Big Brother

my big brother
throws
olive army men
on searing rods

he calls it
torture

we play good guys
bad guys
in the yard

forts of sand
machine gun mouths
olive army men
toppled, scattered

Americans
the good guys

no, my big brother said
no good guys or bad guys
just situations

decades later
another word
interests

olive army men
faces, arms, legs
melting, dripping
plastic sizzling
on red coals

torture, he said
we needed information
no good guys or bad guys
just situations
interests

decades later
waterboarding
sleep deprivation
Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo Bay

mouths gasping
naked humiliation
bodies melting

sizzling
on the coals
of America

no good guys
no bad guys
situations, interests
security, security, security
security, security, security
no good guys

years later
new year
crisp breeze blows
across the sand

on capitol steps
new president
"Our security emanates
from the justness of our cause"

sizzle and stench
fades...fades...fades
crisp breeze blows
across the sand

Digitizing Metaphor

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a fascinating article about the use of computers to recognize and catalog metaphors. It leads with the story of Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, who created a website called The Mind is a Metaphor, which is a database of literary metaphors that writers used for the mind.

The Chronicle reporter writes:

Mr. Pasanek hopes it will help literary and intellectual historians gain insights into how people's language reflects their understanding of the world around them.

The article also notes a database of contemporary metaphors of the mind created by a British artificial intelligence researcher.

I'm intrigued people are collecting these metaphors and that they have developed computer algorithms that can recognize them.

Most intriguing though is the articles discussion of how the metaphors we used to characterize the mind have changed. In the 18th Century writers often compared the mind to a book or a page, whereas nowadays the mind is more often compared to a computer.

The most interesting question for me is how does the shift in the metaphors we use change how we think and act. If I think of my mind as a computer as opposed to a book, how am I different.

Someone asked me recently if I had the bandwidth to handle another task in my workload. I thought it was a great turn of phrase and I've been using myself. But I've also been wondering if it changes somehow the way I perceive myself as a human, professional, worker, cog in the machine.