REFLECTAPHORS The (implicate) Universe as a Work of Art John Briggs Western Connecticut State University   Published Quantum Implications, Essays in Honor of David Bohm, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1987 Copyright Routledge & Kegan Paul   A number of years ago I was quite surprised to discover an uncanny resemblance between an approach I was pursuing into the underlying structure of works of art and David Bohm's visions into the underlying construction of matter. The coincidence between these two ideas continues to surprise me, but Bohm himself added an even stranger twist one afternoon some years later when I had the opportunity of interviewing him for a radio show. The show focused on the possible relationships between the arts and science and, in the course of the interview, Bohm offered that he didn't see why great works of art couldn't also have something important to teach us about the laws of nature. The possibility he raised that day is curious and haunting and in the next pages I will try to catch a glimpse of its ghost by outlining the hypothesis I found so startlingly mirrored in David Bohm's implicate order. The hypothesis in question is a way of conceptualizing both the structure of works of art and some aspects of the process which goes into creating them. Specifically, it describes the global interaction of what I call 'reflectaphors.' Reflectaphors are created in the dynamics that takes place among the elements that comprise a work of art. In the visual arts, reflectaphors emerge in the interactions of elements like shape, line, color and negative space. In literature they appear in such techniques as irony, pun, motif, symbol and metaphor. Through reflectaphors are displayed an artwork's subtlety and its ability to astonish: they are the intersection between its parts and the whole; seedbeds of its 'truth'; the nexes of the mind apprehending and the thing apprehended; and they remain both unchanged and in process. They are the artwork's hidden order. To illustrate the interworkings of that order, I propose first to look in detail at its appearance as metaphor. X/Y: two sides of a mirror Metaphor is traditionally defined as an unusual or non-logical assertion of identity between two terms. Some aestheticians view metaphor (including simile) as the backbone of poetry. Aristotle claimed that 'it is the greatest thing by far to be the master of metaphor.' A sample poetic metaphor will illustrate why. In his well-known Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish sets out to tell his readers what a poem is by writing one. His strategy is to identify the abstract concept 'a poem' with a series of sensuous images, creating a string of stunning metaphors. Through these metaphors the poet evokes rather than prescribes an understanding of what a poem is. Consider one of MacLeish's figures: 'A poem should be wordless as the flight of birds.' The metaphor is conventional in that it is composed of two terms X 'a poem,' and Y. 'a flight of birds' - asserted to be at least potentially (i.e. 'should be') identical. And the mind is given pause. Behind that pause lurks the secret of poetic metaphor - a peculiar equation of tension between terms. For in the same mental space X and Y are convergently compared and contrasted. On the contrast side, X + Y because the reader knows very well that a poem is not a movement made out of flesh, blood, feathers and the instinct to negotiate currents of air. Applying 'wordless' to the equation heightens this contrast almost to the point of paradox. On the comparison side, the asserted X = Y compels the mind to stretch out to connect the terms. For the metaphor to do that there must be enough felt similarity between them. For example, we might see in the flight of birds an orderly activity, a free and lyrical quality, a living and ultimately unutterable meaning that might be appropriate to a poem. Might be but, of course, anyone attempting to give an account of all the meanings of this metaphor would immediately run head-on into two problems. First, the analyzable meanings here are both complex and multiplex because the number of discernible similarities and shades of similarities between the wordless flight of birds and a poem is limited only by human imagination. Second, to delineate fully even one meaning would require actively ignoring the contrast side of the metaphor - for to include that would effectively undercut any meaning by making us aware that a flight of birds is basically not like a poem. Moreover, the fact that it is not like a poem creates still further meanings which are, themselves, not fully analyzable. Not surprisingly, therefore, the interpreted meanings of metaphors often turn out to be paradoxical or self-contradictory. The movement which produces this effect bears connection to Bohm's implicate order. According to Bohm, matter and energy continually unfold and enfold, appearing in particular (explicate) forms like photons and mountains and then disappearing into the (implicate) background For Bohm this primordial unending movement from implicate to explicate and back again implies the whole. He calls it holomovement and considers it primary to all natural law. In a metaphor, an analogous sort of thing seems to happen with meaning. Recently one of the many subtleties of the often paradoxical movement of meaning through metaphor surfaced during a class discussion of the MacLeish lines. I was explaining that I personally experienced the image as a flight of birds in formation very high up and silent, wordless. Then someone in the class pointed out that birds in flight often make quite a bit of noise, also not words, but probably communication of some sort and we realized such an image could also fit MacLeish's metaphor. Obviously, taking that angle on the metaphor alters and broadens in Bohm's terms unfolds and enfolds one's conception of its meaning. In the movement through the mind of the old conception and the new, one gets a taste of the whole. This suggests the metaphor is meaning as an ongoing process and perception rather than meaning as the conclusions of knowledge. To illustrate, consider the difference between the MacLeish metaphor and the statement 'A poem should be made of rhymed couplets.' Evidently, the statement is conclusive and logical. There is no sense of movement from the two terms, no hint of the kind of activity created by the provocative ambiguity of the metaphor. The statement may be arguable, but it can be quickly assimilated and filed away by the mind. MacLeish's metaphor, however, invites neither agreement nor disagreement, and despite its stipulative syntax, the sentence leaves the mind in a state more like that of hearing a question than understanding an assertion. Perhaps that is the metaphor's point. Certainly it was MacLeish's point. 