Exploring a Metaphor of Exposure

DEITY AND SEXUALITY ALIKE are often hedged around with proscription. In cultures where the strict control of human sexuality is invested with religious sanctions, this circumstance may generate strong sense of analogy between the sexual and the divine. As Warren Shibles asks, How much of deity is merely metaphorical sexual euphemism and personification?' The question is to some extent rhetorical; but even if its general implications are not fully accepted, it directs attention to the use of divine images as euphemistic surrogates for human sexuality. In the most catholic terms, this is but special case of the widespread recognition of metaphor as an encapsulation of paradox. This recognition has been elaborated in number of different ways. Thus, K. Basso treats metaphor as set of appropriately ill-formed utterances, Ricoeur as misallocation of concepts, I. A. Richards as tension between likeness and dissimilarity, Fernandez as a sign-image upon an inchoate subject, while in Kenneth Burke's terminology, metaphor belongs to the wider phenomenon of perspective by incongruity.'2 The concept of purposive non-conventionality, though likewise applied by Crick to wider domain of semantic investigation, expresses what is most readily recognized as definitively