Metaphor

A word-picture that bridges an abstract principle and a tangible reality, so that a large and complex thing becomes immediately graspable.

Metaphors compress. A vast structure of relationships is folded into an image a person already knows, and the image can then be carried, handed on, and unfolded again by someone who was never taught the structure. That is why they work on the intuitive and emotional faculties as well as the intellect, and why a movement's metaphors travel further than its definitions.

This body runs on a small set of them, and they are doing real work. The Golden Seed — the whole pattern folded into something small enough to carry and alive enough to grow. The sacred tree. Quest — work with a shape, an end, and a point. The city on a hill. The body, of which each person is a member and each Circle a Cell. The flame, passed hand to hand and diminished in no one who passes it. The waterfall, for how value flows. Compost, for how endings feed beginnings. Each of these is a compressed argument, and in several cases the metaphor arrived before the articulation did.

It is load-bearing because the alternative is a system only specialists can hold. A metaphor lets a ten-year-old and a systems architect hold the same idea at their own depths, which is exactly what a pattern meant for everyone requires. Parable is the narrative form of the same instrument; The True Myth is the largest version of it.

The discipline is the same one that governs every word here: a metaphor is a pointer, never the thing, and never an idol. Push any of them far enough and it misleads — a body implies organs that cannot leave, a seed implies a predetermined form, a flame implies something that can go out. The canon's practice is to keep several running at once, so that no single picture governs, and to say plainly where a picture stops.

Also called: Metaphors · The LIØNSBERG Book of Metaphors Stands on: Language · Story · Word Tools Opens onto: Parable · The True Myth · The Golden Seed · Narrative Lens In play: door · table Sources: Metaphor (a written root page) · The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, The Metaphors section · Narrative Structure of LIØNSBERG · lionsberg.wiki: Metaphor Open: The root page names a set of metaphors and a set of stories without distinguishing the two clearly; The LIØNSBERG Book of Metaphors is named as a volume and does not exist as a written body.