You can also find this essay on my substack :).

Metaphor Is

Metaphor is the string that brings kite to hand. Fingers curl in seeming control, but it is the wind the kite lives in, the eddies that guide its path. Our task is to keep a firm hand on the string until it is time to reel the kite back so we can see what marks the skies have left on it.

It is the light that brings mountain to valley, brings shore to shore. It scatters through the air, over the waves, and it is the task of eyes to catch the sight of peaks and sands.

It is the water that rains cloud to ground. It gathers in pools and flows in streams, and as we dip our toes, we feel the cool calm that once belonged to the sky. If we dare, we dive to swim in its waters and hope to gape at views we never knew shared a river.

It is the leaf that falls tree to palm, a part of the whole that has drifted down, a glimpse of the life still above. Brittle, it crunches as we close our palms, but, oh, is it a nice sound. A contribution to the autumn smell in the air.

And it is the dust that drifts skin to floor in swirling vortices, all around, always, but unseen except in richer light.

Definition is metaphor, however much I like to imagine it as a stuffy man at a dusty typewriter, stodging away at his task ‘til his eyes droop. Well, it can be him--these are precisely the sort of definitions one finds living in dictionaries. Are those really metaphors? I think so. If metaphor is that path, that string, that light, that brings two packets of meaning together, then what is definition if not precise and exact metaphor?

Is a chair, wholly and completely, a thing that someone sits on? What about a chair no one ever sits on? A chair in a painting? A chair that only your mind’s eye can ever see? You know what a chair is—you can feel it as surely as you feel the air on your skin. No matter how you futz with the definition, you’ll never be able to reach the approximate totality the word chair itself has. Chair carries the weight of all chairs like no definition, or more expansively, metaphor, can. And the word chair is itself a metaphor—I can’t sit on sounds or letters.

I like to visualize words mapping onto my mental semantic space—that sea of meaning that neurons sail. When I say or think a word, it points to that part of the sea in a way that other words do not, for they each point to their own places on the map. Though, I wouldn’t have you imagining a political map with nice, clean borders, for the lines between words are not only fuzzy, but overlap, often in surprising ways. Words that seem to be distant can find themselves sharing waters as if a wormhole has torn through spacetime.

I do admit that the analogy breaks down unless you’re willing to cross your mind’s eyes a bit to visualize the fourth dimension. Anyways.

Stodgy definition can do a fine job at finding most of the chairs, but I find that unbridled, colorful metaphor is more powerful, its sails more able to harness semantic winds. That is the great failure of definitions: they touch on the senses and the rational while ignoring the emotions and the beautiful. The whole of your experience cannot be made without love and art, and so definition’s sails tend to fall flat. A scientific diagram cannot birth emotion like a tapestry of golden thread or a plant grown from seed to flower. Stop and smell it, why don’t you? You won’t understand the rose until you do.

Metaphor is definition, however much I like to imagine it as an artist in long, flowing robes as colorful as the painting they’ve crafted. Any metaphor, especially strange ones, can teach. A great metaphor is one with enough semantic distance to offer many paths to explore and understand.

Take, for example: The fruit fly is a July rainstorm. How? Is it because the fly rains down upon the fresh earth that is a ripened fruit? Is it that they can swarm in great clouds? Is it that they’re bad to have in your kitchen? Turn the metaphor in your hand, study the subjects on either end. Note that shadow there. Have you turned it diagonally yet?

Now consider Light is darkness. Is this a bad metaphor because the semantic distance is too far, its subjects too opposite? I don’t think so—I don’t think there is a way to have too much semantic distance. Nothing is too big for you to hold in your hand. The exercise of discovering the meaning in the waves is the gift that metaphor brings. It is a puzzle, where your solutions say as much about you as about the metaphor and the things it connects.

Art is metaphor. It is an offered umbrella, a hug, a nuzzle on the cheek. It is the lightest touch of a chick’s downy feather. It is a fist thrown at the gut, face, or shoulder. We dance with it, try to care for it in our own way, but it always breaks the waltz or eats from berry bushes rather than our extended hands. It’s a fox that may not ever be fully tamed, but it does come in from the woods when it wants to chase a ball and cuddle.

We use art as our words when our tongues shrivel in our mouths. We paint to show how we see. We make music to show how we want to be heard. We write stories to show how we experience. We raise pieces from birth to wear our memories and wag their tails when they see sadness or joy, and then we let them loose upon the earth for others to not only learn from, but also play with and feed and love.

And if art is communication, then metaphor is the language. Its power is concentrated, sharp, weighty, allowing us to send our messages using fewer bytes.

Metaphor is the bark, the wag of the tail, the chasing of the ball, the eating of the berries from the bush, the chasing after mice and butterflies.

What are the limits of metaphor?

Well, no object is metaphor. Meaning is butter—it is spread over material things, but it comes from somewhere else, called mind. Objects may be connected through the realm of ideas, but it is those connections that are metaphor, not the objects themselves. The interpreting of connections between physical things is, I would argue, the essence of science. Two masses are connected by gravitational formulas. Your past and present are connected by time and motion.

But every object is metaphor. All things exist between other things, and all you have to do is mold them to bridge that distance. Once you do that, you can cross them or stand at their railings to study the semantic waters flowing underneath. I suspect this is an essence of magic. Metaphor made not of language, but of objects. Mars is a bridge to action and conflict. A bay leaf is a bridge to success.

Is all language metaphor? Is all art metaphor? Is there anything, real or abstract, that isn’t metaphor?

Have you not been paying attention? Perhaps the greatest lesson metaphor has to teach us is that anything can be everything else at once while being nothing at all.