DAY 017 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Use Feeling Words

There is a poetry inside us. We all have a variety of experiences that can’t be captured in linear sentences. We instead began to draw on walls, bend language and create new words, create music. 

Hell, we even came up with the idea of metaphor, which if you think about it is pretty radical. We took the most vanilla, benign verb, “is” (rather, the ancient equivalent) and used it to conjoin two disparate ideas. Can you imagine the first person that walked up to someone and said, “Apple is temptation.” No...it’s not. Apple is fruit. Apple is red, or green. Apple is tart. Apple is many things, but it is not temptation.

Beth reminded me last night about this RadioLab we listened to, about raccoons on the island of Guadeloupe. It’s called “Stranger in Paradise” if you want to check it out. There are some interesting things in there, but they talk about this farm that butts up to the ocean, and they grow watermelons. The raccoons under cover of darkness will find the best, most flavorful watermelons. They make a tiny hole, one that would be easy to miss, and hollow out the entirety of the watermelon, down the rind, leaving only the shell in seemingly perfect shape.

I would suggest that we are (or can be) the raccoon and that our mind/spirit is the watermelon. Language is the arm we poke inside, rooting around, scraping the juicy bits off the walls of our psyche, to be shared and consumed by the group. We nourish each other. Where this series of metaphors falls apart is that the watermelon can only be consumed once. Our minds on the other hand can’t help but gobble up information, synthesize ideas, and be full anew, ready for us to reach inside and see what we can find.