Need to read the article “Voices” by Antonio Porchia.
Reread the following five aphorisms in Antonio Porchia’s “Voices”:
He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.
Mud, when it leaves the mud, stops being mud.
A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.
I have scarcely touched the clay and I am made of it.
Only the wound speaks its own word.
The thread, the mud, the door, the clay, or the world—you are asked to think about each of these as both a word in normal use (where mud is mud) but also to think of it as outside of normal use, where it is now referring to something else. Choose two of these aphorisms and write an essay that attempts to bring together the following:
A description, one written as closely as possible, of what you take each aphorism to mean. This will require an explication of the metaphor, a parsing out of what it seems to say.
An account, one written as technically as possible, of how each metaphor works—or how it worked for you. What was hard? What was fun? What was surprising?
A theory of metaphor as a way of thinking, seeing and writing.