'A poem,' he says at the end of Ars Poetica, 'should not mean but be.' The metaphor should move the mind beyond the conceptual confines of the X and Y terms, from meaning (which is paraphrasable and analyzable) to an implicate-explicate-implicate movement of meaning or being (which is not). Amazingly, if the metaphor strikes the right chemistry between X and Y. even repeated encounters with it will not inhibit this movement. How can this be? The answer may lie in understanding how consciousness perceives a metaphor. At present, neuroscience is only beginning to grapple with the immensely intricate questions of how consciousness works. But whatever the specific mechanisms, it seems plausible to generalize that a great deal of conscious processing (including layers of the unconscious and perception) relies on some form of comparison and contrast activity. For example, a sound is 'heard' against a background of other sounds (the voice of a friend shouting above the crash of the sea) by a process which separates out, abstracts, by contrast, the pitch, volume, rhythm of one sound (the voice) from that of the background (waves) and compares and contrasts it to patterns (of words, the friend's voice) recorded in memory. Memory, whether genetically acquired as instinct or experientially acquired as learning, lies at the root of the brain movement in which the complex mix of reason, emotion, brain states, perceptual regimes and immediate environmental influences unfold in conscious (explicate level) awareness as a stream of comparing and contrasting. These comparing and contrasting activities then refold into the background (implicate) levels of the brain to set the stage for further comparisons and contrasts. In the appendix to his 1965 book The Special Theory of Relativity, Bohm considers theories of perception by Piaget, Gibson, Held, Ditchburn and others and conveys his sense of them through an elegant hypothetical illustration which I will modify and simplify to make the point here about metaphor. Suppose you are walking along a road in the obscure light of the moon. You see an unknown shape in the distance (contrast: the figure to its background). Initially you think you are seeing a person (comparison: of that shape to the complex memories of human shapes in various positions), but as you draw closer you notice features unlike human ones (your comparison has disclosed elements in contrast) and you then formulate a new image of what you see as an animal (comparison) until this comparison too reveals a contrast. At this juncture, still retaining elements of your comparisons of human-like and animal-like features, but confronted by undeniable contrasting elements which make this conclusion unlikely, you may compare your information to some idea you have of a monster and begin to panic. Finally, trembling on the edge of flight, you press ahead enough to recognize the shape as a bush (comparison of features of the object with features in the memory-abstraction 'bush'). Sequences of comparison-then-contrast-then-comparison unfold with neuronal rapidity and flow indistinguishably into one another. Nevertheless, it is obvious that consciousness does not see the shape simultaneously as background, person, animal, monster and bush. That would be absurd, if not actually psychotic. Instead, what is perceived in the advance toward the shape is a series of advancing conclusions or abstractions, each held successively as a theory (and one of the roots of 'theory' is the Greek theasthai, 'to see'). At any moment the comparing and contrasting sequences yield apparent knowledge of what is being seen. In poetic metaphor, however, comparisons and contrasts between the X and Y terms don't alternate; they remain in dynamic X/ Y tension or balance. The metaphor's dynamic appears to engender the perception that the metaphor means all the possible similarities between its terms and none of the similarities. The categorical or conclusive mind set which is the staple of our consciousness is momentarily cancelled out. We have the vivid and immediate experience that our meanings may be viable but they are horribly limited. Indeed, it isn't far-fetched to imagine a poet writing a piece in which he approaches an object and reveals in metaphor that it is a man, an animal, a monster and a bush. Moreover, he might suggest there are also other possibilities he senses are present in the object but cannot quite discern, and that all of these, in turn, reflect his own existential condition and the very act of his observing so that, in the end, he is finding himself in the object. Meanwhile he could be revealing that his experience is more than any of this because it is none of these things. Such coalescences and twists occur in literature all the time. It is what William Empson meant by his use of the term ambiguity 2. Something like this happens, for example, in Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken.' The narrator in the poem tells about stopping at the place where the single road he had been traveling on diverged and how he decided which of the two alternative paths to take. In the course of four stanzas, each road is described in such a way as to suggest that every feature of the roads is also a feature of the narrator's dilemma in living his human life (e.g. 'I looked down one [road] as far as I could/To where it bent in the undergrowth'). Meanwhile, though he is at pains to tell the reader how similar the roads were, the narrator also asserts that they were different (e.g. 'the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same' yet 'I took the one less traveled by'). This comparison/contrast, similarity/difference ambiguity is central to our experience of the roads as a metaphor. 'The Road Not Taken' might be called a central one-term metaphor because the narrator never says explicitly that the activity of a man choosing roads X, is metaphorically equated with any Y. But the tone and weight of the narrative suggests that such an unstated Y term is present. Indeed, the fact that the reader can never say for sure that a Y such as 'choosing one's path in life' is meant at all adds considerable energy to the X/Y, comparison/contrast tension. (Actually it's more a harmony than a tension, in the musical sense of the word harmony.) When asked to respond to the various meanings that people had given to this poem, Frost himself insisted rather sharply there was no ulterior meaning at all. It was about a man in the woods choosing roads. In a sense, his reaction could have been expected. Artists typically become sullen or hostile when asked what their work means. Why? Because it's the wrong question. To want to 'know' the meaning of a metaphor indicates you're bent on missing its meaning. By not falling victim to the lust for a meaning, Frost kept his metaphor alive. There are many varieties of poetic metaphor. Some metaphors appear as images, as in poet Richard Hugo's line 'The sun bruises the oats gold' which is formed from three compressed metaphoric juxtapositions-- 1 (X) sun = ( Y) a being or physical object