The feed includes blog entries, publications and page updates.
A timber framed house in Lavenham Suffolk, googled from flickr
I’ve been thinking, in the toolkit, about how to write about purposeful metaphor. I’ve a great fear of offering the dreamy, irritating kind, or of not being able to get through the sludge of imprisoning metaphors, analogies and assumptions in which organisations unwittingly bind themselves. It seems to me that in the kind of rigorous imagineering that foresight work encourages, a well placed, sturdy metaphor can do a lot of real work. Like the epidemiological lens through which researchers into fundamentalist terrorism peered as a way of reframing their enquiries. That seems to me to be highly practical.
What about biological discovery? Jonathon Miller, in his marvellous book The Body in Question writes, in the chapter on the heart, of the essential role of metaphor in recognising the propulsive role of the heart.
The recognition of the propulsive role of the heart was dealyed for nearly 1,500 years, although the necessary evidence was just as available to Galen as it was to William Harvey. The difference between the two men is not one of ingenuity and skill….seeing is not all there is to believing; belief determines the significance of what is seen. The difference between Harvey and Galen was one of metaphorical equipment.
Miller goes on to say that the analogies for transformation and change at hand for Galen were no better than the smelter’s furnace. He could not see the heart as a pump because pumps, as machines, were not on the scene until long after his death.
The heart could be seen as a pump only when such engines began to be widely exploited in sixteenth -century mining, fire-fighting and civil engineering.
I also unearthed Twyla Tharp’s ‘The Creative Habit’ which had been lying under a pile of unsorted clothes since I brought it back from Washington in May. It really is a terrific, and deceptively simple, book, worth anyone’s $15 plus p&p (and again, thanks to Louise Shaxton for putting me onto it). In the chapter on the Story Spine, she talke about the spine as the first strong idea.
The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. You intend to tell this story. You intend to explore this theme. You intend to employ this structure. The audience may infer it or not. But if you stick to your spine, the piece will work.
In the exercises at the end of the chapter she talks about MQ, Metaphor Quotient. as being as valuable as IQ and suggests these seven exercises for exercising the metaphor muscle (my metaphor, muscle, not her’s, pinched from someone who said that the imagination is a muscle which atrophies through lack of use):
I can think of a few more I could add, to do with clearing away stale metaphor. But it’s a useful start. Appreciative Inquiry is good too. Popping a question at the end of an interview along the lines of ‘so if you were trying to sum up how you felt about the whole thing, what image comes to mind?’ As a device for getting under the skin, into the feeling of things, it’s very useful. I need to think on this all more, and less scatterdly, but thats where I am for now.
I said I’d write about Roger Deakin, and so I’ll end with him.
I’m trying to read ecologically while we wrestle this Defra toolkit to the ground and try and get it in an armlock. So I’ve been reading Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Richard Mabey, about resilience in Getting to Maybe by Francis Westley (for which I must thank Cathy Wilkinson, and I’ll be returning to it in other blogs).
I’m really struck, with Deakin and Mabey (who knew each other) by the rendering of nature and ecological testimony so beautifully and personally. The bridge of words which invites the lay reader into new ecological insight is built with great care by each writer.
Early on in Deakin’s book, he talks about the damaging ‘straightening out’ of old timber houses, loss of a generation of Suffolk builders.
The last generation of Suffolk builders understood the old houses well, approaching them as structures that are engineered as much as built. Evolved, rather than designer, the timber frame is intended to sit lightly on the sea of shifting Suffolk clay like an upturned boat and ride the earth’s constant movement.
The power of this image of a structure as a flexible thing, riding the waves, rather than a rigid thing, stays with me as I live inside the Defra wiki. I had been thinking of it through the lenses of knowledge asset bundles and of Mark Ravenhill’s structure for ‘Shoot, Get Treasure, Repeat’. These images have not receded, but I do like the idea that we are making something for Defra that will sit lightly on the shifting organisational clay like an upturned boat and ride the organisation’s constant movement.
