Words flow from the world of physical space to the world of mental space. Once you learn this, it is impossible to speak one sentence without seeing the spatial implications of all your words. We find a way to use every physical thing to map our ideas.

All language is the sedimentation of metaphor; we started with words that referred only to immediate material facts. Rock. food. enemy. At the genesis of language, which was not a peak but a plateau, there could not have been abstractions

From geology: pleateaus and peaks.

The etymology of “abstract” is “ab” - “from” and “trahere” — “draw off”. To be abstract is to be drawn off from from, or drawn away. Metaphorically, abstraction is distance.

Our philosophies have foundations, we lay down planks in our ideologies, ideas can move us, they can be structured, truths can be hollow, an idea can be solid, an idea can be an anchor, we can toss an idea out there. We can catch what someone said

An idea can have a point, a mind can be sharp, a wit can be sharp, an idea can have fangs, an idea can have legs, you can take an idea and run with it, we can run or hide from the truth, which can also be right in front of our faces.

Water, which flows and pools, becomes data and capital. It ebbs, it surges. Pipelines get flooded. Buffers overflow. Data can leak. A source can run dry. People build reservoirs of capital, they store information in “data lakes”.

With each new innovation of the mind, we adapted the language of older iterations to describe new ones. We used to point with our fingers to indicate physical things, but the concept of pointing became freed from this constraint, transformed into an all-purpose indicator.

“Freed from the purpose of this constraint” —you see what I mean? “You see what I mean” — one sentence! As if ideas could roam of their own volition, as if you might tie them down, as if they had shapes that could change.

At some point metaphors become so settled that they cease to appear as metaphors, and we simply see them as language. But if you dig into etymology you can imagine layer upon layer of metaphors, settling like sediment, forming a substrate

When you write, pay attention to the invisible metaphors, the ones below the surface of your words, even unto the deep. THERE lies poetry. You cannot grow a beautiful garden if you do not tend to the soil.