Aftereffect

One joy of attempting to write over a longer period of time is that echos become a habit.  A couple or three semesters ago, I taught a seminar in metaphor and since then I've never quite felt like the course landed well with me.  The students (hello you all) seemed to love it, but there was no closure, no artificial sense that I knew something that I hadn't known before. Had I not invested myself enough in it?

But this morning, I write this passage as part of a larger piece:

How can something not have meaning?  In a metaphor seminar, remember?  Jamming any two items together, no matter how far apart in domain or correlation or connection, creates a thing that has meaning.   Take, for instance, locked fur, cram jumble, under freshen, trace hump.  Either sonically (“hey that sounds German!”), imagistically, or conceptually,  there’s meaning, even if the meaning is simply more what the complex of words echo than what it seems on the surface.  Meaning is an appearance that never fails.

And now, meaning is an appearance that never fails.  My response, perhaps, to those who took Derrida to nihilism.

That seminar is remarkably worth every learning minute now.