But Apollo took from them the day of their return
Homer, the Odyssey
IN THIS CHAPTER and the next, we will begin to map the basic parabolic terrain of the everyday mind. We will look at fundamental and extremely common patterns of parable that are essential to everyday thought, reasoning, and action, and that show up in literary examples for the reason that literature takes its instruments from the everyday mind. We will see some extremely basic abstract stories and some extremely common projections of those stories. Any single detail of these many related projections may look as if it could interest only the specialist, but taken together, these details provide an overall picture of the importance of parable in the everyday mind.
We begin by looking at stories that involve actors engaged in bodily action. Often a spatial story has no actor. The small spatial story of a wall’s collapsing from age, for example, has no actor. Often a spatial story has many partial or potential actors and many intricate events that are brought about by no single distinct actor. The story of a bridge’s giving way after years of use is such a story. Unfamiliar or complicated event-stories like these are easy to grasp by projection from simple action-stories we already know. Parable, by projecting simple action-stories onto unfamiliar or complicated event-stories, extends the range of action-stories.
Parable extends story through projection. One type of extremely fundamental projection projects action-stories onto event-stories. George Lakoff and I named this general pattern EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. An action is an event with an actor.
EVENTS ARE ACTIONS guides us in projecting familiar action-stories onto event-stories with or without actors, EVENTS ARE ACTIONS is a special case of parable: The source story is an action-story; the target story is any kind of event-story, including action-stories.
We can observe an example of this kind of parable in the first few lines of the Odyssey, where Homer refers to the thoughts of Odysseus and to the sad fates of his shipmates as they sailed homeward toward the island of Ithaka:
Many were the men whose cities Odysseus learned and whose minds he came to know,
Many were the cares he suffered inwardly upon the sea,
Hoping for his own life and the return of his crew.
He could not save them, although he wanted to.
Their own blind folly destroyed them.
Idiots, they ate the cattle of Apollo.
But Apollo took from them the day of their return.
The shipmates, returning from the Trojan War, sailed toward Ithaka with Odysseus, but in their wanderings they died at various times and in various ways. None of them made it home to Ithaka. This is a complicated spatial story of a journey, structured by the image schema of a directed path from a source (Troy) to a goal (Ithaka). For each of the shipmates, the progress along the path halts before the goal is reached. Many events of death occur in the elaborate story of this journey, with no single clear agency responsible for all of them. Homer chooses to present this complicated spatial event-story of a journey through parable: He projects onto it a simple spatial action-story in which there is one actor, Apollo, who is responsible for all these deaths. The source story is an action-story not of a journey but rather of an actor’s physical manipulation of an object: Apollo, god of the sun, “takes” “something” “away from” the shipmates. What he takes away is conceived as an object: “the day of their return.” This looks highly literary, and of course it is, since this parable intricately projects a story of physical manipulation onto a story of a journey. But parabolic projections occur in literature because they are already indispensable in the everyday mind.
In everyday conception, we often project a spatial action-story onto a spatial event-story. We might say, for example, that a duplicating machine chewed up a document. The target story is a physical and spatial event without an actor: A document is damaged in a copying machine. The source story is a physical and spatial action with an actor: The actor chews food. We understand the target event-story of damage by projection from the source action-story of eating. Chewing in the source story is projected onto the mechanical process of copying in the target story; food is projected onto the document; chewer is projected onto the copying machine. An action-story of eating is thus projected parabolically onto an event-story of damage.
We can say of a sailor exposed to the elements at sea that the sun tortured him and that he was beaten mercilessly by savage winds. The story of an actor who tortures someone by burning him is projected onto the story of the sailor’s becoming sunburned. The story of a savage actor’s mercilessly beating a victim is projected parabolically onto the story of forcible gusts of wind impinging on the sailor.
Many everyday event-stories lack causal actors. EVENTS ARE ACTIONS can turn them into action-stories: We complete the event-story to include a causal actor by projecting the actor in the action-story onto a nonactor in the event-story. The nonactor becomes thereby a metaphorical actor, usually a person. The duplicating machine becomes a chewer. The sun becomes a torturer. The wind becomes a savage and merciless beater.
Not just any element of the event-story can receive projection from the actor in the action-story. Not just any action-story can be projected in just any way to cover just any event-story. There are constraints on parable. Not surprisingly, these constraints depend on the image schemas we use to structure the event-story and the action-story.