capable of bruising; 2 (X) the act of bruising = (Y) natural processes which engage photosynthesis; and then 3 this strange bruising, as an action (X) implicitly equated in the metaphor with ( Y) making the oats valuable (like gold). Compression of several different metaphoric elements in interlocking X/Y tension is typical of artistic structure. In other cases, a central X-term may be linked serially in a piece to a number of different Ys to produce a branching-term metaphor, as in the Emily Dickinson poem where the narrator explicitly compares 'a certain slant of light on winter afternoons' to several images and ideas, including 'the heft of cathedral tunes,' 'an imperial affliction' and 'a heavenly hurt.' In poems, the use of metaphor as a technique is extensive and in metaphor resides all of those qualities of vitality, mystery, truth and timeless excitement we normally associate with poetry itself. For that reason, it is important to consider why, outside of literary context, in the world at large, metaphors do not have these qualities. Though general-use metaphors have a structure which also cojoins unlikely or illogical X and Y terms, the structure in this case is superficial. For example, calling somebody a 'rat,' claiming that a cigarette will taste as fresh as a drop of rain, or giving the name spaceship to a vehicle which plies the regions beyond earth's atmosphere, are all forms of metaphor. General-use metaphors abound, and they can be as strikingly unusual as any poetic metaphors. But they are unlike them in one crucial respect. In the general-use metaphor the comparison and contrast between the terms can be resolved. The generaluse metaphor stresses the similarity between X and Y. Such metaphors are dressed up forms of conclusion and knowledge and so they function essentially in the way ordinary communication does. A specific point is intended by the metaphor, a message - and once the point is apprehended, the metaphor is over. 'I saw Mrs Bradshaw today; she was high as a kite.' A metaphor like this is entirely empty or misleading unless the listener, who presumably has a context for Mrs Bradshaw, can draw an appropriate conclusion about what is meant (e.g. the lady has been taking drugs). In contrast, the message of poetic or literary metaphors ('a poem should be wordless as the flight of birds') remains essentially complex and ambiguous though, oddly, literary metaphors are by no means vague ('the sun bruises the oats gold'). They are lucid despite their rigorous disavowal of message. Literary metaphors should also be distinguished from the type of metaphor known variously as 'root' metaphor, 'conceptual archetype' or 'model' 3. The Newtonian notion that the universe is a machine is an example of this type of metaphor. It has an 'envisioning' quality because it is more open-ended than a general-use metaphor. For instance, scientists inspired by the metaphor of celestial mechanics have been able to envision and uncover numerous mechanical-like aspects of nature. When an envisoning metaphor is created, it has meanings which are unknown at the time and this can make the metaphor hugely inviting. However, in the end the invitation is to discern what those meanings are quite different from the invitation of a poetic metaphor. David Bohm, of course, is probably more aware than any scientist in modern times of the traps of envisioning metaphors. Not only has he argued eloquently against the way science has explicated to distortion the Newtonian metaphor; he has tried to incorporate in his model a clear sense of the limitations of all scientific models, including his own, to provide ultimate meanings. I remember that during our radio show he said he thought scientific theories should be presented like poetry because, like poems, theories are insights, acts of perception, rather than hard and fast conclusions. In presenting his implicate order, Bohm is always careful to spell out the suggestive rather than objective value of his illustrating metaphors like the hologram or the glycerine ink-drop experiment. He is always pointing beyond, showing where his theory, vast as it is, must shade off into more subtle reaches and regions of the unknown (the superimplicate order, higher-dimensional realities, chaos as infinite degrees of order, the super-quantum potential and the super-super-quantum potential), always impressing the listener with the limitations of the mind in the face of this vast order of which the mind itself is a mirror. In this way, Bohm tries to avoid the common fate of scientific metaphors and accomplish something very like what happens in the X/Y dynamics of metaphors in poems. But Bohm's understanding is rare. The very richness of an envisioning metaphor is usually its downfall. Greedy for certainty, the mind can't resist and seeks to draw out every last ounce of the treasure until the metaphor collapses. Poetic metaphor avoids this exploitation and eventual exhaustion (though not for the lack of critics' trying) because of its X/Y dynamics and because the metaphor is set in a subtle structure of other metaphor-like devices which engender a pervasive order. This order is, as it were, especially designed to frustrate the drive of consciousness to analyze, paraphrase or constrict the movement which is that order's meaning. Reflectaphoric order There are a number of reasons to propose the neologism reflectaphor. While it might be possible to expand the existing term metaphor to cover the wide range of similar phenomena which occur in literary artforms, the visual arts, music and performing arts, like most other critical terms in the arts, metaphor suffers from over-use. Extending it further could inevitably result in confusion arising from the way the critical literature and common usage have conflated the general-use, envisioning and literary metaphors under the single term and have compounded metaphor indiscriminately with other critical terms like symbol, emblem and image. Nevertheless, the X/Y dynamic of literary metaphor, as I have defined it, has so much to offer by way of illuminating what is happening generally in artistic structure, that I propose to retain an echo of this type of metaphor in a new term. The word metaphor comes from the Greek meta and Aryan medhi which mean 'middle, between, among and beyond' and from the Greek Chore derived from phoros, 'to carry or to bear.' The word 'reflect' comes from the Greek re and flex which means 'bending back or bending again.' Putting these together, a reflectaphor can be thought of as having the quality of carrying between and beyond by a constant bending back. One side of the reflectaphor is carried over to the other, but then is reflected or carried back again and, therefore, once again beyond. The comparison/contrast design of the reflectaphor propels this movement, bending the mind back again and beyond, giving no rest in conclusion. Between the elements of a reflectaphor there is no meaning as