We have confused the capacity for denotation with the capacity of understanding. Denotation is overstanding, via artifact-token. This is like money. Metaphying is understanding; that is, placing oneself beneath the nature of being and identity, in a »second order of intelligence. This is like adoration / reverence. It is an expression Eros, not Techne. Even common thinking is not Techne, however. It is delusion precisely because its purposes and functions are anti-Eros.

That ‘second order’ is based on the roots of meaning and identity in »dreaming… and not, as »every human culture insists… on the replacements for those roots in common ‘thinking’. This common activity is not even thinking, it is, instead, the remnants that occur when we trade intimacy, communion and wonder… for abstraction, false authority, and ‘data’. A kind of confused sonambulism perpetrated among compelling shadows. Such shadows are only cast by denotative purposes, and such purposes start out by depriving the entire terrain of being.

Human intelligence has its roots in a superposition of metaphor; where it falls from impassioned flight into the abstract crawling of abstraction and denotation… the result is a museum. A graveyard, where the angels of true potential and intelligence (and all of their arts) have been killed back to the stone age. What remains is markers. For where intelligence died. There, the skeletal remains appear to dead minds… as gods.