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Ever since I first began to write, I’ve been fascinated with the use of the metaphor, its purpose and function, its symbolic power, its innate capacity to manoeuvre a message into something more, its malleability and ability to alter the imagined landscape of a text. The longer I’ve engaged in the kind of thinking required to form fruitful metaphors, the more I’ve come to realise that it is less a skill to be learned than a way of seeing to be acquainted with. By that I am not disregarding any methods of executing strong metaphors, for there is undoubtedly a baseline of logic and reason that can be applied to the practice. Instead I’m focussing on the parts that can’t be methodised, the way every metaphor is pulled from a place out of sight, requiring a slow and surrendered sensitivity to the described thing in order to let the mind arrive at the significant pairing. Metaphors that spark, I find, tend to be the ones in which the connected subject is not plainly assumed in everyday thinking, but somehow, once the connection is made, the synergy is so strong it becomes impossible to pull apart. Some metaphors can yield a tepid result, where words go undigested and imagination is deactivated. I believe this happens and metaphoric meaning fails to develop when the subject is thematically or emotionally unexplored and a vapid correlation is made for style or convenience, which then compresses the imagination and loses the potential for greater depth. But I am not so focused here in trying to explore what makes a lukewarm metaphor, or presenting a theory of what is good and bad, and I don’t want to ignore the role subjective preferences play in the varied ways they affect people. I’m curious about the journey of the mind from the moment it seeks and branches out, to the moment it arrives at the compatible subject, the vehicle of further meaning. That process of getting there demands a fluidity of seeing; it demands one to do without any insistence on knowing the subject solely as it appears; it calls for a perspective that considers an ungraspable binding of things, and trusts that the right words will portray this binding. It operates alongside faith in the relationships between disparate objects and observations, and trust that if conceived with care and restraint, there is a way to transfer this perceived relationship to someone who may not have considered it before. In thinking about metaphor, I’m also encompassing simile, along with any other kinds of symbolic means of comparison within the field of figurative language.
A written text is a composite of descriptions, each description containing a range of meaning, and in this range lives its potential to be understood. In telling a story, one of the writer’s tasks is to figure out where understanding can be built, to determine which aspects must be further crafted in order to reach the intuited impact. In forming a metaphor, the writer has become aware which descriptions alone will not suffice to transfer the depth of understanding they aspire to impart. That is the sole purpose of a metaphor: to make even more real the understanding of said thing. A sensitive seeker of metaphor knows that there is a dissatisfaction, a falling short of meaning, if they are to let the description speak for itself, that in these cases it is not enough to merely describe the thing, its functions, the way it exists, resounds. I’ve wondered, when these cases show up, why it is so unsatisfying to go the direct route, to have the descriptor written exactly as it appears and as it has occurred? When we encounter words imploring to be built upon through metaphor, and we look at them alone in their practical, pedestrian form, why are we given a feeling so eager to seek greater clarity through symbolic interpretation, as if to leave them alone would be robbing them of their deserved attention, forcing them to live as something less than their potential? Why would someone wish to describe the weight of lamenting as the decomposing of an evergreen, or draw a vivid correlation between the trait of a person and something worlds apart like spilled ink on a table? I think because, fundamentally, we desire and cling to the sense and not solely the fact; we, as readers and writers, want to imagine and not just be told. There is pleasure and fulfilment in a further noticing that takes place at the hands of a metaphor, a spreading out and deepening of detail and particularity. And where exactly we decide (whether consciously or not) to place a metaphor is a fascinating thing: a mystery of why we intuitively know that some things require that symbiotic development in order to add substance to the sense and imagination, while others simply don’t.
Much of how I’ve come to perceive metaphor is through the interplay of images. In looking out to a landscape, for instance, we are bearing witness to the reciprocity of multiple facets, where vast imaginal relationships all simultaneously take place through our noticing. Light and shadow form contrasts within and around one another; blue tones of the sky impact the way our eyes interact with greens of nature. Perhaps a tree, holding a delicate and intricate arrangement, stands before a sweep of colours that flutter in through spaces among leaves—here, both images are forming a multitude of contrasts that inform the recognition of the other and create a new conceivable picture. There is an expansion taking place by introducing one image to another, a discovery of mutual context and new sensory elements. Picture the earthy brown appearance of a wooden chair and its shadow that forges an illusion of vaster height, that for some undefinable reason changes when placed in relation to something new. Perhaps the chair is flattered and its form accentuated when positioned a certain way in front of the terracotta of the wall behind, with small blots of vivid colour still holding place around its facade, grown pale. And perhaps the character of the wall is bolder now, given something to liberate its features. Or maybe its character has shrunk and so we are called to move the chair in another position, or simply replace it with something new. In letting ourselves in on how these two things can exist in relation to each other, we are noticing something that they can give to the other, and somehow through this, the way we ourselves come to know them, separately, has changed. Making metaphor is trusting the instinct that things have something to say about other things, despite their world of differences; that images, whether garnered internally in mind or externally through the environment, can be offered proximity, an opportunity to bond. And in such an offering we can learn something more about them individually.
