choose to use such an unwieldy metaphor —
Unwieldy and stupid, I might emphatically add. Why is it that poets (e.g., Donne, Marvell, Dickinson) Employ flies, compasses, Gangeses, and bees,
Objects proper and lowercase, innocuous, pedestrian, To make their points, manipulating linkages, conflations, When they could, as easily, just cut to the chase,
Call a dinosaur egg a dinosaur egg Rather than a beehive swarming with future fossil fuel Once the tyrannosaur gets stuck in amber-honey.
Oh, you know what I mean, get the flickering picture. There's straight talk, clear and precise communication, Then there's artifice, with its obfuscations, ambiguities,
The stuff that gives English teachers their big kicks And students fits of narcolepsy, PTSD, Paroxysms that cause traumatic brain injury.
"So what's the solution?" you ask, well-intentioned. Should we simply suspend all use of metaphor, Ban similes, as invidious figures of speech,
Do away with tropistic language completely? Might doing so lead to more efficacious diplomacy Between feuding neighbors, nations, nut cases?
At least, it would squelch vast digressions like this, Which diverted me from what I really wanted to say: Whether in writing or life, routine sucks.
07/24/08 - (1)
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