RSS SPIRIT

Metaphor is the most potent weapon of emotional intelligence. Metaphor provides perception and depth. It can properly be viewed as the third eye. It equips us with another level of measurement that allows us to sift, apportion and weigh.

Metaphor is most obvious in dreams. Here visual pictures are created from emotional energy to provide metaphorical apparitions of our internal and external worlds. Metaphor probably exists in some form for all mammals. All the ones that can dream anyway.

Things are like other things but not quite like them. One can argue that life is a metaphor, as it is like not-life but not not-life. The primary urge of life then, if it is a metaphor, is expression. To expend energy is the prime motivator. Nietzsche had some rants along these lines.

It is easy to envision all the prosaic but invaluable knowledge metaphor has provided human kind. But equally valuable is the spiritual and social information metaphor delivers.

If you think about it, there is something insidious and beautiful about the power of metaphor. There is that evolutionary sense about it, where something so simple and mindless can create incredible knowledge and power. It is almost mechanical in its universal efficiency, yet what it creates is overwhelming and unsettling.

Surely if one were to ask, what is the meaning of all this, they would do well to begin by mining metaphor, its subconscious and conscious veins. One might argue that all religious and spiritual impulses are born of metaphor.

The new way, if we do not poison ourselves into extinction, will be powered by a metaphorical engine. A rare born soul will use (used by) metaphor to figure it out and soon everybody else will have that same dream. Then we will get on to that stage of development where things not yet imagined will be created.

Until then, before you go to sleep ask your dreams, what does metaphor look like? Sound like? Smell like?

(tip of the pen to Ann Faraday who figured this stuff out before anybody.)

Get on at Beverly walking up to Melrose,
Mister Pizza, CBS and Jews mingle.
A pedestrian life here, an oasis,
busy, dirty, people brush against.

Where to begin with Freaky Fairfax?
Mister Pizza makes a nice slice,
the sad second hand stores make one pause,
Hollywood wannabe insanity at the Irishman's club.
Fairfax here gives no quarter,
rather many flyers stapled into palm trees.

Back to the secondhand stores, some so sad
enormous piles of crap nobody wants priced to move.
Let us go into Canter's Deli and forget about it.
Go in the back and stare at the autumn lit ceiling,
ordering reuben, matzoh ball soup, cup coffee.

What about the skankhole bar next Canter's?
Go in there only during the day or on drugs.
The tiny bar across the street lets you smoke,
skanky ambitious chicks run it, might do you if you are worthy.
Past the worn down strip mall there is a nice old bookstore,
obsessive, open late, first edition poetry disturbing or delightful.

Something seductive and repulsive runs up and down Fairfax.
Go to the outdoor magazine kiosk and lollygag.
Think about going to the silent movie theater up the street.
Instead go into another sad secondhand store, up the stairs
are piled high under naked bulbs cheap books.
All the stores have something to do with Jews. It is all
rather vague. At night Jewish 13 year old hoodlums will
hassle you for a light for their cigarettes.

Existential crises and other wandering pleas for help
are facilitated nicely up here. For even in the bright light
a natural dimness lurks in the empty bakery and dusty glass coves.

The inklings of a hill fill out the street, up the hill is Melrose and
the promise of snakeskin drinks and other tourist distractions.
Pull up before that tawdry crossroad at Fairfax High.
It boggles the imagination that kids go to school here.
You think, if I had gone to high school here I
would have been eaten alive,
or still wander a strip of Fairfax,
chasing that shiny bit at the edge of vision.

The Jerry Garcia lookalike sells cigars,
corner shop favored by cops. He drinks beer and
he and the dog watch old TV.

Across the way the Polish Deli, get the potato pancakes always.
Chicago Avenue on this bit is retail and ghetto residential
on top of the shops.

Flat and wide, it contain a low sky,
ferocious sun or oppressive clouds.
Always piquant variety of urban perambulator -
crazy cat lady, Hispanic horde, drug addict, hipster chick and
all flavors of anonymity.

Down toward Damen Avenue the businesses cram askew.
Dollar store, ghetto mart, fast food and cell phones for
those who wait for the bus. Always people waiting for the bus,
stoic souls firm against the vortex of trash, mocked
by photoshopped ads pointing from plexiglass.

Junkies like other vermin infest the vacant asphalt,
nobody seems to know how to get rid of them. Watch out
near the ghetto mart, here civilization crumbles into chaotic,
old ladies and rusty sedans will run you down.

Ancient ugly storefronts back up by the Polish deli.
What did travel agencies look like in medieval times?
Look in and find out. Also peek in the ugly tailor shop
and view the most beautiful woman in the world:
a fatigued Ukrainian lass stitching pants.

Turning a corner to this patch of flat asphalt
renders one both wary, nostalgic and happy.
Thin trees shelter lunch eaten in a parked car.
Another hopelessly hopeful storefront opens,
a tattooed woman doggedly arranges a display.

Roaring trolley rolls past ancient graveyard.
A heat fantastic and wet, a fork in the road
down which track melts into a forgotten concrete
valley. There true torpor lies, and also a
pharmacy college.

One could take this fork less traveled time and again
until one would find a minor paradise albeit ghost haunted.
Are there ghosts in the graveyard? Of course one hears stories,
but all that is verified are beautiful corpse fed azaleas and ferocious
dogs at dusk.
Stay away from the dogs, locals know.

The trollies arrive from multi-pronged forks and combine on one track.
Three routes merge at the cement flatbed trolley depot, all eastbound
cars then enter into what the drivers call 'the hole.'
This is where to get a car late night
when love hunting or seeking emergency temporary shelter.

Chester Avenue sports the old brick sidewalk on the graveyard side.
It frequently floods, but provides an archaic walk under hanging trees.
The VA hospital to the east breaks the bucholic spell. A stern brick building,
rusty metal warnings, sad men in worn coats, kids with missing limbs
and smoking doctors.

Where Chester meets 38th Street they paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Not the worst thing actually, paradise is not suited for this bit.
It is more a humble hub where various traffic veins converge.
Disconcerting, pedestrian unfriendly, traffic criss-crosses to the college,
the hospitals, the interstate.

There is a nice hidden nature reserve, walk straight east, past
where Chester T-s against 38th Street. If you have not been run over
yet by autos of various decrepitude.

This patch of Chester Avenue gives it up anciently, urbanely.
It is decadent in its deshabille.
Urban urchins run you down in cars, heavy boxes squeal past.
Westbound down Chester Avenue at the fork is wild and uncharted,
forest and ghetto alternately.
The true and rare pioneer spirit might try it, but most should
get their trolley fare together and
ride into the hole of mystery.