Jumping in the Shower: Dad jokes, dead words, and a different kind of attention
Person One: "I'm just gonna jump in the shower real quick."
Person Two: "Probably best if you just stand there and let the water fall on you, no need to jump."
Why do we like dad jokes (and hate them at the same time)? Because they re-open something closed. For a second dead language is alive again, without changing a word. That's your brain catching a metaphor in the act.
Today's post is a little different. It's more psychology and philosophy than therapeutic application. I have personally found these frameworks helpful for my own emotional wellbeing though, which is why I'm sharing them today. And it all starts with metaphor.
Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist says metaphor is not decoration or an add on to language. He says it is "the bedrock of language." Metaphor means carrying over. It carries over truth from experience into a form we can notice and do something with. Sensations, feelings, thoughts, movements, and of course words are all forms we can notice.
McGilchrist goes on to say that whenever we use language at all, we are using metaphor. Which means every time we speak. A metaphor can be dead or alive though. Ricoeur said a metaphor is alive while it's new and still saying something, and dies once it settles into the dictionary. We notice the alive ones in songs and poetry, or a compelling talk or speaker. But over time what once felt novel and intriguing becomes rote and just functional. Think of a two year old learning to talk. They reveal the wonder of language as they begin to communicate at a higher level. They repeat words and tell you about words that to most of us feel too common to even notice in day to day life.
When someone says don't jump, just stand there and let the water fall on you, your attention gets jarred into hearing the literal words, jumping inside a shower, and how silly they sound, maybe for the first time. Which is why it's funny.
Metaphors come in more forms than just words though. Thomas Kinkade paints light coming from a house in the woods and it registers as a flat fairytale. Comforting, maybe, but not alive, because it isn't carrying anything over from lived experience. Van Gogh's self portraits, however, stir us because of how he attended to his own face and the metaphor it created visually. That attention is in the paint, and it still reaches us.
So why does this matter? I am about to tell you, but first let me explain a little more background. McGilchrist says the left hemisphere handles cliché, the worn and familiar and known. When words stop feeling new they become cogs in the wheel of communication (notice the metaphor I just used!?). Live metaphor is the right hemisphere's territory. It works out the hidden meaning in the novel. It is not bothered by the non-literal meaning and even likes the tickle of the absurdity it notices. The left then takes a reduced form of that information so it can make functional use of the symbol.
So the difference between cliché and live metaphor is not in the words. It's in how they are attended to.
Which leads, somewhat surprisingly, to three things: attention comes before all other cognitive functions, attention is a creative act, and not all attention is the same. As McGilchrist said, "The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to."
Which means the feeling of cliché or deadness is not a property of a painting or a song or a sentence. It's a property of the attention brought to it.
What does that actually look like? This question deals with the two main sides of our brains, the left hemisphere and the right. They aren't doing different jobs so much as attending to experience in different ways. It isn't that one takes care of feelings while the other takes care of rational thought. The left cannot experience life first hand. It can only deal with what the right hemisphere tells it about the experience of life. The left provides narrow attention to what we are dealing with. It grasps something specific, holds it still, takes it apart, categorizes it, and gets it ready for use. The right has direct access to lived experience, and its attention stays wide. It holds the whole field, the context, the thing as it is rather than as a type of thing. McGilchrist sums it up as the left helping us apprehend the world in order to manipulate it, and the right helping us comprehend it, to see it for what it is.
Both are needed. McGilchrist's classic example of why is a bird on the ground: a narrow beam to pick the seed out of the gritty dirt, and at the same moment a broad vigilance for the hawk on the prowl. Lose the narrow one and you starve. Lose the wide one and something eats you. Even so, the argument I am making here is for an increase in right hemisphere attending.
Attending with right hemisphere qualities means widening. Staying with the whole instead of the useful part. Letting a thing be itself before it becomes defined. Tolerating that you don't have it pinned down yet. Less doing and more being. Tending to a moment with a right hemisphere bias gives you a better chance of being present to what is. That said, with the dialectic of the left and right hemispheres intact, how present any of us can get to full reality is debatable.
