Anchoring time-space mappings and their emotions: The timeline blend in poetic metaphors

1 Time is space, timelines, and poetic imagery

Expressions of time often involve motion along a path. In such representations, time units can move with respect to an observer (1), vice versa (2), or else the motion can be observed from an external viewpoint (3):

Time is space, as described by Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), has become a classic set of conceptual mappings in metaphor research within cognitive linguistics. Empirical evidence supports the psychological reality of a system of inferences for the understanding of temporal relations in terms of spatial structure (for the initial paradigms, Boroditsky, 2000 and 2001; for perspective variation, Moore, 2006; for the assymetry between space-time, Ballinger et al., 2007; Bottini and Casasanto, 2010; Casasanto and Boroditsky, 2008; Casasanto et al., 2010; Matlock et al., 2005), although a less explored research line also indicates that some of these conceptual projections can be reversed (Coulson and Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming; Teuscher et al., 2008). Within Conceptual Metaphor Theory, time is space has been postulated as a cross-cultural cognitive pattern, although languages might differ quite a lot in their implementation of the template (Boroditsky et al., 2011; Núñez and Sweetser, 2006), and some could perhaps even lack this mapping altogether (Sinha et al., 2011).

The conclusion that is usually drawn from this cognitive linguistic research is that there is a set of direct projections from space to time. Time is a target concept, understood in terms of space, which is the source of the conceptual metaphor. However, recent research within the framework of Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) shows that time-space meanings emerge from a novel mental configuration, a hybrid or conceptual blend, that results from successive integrations of a variety of conceptual materials, including event structure, motion, and a cultural mechanism measuring duration (Fauconnier and Turner, 2008).

Rather than grounding time directly on space, we build a blended scene for purposes related to the representation of time. This scene is framed by a simple, familiar spatial event, basic to human cognition: an object or objects travel towards an ego, or vice versa. According to developmental research, this type of motion event is one of the basic spatial schemas that get the human conceptual system started during the first months of life (Mandler, 2004, 2010, 2012). In order to provide structure for non-spatial concepts, human cognition often draws on a range of spatial figures, generally known as image schemas (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; a summary in Oakley, 2007). Integrations of emotional responses, abstract thoughts, or cultural knowledge with these basic, shared schemas can better satisfy cognitive constraints and facilitate expression (Turner, 1996).

But not any case of motion through space is valid for the time-space blend. In fact, if we examine the research literature on space-to-time mappings, we see that it has always been describing, even if not fully realizing it, a very particular version of this spatial event, with restrictive and often contradictory properties. In this schematic narrative all observers are on the same spot, all objects are aligned to travel along the same path, objects cannot overtake one another, arrive at the same time or from different directions, change trajectory, and so on. This is already apparent, for example, in the figures in Boroditsky, 2000, where ego and objects are always represented as progressing on a straight line, with objects even placed on a moving conveyor belt towards a static observer, in cases such as our example 1 (‘winter is coming’).

None of these properties of the blended scene are typical of our normal experience of motion through space. They are there because they serve the ultimate goal of the conceptual blend: to create a mental structure within which temporal meanings can be effectively constructed (Coulson and Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming; Fauconnier and Turner, 2008).

As noted by Coulson and Pagán Cánovas (forthcoming), in order to facilitate the navigation of this time-space conceptual blend, the line can become an additional input to the time-space scene. When integrated with the time-space blend, the line, preferably a straight one, is fused with the path in the time-space blend, thus giving us a timeline. The resulting object has novel computational properties that are not available from events, motion, or time measures. It provides a graphic representation of temporal relations that allows us to view all the elements of a sequence at a glance, with evident advantages for chronography.

