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["Writing it
all down," is the phrase that ends Brenda Miller's essay. That's what we
strive to do as writers. It is an ambitious striving, a striving that forces us
to question our experiences and ourselves--can we possibly write it all down? Can
we possibly get it down right? What would it feel like if we didn't have the
longing to do this? Is there any other way for us? Even days we are not
writing, we are considering these questions. When those close to us wonder,
"Can't anything be what it is without you making it something else? Can't
you be here now?" we can remember Brenda's vivid essay. There isn't an
easy answer to whether metaphor making, inherent in our natures as writers,
takes us out of the present or puts us more deeply in it. What is answerable is that this quality of
our nature makes us restless to get to the page.--Sheila]
****
The Case Against
Metaphor: An Apologia
by Brenda Miller
“…. I knew that
she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
Pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind….”
—Billy Collins
I’m on a walk in
Point Reyes—a national seashore north of San Francisco—with a biologist. Where I see a generalized “nature,” pretty
enough, Rich sees a marsh that teems
with activity: he points out green herons and yellow-legged sandpipers,
Virginia rails and kingfishers, coots with white beaks and a coyote with ears
red as a fox. We see the coyote only
because Rich noticed a deer, quite far away, who “looked kind of nervous.” He
followed the deer’s gaze to see the coyote lurking among the trees. All deer, to me, look nervous, but Rich has
lived in Point Reyes for 30 years and his eyes, I imagine, are different than
ordinary eyeballs—clearer perhaps, or wider—and his world seems more populated
and friendlier than mine. We walk in
that stance particular to naturalists, heads swiveling, our hands curved to fit
the rim of the binoculars held against our chests.
He stops and points out a spider web glimmering on a bush. “It’s the pumpkin spider,” he says. It looks like an ordinary web to me, silky,
luminescent, already a little tattered.
I’m gazing around for fresh sights with my binoculars when Rich murmurs,
as an aside, “The pumpkin spider eats her entire web every evening, then spins
it new again in the morning.” We walk
on, but his words lodge—I can actually feel
it happening— in the region of my brain that makes metaphor. I know that
eventually I’ll return to my room and write this fact down, and it will steep in my head overnight. I’ll get up and make my coffee and stand on
the deck, wondering if the fog will lift, if today we’ll see elk, if I’ll ever
finish the essay I’ve been mulling over all week. And when I sit down to write, the page will
feel particularly blank, and I know I’ll have to say something about the
pumpkin spider and her web, because I’m a writer and that’s what we do with
interesting facts: we turn them into metaphor, we are metaphor-making
machines. I know I will write something
pithy and rhythmic, obliquely linking the spider’s work to my own, something
about how as a writer I, too, spend all day spinning webs, hoping to catch
something substantial. I will wait all
day on this gossamer thing, hungry. And
at the end of the day I must be willing to eat this scaffold, make it
disappear, and in the morning start all over again.
I already know this is the metaphor, waiting for me to grab it and run. It hovers in my peripheral vision, clouding
everything, and I try to banish it for now; I want to just keep walking with
Rich. I want to see what he tells me to
see.
We see three wandering tattlers swooping in over the pond; they flutter and
almost land, then flap up wildly and keep going. Rich tells me they’re suffering from
something called “zugenruhe,”
a term coined by a German naturalist to describe migration anxiety. Though the birds have traveled all night and
are surely weary, they can’t bring themselves to land: their restlessness is
too strong, the urge to keep moving too great.
And already I can feel it, like a tickle in my throat, that strangled
mandate: Must…. Make. …Metaphor. But
I don’t want to, at least not yet; I don’t want to make that inevitable
connection between migratory fervor and my own vast restlessness, a disquiet we
must all feel, at one time or
another: the anguished hover above a
perfectly fine resting place. Already,
in the instant it takes to walk a few feet further toward the shore, I’ve
formed a notion of how we quiver and keep ourselves aloft, despite our
exhaustion.
These kinds of metaphors—intuitive correlations between inner and outer
worlds—have always exerted a powerful hold on me, and I’m not sure why. And I’m even less sure why I resist them now. There’s nothing inherently wrong with metaphor: after all, there
can be something rather edifying in the way analogy articulates what previously
remained nebulous. When I see the
wandering tattlers—and hear their story from a man who understands these
wordless creatures—they elicit the sense of a truth always known but long
forgotten. When I see the pumpkin spider
at her endless and repeating task, she affirms for me that what I do every day
is natural, almost preordained. These
creatures, and the facts Rich feeds me about them, stay in mind because the
links between us feel organic; my brain grows nooks and crannies precisely to
receive these articulations. For me, it
seems, there is no other way to speak, no other way to think.