We appear to understand an event as having its own “internal” structure: It can be punctual or drawn out; single or repeating; closed or open; preserving, creating, or destroying entities; cyclic or not cyclic, and so on. This internal structure is image-schematic: it is rooted in our understanding of small spatial stories. Technically, this internal structure of an event is called its “aspect.” I will refer to it loosely as its “event shape.” We think of a season as coming around again, time as progressing along a line, a search as going on, a sale as closed, a blink as punctual (like a spatial point). None of these events has the literal spatial or bodily form we associate with it, but we use these image schemas to structure and recognize these events.
In addition to “event shape,” events also have causal structure, which is also image-schematic. Causation by physical force, for example, is typically understood through image schemas of force dynamics. When the force of the sledgehammer causes the door to fall, or a punch causes a boxer to fall, or a gust of wind topples the tree, we understand all of these events as instances of a particular image schema of physical force dynamics, which is why we can say of all of them that the first entity (sledgehammer, boxer, wind) “knocked” the other entity (door, opponent, tree) “down.” Phrases like “The tidal wave swept the resort away,” “The telephone pole crushed the car,” “The roof gave in when the tree fell on it,” “The river cut a new path,” and similar expressions all portray causal events through image schemas of physical force dynamics.
Leonard Talmy has shown that image schemas of force dynamics are also used to structure nonphysical causation, as when we say, “The sight of blood forced him to run,” “His ambition propelled him to excess,” or “The committee finally gave in and collapsed.” Causes are often understood by projecting onto them image schemas of force dynamics.
Some causes are understood by projecting onto them the image schema of movement along a path. First consider physical causation. A physical event of movement often involves a change of location. We are in one location, and then we are in another. The change is caused by our movement along a path. We say, “The road led us from the mountaintop to the valley floor,” and understand it to mean that first we were in one situation, the mountaintop, and then we were in a different situation, the valley floor, and that going from one location to the other constituted a change of situation, and that the cause of this change in situation was movement along the path. Now consider nonphysical causation. The image schema of movement along a path can be projected onto nonphysical causation, as when we say, “The economy sank to its lowest point.” The initial situation (strong economy) is understood by projection from the beginning of the path, and the final situation (bad economy) is understood by projection from the endpoint of the path. Both situations are understood by projection from spatial locations. The causal relation connecting the first situation to the second situation is understood image-schematically as a path between the first location and the second. Of course, “path” causation and “force-dynamic” causation usually go together. In “Fear drove him to a situation he otherwise would have avoided,” we have both.
We also recognize the elements and parts of an event as standing in certain relations to each other, such as ability (actors are able to perform actions), obligation or necessity (a command may require the action), possibility (some condition may allow the actor to perform the action), and so on. Relations of these sorts are referred to technically as “modal” structure. These relations too are understood through projection from physical image schemas. When we think of someone as able to deal with a difficulty, we say, “He can break through that psychological barrier if he wants to.” In that case, will is understood as a physical force and difficulty as a physical barrier, where the physical force (will) is strong enough to breakthrough the barrier (difficulty). Alternatively, we might say, “He can overcome that if he tries.” In that case, will is understood as a physical force and difficulty as a physical barrier, where the physical force (will) is strong enough and oriented suitably to flow over the physical barrier (difficulty). In either case, we know from the force-dynamic image schema that the force continues past the point of the barrier. It is therefore an inference that someone who “breaks through” or “overcomes” a “barrier” will continue along his “path” toward his “destination.”
The projection of an action-story onto an event-story depends on the projection of the image schemas of the first story onto the second story.
Just as we categorize events according to shared image schemas and actions according to shared image schemas, so we project action-stories onto event-stories in accord with their image schemas. We project image-schematic structure from the action-story to give structure to the event-story, but under a constraint: The result shall not be a clash of image-schematic structures in the target. Let us consider an example, Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” which begins:
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake.
In the source action-story, there is a causal link between the actor who tears something down and the event of tearing down. This structure is image-schematic. In the target event-story, there is a causal link between the wind and the falling of the trees. This structure is image-schematic. Projecting one onto the other creates no clash in the target, since they match. But we could not say, for example, “The transparency of the wind tore the treetops down for spite,” without provoking objection or offering an explanation, because the expression asks us to project an image-schematic causal link in the action-story onto two things in the event-story that we cannot think of as causally linked. Anyone who found the expression unobjectionable would have to be interpreting the target inventively so as to find such a causal link between the transparency of the wind and the falling of the trees.
