Summary Of Meditation At Lagunitas

Hass’ Meditation at Lagunitas analyzes the potency within words, images, and the association of ideas they create to complicate the relationship between vehicles and tenors of metaphors. The poem offers the analogy of a “blackberry” to demonstrate this relationship: it is an aggregate fruit consisting of smaller fruitlets. Moreover, this relates to metaphors, which take separate images to form new composite images. Initially, the poem introduces the difficulty arising from a correspondence of separate images, when it states, “The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea. […] / because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds” (3-4, 9-10). In effect, the

The lines introduce a personal element through the vehicle of “salt” and elaborate upon it with a series of anecdotal tenors: “like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river / with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, / muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed” (20-3). In effect, the vehicle of “salt” stands in for “my childhood river”, “silly music from the pleasure boat”, “muddy places”, and any other associations that it contains to depict the comparable, yet not completely transposable relationship that “salt” has with countless tenors. The text inverts the one to one relationship between vehicles and tenors by listing a series of anecdotes as tenors; nonetheless, this series of tenors is personal, and the associations they contain are for one particular individual. Thus, through anecdotes the text attempts to explain the vehicle of “salt” and is unable to find the perfect representation of it. Moreover, since tenors that apply to particular vehicles are sometimes personal, they are never perceivable to others in their full “luminous clarity”. The lines then push the ambiguities further by using the paradoxical phrase, “thirst for salt”. Correspondingly, a single person’s associations with “salt” may not be same as another’s,

Nonetheless, due to the complications words and preexisting images interpose it becomes impossible to illustrate a one to one relationship between vehicles and tenors. The image of a blackberry is the initial representation of metaphors the text proposes. It stands in for the countless associations that correspond to any metaphor: it is multiplicity through singularity. Moreover, the final line of the text returns to the metaphor for metaphors, which is the blackberry, and explains the reason for this meditation at Lagunitas: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” (31). In effect, this is the same blackberry as before, which the text illustrates by means of italicizing it in the same manner it originally does; however, now it repeats the word thrice. The epizeuxis makes it explicit that this is the repetition of a singular “blackberry” and not the description of plural blackberries. Essentially, the text presents a meditation on the blackberry, and by association, on the complexity of metaphors themselves through the thrice repetition of this word, which mimics the quintessential repetition of meditation: the “om” of Hinduism. The phrase “om” originates in Sanskrit and embodies meditation through a thrice repetition of the sound “aum”, which represents “the creative powers of the universe” (Wilke, 435-6). The entirety of the