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Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire

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Traditional institutions control time and space when they can stifle the imaginations of anyone who could be more creative if everything were more like something else. Metaforeplay can change meals into a form of knowledge that combines a bottoms up fetish mentality with the weirdness of a news room joking about a world that is going to hell. I did not hear much about hell or the end of the world when I was growing up, and I never had Blueberry Muffin Squares cereal with a banana and milk for breakfast way back when, but it was quite common to thank the Lord for our food before I started reading the Minneapolis Star Tribune as I was eating breakfast.

Holy war was so common in the lifetime of John Milton that it should not surprise Americans that I considered my year in Vietnam an attempt to support a government that was not representative of godless Commies in Asia. Picking a room to live in by myself brought me to Saint Paul, in the great bong water state of Minnesota as my literary life was seeking the kind of sensory deprivation that is standard for the kind of theology that gives Christianity a bad name, and it was Saint Paul that gave us that theology. Milton used his imagination to produce poems that were read back to him by wives and daughters who assisted his living in blindness. Milton was trying to put his heart and soul into:

Embracing poetry's paradoxical demand

to express the inexpressible, Milton's

phrases anticipate the careful scrutiny

by metaphor theory of the interaction

between claims of inspiration and

manifest evidence of art. (p. 16).

all art invokes affective assent,

and fervent witness is an important

part of what we seek in artistic

experience. (p. 30).

Or more precisely, it is what

metaphor cannot do that causes

us to feel metaphor's schematizing

juxtapositions as a tensional

experience. Metaphoric juxtaposition

can arouse us to tensive new

awareness; but it cannot repay

us for what that new awareness

costs. (p. 31).

Therefore, what gets dissociated

and divested are not merely lexical

meanings but also, and more compellingly,

the ways people think in response

to language. Lively metaphor makes

an assault on intellectual and

emotional complacency (pp. 31-32).

When I was a child, I was taught to restrain my language in ways that would have been nice if I had spent my year in Vietnam with my mother, but I was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division of the US Army, where enemies were officially referred to as:

dinks.