The event in which standing objects are torn down by a person has an event shape structured by image schemas; the event in which elms are toppled in the wind has an event shape structured by the identical image schemas. Projecting the first onto the second creates no image-schematic clash. But we could not say, for example, “It wore the treetops down for spite,” to express the same event-story, because the action of wearing down has an image-schematic event shape incompatible with the image-schematic event shape of wind forcing trees over.
In general, conceptual projection from a source to a target is not arbitrary: it is guided by the principle of avoiding an image-schematic clash in the target. This principle is called “the invariance principle.” We will encounter it often in our investigation of parable. It does not require that the image schema projected from the source already exist in the target before the projection, but instead that the result of the projection not include a contradiction of image schemas.
In Browning’s poem, a spatial event-story of trees falling before the wind is understood by parabolic projection from a spatial action-story of someone tearing something down intentionally. The instrument of this projection is EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, which invites us to personify something in the event that is causally related to the event. Browning takes advantage of that possibility to personify the wind.
In Browning’s poem, we saw a spatial action-story projected onto a spatial event-story. A spatial action story can also be projected onto a nonspatial event story. In Euripides’s Alcestis, Apollo has arranged for Admetus to live beyond his appointed moment of death, provided he can produce a volunteer to die in his place. His wife, Alcestis, has volunteered. The play opens on the day of her death.
An event of death is not essentially a spatial story. Certainly, a corpse may be buried, so that the body moves from one spatial location to another, but the event of death is conceptually independent of any such movement. Yet we routinely conceive of the event-story of death parabolically by projection from the action-story of someone’s departing, willingly or not, as when we say “He’s gone” or “He’s left us” to indicate that someone has died: the spatial action-story of departure is projected onto the nonspatial event-story of death.
There is an image-schematic event shape associated with the standard conception of death: Something that has existed goes out of existence forever. There is also an image-schematic event shape associated with the standard conception of departure without chance of return: Someone who has been present goes away forever. The image-schematic structure of the event shape of death accords with the image-schematic structure of the event shape of departure; therefore, projecting the action-story onto the event-story does not create a clash in the target.
In any particular event-story of death, there will be a particular cause: illness, disease, injury, old age. We count all of them as instances of a general cause, Death-in-general. The notion that Death causes dying follows from our general conception of causal tautology: Death causes dying, Hunger causes hungering, Lust causes lusting, Desire causes desiring, Sleep causes sleeping. In all of these, an event of a certain kind is caused by an abstract causal element. In an event-story of dying, Death-in-general causes the particular death. In an action-story of departure, there can be an actor who causes someone to depart. If we project the person who departs onto the person who dies and the actor who causes the departure onto Death-in-general, we personify Death-in-general while preserving causal relationships. In “He left us,” we project the person who departs onto the person who dies. In “Death took him,” we additionally project the actor who enforces the departure onto Death-in-general.
The general personification of Death-in-general as an actor can be made more specific, depending on which action-story we project. In Alcestis, Death is personified in a number of ways. At one point, Death is personified as Thanatos, a wrestler who intends to take Alcestis away by dragging her body down to the halls of the dead. Heracles, a houseguest of Admetus’s at the time, waits in hiding for Thanatos to appear at the grave, pounces on him, and wrestles him into yielding. In this personification, Death is an actor who tries to enforce the departure but fails.
Much earlier in the play, we have witnessed Alcestis “die.” After her death, she lies in state, to be visited by her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Admetus and his father have a nasty quarrel over which of them bears responsibility for her death: The father, quite old, has refused to die in the place of his son. During this spat, Alcestis lies between them, dead. How can Alcestis be saved from death later by Heracles if indeed we have already seen her die? The answer is that in Alcestis death is conceived of as a complicated event with stages. Consequently, the action-story that is projected onto the event-story of death is equally complicated and has stages—it contains various actions and various actors. The complicated event-story of death involves not only the body’s going underground but also the body’s going limp because it no longer has a soul.
