And the Walls Came Down
Across seven seasons and 178 episodes, Patrick Stewart performed the role of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets NCC-1701-D starship the USS Enterprise with professionalism, wisdom, and humanity. Displaying granitoid stoicism and reserved decorum, Picard was the thinking-person’s captain. The fifth season episode “Darmok” is an example of how Star Trek: The Next Generation was among the most metaphysically speculative shows to ever be broadcast. In the beginning, the Enterprise is hailed by the Tamarians, but the Enterprise’s computerized translator can’t comprehend their language. Against his will, Picard is transported alongside the Tamarian captain Dathon—whose head looks like a cross between a pig and a walnut—to the surface of a hostile planet. Confronted by a massive, shimmering, and horned beast, Dathon tosses Picard a dagger and yells “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” After they’ve defeated the monster, though at the price of Dathon being injured, Picard realizes that the enigmatic phrase is a reference, an allusion, a myth. Thus, a clue to their language—Tamarians speak only in allegory. Dathon has invoked two mythic heroes to communicate that he and Picard must fight the beast together. Doubtful though it may be that Paul Ricoeur was a Trekkie, but Dathon embodies the French philosopher’s claim in The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language that “Only a feeling transformed into myth can open and discover the world.” Dathon, however, has sacrificed himself upon the altar of comprehensibility, for he received a fatal blow, and dies as a pieta in Picard’s arms. As he passes into that undiscovered country, Picard speaks to him in our own mythic-metaphorical tongue – “They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.”
Tamarian makes explicit our own language’s reliance on the figurative—, for that matter. “Try as one might, it is impossible to free oneself from figural in as “all language is figurative.” Examine my first paragraph, for there are several mythic allusions throughout—the first clause of my fourth sentence reads “In the beginning,” a reference to the 16th-century Bible translator ’s rendering of the Hebrew in Genesis (later incorporated into the more famous King James Version, as well as the translation of a different koine phrase in John 1:1). My penultimate sentence has two mythopoeic references; one to Dathon having “sacrificed himself upon the altar,” and a mention of the “pieta,” a word that translates to “piety” and often refers to Christ dead in the arms of the Virgin Mary. Such mythic allusions abound in language. For example—as a writer my Achilles’ Heel is that I take on Herculean tasks like writing an overview of metaphor, requiring me to stop resting on my laurels and to open up a Pandora’s Box, so that I can leave no stone unturned; touch on wood, and don’t treat me like a Casandra, but let’s hope that I can cut the Gordian Knot here. Such Greco-Roman adornments aren’t just mythic allusions, they’re also a dead or at least dying metaphors—for who among us ever tells somebody that we’re “Between a rock and a hard place” while thinking of the Scylla and Charybdis in ’s That’s another way to say that they’re , but mythic connections abound in less noticeable ways too, though perhaps I’d do well this Wednesday to render unto Odin what belongs to Odin and to spare a thought for the Germanic goddess Frigg when the work week draws to a close.
