I have been teaching a workshop on metaphor. (For any readers whose Leaving Cert was a while ago, metaphor is when one thing’s meaning flows into another thing; simile is when a thing is compared to a different and distinct thing, usually, in English, using “like” or “as”. Christina Rossetti’s line “My heart is like a singing bird” uses simile; John Donne’s “no man is an island” is metaphor. Simile compares different things while respecting their quiddity, metaphor questions distinctions.)
Students sometimes come warily to metaphor, believing that “making metaphors” might be artificial or laborious work. I start by asking them to think of metaphors in common use, or to note uses of metaphor in the wild by way of homework. (Don’t worry, this is freelance teaching, no public funds expended on such serious tomfoolery.)
My online workshops have participants from around the world, and at first I wondered if some students’ difficulty with my request related to cultural differences. Maybe in some countries, you just don’t hear much metaphor? There are after all stereotypes which would suggest that some nations are more literal-minded than others. The Irish students had no problem, returning with nets full of lively similitudes overheard on buses and in cafes.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps the habit of metaphorical thinking runs so deep that most people don’t notice it. What about falling in love, I asked. What about it, they said. That fall, I said, it doesn’t in fact involve gravity, does it?
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We played with other metaphors for the experience of beginning to love another person, sometimes without wanting to. If it were climbing in love, I said, or even jumping in love or diving in love, would it feel different? What other qualities of that experience would we see with a different metaphor? To sleep in love would be slower but still involuntary; to leap in love would suggest effort and also risk; to swim in love would convey immersion, buoyancy and perhaps a destination. You can’t help falling in love but you could probably choose not to jump. We can imagine how the experience and its cultural position might change with the figurative verb. Other languages, of course, love differently.
To be woolly-minded, I said, or small-minded or narrow- or broad-minded, which is different from being high-minded but still spatial, still a way for the immaterial imagination to see itself in three dimensions.
To lose one’s mind, someone suggested. We tried: to flee one’s mind, more deliberate but as desperate; to leave one’s mind, more considered but perhaps stranger. There is also the phrase “to be out of” one’s mind, which is not quite the same as “losing” it, although not unlike the somewhat worrying expression younger students have begun to use, to “get in my head”. (Better, surely, than out of one’s mind?). All spatial metaphors, depicting the mind as a place where some other element of us is only sometimes to be found. What exactly is it that loses the mind, that is out of the mind or in or not in the head? What part of the self is separable from its own thinking?
Could we think of thinking in some other, perhaps less domestic way? There is a recent tendency to imagine the mind as a computer, sometimes capable of “re-wiring”, but in the 19th century it was a loom, making patterns in the cloth of memory and knowledge. The obvious metaphor for thought comes from the most sophisticated technology at any given moment.
Metaphor makes reality. We can’t think without it, but the images we choose constrain our thinking
Almost everything from cancer to hobbies is now described as “your journey”, fantasising a quest with a setting-out, hardship overcome and a triumphant ending, promising linear progress through the formlessness and reiteration of messy life. I prefer words that don’t make false promises: your cancer experience, your knitting practice. No destination, no sunlit uplands.
Metaphor makes reality. We can’t think without it, but the images we choose constrain our thinking. This is why xenophobic politicians like to refer to the people they fear as “hordes” or “infestations”; why we should reject any rhetoric that imagines humans as things. The simile “that person is like a rat” calls attention to similarities and differences (whiskers? tail? wiffly nose?). The metaphor “that person is a rat”, or worse, “all those people are rats” invites inhuman treatment. We know there are no whiskers and tails in the case, rather contamination, rapacity, the regrettable necessity of extermination.
Watch out for metaphors. Sometimes they enlighten you, and sometimes they kill.