I’ve noticed that we can see metaphor in how the character of other people shines a light on our own character. Experiences with and through others, whether composed of small words and gesticulations or mountainous moments of shared exultation, never cease contributing to one’s own finding out of themself. Noticing the subtle pathways through which metaphor can begin goes hand in hand with the awareness of the unceasing tethering we are all subject to, like how conversations (which coagulate as thoughts and beliefs and feelings) can only grow a body through reciprocation. To enact this awareness through gathering words is the practice of digging into one’s own responses, interpretations, and impressions of things in relation to other things, a this and that, a here and there, where barriers are momentarily evaporated. This digging can be worked through from different angles, but the goal is always to achieve greater depth. How mysterious it is to look at one thing and to decide that maybe it could be married with another, or another; and how affirming it is when the right thing comes solidly into place and mirrors exactly what we’ve been searching to find, sometimes even more. There are likenesses to be discovered in letting one thing mirror another, and in that transfer of likeness a whole new meaning occurs. For words, what they represent, how we each come to know them, when placed side by side can exhilarate the rhythm and beat in one another, driving us to a place of finer comprehension and more layered sensitivity. I find that this occurrence of likeness often seeps into moments beyond books and pages. Like when the song of a cellist reminds you, for reasons you do not know, of your late grandparent, or of the one who lived next door who used to weed your garden in slow gestures. And how in the cello itself, meaning is conveyed through association: each note preceding the next is always and only acting as a continuation of the previous one, carrying its information forward; without the previous one, the meaning of the new is completely lost on us—and on and on the music moves this way. When the feeling of a rigid door conjures a recollection of the time you couldn’t let your cries escape you as a child, the push of the panel in itself a memory, languished with years, but now alive again. When the lines of a floorboard stoke the patterns of city architecture you could once outline by memory, or a painting you were given, whose shapes and caresses once left a permanent impression on the way you take notice. When you notice in somebody’s walk a gentleness you feel you’ve somehow witnessed in the turning of seasons; or you find in somebody else’s stubbornness a small wobbly part of yourself and it makes you laugh, or sigh.
A metaphor is an invitation to consider a new way of seeing, and in orchestrating one, there is a quest to make the message as palpable as possible. But to do so, one takes the necessary route of diversion, in hopes to return back to the centre point of meaning. This diversion is where the enrichment takes place, where the object of focus finds directness through indirectness, where it grows in shape and colour. There is a subtle switching lanes, and an even subtler getting lost, that takes place during the enveloping of a metaphor, and along the way we are given pieces, building blocks that alter our awareness of the subject at hand, sometimes transforming it completely. Through the picking out and forging of words, fuelled by imagination, we are targeting sensations in an effort to hit the middle mark. Sometimes sensations paint images in our mind without effort; other times it is an uncertain process of honing in on the abstraction and blindly reaching, plucking a pin out of a void. It is like standing on the precipice of a most lucid and satisfying communication, attempting to find something that may not even be clear to ourselves until we have introduced the compatible image. I think there is something freeing and epiphanic about imparting a new perspective, universalising the personal so others can be let in on your findings.
And to me, it is strange and divine. Strange because it requires absolute sureness in the undiscovered; it seems to thrive when we introduce the radically unpredicted, the parallels and resemblances that the act of marking out and describing alone could not dare to extract without a mediator. For we could describe something in immense detail, assess it from every angle in an attempt to highlight and explain and get to the core of it, but, when metaphor calls, not until we introduce something seemingly unlike it can it truly be seen in the way we desire, brought out through the undefinable sense we knew we could summon if we paid enough attention. It is a phenomenon that exists when we refuse to to be swayed by what is ostensibly “there” and choose the unfledged intuition that there is more to the story. And I use the word divine, not religiously, but because it is one of the things in life that eludes us, of which we can only be students, curious and aware of certain resonances and the methods of accessing them, but ultimately unknowing. Seeking metaphor is the decision to eavesdrop on the almost silent conversations between things, learning the precise ways they speak to each other. It is drawing out a bridge along the gaps and holes between things whose relations are only known if we are careful enough to locate them. It is a place where similarities and differences correspond, sometimes touch, and sometimes blend into one and awaken something bright and entirely new.