such; the meaning is the continual revelation what Bohm calls unfoldment and unfoldment - of this reflective movement. Two further important dimensions of the 'reflect' in reflectaphor will also become apparent as we probe deeper into artistic process and structure. First, a reflectaphor mirrors the apprehender of the reflectaphor so that, as Bohm would say, the observer becomes revealed as the observed. Second, a reflectaphor in the context of a particular artwork is mirroring other reflectaphors in that context and in fact is a reflection of the whole of that context. The first step toward contacting that larger order of reflectaphors is to see that the kind of dynamic we observed in the individual poetic metaphor also appears in other artistic techniques. In literature any technique or aspect of a piece can be reflectaphoric; for instance, irony. In 'The Road Not Taken,' as we noted, the central axis of the poem is a metaphor (X) roads like (implied Y) life. But this metaphor is itself worked out ironically. The narrator's statement that he decided to take one road 'because it was grassy and wanted wear;/Though as for that, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same' combined with his assertion that 'two roads diverged in a wood, and I /I took the one less traveled by' create a context that causes the final statement, 'And that has made all the difference' to become ironic to a high degree. There is also irony in the fact that, although the narrator appears to emphasize the road he took, the title of the poem is 'The Road Not Taken.' In irony, the words or situation intend one meaning (X) and yet another meaning (Y) is perceived. If there is tension or harmony between the two sometimes contradictory meanings it creates a reflectaphor. Even puns can be reflectaphors. 'Would he had been one of my rank!' one Shakespeare character says, and his comrade replies, 'To have smell'd like a fool.' Rank as status (X) is juxtaposed to rank as bad smell ( Y). The similarity between X and Y (they're the same word) emphasizes the contrast, and the reflectaphor is formed. What happens when these and the many other reflectaphoric techniques are brought together into a whole context? Here lies what is perhaps the most dramatic similarity between Bohm's theory of matter and the structure and process found embedded in works of art. One of the primary models Bohm uses to illustrate the implicate order is the hologram. He focuses on the fact that in a hologram each region contains information about the whole picture which is recorded on the holographic plate. If a laser beam is passed through different fragments of the plate, this whole picture will be revealed to have been encoded in each piece, though seen from different angles. Holographic images are produced by recording on to the plate the interference patterns of light. Bohm says that since all matter-energy is composed of extremely subtle interference patterns moving continually throughout space, each particle or wave of matter and energy contains a unique image of the whole. In artistic creation an analogous holomovement takes place through the medium of reflectaphors. Joseph Conrad's masterwork Typhoon provides a brilliant example of this and shows how the artistic hologram is formed by concatenations of reflectaphors enfolded in every aspect of the story; characters, setting, plot, conflict and an array of expressive techniques. Ostensibly Conrad's tale is about a rather dull-witted sea captain who navigates his ship through the unimaginable fury of a tropical typhoon. In actuality, the story is about the nature of a human being's relationship to his fellows, the relationship of mind to matter, fate and will, knowledge and ignorance, truth and illusion, courage, cowardice, imagination and the creative act. In short, it is a story that implicates the whole. Conrad depicts the storm which the plot of the tale revolves around as commencing with the surprising oppressive placidity characteristic of typhoons. A puzzling calm besets the ship and turns out to be the prelude to the tempest that follows. In its context, this storm becomes a reflectaphor comparing/contrasting (X) its paradoxical placidity with ( Y) its amazing energy. The typhoon-as-plot-device, in turn, stands in X/Y comparison/contrast to Conrad's rendering of the strikingly unimaginative captain whose fate it is to ride out the storm. He is one of literature's most improbable heroes, described to the reader as an (X) absurdly placid character, lacking foresight and drive. Incongruously, however, he possesses 'fiery metallic gleams' on his cheeks 'no matter how close he shaved,' and these foreshadow (Y) the inner spark and power that allows him, for all his perplexing dullness, to take on the typhoon. Like the typhoon, the captain possesses tremendous force, at first obscured by a face of apparent placidity. The captain's name another reflectaphor of the typhoon - -MacWhirr. MacWhirr is also juxtaposed in reflectaphoric X/Y to his ship. The NanShan has 'the reputation of an exceptionally steady ship in a seaway.' MacWhirr is described as physically 'stolid' and proves to be psychologically exceptionally steady in the distressing seaway of the typhoon. In this regard, the fiery gleams on MacWhirr's cheeks (X) are also a reflection of (Y) the fire in the Nan-Shan's boilers that keeps the stolid ship with her head to the wind. The Nan-Shan carries a cargo of Chinese coolies and they reveal yet another reflectaphor of MacWhirr and the typhoon. Portrayed as a 'languid' (placid) lot, during the storm the coolies become anything but languid, clawing and thrashing each other in a frenzy because the footlockers they have brought with them have been battered open by the pitching of the ship, and the silver dollars which they have spent years away from home earning are flying around the innards of the cabin. At one point, the boatswain opens a hatch and witnesses this scene which Conrad clearly intends to suggest is a human typhoon. Even rolling circular dollars which the Chinese are chasing are reflectaphoric of the 'circular storm' raging outside. All these connections are interlocking reflectaphors in which one image, theme or event is equated with another to which it is logically dissimilar. Out of the basic reflectaphor of the typhoon whirl galaxies of reflectaphoric relationships: captain to storm; Chinese to storm; dollars to storm; ship to captain; storm to ship; passivity vs activity to all of the above; and so on in manifold, swirling compressions and combinations. Taken together, these relationships make the work a kind of moving hologram, a holomovement, in which each element (e.g. MacWhirr, the ship, the dollars) reflects by implication the whole. Moreover, this hologram partakes of something analogous to what Bohm calls a 'higher dimensional reality.' Bohm notes that in the quantum domain, because each detectable atomic particle must exist in three dimensions, an