The Metaphorical Heart

Once upon a time, I thought the metaphorical heart was the laziest and sappiest entry to an emotional fortress. The heart is the overworn metaphor of a simile; somehow, it carries more than its due.

Now, I am happy to have anyone talking about people and bodies and Actual Intelligence. In this time, any conversation about human bodies is a good one. I’ve reread “I Sing the Body Electric” recently, and Whitman’s celebration of the bodily machine reads to me with more flesh and less metaphor than when a pre-AI Aron read it.

The heart and the music of its beat drive so much of our literature. From our common conversation, “the heart” seems to run the whole body. We’ve ascribed so much of the brain’s work to the heart that I think people sometimes forget where the work really happens. All those connections between the heart and love, dedication, generosity, bravery, grief and path-finding are really about the brain. Oh sure, the limbic, sympathic and parasympathic systems all get input from the heart, but it is just input; if you are “following your heart” or “wearing your heart on your sleeve,” you are doing neither.

I’m being a little more cantankerous than I need to be, but we need to get right with our anatomy. By misapplying all those traits to the heart, we make these existential attributes metaphysical rather than deeply set in the physical and very fragile domain inside our dura mater.

More to the point, sometimes the metaphysical is a more comfortable place to be than the physical world with its manifest struggles. The poetry of our bodies, including our hearts, can bring more understanding and common language to connect us to our neighbors, their loves and their losses.

For the contrarian in all of us, the enlightened heart may well be the key to get us out of our own heads and into the lives of those around us.