The timeline is not merely a sign representing time spatially. It is not just a time-space metaphor, such as our examples 1–3. Instead, the timeline functions like a clock or a cue, that is, as a material anchor for a conceptual blend (Hutchins, 2005). Material anchors are cultural and physical devices for grounding conceptual blends on perceptual relations. In material anchors, conceptual structure becomes immediately available as perceptual structure, thus considerably reducing cognitive effort. Having the seventh turn in a line or the time being ten minutes to eight on a clock are conceptual structures that can be seen directly, by perceiving relative positions in space as temporal relations. Material anchors are by no means used exclusively to conceptualize time, although they are especially appropriate, and often necessary, for that purpose. It is not easy to think about temporal relations without the calendar, the clock, or the timeline. All material anchors for time seem to be designed to help the observer perceive spatial relations directly as temporal relations.

The timeline anchor allows us to ground the metaphoric temporal relations of the time-space blended scene directly on the spatial structure we perceive, thus reducing our cognitive effort to the conceptualization of a discrete set of easily apprehensible spatial relations. The timeline object can be directly perceivable (e.g. an actual line in a history book) or imaginary (e.g. a linear object described with words). Paths, geometric lines representing trajectories, and a multitude of narrow objects, from a rope to a snake, are all eligible instantiations of the timeline blend (Coulson and Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming).

Given their linear configuration, timelines are especially useful for anchoring the relations between events within a single duration, representing them as relative distances between landmarks. A timeline would not be as useful as a clock to anchor the time units of the cyclic day, but it is indeed much easier to perceive at a glance periods and temporal developments, including plans, on the timeline. Just as we would prefer not to use the timeline to express something like ‘twenty minutes to seven’, we would not normally use the clock or the sundial to represent the history of Athens in the classical period, or the biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Just like most other representations of time, timelines do not only have the potential to conceptualize temporal relations as such, but also to help us express the way we feel about temporal experience. Poetic texts provide some remarkable examples of powerful affective meanings created by situating the reader within a timeline, which can be instantiated as a wide variety of objects, each with particularities that can be opportunistically exploited. Coulson and Pagán Cánovas study two poetic examples of affective timelines:

(4) Perhaps time is flowing faster up there in the attic. Perhaps the accumulated mass of the past gathered there is pulling time out of the future faster, like a weight on a line. Or perhaps, more mundanely, it is only that I am getting older every year and that it is the accumulated weight of time behind me that is unreeling the years with ever-increasing speed.

Ian McDonald, ‘Emily’s Diary, November 5, 1913’, in King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), pp. 82–83 (initially discussed in Fauconnier and Turner, 2008).

(5) Todo nos amenaza:

el tiempo, que en vivientes fragmentos divide

al que fui

del que seré,

como el machete a la culebra.

Everything threatens us:

time, which into living fragments divides

the one I was

from the one I will be,

like the machete the snake. ¹

Octavio Paz, ‘Más allá del amor’ [‘Beyond Love’] in El girasol [The Sunflower] (1948).

Both the pulley and the snake function here as instantiations of the timeline blend. In the first example, time, simultaneously conceptualized as a material substance, is fused both with the line and with a weight pulling the line, and speed is manipulated to yield subjective time experience, with the emergent meaning of time passing faster as one grows older.

In Paz’s poem, time maps both onto an agent and an instrument. There is an analogical mapping between the self and the snake, within a context that includes threat, time awareness, and self-consciousness. The snake thus becomes a timeline that can be cut alive and killed, with the wound corresponding to the present, a gap between past and future. Without further specifications, we imagine readers will tend to identify the head with the future self, and the tail with the past. ²

These meanings are not arbitrary. Even in the case of extremely creative examples, not anything goes. Innumerable instantiations are possible, but the timeline template imposes narrow constraints on the final product. These entrenched, widely available templates, guide readers’ minds, helping them construct the meaning of the poetic image promptly and adequately. The line can provide an anchor for the path of motion, as in McDonald’s pulley, or for sequential relations on a static object, with no motion along it being necessary, as in Paz’s snake. In all these cases, temporal relations remain anchored to spatial relations on the timeline: past and future ‘are located’ each in one of the two pieces of the snake; years are successive objects on the line, unreeled one by one, with more speed resulting in more extension of rope unreeled at a time, and thus years passing faster.