object with 10 to the 24 atomic particles would have 3 x 10 to the 24 dimensions of space. For him this multiplicity of dimensions is a powerful way to visualize his implicateexplicate order because it means that each the terms of the reflectaphors in the piece and the perceiver's own identity. Thus, the reader of Typhoon tacitly perceives the movement of similarity/difference between himself and MacWhirr, the typhoon, the Chinese, etc. He sees implicitly that in his life, in his mind and in the world there are all manner of typhoons. In the preface to one of his stories, Conrad called the effect of discovering one's identity in a story 'solidarity:' The presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. Finally, in its largest aspect, the reader may perceive through the story that in the this-ness of the world there is also an overall other-ness, an order which cannot be contained by our definitions - a super-implicate order. One more example from Typhoon will illustrate how the unfolding reflectaphoric, holographic, super-implicate and this*other-ly order Conrad's 'solidarity' - subtly informs an artwork's entire structure; and it may recall Thomas Mann's claim that the only way to write a novel isiwith mirrors.' The boatswain enters an empty coal bunker just before opening the door to the 'tween deck cabin and witnessing the mayhem of the Chinese chasing their dollars. In the pitch black bunker just before reaching the door, the sailor finds himself menaced by a loose metal bar, a coaltrimmer's slice, which is being hurtled around in the blackness by the pitch of the ship. The boatswain has the distinct impression that this piece of metal is trying to catch him and kill him. Finally, as if by blind luck, his hand falls upon the slice and he is saved. A moment later, he opens the door to the 'tween deck. Here, rather than being chased by pieces of metal, the Chinese are trying to catch metal pieces (their rolling dollars) which by a seeming blind luck keep slipping from their grasp. The ostensible reasons for these cat-andmouse chases between man and metal are manifestly different (the boatswain wants to save himself from being battered to death by an unseen force; the Chinese want to secure their possessions). Or are they so different? The scene is like a chemical solution mixing these eflectaphors with others in the story having to do with blindness, circularity and luck or fate. This illustration and the others from Typhoon are far from untypical of the piece as a whole and represent only a very small sample of its total reflectaphoric connections (a 'higher dimensional' total, probably impossible to calculate). One does not need to assume that Conrad was consciously aware of these connections or that he intended them - though there is good evidence that he was well aware of the principle. Creators frequently say that in the act of creating they feel as if they participate in an order that is beyond them. It should also be noted that not all novels have the direct mirror type of reflectaphors exhibited by Typhoon. In fact every great artist finds his or her own approach and techniques for the expression of this*other-ness so that the variety of reflectaphoric structures is an immense and fascinating subject in itself. One should also not infer that a work of art's greatness is to be measured by the sheer complexity or quantity of reflectaphoric permutations. Even a single, simple reflectaphor can be enduring, as Matso Basho's haiku:   One's life, a single dewdrop. Its lonely savor.   Umbrella Terms In the art of painting, reflectaphors exist on a number of levels and are articulated through numerous techniques. For example, reflectaphors can be created when a painting of one thing looks subliminally like another - a building that looks subtly like a face, a range of mountains that is as sensuous as a reclining body. Reflectaphors occur most intensively, however, among the shapes, colors and lines of the painting. This can be seen readily in a relatively simple Chinese portrait, after Kao Ch'i-p'ei (AD 1672?-1734), called 'Man With Umbrella'.   Let us begin to explore the this*other-ness resonance in this painting with the shape which appears as the top of the man's umbrella, abstracted thus:   This shape is echoed reflectaphorically throughout the painting. Notice that it is in the hat strapped to the man's back; in the notch of his front pant leg; in the notch between the rear and front pant leg; in the shape of the shadow under the arm; in the top of the bridge (where the entire figure of the man himself might be viewed as something like the dot on the umbrella peak). Each of these variations is slightly different from the of the umbrella, different enough probably to pass unnoticed as reflections. For instance, note the comparison/contrast created by the lines which form the bridge the old man is walking across. These shapes are a kind of X/ Y between the Euclidian triangle composed of straight lines (like the umbrella) and the Riemannian triangle made of curved lines. This reflectaphoric tension is maintained throughout the piece in numerous variations. In these permutations of permutations of the basic shape, the viewer is no longer following actual lines but tracking lines of force created by the overall composition. This suggests another kind of visual reflectaphor at work. Look at the shape formed by the line of the man's back and rear pant leg and stomach, then up to the dark spot behind the nape of the neck - a shape that might be abstracted Again, there is the shape, complete with curve/triangle reflectaphor and a solid spot at the buttocks' apex. Between the armpit and the nape of the neck this line is not filled in, but is suggested by the faint upward thrust in the armpit shadow which draws the eye toward the heavy dark spot at the neck. Here the line which begins at the rear pant leg and ends at the neck is itself a kind of reflectaphor; that is, though it is 'this' (a line) it is also many 'other' things - a trouser leg, a shadow, a belly and chest, an armpit and, for a while, between the arm and neck, nothing at all. Each is reflectaphorically both there and not there since each figure's lines are also lines of other triangles, other parts of the composition. Thus, while the this*other-ness spreads an implicit recognition of the everywhere, it keeps its distance so the similarities are never overstressed or conclusive. The painting cannot be resolved into a clever collection of shapes. Each variation blends into the others, appears and vanishes into the overall picture. Yet the presence of these reflections contribute to the deep sense of coherence in the piece. These, of course, are formal elements. But there are other quite important aspects to this painting. How do they fit? One might wonder, for example, about the this*other-ness of an old man crossing a bridge hung in space. And what about the old man's character? Is that reflectaphoric, as well? Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa' is perhaps the most popular example of portraiture in the history of painting and can be taken as exemplary of the reflectaphoric effect of creating character by visual means. Albert Rothenberg notes that over the centuries critics have described the Gioconda smile as both 'good and wicked,' 'cruel' and 'compassionate,' 'the smile of the Saints at Rheims' and 'worldly, watchful and self satisfied,' a look of both 'modesty and a secret sensouous joy.'4 Leonardo evidently created in this smile a this*other-ness in which various psychological states were reflectaphorically related. In that particular remarkable smile, which is Mona Lisa's and no other's, something universal about the nature of human passion shines through. Something similar is happening with the old man on the bridge something conveyed by his expression and the attitude of his body. Could one say what his character is in the instant of the painting? determination? resignation? sourness? humor? combativeness? Or should we say that the painting has somehow penetrated and found the common ground for the structure of all those different emotions (and more)? Yet the man with the umbrella is not an abstraction, a human generality. He is a particular, unique presence. The painter has expressed through line and simple shape the sense that this man crossing a bridge stands beyond himself, that his lines extend outward to touch the solidarity of humanity and being. It is as if his individuality were somehow founded upon his universality; as if the viewer's sense of his universality were founded upon the old man's uniqueness. Like the narrator choosing roads in the Frost poem, the situation of the man with the umbrella is charged so that, even though we aren't told this is a reflectaphor whose terms are (X) the old man crossing the bridge with (Y) our own life, we perceive that it is. And in so far as we are disposed to assign meaning to the painting, the expression and attitude of the old man's body has something like the effect of the irony in 'The Road Not Taken.' Each time we think we've got it, we must see we haven't. With paintings, however, we generally don't assign meanings, not consciously, anyway. In fact, in talking about 'Man With Umbrella' I have made explicit aspects which remain implicit for most viewers and were probably so for the artist in the act of making his creation. However, that's not to say either that the implicit is not real or that by making it explicit we have come any closer to understanding the actual 'truth' of the piece. That 'truth' must ultimately lie in the mysterious realm of what brought all these reflectaphors together in the artist's mind and in the poignant movement that takes place when they are encountered by a viewing consciousness. Some reflectaphors, like 'the sun bruises the oats gold,' depend upon being explicit and shocking; others, like the bunker scene in Typhoon and the of 'Man With Umbrella,' remain implicit for their effect. The relative degrees of explicitness or implicitness; the types of techniques used to express the reflectaphors and the reflectaphoric combinations (e.g. irony, metaphor, pun); the types of reflectaphors inherent in each genre and artform (the gestures of dance; contrast and tonalities in black and white photography; the conceptual quality of words) all have quite different effects on the observing consciousness. Yet they have a similar effect as well: to create a sense of a this*other-ness order, a moment of uncanniness where, as Heidegger said, one comes into immediate contact with being. The whole issue of explicit and implicit can be illuminated by analogy to Bohm's assertion that explicate forms like electrons are also implicate and that the strangenesses of quantum mechanics -- such as the puzzle that the electron can be both particle and wave - are really symptoms of the fact that implicate and explicate are two sides of the same coin. Our minds prefer to see one side or the other. The power of a great work of art is that it gives both sides simultaneously. Implicit and explicit converge. That is the meaning of the this*other-ness order and a major function of the X/ Y dynamics. In the creative mind Modern abstract art, photography, dance, music - all artforms and styles find ways to express that order. Composer Igor Stravinsky, in his Poetics of Music, noted that for him 'variety is valued only as a means of attaining similarity' 5. In his Norton Lectures Leonard Bernstein defined compositions of the Romantic era as having what he called 'extrinsic metaphor,' in that melodies and instruments are used to refer to objects or processes like birds, brooks, characters. He also noted a more general feature of composition, 'intrinsic metaphor,' where a set of notes becomes varied so that the variations are, in effect, compared to each other6. In 'serious' music, regardless of stylistic, cultural and historical changes, a reflectaphoric order appears. A composer once remarked to me that he thought of the notes in a musical composition as forming 'a little expanding cosmos with its own laws and forms, like our cosmos.' But in saying this, one very much wants to avoid implying that reflectaphoric order is some subtle principle by which an artist generates, more or less mechanically, variations of the same thing. Just as Bohm says that for the physical universe it will be impossible to formulate a general law of the whole, in the reflectaphoric universe a general law for constructing reflectaphors will not be possible. This is because reflectaphoric order unfolds to undercut the very processes and machinations of thought. An experiment in perception will help illustrate this point. It is known that if persons are subjected to a single brief tone (or touch) recurring at fixed, short intervals of, say, a second or so apart, the series of sounds very quickly becomes perceived as rhythm, even though, objectively, no rhythm exists. In the days before digital clocks people had direct experience of this the tick tick tick sound of a clock becoming in the mind a tick-tock pattern. The brain, it would appear, is a kind of patterning device. Further evidence for this is as near as one's habits. On the other side, research has shown how quickly a pattern, once established, falls into the background of conscious awareness in the phenomenon of 'habituation.' In habituation, brainwave responses begin to flatten and arousal diminishes until the pattern is hardly noticed at all7, or until a trance-like state occurs in which at least some levels of the brain are dulled, as happens with patterns used to induce hypnosis and with narrowly rhythmic music (rock music, chants). Taken together, these observations suggest what may be happening with reflectaphors. In a Beethoven symphony, in 'Man With Umbrella,' in Typhoon and in 'The Road Not Taken' the brain's craving for establishing a patterned order is satisfied