Welch, Thomas, Picasso, and Everyone Else

Randomly selected sentence from A Prospect of the Sea:

“Did the princess live again, rising like a mermaid from the net, or did the prince from another story tauten the tails of her hair and bend her shoulder-bone into a harp and pluck the dead, black tunes for ever in the courts of the royal country?”

Randomly selected sentence from Winter in the Blood:

“My right eye was swollen up, but I couldn’t remember how or why, just the white man, loose with his wife and buying drinks, his raging tongue a flame above the music and my eyes.”

Prospect is almost pure metaphor; not only is the princess a character in the story that the boy is imagining within Thomas’s story, but she is taken from a Christmas story in the boy’s story. Three levels of fiction. Then there is a prince from yet another story. Within this one sentence, the princess, who is already a metaphor, is futher simileed upon when she rises like a mermaid. She alternatively becomes a musical instrument. And then there is also an allusion to the phoenix as she rises and lives again. Thomas takes a single subject and sends it through a prism, breaking it into many concepts, all of which existed within the original subject as possible themes from which metaphors could be constructed. The difference between Thomas and Welch and the majority of authors is that most authors will take a trait from their character or a quality or concept that they want to describe, find an appropriate metaphor that illustrates that trait or quality or concept and they stick to it; their work is done and they don’t think about it twice. Thomas starts with a trait or a quality or a concept, considers many possible metaphors to illustrate his that trait etc. and instead of choosing one, he throws them all in, mixing them together and bending them back and forth upon and through one another. An author might say a subject was quiet, strong, and intelligent, etc., but Thomas turns all those adjectives into metaphors, letting them play with one another, sometimes letting them take over an entire paragraph or an entire story. He doesn’t let the plot get in the way of the will of the metaphor. His stories are kind of similar to dreams in that way.
VS Ramachandran wrote about the paintings of picasso that show a subject composed of all possible perspectives of their face and body, combined into one form. It turns out that within the are of the brain that recognizes faces, there are specific areas that recognize the face from a given angle, whether profile, straight on, ¼. Normally only one of these facial recognition areas activates when viewing a face, but when a person views a multi-perspective picasso face, all three of these areas activate simultaneously. I think Thomas is doing something similar to our brains when he composes these multi-layered sentences with multi-dimensional metaphors. He intentionally activates multiple and disparate regions of our brains that in normal life never have the opportunity to activate simultaneously. I don’t know why it’s cool, why having these multiple regions activate simultaneously is cool, I just know that it is. It’s like a sphinx or a griffin or a labradoodle or Beatles’ harmonies. Anyway, Welch kind of does this too, but not to the degree or level of skill that Thomas does. He has some runs like “his raging tongue a flame above the music and my eyes.” That’s interesting because it completely disregards natural laws that dictate that something like a tongue can’t at once be a flame and also in someone’s mouth and in the air. Welch activates fear with raging, the sensation of touch with a flame, hearing with music (which in itself activates many other senses and emotions) and vision, all within one short sentence and with one thing. the sentence occupies multiple dimensions, senses, emotions, and all the intellectual crap that goes along with it. Kind of like cerebral yoga, which is why I like good art, what little of it there is. Ps I’m not going to re view or revise these posts, so I apoligize if their our gramattical, or speling airers.