The pulley and the snake exist as independent categories outside the poems. In other domains or scenarios, as well as in other conceptual blends, they are not typically connected to temporal relations and the way we feel about them. A wide variety of elements, borrowed from very different domains, can become instantiations of the timeline, as long as their contribution leads to a useful integration. These items bring along not only their properties as material objects but also the potential to activate their own typical conceptual frames, characteristic gestalts defined by experience and culture (Fillmore, 1982), such as the way a pulley works or the typical actions and situations involving snakes. Emergent emotions in the blend often result from an integration of affective time with feelings that do not originate from time experience itself, but rather belong to an independent conceptual structure or cultural framework evoked by the timeline object.

Of course, the line is by no means compulsory to conceptualize time. There are many advantages in adopting this conceptual structure, but there is also a price to pay. For some affective time meanings, the timeline might contribute to a very effective image. But by privileging a certain set of spatial and temporal relations, the linear pattern blocks other conceptualizations. For different time-related sentiments, not focusing primarily on sequence, a motion scene or a geometric figure can still yield an interesting blend, but different spatial structures might be preferred.

In the next two sections, we analyze two further examples of the timeline blend in poetic imagery: the simile of the row of candles for the days of our life in Kavafis, and Manrique’s metaphor of human lives as rivers that end in the sea, a classic with many re-elaborations in Spanish literature, such as one by Borges that we also examine. We show that these texts rely on the timeline to create strong poetic and emotional effects related to the passing of life. The line is crucial to achieve this anchoring.

2 Kavafis’ Candles

Sometimes the timeline object is exclusively designed to represent time, and it is not likely to be found outside the poetic image. This results in a scene that encourages us to relate every detail to temporal relations. In his poem Candles (Κϵριά) (1899), Kavafis develops a simile that runs throughout the whole composition. The simile is based on a peculiar line of candles, experienced in a special way:

(6) Του μέλλοντος η μέρϵς στέκοντ’ ϵμπροστά μας

σα μια σϵιρά κϵράκια αναμένα –

χρυσά, ζϵστά, και ζωηρά κϵράκια.

Η πϵρασμένϵς μέρϵς πίσω μένουν,

μια θλιβϵρή γραμμή κϵριών σβυσμένων.

τα πιο κοντά βγάζουν καπνόν ακόμη,

κρύα κϵριά, λυωμένα, και κυρτά.

Δϵν θέλω να τα βλέπω. μϵ λυπϵί η μορφή των,

και μϵ λυπϵί το πρώτο φως των να θυμούμαι.

Εμπρός κυττάζω τ’ αναμένα μου κϵριά.

Δϵ θέλω να γυρίσω να μη διω και φρίξω

τι γρήγορα που η σκοτϵινή γραμμή μακραίνϵι

τι γρήγορα που τα σβυστά κϵριά πληθαίνουν.

The days of the future stand in front of us,

like a row of burning little candles –

golden, warm, and vivid little candles.

Days past lie behind,

a grim line of extinguished candles;

the nearest are still smoking,

cold candles, melted, and bent.

I don’t want to see them: their shape saddens me,

and it saddens me to remember their original light.

I look ahead at my burning candles.

I don’t want to turn and see, terrified,

how quickly the dark line gets longer,

how quickly the burnt out candles multiply.

Konstantinos P Kavafis, Κϵριά [‘Candles’] in Τα ποιήματα, edited by GP Savvides (1984).

This row of candles is not situated within any familiar event. If there is one candle for each day of the speaker’s life, the row has to be constituted by thousands of candles. We are not told how this extraordinary multitude of candles has been lit, or how they extinguish as they fall behind the observer. The poet does not give details about how this happens because he is not interested in agency, but rather in making a connection with the passing of time.

