Making
November 19th, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |I like the metaphor of making.
- Making sense
- Making love
- Make believe
- Makeup
- Making friends
- Making enemies
- Making mincemeat.
These are dead metaphors now, but if we view them literally they all suggest the idea of invention or transformation.
When we make sense, we create something new out of what is there - a text is nothing until we make sense out of it.
When we make love, we make a new entity that is not one person or the other, but the relationship between the two (or so I’ve heard).
When we make believe, we imagine things that were not there before.
When we make ourselves up, we paint our faces so as to create a new persona. The same phrase, “making up”, is used to describe the invention of a story - “I made it all up”.
When we make friends, we transform another person’s status into that of an ally.
When we make enemies, we transform a person into our foe. He isn’t intrinsically our enemy; we made him our enemy.
When we make mincemeat of somebody, we commit such an act of violence that the person is utterly unrecognisable, now resembling more a mixture of chopped dried fruit, distilled spirits and spices than a human being.
I suspect that our tendency to use the metaphor of invention when describing these quite different activities betrays the fact that, in a fundamental sense, doing is making. When we do anything, we make another footprint in the world.
Seeing is making, because our eyes create another illusion through which we perceive our world.
Talking is making, because it creates sounds that add to the world’s noise, and conveys concepts that add to other people’s brains, physically making new connections between brain cells.
Writing is making, because we’re making a scratch on the world’s surface, and because it makes readers of other people, giving them ideas that we never had.
In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the earth, he did so by speaking. He said, Let there be light: and there was light.
That’s pretty clever, but isn’t it similar to what we do all the time? Man said the words homosexual, racist, terrorist, autism, arthritis, word, credit crunch, global warming, performative, republic, teenager, chav, punk, vegetable, shoe, frizzen, wiki, and suddenly these things existed.
For me, the metaphor of God creating the world is a good way of visualising the link between perception and creation for all human beings, and the particular importance of words in the creating process.
Man created God in his image as a tool for exploring the very human act of creation.
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