"Metaphor is embodied in language"
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Potter’s line is less a literary nicety than a warning shot: metaphor isn’t a decorative layer you paste onto “real” meaning, it’s the operating system. Coming from a dramatist who wrote bodies in pain, desire, and illness into the grammar of his work, “embodied” lands with double force. Language doesn’t hover above life like commentary; it lives in mouths, nerves, breath, class accents, taboos. Metaphor, in that sense, isn’t a clever comparison but the way we smuggle sensation and social reality into speech.
The intent is to collapse a hierarchy. People often treat metaphor as optional sophistication, the poet’s party trick. Potter insists it’s foundational: we understand time as money, arguments as war, love as weather, politics as theater because those mappings are already lodged in how we speak and therefore how we think. The subtext is political as much as aesthetic. If metaphor is embodied, then whoever polices language polices bodies: which experiences get named, which get euphemized, which get pathologized, which get turned into jokes. Metaphor becomes a site of power, not just imagination.
Context matters: Potter worked in television drama, a medium often expected to be “naturalistic,” suspicious of overt lyricism. He made a career of proving that realism is built out of metaphors we’ve stopped noticing. His work’s famous collisions of song, memory, and diagnosis don’t escape the body; they expose how deeply the body scripts the stories we tell. The line reads like an artistic manifesto: if you want to change what people feel is possible, start with the metaphors their language forces them to inhabit.
The intent is to collapse a hierarchy. People often treat metaphor as optional sophistication, the poet’s party trick. Potter insists it’s foundational: we understand time as money, arguments as war, love as weather, politics as theater because those mappings are already lodged in how we speak and therefore how we think. The subtext is political as much as aesthetic. If metaphor is embodied, then whoever polices language polices bodies: which experiences get named, which get euphemized, which get pathologized, which get turned into jokes. Metaphor becomes a site of power, not just imagination.
Context matters: Potter worked in television drama, a medium often expected to be “naturalistic,” suspicious of overt lyricism. He made a career of proving that realism is built out of metaphors we’ve stopped noticing. His work’s famous collisions of song, memory, and diagnosis don’t escape the body; they expose how deeply the body scripts the stories we tell. The line reads like an artistic manifesto: if you want to change what people feel is possible, start with the metaphors their language forces them to inhabit.
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| Topic | Writing |
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