These elements of incoherence do not hinder a meaningful reading, because we are explicitly prompted to make direct connections between temporal relations in the sequence of human life and spatial relations within the row of candles. That is, we are invited to situate ourselves within the time-space blended scene. It seems very easy for readers to get immediately oriented, because the mappings are clearly those of the conventional blend: the future is ahead, the past behind, the candles are units of time (days), and motion of the ego towards these landmarks—or vice versa, it is not specified—means duration.

Once the mappings are established and the reader has accepted to play this game, the scene can be easily loaded with affect. For example, descriptions of lit or extinguished candles will trigger emotions related to time experience, because readers are aware that the adjectives used do not merely refer to candles, but to the integrated objects that result from blending candle, day, and landmark on the timeline. Thus golden (χρυσά), warm (ζϵστά) and vivid (ζωηρά) can be interpreted as physical descriptions of the candles and, at the same time, as metaphoric expressions of affect for the future days ahead. The same goes for the adjectives referring to the past candles: cold (κρύα) establishes the opposition so common to emotion metaphors, in which warmth is positive and cold is negative affect. If they were just referring to candles, melted (λυωμένα) and bent (κυρτά) would not normally have a great emotional power, but in this image it is also the days of our past that look extinguished and consumed, and thus they can inspire pity, fear, melancholy, and so on. The positive emotions that the speaker feels for the days ahead are also signaled by the use of the diminutive word for candles (κϵράκια), which often denotes affection in Greek. Past candles are just candles (κϵριά).

Instantiating the path as a line of candles that burn out as soon as they fall behind the observer is felicitous in many ways, owing to the emergent meanings opportunistically created by this particular instantiation of the timeline. Readers can feel the contrast between light and darkness throughout the poem, and are invited to apply the conventional mappings that associate positive and negative values to these physical features. This is, of course, not a typical property or use of candles, either as illumination devices or even as time symbols on the birthday cake. Rather, these connections arise from the identification of the candles with time units and their placement on a timeline.

Several other aspects of the common knowledge about timelines and the time-space blend have the potential to create affective meanings. Without the poet telling us, we are likely to know, at least unconsciously, that we cannot go back and light the candles again, or control the scene in any other way: we are powerless. As the poet suggests, we may cheer up looking at the lighted candles, and prefer not to turn back—although perhaps we cannot help it—and realize how old we are, how long the dark line has got. The dark line is subjectively felt as growing very fast, a conceptual structure that is also available from more conventional instantiations of the conceptual network (e.g. ‘years fly by when you are old’).

Because the spatio-temporal relations on the timeline are expressed in a straightforward way, the scene is easy to navigate, and may look deceivingly familiar and simple. To serve the expressive purposes of the poem, this image counts on being identified as an instantiation of a generic conceptual recipe. Since we have often assembled this type of mental simulation before, we will run it here again quite easily, in spite of its intricacy, and will come up with emergent structure that seems familiar.

Introducing a material anchor is crucial to help us feel time in this ‘straightforward’ manner. One of the virtues of the timeline is that it allows us to conceptualize diachrony at a glance. Thanks to it, we can ‘see’ multiple periods, sequences and events, with reduced cognitive effort. This compression is widely exploited for didactic and other representational purposes, but we see that it can also be used for affective and poetic effects.

The line is appropriate not only for unidimensionality, regularity, and sequence. A segment can be immediately felt to be long or short, or to increase or decrease at varying speed; it can be easily apprehended as a whole, with a clear beginning and end. All these properties are quite convenient when it comes to building certain affective meanings about time. Kavafis could not have achieved the same effect with a non-linear structure, such as a triangle or a circle, because the topology of the blended simulation would have lacked some of these features. Imagine the line of candles closing into a circle. New implications would arise, certain feelings would be revised, the location of the observer would have to be redefined, and so forth. Most importantly, the length of the lines of lighted and extinguished candles could not be perceived and compared in such a straightforward manner.

