drawn from... bees

life is a metaphor. and that is a metaphor. so's that.

einstein and nietzsche both come to the same sort of conclusion. it's all relative. it's all just a way of describing things.

i love metaphors, especially the ones inherent in our very way of thinking. every word with even a trace of etymology will conjure double-meanings. deeper interpretations. misinterpretations.

i am particularly pleased with this metaphor, which i wrote:

"as weak and trembling as a three-legged newborn giraffe"

i have a friend who is quite clever with puns. the play from which i've taken the title of this entry is a delightful pun, by one of the most fascinatingly brilliant writers i have had the opportunity to appreciate, Oscar Wilde. puns are odd things... the lowest form of humor, so they say. why is that? they expose the inner workings of our language, a system so integral to society's function that we so often overlook it and its possibilities.

during reading theory, a class i took over a year ago, we focused for a moment on metaphors and the evaluation of them. they're not always acurate, not always complete. if i say life is pain, that doesn't mean that's all it is. fit as a fiddle and happy as a lark are just cliches, aren't they?

there is a song, with a line "as clean as earth right after rain" and it struck me that after it rains the earth isn't really all that clean. i mean, it gets muddy, all the worms come up out of the ground... is that the kind of clean you mean?

but of course, water, rain, and floods all have specific symbolic meanings. many things do. white. black. hearts. roads. light. dark. fire. we humans must have our ideals, of course, our archetypes. the knights in shining armor, the dark and stormy night, the road to happily ever after.

but the metaphors aren't just there in stories and dreams. they are in the way we name the parts of airplanes, in the way we insult our little brother. everywhere. how many can you spot today?