The event-story of the body’s going underground is understood by projection from the action-story of Thanatos’s dragging the body away. But the different event-story of the body’s going limp is understood by projection from a different action-story of departure: The soul leaves the body and goes down to Hades. This departure of the soul involves a team of two actors, neither of them Alcestis. Alcestis sees these two actors as she is “dying” on stage. The first actor is an assistant to her departure: Charon, the ferryman, who is waiting to carry her soul over the river Styx. He leans on his pole, calling to her, hurrying her along. “Why are you so slow?” he asks.
The other actor, teamed with Charon, attempts to force Alcestis to depart on her parabolic journey from this life. Alcestis says:
I feel a hand grasping my hand,
Leading me—don’t you see him?—leading me
To the home of the dead. He has wings;
His eyes glow dark under his frowning brow.
What are you doing? Let me go.
I am treading a fearful path; I am terrified.
In Alcestis, Death-in-general is personified not as a single agent but rather as a series of enforcers and assistants involved in the action-story of departure. The complicated event-story of Alcestis’s death is not essentially spatial; the action-story of departure projected onto it is entirely spatial.
The story of Apollo and the shipmates in the Odyssey is another case in which a spatial action-story is projected onto a complicated event-story. The source action-story is Apollo’s taking something from the shipmates. The body action in this case is not primarily movement of a body through space, as in Alcestis, but rather manipulation of physical objects.
Grasping a physical object so as to control it is a common body action performed by an actor. If we grasp a physical object, we can do what we want with it: We can put it into our mouth, throw it, throw it away, give it away, put it into a pocket, enjoy it as we wish. When a physical object is within our reach, only a small movement separates us from grasping it and controlling it. Reaching for a physical object, or moving near to it so as to reach for it, is a body action accessory to grasping it and therefore to controlling it. These are some of the earliest spatial stories learned by a child. In them, the child is the actor. Grasping a physical object so as to control it often seems to be the central story of the infant imagination.
It is common to project action-stories of grasping and controlling physical objects onto other event-stories. Conditions we control and enjoy correspond parabolically to physical objects we grasp, possess, and control. We can say of someone that he has a wonderful office when in fact it is owned legally by his employer; that an opportunity was handed to him on a platter; that he is having a good time; that he grabbed the chance; that he holds a good job.
Within the logic of objects and grasping, something reliably within our grasp is subject to our control. When we project an action-story of grasping, we project this logic. Thus we can say of an elected official that he has his voting district in his hip pocket, implying that he controls it. An object that we almost grasp is almost under our control. We project this inference, and so can say of a job candidate that he has one hand on the job but has not yet got it.
If something is near enough to us to be grasped and we have not yet grasped it but see no obstruction to doing so, then we are close to controlling it but do not yet control it. Projecting this logic, we can say of a thinker that the solution to the problem he is working on is easily within his reach. We know that a lost or discarded physical object was once in our grasp or reliably within our grasp but is no longer; we controlled it but now do not. Thus we can say that someone lost his job or threw away an opportunity. Something we give away is no longer under our control, so we can say that someone gave up the chairmanship. Something that is taken away is no longer under our control, so we can say that someone’s job was taken away.
If we grip an object or otherwise make it impossible for someone else to grasp and manipulate the object, then we prevent anyone else from controlling it. Thus we can say that someone has a firm grip on first place or that her grip on the seat in the Senate cannot be broken or that she has the championship all locked up or that he has a lock on her affections.
In all of these cases, the spatial body action of grasping is projected onto situations that are not principally bodily or spatial. Projecting the actor from the source story personifies something in the target story. Suppose we map the body action of taking away onto the event-story of becoming unemployed. Then the state of being employed corresponds to a physical object. Enjoying that state corresponds to having the physical object in our grasp. Ceasing to enjoy that state corresponds to having the physical object removed from our grasp. Something causally related to this change of state can be personified as the actor of that change. We can say that a machine took our job away or recession took our job away, thus projecting the actor of take away onto the machine or the recession.
A physical object that we expect will remain reliably within our grasp is also under our control, to the extent that our expectation is correct. If the object is in our hip pocket or all locked up, we can think of ourselves as having it at our disposal. Alternatively, if we are able to reach the object and see no obstruction, we imagine ourselves, narratively, as able to grasp it and control it. When someone, to our surprise, removes the object, as when a pickpocket steals our watch or a thief breaks the lock or someone pops out of nowhere to grab the object and run away, we feel that an actor has spatially removed a physical object from within our reliable grasp and control. Thus we can say that the happy little boy bending to pick up the penny had it until the last second when his older sister took it away from him, even though the boy never touched the coin. Parabolically, we can say of someone nearing retirement that his secure old age was stolen from him by a crooked labor union whose president embezzled from the pension fund, even though the employee had not yet reached old age or retired. We can say that the weather took our sailing trip away from us, even though we had not yet launched the boat. In this case, the weather is personified: the weather is the actor of the taking.