by the constant display of similar items; at the same time arousal and alertness are maintained and habituation suppressed by the fact that these variations unfold in always unpredictable ways that is, by the law of comparison/contrast which makes each figure (even after repeated encounters) cognitively dissimilar from the last. The reflectaphoric figures create an alertness in consciousness and, in a sense, this unfolding alertness is itself the order. It therefore follows that such an order cannot be produced or comprehended mechanically. For example, as we noted earlier, in a poetic metaphor, to achieve the proper X/ Y tension, the terms have to be close enough together for an observer to perceive their similarities yet far enough apart to create an enduring, perhaps astonishing, contrast. How could one determine mechanically what the proper distance is to achieve that spark? As Jorge Luis Borges says, the terms of a metaphor must be 'precise': I always remember that wonderful line in a poem by Emily Dickinson, which can exemplify this: 'This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies.' The idea is banal. The idea of dust, the dust of death (we will all be dust one day), is a cliche; but what surprises is the phrase 'gentlemen and ladies,' which gives the line its magic and poetic quality. If she had written 'men and women' it would have failed as poetry, it would have been trivial.   There is a further complication to codifying this proper distance between the terms: the effect of context. Many reflectaphors which make little sense or altogether too much 'conclusive' sense outside their literary context (poem, play, story) have exactly the right similarity/difference harmony within that context. Example: Shakespeare's lines 'This above all, to thine own self be true/And it must follow as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.' Outside the play, this has become the most banal sort of conclusive aphorism. In the play's context, however, it is said by Polonius who is false to everybody and so the lines are reflectaphorically ironic. To the extent that we do become habituated to great works of art, it's when we take things out of context or allow our conclusions about the piece to shut off active perception of the reflectaphoric movement. Thus, it would be an unproductive paradox to assume that reflectaphors could be generated by some scheme or formula. If it were possible to recognize and predict the pattern, the mind would become habituated to the structure and the structure would fall from this* other-ness into conclusion. As Frost insisted, 'No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.' Creators know well that attempting to generate an artistic resonance or reflectaphor by analytically or premeditatively balancing terms unavoidably collapses into confusion and arbitrariness. Most artists are quick to point out that any choice of words, lines or notes can be 'justified' on some aesthetic, emotional, rational or other grounds, but that for each moment and position in the piece it is not the most justifiable choice which counts. It is the one which 'works.' There is about the discovery of a good reflectaphor a stochastic quality, as unexpected for the artist as if he had just fallen off a ledge (though sometimes a subtle one), but then in midair seems to remember the ledge was always there. When a creator has tumbled over the edge and finds himself flung along the iron flight-path of his 'right' choice Wordsworth called it the 'inevitable' choice - he feels paradoxically free. Creators have long maintained that creativity is impossible to teach. Can you teach someone how always to tumble over the rules without yourself making rules which would have to be tumbled over? As Aristotle said of metaphor, it is 'the one thing that cannot be learned.' But why do artists make reflectaphors'? What is their felicity in the creative act? Many creators have said a piece begins for them in something vague, amorphous or objectively insignificant; a trivial object, a memory, silly melody, idea or a fusion of these which uncannily floods the artist with the impression that it contains somehow an immensity, perhaps all the world. Perhaps it is a vision of the whole universe and the artist's relation to it. Perhaps it is a vision of what Conrad called 'truth.' As one sculptor described it to me: At times there emanated from people almost palpable extensions of themselves, and certain objects possessed a special dimensionality. A small puddle iridescent with spilt oil and reflecting a patch of midwestern sky would suddenly expand for an endless split-second to encompass my entire universe.   This glance of this*other-ness becomes for the artist a touchstone or what Henry James called a 'germ' out of which the piece evolves. The germ might also be thought of as something which serves the artist as a sudden window, opening between the explicate and the implicate. The evolution of the piece out of that germ (a process which Frost described as like ice riding on its own melting) is a reflectaphoric evolution, each element emerging in X/Y tension with others. In a peculiar and often quite indirect way, the inspiration for the creation and the thing created began to mirror each other. The initial perception is that some one element idea, memory, melody - contained the whole, and, in the end, the creator produces a form in which each unique element reflects the whole of the piece. Then, since each element in the piece stands or moves beyond itself, the piece as a whole stands beyond itself which, again, is in keeping with the standingbeyond quality of the piece's inspiration or germ. The artist's biography also enters strongly into this process. As Rothenberg has pointed out 4, many elements of creative works arise out of superimposing remembered or personal experience on to the constraints of the piece. For example, in creating a character, a novelist may adopt personality traits of someone he has actually known or read about as well as his own personality traits, he then finds these traits modified, shaped and coordinated by the imagined events and other characters in his story. In the case of a photographer, a tension exists between the external scene being photographed and what Ansel Adams calls the internal or imagined 'visualization' of that scene. There is, therefore, in the creative process an ongoing similarity/difference dynamic between (X) the forces of the artist's personal experience of the world and ( Y) the material of his invention. The fateful balancing of this unfolding X/Y (which can become exceedingly complex) enters into such important issues as finding the proper 'distance' on the piece, attaining an authentic 'persona' or style and achieving the appropriate voice or tone for the work. In the evolution of the artwork, the artist doesn't make choices according to some analyzable logic or pattern, but chooses elements that feel 'right,' in