Place the seven metaphors in the blender for ten minutes on purée:

I get these lines that are modifications of sayings that just stick in my head; today’s is “burning your bridges at both ends”. I suppose that might mean an endless number of things dependant on context, for me today it means most simply that I’ve been drinking too much coffee. It also might mean that doing too much isn’t always just about doing too much. I had en ex, Melinda, who would carry seventeen hours a semester, work two jobs, act in or run-costumes for a play, try and make a relationship with me happen in the midst of that, and generally push herself until she imploded.

I had a dream last week in which I had a friend, not a friend in real life, but a friend in the dream. This friend told me that he taught at Truman so I started to tell him what we had in common and I realized that he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with dragons on it. On my real shirt the dragons are swirling in a blue sky. His shirt was animated, the images were moving. While I was watching him, flying black stallions swooped down on the dragons and began to devour them. I’ve been trying to figure out that image all week. Why would my subconscious send flying black horses to eat the fleeing dragons off the shirt of a Truman professor?

The professor friend is easy enough. It’s a version of me. After all, he’s got my shirt on and my old job. The black horses are mythological, night-mares with flaming nostrils and Pegasus wings. Dragons are higher order snakes. They are powerful agents of reinvention. They are shedders of skin. Freud thought flying dreams were generally about sex. I think the flying is about really cool power animals flying. Wouldn’t it be cool to fly? My reaction to the dragon’s consumption in the dream was, “how cool is that!” So, they are not an image of woe, or impending doom, but rapid transformation. What does it mean to have a power animal, or many power animals, devouring power animals of a different breed? What does it mean to have the horse eat the dragon?

I did not have a childhood filled with horses, but I did read The Black Stallion and I had black horse toys, several of them. So the horse is me too, as everything can be you in your dream. I didn’t remember that until I started to analyze the dream. I also recall an after school special about a boy who nurses a black flying horse back to health. So these images are early childhood stuff for me. These are images I chose to identify with in that first transition from the young child at home to the young boy in school. The black flying horse was important to me when I was in the first grade, after I knew we were moving away from Milwaukee. In my games I was both the injured horse and the boy who saves him.

A few days ago I wrote a blog wondering where my “A” game was and then the shit hit the fan in my academic life, I have been burning the candle at both ends. My intellectual horses, that have mostly been at trot since I started back to graduate school, actually had to get up to a full on gallop. If you haven’t run in a while and you get up to speed, I have to tell you that it feels really good. When I asked where my “A” game was I was starting to fall behind. I am caught up now and no longer asleep at the wheel.

Just like black horses don’t seem on the surface to be a positive image, burning bridges often signal an unfortunate loss of connection that will obstruct future opportunity. We are told to consider, in our scorched-earth retreats, the delay of severed connections until the last possible chance of their utility is passed. This of course depends on what your bridges are connected to.

Do you know the etymology of the word “understanding”? It comes from bridge building. The understanding is that which stands- under the bridge to support it. Our use of the term for knowledge and cognition rests on the semantic implications of this metaphor (There are elements of recursive irony here, as your understanding of understanding is helped by an understanding of under-standing). Sometimes it’s good to burn bridges at both ends, when all your bridges fall down you may have the opportunity to build new understandings.