In the story of Odysseus’s shipmates, homecoming is a state to which they look forward. They expect to be able to enjoy that state. Parabolically, it is a physical object within their grasp. The cancelation of the possibility corresponds parabolically to the taking away an object. An epic story of events, deaths, and dashed expectations is understood by parabolic projection from a simple story of body action in space, in which Apollo takes something away from the shipmates. Apollo acts justly, says Homer. The shipmates had been warned to conduct themselves respectfully as they journeyed home, but, ignoring the advice of Odysseus, they turned savage and raided a herd of cattle. The cattle belonged to Apollo. They took what was his; in response, he takes what was theirs.
We have seen EVENTS ARE ACTIONS guide us in projecting the action-story of a journey. In this projection, states correspond to locations, so that the state of being alive corresponds to being present here and the state of being dead corresponds to having departed for a different location. Changes of state correspond to changes of location that are caused by spatial movement.
We have also seen EVENTS ARE ACTIONS guide us in projecting the action-story of reaching, grasping, holding, and taking physical objects. In this projection, states correspond to physical objects. We can grasp or fail to grasp a physical object; we can lose it or keep it. Parabolically, we can obtain or fail to obtain a state; we can get or fail to get a job; or we can lose a job or keep it.
These are two alternative ways to conceive of a state, as a location or as an object, but they combine and reinforce each other. In our spatial experience, we routinely journey to a point near a physical object in order to grasp it. We must walk to the coffee cup in order to pick it up. The state of having a physical object thus often involves two parts: moving toward it and graspingit. They go together in our experience, and they go together in the parabolic projection of stories of body action. Thus we can say of a job candidate that he had almost arrived at the point of having thejob in hand, and feel no conceptual collision, even though we are projecting both movement and manipulation. We journey to an object and grasp it; parabolically, we journey to a state and have it.
In both cases, we project a routine spatial story of body action onto a story that may not necessarily be spatial.
EVENTS ARE ACTIONS guides us in understanding a wide range of event-stories by parabolic projection from spatial stories of body action. Sometimes the target event-story is itself a spatial action, with an actor or actors. When a ball is thrown in the direction of a receiver but another receiver intercepts it, this is certainly a spatial action-story, with actors. But through EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, we can project a different spatial action-story onto it, one in which the interceptor “takes” the ball “away” from the intended receiver. Of course, the intended receiver never had the ball, so the interceptor does not literally “take” it from him; and of course, the ball may have never been near the intended receiver, and the interceptor may in fact have carried the ball closer to the intended receiver in catching it, so the “away” is also metaphorical. The naturalness of the projection is so deep that it requires some scrutiny before we see that one spatial story of action is being projected onto a different spatial story of action. In the tale of the ox and the donkey, it is easy to see that one story is projected onto another; here, it is much harder to see, except under analysis. But the mental instruments are the same.
Sometimes the target event is not an action-story. The small story of what the sun and waves do to the sailor, and the small story of what the rain does to the elms and the lake, are spatial events where the causes are not actors but can correspond parabolically to actors in a spatial action-story.
Sometimes the target event-story is not clearly spatial or even physical. Consider mental events. They are of course physical in the sense that they consist of neurobiological events, but we rarely if ever conceive of an idea as physical. Usually, we conceive of an idea as neither physical nor spatial. Nor do we routinely conceive of it as a literal actor. But an idea can correspond parabolically to an actor in a spatial action-story. The idea can become, parabolically, an actor performing a spatial action, as when we say, “An idea came to me unbidden,” “An idea seized me,” or “An idea grabbed hold of me.” We can turn our thoughts parabolically into actors of movement who “elude” us or “outrun our ability to express them.”
So far, we have considered cases where the source story is a spatial story of body action. We have seen that such a source story can be projected onto stories of spatial action with actors, onto stories of spatial events without actors, and onto stories of nonspatial events. We will see in what follows that the scope of projection of spatial stories is much wider still.