– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Edward Kelly has highlighted another problem inherent in the transmission metaphor: it can imply a more or less perfect one-to-one communication, as in a television reception. This is certainly not what Myers had in mind, or James, or Huxley. Here the metaphors of the filter or reducing valve are much more appropriate, as they imply a selection, a narrowing, and a loss of an original More. For these reasons, Kelly prefers the metaphor of “permission” over that of “transmission.” I could not agree more. And I would take Kelly’s metaphorical re-visioning one step further and suggest a complimentary metaphor that is already implied in the literature but not, in my opinion, emphasized nearly enough: the metaphor of “translation.” What is permitted to cross the threshold, after all, is not only filtered, selected, and narrowed. It also comes through in a different form, whether this is a dream, a vision, a symbol, a text, or a drawing. In a word, it is translated. But this implies that, if we wish to understand something about the communication’s source, we must translate it back, that is, we must interpret it. This, of course, has been my basic point throughout these chapters, and it remains my final point here at the end. Psychical and paranormal phenomena are hermeneutical realities. They work like texts and stories. They are about meaning as much as they are about matter. There is always a gap. The fisherman cannot talk to the fish without using symbols and signs (or just a hook).
P. 257
Possibly cf. W.R. Bion’s notion of ‘transformations’.