The Literary Mind.pdf

52 THE LITERARY MIND
flooring. Nonetheless, these expressions seem less idiomatic than those based in
spatial and bodily stories.
Given our robust capacity to project from stories of society or the mind, how
would we know whether spatial and bodily stories are always basic to understanding?
This appears to be one of the profoundly tantalizing and difficult open
questions in the study of the mind.
THE STORY OF BIRTH
The story of birth is complex, universal, and familiar. It is found at the core of
both secular and holy literature. It is a spatial story in which one physical body
comes out of another. It is equally a spatial story of action in which the mother
is an intentional actor. It is also a biological if not spatial story in which mother
and father are biological causes. Birth, or more accurately, progeneration, is a
story with several acts, from conception through gestation to birth. Extra acts
are often added: courtship, nurturing, bonding, early development.
Various parts of the story of birth are structured by spatial image schemas.
The first image schema in the story of birth is one thing coming out of another.
The mother is conceived of as a container that has a body inside it. The interior
body exits, creating two distinct bodies where only one existed before. The second
image schema is an object emerging from its source material. The mother's body
is conceived of as a biological source material; the child emerges from it. A third
image schema is motion along a path from a source to a goal. The child, at birth,
departs its point of origin along a bodily way to a point outside the mother's body.
A fourth is link: The spatial path from mother to child is statically realized in
the form of an umbilical cord, which is understood as an asymmetric spatial link
between mother and child. A fifth is spatial growth: The body that is interior to
the mother-container begins from next to nothing, and grows, forcing its mothercontainer
to become convex.
The extraordinary richness of the story of birth has made it perhaps the
premier example of a familiar and powerful story that is projected onto other
stories. Stories of progeneration are often projected onto causal stories, in accord
with the invariance principle. We may speak of a "brainchild" or say, "Necessity
is the mother of invention." We may say, with Wallace Stevens, "The moon is
the mother of pathos and pity," or simply, "Ignorance is the mother of suspicion."
We may say, "Italian is the eldest daughter of Latin." This range of causal
projections is to be expected: the story of birth happens to include a set of image
schemas that are, quite independently of the story of birth itself, routinely projected
to causation. It is easy to think of nonbirth sources for "The tax cut came
out of desperation," "His ambitions emerge directly from his greed," "One thing