Almost nothing you handled today was the thing itself. The word chair is not a chair. Your name is not you. The story you tell about your marriage is not your marriage. "Anxious" is a sound standing in for something happening in your chest that has no sounds in it at all, which is itself standing in for an experience you lived before you had a word for it. McGilchrist says it flatly: we live "no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it."
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave this a name. He called it the symbolic order, and we live inside it. All symbols (and he would say the entire world we perceive is made of symbols) are what he called signifiers. For Lacan, signifiers don't point to some true version like Plato talked about. Instead they confusingly just point at other signifiers. There is no way to use the symbolic to point at anything other than the symbolic. He says there is experience outside the symbolic. He calls that the Real. Again, don't hear that as Platonic, as though the Real were a truer world sitting behind this one. Hear it as the problem with symbols. Experience arrives formless, and forcing it into a shareable form leaves you holding a signal of something that was more complete before it got reduced. The Real is all that resists being named and formed and put into a symbol.
So we don't get to experience the Real. But Lacan says trauma is a symptom of it intruding into the reality we have built inside the symbolic order. We get disorganized by something our faculties cannot define. He calls that an encounter with the Real. Jokes, when they gently alert us to an absurdity standing alongside a rational concept, are perhaps a light version of that encounter. Or at least a glitch in the matrix, a moment where we get to recognize the order we are inside.
Lacan's point was that the order of symbols was here before you were. You were born into a form, and that form sits inside a world of words, names, rules and relations already in motion. Somebody named you before you could object. He suggests that to be human is to carry an internal unsolvable wound, the felt loss of a wholeness that Lacan says we never even really had. The felt loss is real. Assuming we were once whole and that that’s what we grieve is a retroactive contruction we make in effort to make sense of our pain.
Here is where I think Lacan and McGilchrist are not saying the same thing. Lacan gives us a theory for the structure of our reality, and tells us the wound that structure causes does not heal. McGilchrist gives us a mechanism, and a mechanism has a dial on it. So the gap does not close. But it has a width, and how we attend sets the width. I'm not suggesting we can escape the symbolic order. Some yogis claim experiences of an all unifying reality, so the jury is still out, but it is safe to say it is very unlikely for most of us. I am suggesting that right hemispheric attention is the difference between living in a thin description of your life and living in a wider one. Which is most of what I watch happen in a therapy room. Nobody gets out of the symbolic order. Some people get more room inside it.
Symbols also help us connect. Metaphors allow us to communicate. They solve for isolation in this life. We can translate what is inside of us to others and feel seen and known, at least in part.
So the symbols were never the problem. Forgetting they are symbols is, because that's when we stop being present. We start living in a description of life instead of life itself. That's what over-leaning on the left hemisphere does. This is much of McGilchrist's warning, that we are allowing our cultures to become homogenized toward a left hemisphere way of attending to the world.
So it's up to us to resist. Start small. Listen to what you said today. You caught a flight. You killed time. You ran an idea past someone. You were going to jump in the shower.
None of it is literally true. Every one is a bridge, but what if you could stop mid bridge and look around?
Nothing in that list is permanently dead. A shift out of rote and back into experience is still possible. The deadness was never in the words, so it can't be sealed in there. It sits in the attention, which means it's reversible, by you, today, by tracing the language you already have back toward the experience it came from, the part that is less defined symbol and more full picture mystery.
Which makes attending a skill. Something you practice, and the practice is widening. Noticing what you feel before you name it. Staying with a sensation instead of explaining it. Hearing what someone actually said rather than the category you filed it under. Narrow the attention and the world gets smaller. Open it and there's more there than there was a minute ago.
References
Channel McGilchrist. (2022, May 16). Understanding the matter with things dialogues episode 6: Chapter 6 emotional & social intelligence [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZViXjsYjY4
Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's papers on technique, 1953–1954 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; J. Forrester, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1975)
Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1973)
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Perspectiva Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1977). The rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language (R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, & J. Costello, Trans.). University of Toronto Press. (Original work published 1975)