3 Manrique’s rivers

Jorge Manrique’s reflections about life as a river, upon his father’s death in 1476 (Coplas a la muerte del Maestre don Rodrigo), constitute the most celebrated time metaphor of Spanish literature:

(7) Nuestras vidas son los ríos

que van a dar en la mar

qu’es el morir;

allí van los señoríos

derechos a se acabar

e consumir;

allí los ríos caudales,

allí los otros, medianos

e más chicos;

allegados, son iguales

los que viven por sus manos

e los ricos.

Our lives are the rivers

that end in the sea

that is death;

there go the estates

right to their end

and dissolution;

there the powerful rivers,

there the others, the middle-sized

and smaller ones.

Once arrived they are equal,

those who worked with their hands

and the rich.

Jorge Manrique, ‘Coplas a la muerte del Maestre don Rodrigo, su padre’ [Verses upon the death of Master Rodrigo, his father], stanza III, edited by A Medina-Bocos (1992).

Like Kavafis’ ‘Candles,’ this text clearly establishes connections between the spatial and the temporal: our lives are the rivers—‘los ríos,’ not just some particular rivers, but rather the whole category—and death is the sea where they end. All differences based on property also end there. Opportunistically, Manrique identifies the volume of a river with wealth, exploiting a conventional connection in language, sanctioned by the polysemy of the adjective (or noun) caudal, which means volume or flow, but also wealth. At the vast sea of death, the rich and the poor become the same, all rivers/men equally disappear, regardless of their initial volume/wealth.

This famous time metaphor presents an evident incongruity. Rivers do not disappear in the sea: they keep on flowing for periods usually much longer than human life or history. However, Manrique’s rivers seem to vanish right after reaching their destination, because they represent worldly matters that disappear with death. As is typical in blends of linear motion and the duration of a human life, the motion in the blended scene does not repeat: these rivers can only flow once. ‘Our lives are the rivers / that endlessly flow towards the sea / that is death’ does not seem to be such a valid metaphor, especially for the ‘vanity of life’ theme that predominates throughout the forty stanzas of Manrique’s Coplas.

This is a standard emergent property of what gets called the life is a journey conceptual metaphor (Lakoff, 1993). The fact that life is one and only one journey shows that we do not simply understand time through space, because motion through space is not in itself unique or unidirectional. Instead, our knowledge of time constrains which spatial structure we select for our metaphors, and produces emergent meanings in the novel conceptualization. This constraint is a permanent source of—often predictable— emergent meanings in this generic template: rivers that only flow once, candles that cannot be lit again, or ropes that cannot be reeled back to their former position.

This constraint is also intrinsically affective. We do not only conceptualize life as one journey, we feel it that way. Get rid of the affective component, and the limitation relaxes considerably. In a museum or a book, a timeline representing a historical period or a biography can be reeled and unreeled, or we can move along it at our will. We can repeat and repeat Columbus’ first trip to America, or go back and forth in his life, by focusing on different points of his biographical timeline. We usually do this when comparing historical periods, devising plans, finding connections between events, and so on. In these cases, we are not typically representing how we feel about life. When we are dealing with our own personal experience, changing direction is not that easy. Perform any of these operations upon Manrique’s rivers or Kavafis’ candles (e.g. go back and light one of the extinguished candles) and immediately an effect of incongruity arises.

In Manrique’s image, each individual human life is fused with one single river, which results in many rivers with different volumes, caudales. There is, however, another version of this generic template, presenting the same elements but performing different integrations. In the pattern we could call the river of life, time in general is integrated with the flow. There is only one river, and an individual life is not fused with it, but with something floating on its waters. In the river of life, our lives are not rivers, but objects travelling on the stream. We have many individual human lives travelling on one river, rather than many rivers that end in the sea.

