A guest posting by Laurie Edwards, Principal, Breathlines.org
“I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,
a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall
cutting as holly and ice”
— Seamus Heany, “Holly,” in New Selected Poems: 1966–1987, Faber and Faber
A man I know, David Nostbakken, a one-time student of Marshall McLuhan, is trying to breathe new life into the MacLuhan Centre (aka The Coach-house Institute) at the University of Toronto. He’s talking to all and sundry about what its mission should be now that the digital age is well and truly upon us.
My question: what is the net doing to language? Never has there been more texting, never such a shrinking of useable vocabulary. When words fall into dis-use, the actualities they call forth withdraw from our experience. Our first task, according to scripture, at least, was naming.
Our longing for meaning, and for reconciliation with loneliness, exile (from Eden, childhood, vigour, and home), and death invests words with the power of not only representing phenomena but generating them. Such transcendence speaks not only to human sorrow but also to the capacity we have for wonder. In the end, all we have is metaphor.
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
The power of metaphor is rooted in Judaeo-Christian values: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” While the internet connects us might it be obliterating our roots? We are always in the present on the net, but are we losing the past?
I very much appreciate the premise of Judaeo roots. But how might the internet obliterate them? I could as easily imagine their enhancement.
In the philosophy of language, Lakoff and Johnson emphasise the importance of metaphor, where, ‘The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 5). New things are interpreted through assumed similarity with the familiar. They later elaborate:
‘In all aspects of life…we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003, p. 158).