esmenet | mapping the metaphorical to the real

I just wrote a short essay on a branch of philosophy that doesn't exist, based on misreading 'College of Cosmetology' as 'College of Cosmology' on a sign once a few months ago. (Also, it may not be 100% coherent.)

Now let us touch in brief upon astro-cosmetology, that branch of science dedicated to the realization that each person is, in fact, a vast field of stars. In the past this was thought to be merely an overwrought metaphor, leaning heavily on poetic cliche about the vastness of humanity's inner spirit, but recent discoveries show that, contrary to wide belief, it may be an entirely literal truth.₂₇

Though at first glance it may be surprising that this new information has had little or no effect on the astro-cosmetological community at large, a closer look at the history of that field will render a clearer explanation. From its beginnings, astro-cosmetology has been more of a philosophical discipline than a scientific one; and, indeed, the popular conception of astro-cosmetologists as a bunch of too-extreme Romantic poets may not be that far off. Originally, the very name was a derogatory one, popularly applied to a certain trend of writers who took their metaphors over-literally (for example, a certain poem with the theme of her face is as the moon might use her face waxes and wanes over a period of approximately twenty-eight days with certain annual fluctuations in color and brightness according to other heavenly bodies around her as well as the observer's own position as a base and elaborate upon that) but was soon taken by a group of female philosophers as the perfect blend of the literal and scientific with the metaphorical and ethereal.

[...]

—It must be noted that cosmetics, being tangible objects close at hand, are more real than the distant stars in this instance. And yet they also provide a touch of the hidden, the transformative, to the once-fixed and definite cosmos.

[...]

In its very essence, astro-cosmetology is the study of mapping the metaphorical to the real, the concrete to the changing. When the human body is declared a universe, one must describe its faults in significantly different terms; a wart becomes an enlarged and ancient star, a missing finger only an unexpected edge in the shape of space. We are freed from the standard paradigms of social judgement: a person may no longer be judged as attractive or ugly, but only as a natural body with all the oddities and complexities that entails.

I was originally just going to mention it in the background of a Harry Potter fic, but it sorta got away from me.

---and of course the metaphorical is the concrete, and the real is ever-changing.