In the river of life, life is a journey combines with time flow. As in all other such templates, beginning, end and all other parts of the journey map onto their corresponding elements in the life frame. Of course, their durations do not match: typically, the time it takes for an object to travel the length of a river is substantially shorter than a human life. In the blend of river journey and human life, a compression of temporal relations is performed. The compression turns these relations between elements from different domains into relations within a single conceptual framework, or mental space. Journey and life, with their different durations, become the same event, with one single duration; within the blend the mismatch disappears.

Heraclitus’ well-known allegory for existence, ‘ever-different waters flow on those who step into the same rivers’ (Fr. 12, 4–6), ³ makes use of a standard version of this time flow template. The time-space blend is dual, as we saw in our first examples: (1) and (2). The observer can be in motion, as in the life is a journey version, or static, as in ‘Monday is drawing near.’ Heraclitus chooses the second option for his famous image on time and change. Rather than different boats or travelers floating on the river of life, in Heraclitus’ metaphor experiencers are static and time flows towards them. In either version, this generic pattern yields a structure that allows us to reflect on the way we feel about life, while we also keep time continuously flowing. But this is not Manrique’s solution.

Imbued by late medieval worldviews and driven by Christian ideals of humility and endurance, Manrique wishes to enhance the brevity of life and the leveling effect of death. By situating individual death within death in general, he can point at the meaninglessness of human pursuits (vanitas vanitatis), and conceptualize specific events as part of a higher, divine plan. Like Kavafis, he wishes to become proverbial by connecting individual circumstances to universal truth, but, unlike Kavafis’ expression of anxiety, Manrique’s image seems intended to convey a serene acceptance of a divine plan. His objective is not only to mourn the death of his father and to proclaim the vanity of human existence, but also to represent the individual lives and deaths of us all as part of a divine plan. His Coplas insist on this idea again and again, practically in every stanza, with an explicit acceptance of death and the divine plan by his father and family in the last part of the composition.

Given these goals, fusing individual life with an individual river proves to be the right choice. If Manrique had used the river of life template, like Heraclitus and so many others, he would have striven in vain to provide a sufficiently compact image. Individual bathers or travelers would not have suited Manrique’s purposes. They would have provided a scattered picture requiring explanation, which would have probably diverted our attention to time itself, to its ‘flow,’ rather than prompting us to focus on the vanity of life and the inevitable equality of death.

Depicting the rapid flow of time is the ultimate objective for Heraclitus and Kavafis, as well as for McDonald’s pulley metaphor, but not for Manrique. Besides, he is committed to conciseness, because of his own personal attitude, his ethical and stylistic ideals, and also because of the stanza he is using, the copla de pie quebrado, quite typical of 15th-century Castille—the broken rhythm of the copla (8 + 8 + 4 syllables) is especially appropriate for sententious style. He is not looking for a complex allegory that needs ample space—and hence long lines or line sequences—for its development, but rather for a clear image that can be grasped immediately from minimal prompts.

By telling us that our lives are the rivers, the poet seems to encourage us to ‘see’ a multitude of rivers heading right to the sea, unimpeded—because nothing stops our lives from ‘progressing’ towards death. The trajectories and shapes of these rivers do not appear to be important for forming the mental image. The only relevant difference between them is that of water volume. Because of this, readers probably do not tend to imagine the rivers in this image as having complex and well-differentiated shapes. This makes it easier to identify these particular rivers as instantiations of the timeline.

Without any further details, we know how this image works, because we are familiar with the integration of the temporal motion scene and its linear anchor. For example, we know what short and long rivers would mean, how different segments of the river correspond to different periods of life, and what in the life frame corresponds to being close to the sea. Since these mappings are entrenched, Manrique can take them for granted and, without losing these meanings, add the novel mapping that uses water volume as a measure for wealth. Opportunistically adding new dimensions to the timeline is also common in graphic instantiations of the timeline, where success or failure, war or peace, youth or old age, and so forth can be represented by different colors, for example. These additional structures enhance certain elements while building on the stable mappings of the entrenched template.

