The Neuromantics – S2, Ep 6

An all-purpose definition of “metaphor” might be, as the OED suggests, a name or descriptive term given to an object to which it is not properly applicable – something described in terms of something else. Can such a transfer of meaning be more than a figure of speech? Hernan Pablo Casakin thinks so. In Tel Aviv, a group of first-year architectural students were asked to redevelop an old bus station. All stages of planning benefited from ideas and images from other disciplines, but especially those involving practical difficulties of space and resources. Thinking about the city “as a bazaar of knowledge” helped one student overcome relative inexperience to create a mixed-use neighbourhood with fifteen flats, public buildings and amenities. Casakin records the experiment in Metaphors in Design Problem Solving (2007).A longer, stranger, and more beautiful experiment, conducted by the writer, musician, artist and “psychonaut” Peter Blegvad, treats metaphor less as a tool or guide and more as a way of meeting the strangeness of the world. Imagine, Observe, Remember (Uniform Books, 2021) is a dazzling picture-essay in which the author paints and repaints objects and places in situ, from memory, and as his inner eye “sees” them. Radiators grow in stature, pianos become icons, a river delta acquires perfect symmetry. This is Transformers for the everyday environment, but with speculations in place of body armour. If the world comes to us through perception, then what is it “really” like, and are our senses just metaphorical descriptions? If they are, how does one shake off their influence? And do we want to?