Metaphors by the seashore.

A vacation at the seashore is a time to relax, unwind, and maybe get a new slant on life. On two recent stays at the shore, I found myself reflecting on metaphor in new ways: once when contemplating the bridges of the Chesapeake Bay, and once when I collected seashells on the beach.

The Chesapeake Bay looks small on a map, but it has over 7,000 miles of coastline, due to the many rivers and inlets which make its coast so jagged. When driving around the Bay, my wife and I were struck by how many bridges have been built, over marshes, grasslands, and water.

Not only were there a lot of bridges, but they were long, often traversing acres of marsh and wetlands before even reaching the water. The most famous long bridges in the region are the Bay Bridge near Annapolis, and the combination bridge-tunnel which crosses the opening of the bay near Hampton, Virginia. But there are plenty of other long bridges in the area, unheralded yet sleek and lovely.

These bridges are relatively recent, however. A woman who has lived on the Chesapeake all her life recalled for me when there were many ferries. These ferries, often very small, carried a few cars or wagons from the farms and fishing villages on the bay, traveling a couple of times in the morning, and again in the afternoon. Life was slower then, geared to the pace of the ferry, at the mercy of the weather.

When the huge bridges were erected, life sped up. Vastly more traffic rushed across the bridges, in a constant stream. The formerly remote farms and villages became fodder for development. Heavy trucks rumbled through formerly quiet village streets. Vacation homes sprang up all along the bay, then permanent homes. The bridges transformed what had truly been a backwater area into prime vacation spots for the many.

I was interested in this transformation, and the analogy with metaphor struck me. Could this situation be a metaphor about metaphor?

A metaphor is commonly thought of as a bridge - a linguistic bridge linking two separate conceptual domains. Nobody speaks of a metaphor as a ferry. Yet the root terms of a meta-phor refer to a carrying over. A metaphor could be a ferry as well as a bridge.

What would metaphor-as-ferry be? It would be slower than metaphor-as-bridge. It would require more constant attention, as the ferry needs to be manned at all times. It would carry its freight intermittently. And probably it would leave both shores pretty much the same after its journey, as opposed to the bridge, which would transform them.

It occurred to me that poetic metaphors, the metaphors found in poetry, are the ferries. Poetic metaphors are unique, idiosyncratic, sometimes taking a lot of work to elucidate. A poetic metaphor is a ferry between two shores, carrying a small but precious cargo of delicate meanings.

The bridges, which carry a steady stream of cargo and forge strong ties between shores, are the prose metaphors. Our prose metaphors form structures for our everyday thought and discourse. We use them without selfconsciousness, just as we drive over a bridge without noticing.

Do our metaphors start out as ferries - poetic metaphors laboriously interpreted? Then, across some of these links, do bridges get built - do the metaphors become prosaic, undergirding the prose and carrying steady streams of conceptual traffic? Such, anyway, is my guess at the metaphorical history of metaphor.

Our vacation then took us to the Southern New Jersey seashore, where we sat on the beach and tried not to get too sunburned. The sound of the surf was calming as it steadily crashed into the shore. The straight stretches of beach were bare and clean and lovely. One cloudy day I took a walk and started picking up seashells.

The most common shells were clamshells, with their distinctive flat oval shapes, whitish-multicolored insides, and parallel curved lines on the outsides. In our family, long ago, they had served as ashtrays.

What struck me on this day, however, was the similarity in color between the inside of the seashells and the colors of the cloudy sky. Both had lines of soft whites, grays, and occasional tinges of blue and pink. Even the translucent quality of the pink-shaded areas was similar between the sky and the shell.

I held a shell up to the sky - the colors matched. The cloudy sky blended with the cloudy inside of the seashell.

What does this match mean? I felt the presence of a mystery. I wondered if I was looking at a visual metaphor. Is color a clue to deeper meanings of process in the universe?

Often when we talk about mysteries, we know the answers, or at least have some clues about what the answers will be like. But this, to me, was a real mystery, because it was not clear what the clues were, or what the answer might look like.

Are the processes of moisture and cloud-formation in the sky somehow analogous to the processes of life in the ocean for the lowly clam? Do these analogous processes leave their traces in the seashells lying randomly around the shore, underneath the cloudy sky, waiting for someone to come along and read their proper meanings?

If I wanted to get a poetic metaphor out of it, as I am sure many have, I could write about the sky as a seashell, enclosing our lives as the shell protects life inside it. The skyseashell closes at night and opens in the day. Or, I would write about the seashells as pieces of the sky, washed up from the ocean depths.

But I was thinking in terms of prose metaphors on this day - scientific bridges which could serve as structures for heavy traffic. Is color a clue to process? Or are we merely dealing with the paintbrush of the Creator, artistically applied?

The lines on the reverse side of the shell seem to mirror the lines of the ocean waves as they progress up the shore, and the lines the ocean waves leave on sand seem to be of a similar family to the lines on the shells. Or here again, am I being misled by esthetics? Do I see the fingerprint of similar underlying processes? Or just beauty put there for our delight?

One thing I did notice about the seashells. When I found one with meat still clinging to it, left behind after some gull's breakfast, I tended to leave it alone. I prefer the dry abstractions of structure, rather than the messy remains of organic activity.

There is a new branch of mathematics, known as fractals, which studies self-similar structures. These are often illustrated by examples from nature: for example, how the shapes of rocks on a mountain often resemble the much larger shapes of the mountain itself.

Do the seashells illustrate such fractal processes? Do some fractal processes ultimately generate metaphors, embodied in the thousands of seashells lying randomly on the beach? For once I could enjoy a real mystery. All I could follow was my intuition, which tells me that these visual-embodied metaphors of sky and wave are clues to larger processes. Just how they work will have to await the opening of some larger conceptual clamshell, to reveal, hopefully, a beautiful mathematical pearl.

Dr. Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the Television-Radio Department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.