“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.

“…. 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).]