harmony with the this*other-ness of the germ. In this process the particular, the individual the puddle iridescent with oil, the two roads in the woods, Captain MacWhirr, the artist's own life becomes the universal. The universal, in turn, is revealed as something immediately present to our senses the place where implicate and explicate have coalesced. (In)conclusion Those familiar with David Bohm's theory of the implicate order may be as surprised as I was to find such correspondence between a scientific theory and a purely aesthetic one. Bohm has proposed that matter and energy are holographic that information about the whole is enfolded in the interference patterns of the matter and energy waves which instantiate space and time. He has also proposed that the universe is multi-dimensional and flowing and that in it the observer is the observed. A reflectaphor could also be viewed as a kind of interference pattern, created by the reverberations of the colliding X/ Y terms and producing an unfolding and multi-dimensional reality. However, instead of unfolding into - and as space and time, reflectaphors unfold in holomovement to instantiate for the observer of the artwork that he is essentially what he observes - every reader is, in some sense, MacWhirr; we are all the old man on the bridge. And the artists who created them were also those figures. (But perhaps in such discoveries lies the secret meaning for us of space and time.) Creative artists who know anything about David Bohm's work usually recognize immediately that he has envisioned a physical universe which is congenial and familiar, one which has been echoed before in aesthetic ideas like Aristotle's concept of the dramatist inspiring 'pity and fear,' T. S. Eliot's 'objective correlative,' Keats' 'negative capability,' the symbolists' 'correspondences,' Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum. It is a universe where, in William Blakes' words, one can 'see the world in a grain of sand' - or a pair of roads, a typhoon, an old man crossing the bridge with an umbrella. It is a universe that would have been recognizable to da Vinci who wrote in his journal that 'every body placed in the luminous air spreads out in circles and fills the surrounding space with infinite likenesses of itself and appears all in all and all in every part.' Bohm brings new light and considerable force to these ancient artistic visions. But we began by asking if the artistic vision can add anything to our contemplation of the physical universe. The question remains open. I can offer here only a few vague intimations. The holographic and reflectaphoric perspectives are strikingly similar but by no means exactly the same. The difference raises a number of questions. Could physical reality also be reflectaphoric; that is, based on an X/Y dynamic such as is found in works of art? For example, could such natural relationships as man/other men, man/ objects, objects/energy derive their vitality, perhaps even their very being, from a similarity/difference dynamic? Certainly there is ample evidence that similarity/difference is involved in the shape of the physical world: DNA unfolds the similarity/ difference dynamic in all living creatures; the way ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny suggests this vital harmony and tension; matter-energy exchange suggests it. In the consciousness of human beings appreciation of this dynamic is obscured by our tendency to view things as either similar or different and to introduce causality to explain away the fact that everything is similar and different simultaneously. Taking a reflectaphoric approach might affect the way in which we classify natural objects and transform the meanings which we give to our classifications. The reflectaphor is a hinge between the explicate order of our familiar reality (the grain of sand) and the implicate order (the whole implied by the sand). If we were to observe objects around us as grains of sand, as this* other-nesses, could this provide a new perspective into what is happening at the quantum level? In evolution? Should our scientific explanations of natural phenomena have a comparison/ contrast dynamic between implicate and explicate; between analysis and what lies beyond analysis? Bohm himself has been an advocate of this position. If we were to take such an approach seriously, how would the universe appear to us and how would we perceive nature's laws? Might, for example, the unknown then become a vivid dimension of our experience of the known similar to what happens in metaphor when the unknown emerges out of the junction between the two known terms? In a work of art, only when the unknown or ambiguity is present does one implicitly perceive the whole of the piece and the whole beyond the piece. What would be the role of the observer and the observed in such an X/Y relationship? For ages artists have been portraying the physical world as a reflection of the mind, heart and soul of human beings - and vice versa (e.g. the Chinese chasing dollars are the typhoon). What if the artists are right and the world around us is literally a mirror of our minds? Deep within the similarity/difference of physical things is there a natural law as broad and rigorous as the law of gravity but governing what Conrad meant by the 'solidarity . . . which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world'? Many people have been surprised by David Bohm's thesis for various reasons. Some have been surprised by its elegance; some by its sweeping grandeur; some by its perfect aptness to their field of interest. There are even some who are surprised at how much they dislike it. In my case, I was surprised to discover someone in science who saw the world as an artist does; a scientist who had found a creative rather than a random universe; a scientist who found in nature a continuous mystery allied with a continuous meaning. But perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised because, after all, artists and scientists do have in common a fascination with our sensual world and both are driven to discover in its immediate and apparently chaotic phenomena some glimpses of enduring order.   References David Shainberg, 'Consciousness and psychoanalysis,' Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 3, 131 (1975). William Empson, Seven Types of'Ambiguity, 1930. Max Black, Models and Metaphors. Studies in Language and Philosophy1 962. Albert Rothenberg, The Emerging Goddess, 1979. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of' Music: In the Form of Six Lessons (Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, trans.), 1970. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, 1 976. David Shainberg, The Transforming Self; Intercontinental Medical Book Corp., N.Y. 1973. Jorge Luis Borges, 'Poetry: a conversation with Roberto Alifano' (Nicomedes Suarez Arauz and Willis Barnstone, trans.) The American Poetry Review, Nov./Dec. ( 1983).