A few months ago I came across Books for Soldiers, a site that lets people send books, magazines and DVDs to soldiers in the field to keep their morale up. This strikes me as a very good idea. While I oppose the war in Iraq by any sensible definition of opposition, I also think it's vital to learn from our mistakes in Vietnam and give adequate support to the military troops who, in many cases, are deployed against their wishes.
Although I endorse the idea behind the site, that's not what I'm posting about. While I was browsing the forums there, I came across a comment that puzzled and disturbed me. One lady, responding to a soldier posting a request for some book or other, thanked him for being "a true hero just like the firefighters in New York".
I'm really not interested in evaluating the comment itself. What struck me was that this is precisely the language used on and after 9/11, and it's taken me several months to figure out why I found this so confusing.
You see, it never occurred to me--not once in my life, not until very recently--that it's possible for a human being to hear a metaphor or an idea, and years later have that idea, expressed in exactly the same way, still mean something. I have no idea how that's possible. As soon as I understand an idea to my satisfaction, it loses its appeal; the moment a metaphor becomes familiar to me it loses its power. The only way I can hold an idea in my head is by constantly checking, rechecking and cross-checking it with my experiences, observations, other ideas and the ideas of other people, revising and expanding it accordingly. I rarely express an idea the same way twice.
Hanging on to a metaphor is even harder; I have to constantly invert it and overhaul it, and even then it lapses into a stagnant ruin unless I can play with some deeper, more explicit underlying idea. The first time I hear a metaphor (a good metaphor, mind you, not some half-assed cheesy excuse for verbiage), I'm impressed and I think about it. The second time I hear it, my attitude is, "Yes, yes, I've heard that before." The third time I hear it I start to get annoyed. Come up with a new one, or express things in a different way!
I would guess that this instinctive avoidance of repetition is common to all creative personalities. How many times can writers stand to hear the same story before hearing a new one? How long can an artist draw one single subject before doing something else? How long can a musician listen to one and only one CD before she goes nuts? This probably explains a lot about why creative people tend to be estranged from politics, which has devolved into a banal cliche-slinging match. Everyone's saying the same thing over and over--which means they're saying nothing at all.
What would life be like if a buzzword or a maxim could hold its value for years? It's almost a contradictory question; it's like asking you to imagine a universe in which there is no imagination. (It's not quite a contradiction, of course. It's just difficult to do.) Still, there are people whose minds act as a sort of formaldehyde for ideas, and to my chagrin I haven't the faintest idea what goes on in their heads.