THERE'S NO OTHER WAY TRULY TO `SEE' THE WORLD

Author: By Linda Simon

Date: SUNDAY, December 14, 1997

Page: H4

Section: Books

As a reader, I am always in search of apt metaphors, deeply satisfied when I find one, clutching it, as it were, to my heart or, more likely, catching it while it still hovers -- diaphanous as a luna moth -- recording it into a notebook that acts, in this case, as a net.

A net, Barnes tells us, can be defined in two ways. As ``a meshed instrument designed to catch fish'' it becomes an image, familiar to us all, of the snares we devise, the snares in which we sometimes, willingly or unwittingly, are caught. ``But,'' Barnes suggests, ``you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.'' Holes, no doubt, open to streams of experience, oceans of opportunity, and tidal waves of inspiration.

In ``Metaphor and Memory,'' Cynthia Ozick recalls that when she read a parable ``drenched, above all, in metaphor'' to an audience of physicians, they were offended by what they considered the triviality of the very idea of metaphor; rooted in the signs and symbols of disease, they saw nothing beneficent in being awash in the signs and symbols of imagery. Yet as Ozick herself noted, medical terminology relies mightily on metaphor to describe bodily functions and malfunctions. Surely when we attempt to describe pain to our own physician, we can do no better than convey what that pain is like.

In my search for metaphor, scientists and naturalists have offered abundant troves. While a poet sets metaphors before us like jewels, exhumed from some magical plot of earth, cut, burnished, and shining, scientists create images no less artful as they invent metaphors to explain the invisible, the unseen, the theoretical.

As the chemist Roald Hoffman tells us in ``The Same and Not the Same,'' the idea of scientific discovery is itself a metaphor, stolen from the valiant explorers who ventured into the geographical unknown. ``Voyages of discovery, maps filled in, those are powerful images indeed,'' Hoffman believes, and in applying them to the laboratory, scientists managed to share, vicariously, in more muscular adventures. So they conceived their task to be unveiling, penetrating, and, above all, conquering nature.

Yet even without heroic imagery, scientists cannot escape the need to express ideas through metaphor. ``The world out there is moderately chaotic, frighteningly so in the parts we do not understand,'' Hoffman says. ``We want to see a pattern in it. We're clever, we `connoisseurs of chaos,' so we find/create one.'' How many of us, after all, ``see'' atomic structure as a constellation of billiard balls? How many of us have tried to envision God playing dice?

This aspiration to find or create patterns is the theme of Lancelot Law Whyte's ``Aspects of Form,'' a collection of luminous essays by scientists from a variety of fields, reflecting on ways they perceive and explain such processes as growth, thought, metamorphosis, and symbiosis. Read metaphorically, there is hardly an essay that cannot enlighten us about many vicissitudes of our own lives. Consider, for example, zoologist Hugh Cott's discussion of the spectacular varieties of visual adaptations for survival, neatly categorized in three types: ``namely, concealment, disguise, and advertisement. . . . These elusive, deceptive or attractive features,'' Cott adds, ``are variously concerned with other organisms of the habitat -- whether predators or prey, mates or rivals, parents or offspring.''

In his metaphor-rich ``Physics and Philosophy,'' Werner Heisenberg admits that quantum theory pushes the limits of ordinary language. Heisenberg resorts to homely analogies or even poetry to help us understand such concepts as ``matter waves'' and ``charge density,'' based as they are on the theory that energy can be both wave and particle. For Henry Miller, this behavior of energy had inescapable implications: ``A Quantum,'' Miller suggested in ``Black Spring,'' ``is a functional disorder created by trying to squeeze oneself into a frame of reference.''

The ways we squeeze, shape, adorn, and color our corporeal selves serve as metaphors for our inner beings. ``The History of Underclothes'' by C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington gave me a new way to think about the private and public selves of 19th-century women. Few would argue with the perception that a corset, with its wooden, metal, or whalebone stays, symbolized many women's circumscribed social opportunities. How, we can well ask, did women see the potential of their minds and abilities as they were forcing their waists down to 17 inches?

But if a corset seems an incontrovertible metaphor, another peculiar undergarment is more problematical. The ``cage petticoat'' was a structure whose rigidity was ensured by whalebone, metal, or watch-spring wire hoops. The dress skirt was spread over it, making it difficult, of course, for the wearer to sit or climb stairs, much less hoist herself into a carriage. Nevertheless, as tempting as it is to see the ``cage'' as another instrument of torture, we need to picture ``caged'' women in a social setting: undeniably prominent, vast and imposing, and clearly keeping others (the diminished figure of a man, for example) at a distance. The function of a ``cage'' as an image of oppression seems not so clear-cut as we may first have supposed, especially when we learn that the petticoats that covered them were likely to be violet. Or that most metaphorical of colors, scarlet.

Julian Barnes tells us that Flaubert himself was irritated by his irrepressible need to create metaphors. ``I am devoured by comparisons as one is by lice,'' he complained, knowing, at the same time, the extraordinary power of the words ``as if.'' ``All perception of truth,'' Thoreau once noted tersely in his journals, ``is the detection of an analogy.''