As in Paz’s snake–machete simile, Manrique’s image fuses both the self and the duration of an individual life with the material anchor. You are not a traveler on the timeline (as in Kavafis), but the timeline itself. Through the analogy with the snake, Paz is trying to bewilder readers, to make them reflect on their dual nature: self-conscious and animal. The rest of Paz’s poem, ‘Más allá del amor’, explicitly focuses on this duality, by repeatedly placing awareness, words, consciousness or names against the night, the jungle, and other elements of wildlife.

Manrique’s rivers serve very different purposes, and they import very different feelings. The scene with rivers flowing towards the sea has the panoramic serenity of contemplation. In most cultures, and certainly in Manrique’s, this scene will not elicit anxiety, or any other strong emotional reaction. Rather, it suggests a calm landscape, and a humble, peaceful acceptance: all rivers eventually flow into the sea; there is nothing we can do. The particular instantiation of the timeline, as a material anchor, facilitates both the framing of the temporal relations and the construction of their affective meaning. The timeline and its end, the sea, are indeed used to orientate the readers and give them a sense of temporal relations, but, by offering the external viewpoint of a contemplating observer, the image is navigated with much more serenity than those by McDonald, Paz, or Kavafis.

Borges’ sonnet entitled ‘Are the Rivers’ (Son los ríos), from La Cifra (1981), explicitly quotes the last three words of Manrique’s image (first line of our example 7). Borges uses the Manrique version in which the ego is the timeline itself. He then blends this with the Heraclitean version in which time moves as a river over the stationary subject. The combination of the two yields an interesting result, with multiple elements mapping onto the self in the blend:

(8) Somos el tiempo. Somos la famosa

parábola de Heráclito el Oscuro.

Somos el agua, no el diamante duro,

la que se pierde, no la que reposa.

Somos el río y somos aquel griego

que se mira en el río. Su reflejo

cambia en el agua del cambiante espejo,

en el cristal que cambia como el fuego.

Somos el vano río prefijado,

rumbo a su mar. La sombra lo ha cercado.

Todo nos dijo adiós, todo se aleja.

La memoria no acuña su moneda.

Y sin embargo hay algo que se queda

y sin embargo hay algo que se queja.

We are time. We are the famous

parable of Heraclitus the Obscure.

We are water, not hard diamond,

Water that disappears, not that reposes.

We are the river and we are that Greek

that sees himself in the river. His reflection

changes in the changing mirror’s water,

in glass that changes like fire.

We are the vain, predetermined river

whose course is towards its sea. Shadows have closed in.

Everything bids us farewell, everything moves away.

The memory does not mint its coin.

And nevertheless, there is something that remains,

and nevertheless, there is something that complains.

Since this flow is made up of different water for each new bather, time (‘the times,’ the condition of the world) is constantly new. In ‘Heraclitean time,’ there is no concern about the span of our lives or what happens to us after we die. This is because the timeline does not structure Heraclitus’ river: without it we lack the life is a journey metaphor as well as the distinctions of beginning, middle, and end. The focus is rather on the instability of the world, which Borges uses to discuss the vanity of identity.

Borges’ poem only conceives this ever-changing river as a timeline when it references the Manrique version: ‘We are the vain, predetermined river, / whose course is towards its sea.’ In this way Borges points at Manrique’s essential themes: the vanity of life, the certainty of death, and death conceptualized as dissolution in the sea. This is aided by the use of the word ‘course’ (rumbo), which prompts us to think of the river as a trajectory. The entrenched mappings of the timeline are here taken for granted too: relative length corresponds to relative duration of life, relative distance to the sea corresponds to different periods, and so forth.