One of my favorite poets, Jane Hirshfield, puts it
this way: “My job as a human being as
well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am
part of, and then press it a little further. To find out what happens if I ask,
‘What else, what next, what more, what deeper, what hidden?’ And to keep
pressing into that endless realm, in many different ways.” And perhaps that’s it: by giving in to my metaphor reflex, I do pay
greater attention to the world; I love it a little more. I see the pumpkin spider or the wandering
tattlers, and they stick to me a little; I take a second look and then a
third. When I’m in the zone—when the
world appears to offer up symbols at every turn—I sometimes think I understand
what monks must feel when they’ve solved their illogical koans:
the grind of the brain ceasing, all things falling into place with a sigh.
Even the dharma talks of the Zen masters use analogy or metaphor to
clarify—little parables where every small object becomes a means to
enlightenment: the overflowing tea cup,
the twirled wildflower, the ripe artichoke.
All these things become portals for a new kind of wisdom to arise.
But today, for me, it all seems too assembled,
and I want the world to just remain as it is, firmly itself. If, as Hirshfield
suggests, my job is to pay attention, why can’t I do it on the world’s terms
and not my own? Why do I need to push it
further? Take my guide Rich, for
example. His telepathy with the birds comes from his keen observations: he
knows they are tired by observing them, by putting together this knowledge with
what he knows of the season and the time of day. When he sees that they do not alight on the
pond, he smiles, almost beams at their predictability, the way they acquiesce
to the patterns he’s studied for years.
Of course, I know his perception is as much a construct as mine,
overlaid with the dialect of science, but his way seems more guileless; he has
no need to use the birds the way I’m
working them now, the way I reach out and grab hold of the tattlers for the
lyric moment they may engender.
Today I want to see the world simply,
plainly, without my writing hand limning every surface. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been immersed in my
meditation practice these last few mornings, ringing my little bell, and for a
few moments at a time I hover close to that mindful ideal, each breath arriving
coolly on the heels of the one before it, the world settling down from its
constant swirl to sit quietly just as it is.
The poet James Tate has written that poetry “….speaks against an essential
backdrop of silence. It is almost reluctant to speak at all, knowing that it
can never fully name what is at the heart of its intention.” When I’m meditating like this, sometimes
the open weave of the world presents itself, the empty spaces stretching wide,
the silence a holy thing I would never want to break with my paltry utterance.
So for me, today, this reflex of meaning-making becomes a barrier rather than a
path: a false illumination. Today I
don’t want to write the metaphor of the wandering tattlers, nor all the others
that now seem to throw themselves at me with reckless abandon. On the radio when I get home, I hear about
freshwater eels, all of whom breed in the Sargasso Sea off Bermuda, then
migrate to freshwater rivers all over North America. Ten or fifteen or twenty years later, they
make their way thousands of miles back to the Sargasso, those mythic waters,
divesting themselves of their digestive system to make room for their growing
sexual organs. Or I keep watching the
Forster’s tern, this afternoon, how she keeps circling the pond at Tomales Bay, solitary hunter, diving again and again at the
skin of water but coming up empty-taloned every
time. Or the way the paths on the cliff
keep diverging in the dried grass, all of them well-trod, most of them leading
nowhere.
All these things register. The eels with
their empty bellies. The estuary out my
window and how it shows so clearly the transitions from sea to bay to
river—each margin becomes a new ecotone altogether,
and Rich says, “it all has to do with salt.”
And before the words are barely out of his mouth I’m thinking, of
course, tears and sweat and our bodies, too, must have these tidal zones,
different measures of salinity and all manner of life they’re able to support….
And I say: Enough! Let salt be salt. Let the eels be eels and the web a web, let
the tattlers fly all night and day; let the bay and estuary flow where they
will, around and beyond the headland where the paths lead back the way they
came. A world without metaphor, I
imagine, would hold us in rapture, and, like rapture, would be beautiful,
terrifying, and impossible to sustain. I
know this afternoon I'll walk down to that cliff; I'll find the bend to the
path where I can turn to look back on this house. I'll raise my binoculars, and see, in sharp
focus, this balcony and this climbing rose, this rocking chair, and barely—like
a ghost, like a shade—the faint contour of a person bent over her notebook,
writing it all down.
[This essay first appeared in Fourth Genre,
Vol. 6, issue 2 (Fall, 2004).] . . .
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