Borges manipulates Manrique’s vision of rivers to express his own unique worldview. He writes that the river is on a course to ‘its sea,’ utilizing the possessive pronoun (su in Spanish). The fact that each river has its own sea/destination seems to emphasize the importance of destiny, typical in Borges but not necessarily a part of Manrique’s version of the metaphor, given that destiny is not an integral element of the Christian worldview within which Manrique wrote. Also, for Manrique’s medieval ethics of humility, the fact that all rivers end in the sea, the same sea, is crucial. This sea, which is death, is the great leveler of all social distinctions.

We have shown some aspects of the interplay between the timeline blend and the motivations of particular authors and periods. We have seen that the anchoring of the time-motion scene crucially depends on adopting a suitable linear object. Then the poet needs to give the readers reasons—either explicitly or implicitly—to situate themselves on the timeline, that is, to use the affordances of the linear object for mappings between time and the spatial figure. Finally, when the timeline is manipulated in an adequate way, its specific properties (being cut in two, being composed by candles, ending in the sea) can be employed to construct affective meanings that can only be experienced in that particular way inside the blend, and that do not belong to the object if considered outside the blend, where the cultural frames, concepts and emotions associated with these objects do not typically relate to time. Although there is great variation between instantiations, depending on style and context, the properties of the timeline blend remain stable.

4 Affective time imagery and integration templates

We have seen that familiarity with complex—but conventional—templates for building conceptual blends plays a crucial role in producing and understanding creative time metaphors in poetic texts. Poets select and exploit these templates to suit their expressive purposes. The template we have studied, the timeline, is a powerful material anchor. It makes temporal relations immediately available as spatial relations, by integrating a line with the path of the time-space blend. Comparing different instantiations of the same pattern can yield a variety of insights, including some related to intertextuality, as we have seen with Borges’ reformulation of river metaphors from Manrique and Heraclitus.

The time metaphors examined in this article are all used to express particular emotions relating to the passage of time. This affective component is important not just for poetic language, but also for day-to-day discourse as well. Expressions such as ‘the end of the semester is coming up fast’ are meant to express emotion, rather than just time relations. We do agree with Conceptual Metaphor Theory that spatial cognition is important for the conceptualization of time, but we want to emphasize that there are important lacunae in this approach, such as the neglect of affect in metaphoric expression.

Another complexity absent from current Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and which can be better addressed with Conceptual Integration Theory, is the fact that we utilize different spatial structures (e.g., either linear or non-linear) for different rhetorical and expressive purposes. Moreover, in our examples we see that the linear pattern is more suitable to function as a material anchor for certain temporal relations. Other spatial configurations, like the circular pattern, are not so appropriate to provide spatial landmarks on which to ground the same temporal relations.

Past, future, periods of human life, duration differences, or remaining time available are easily anchored and perceived on the timeline. Other anchors will offer other features: for example cyclic time and the succession of hours, minutes, seconds, as well as the precise moment within the hour, are well anchored by the clock or the sundial. Figures which provide no anchoring may be symbols with affective meaning, but, unlike the timeline cases, they are not devices that facilitate the navigation of a time-space scene. Kavafis’ row of candles, for instance, is not only a metaphor: it is also a mechanism that the poetic enunciator uses to show spatially where he is in the timeline of his life. This spatial position—given by the timeline anchor—helps the poet convey sentiment, whether it be regret, nostalgia, or any other feeling, about the fact that the speaker is far along in his life.

A detailed study of conceptual integration, material anchors, spatial schemas, and affective meaning construction is crucial for understanding how these generic templates work. Their instantiations need to be situated within their cultural diachrony and their communicative objectives. Studying the creative and complex examples provided by poetic imagery is crucial to expose the templates and their relations with context and goals. Although research in conceptual mappings has made great progress in the last three decades, we are only beginning to grasp the complexity of the cognitive patterns underlying figurative language. The initial idea of binary, unidirectional projections between domains, such as time is space, has provided many fruitful insights, but is repeatedly challenged as we perform increasingly more detailed analyses. The complexity of conceptual mappings becomes especially apparent when we study patterns of creativity across poetic texts.