The Other Thing About Metaphors
They can be weaponry.
Let Metaphor: Join Me in the Webinar
I will be guiding a live webinar on metaphor-making and metaphor-finding on Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024 starting at 10 a.m. Eastern US/Canada Time. The live workshop takes place via Zoom and will run for 2 hours 22 minutes, or until 12:22 p.m. Eastern Time. The cost is $22. You will need to register in advance. You have 10 days left to register.
I’ll be talking not only about finding the common metaphors we use in our writing, but the deeper philosophy of why metaphors matter & what happens if you control the frames they create.
What you get from this webinar:
pdf handouts, including pages of definitions
5 ways to find & attract metaphors
a list of your own metaphors for your work
powerful metaphors in literature
a morning spent improving your craft
a writing community
About Metaphors
Metaphors have to be watched. They're sneaky. They can turn language into medicine or into weaponry. This makes them a powerful tool.
In 2004 linguist George Lakoff published a hand-grenade of a book, Don't Think of an Elephant. It came out from Chelsea Green Publishing in Vermont, which has recently brought out a revised edition. If someone says to you, "Whatever you do, don't think of an elephant" then what do you do?
You think of an elephant. An elephant is the first thing you think of. In fact, you can hardly think of anything else.
The Power of Metaphor
"Who controls the metaphor controls the world," Lakoff wrote in that book. Think about that line—Who controls the metaphor controls the world. Why?
According to Lakoff, people think in terms of metaphors, or frames, which are conceptual structures. These frames represent a foundational credo about life and the world. One such frame is how we think about fatherhood. We have two basic frames—the strict father or the nourishing father. In current politics, Mr. Trump represents the strict father and Mr. Walz represents the nourishing dad.
"When the facts don't fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored," Lakoff said. To win in politics, speak to the frame, not to the issue. Use the metaphor for “strict father” in your speeches, and that’s what people will hear, whether you are a strict father or not.
Politicized Metaphors
No Child Left Behind meant the opposite—as children couldn't pass standardized tests, they were passed along without knowing basic academic skills, how to read or how to multiply. The children weren’t left behind but their academic skills were.
Healthy Forests Initiative proposed clearcutting. Remove the forest that can burn.
The two words Clean Coal hid an entire back-story. If coal is clean, nobody gets damaged by it. Nobody gets asthma.
Dr. King
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a master at metaphor. The Emancipation Proclamation, he wrote, was a great beacon light of hope and a joyous daybreak.
Withering injustice was like being seared in the flames.
Racial injustice was quicksand.
Segregation was a desolate valley, racial justice a sunlit path.
Many of Dr. King's metaphors are economic in nature, because the insidious economic oppression of black and brown Americans was a forceful rallying cry. "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity,” King wrote.
America had written the Negro people a bad check. It came back marked insufficient funds. America defaulted on its promissory note.
In the very last speech Dr. King delivered before his heart-breaking murder, he said that he had been to the mountaintop. He said that he had seen the promised land.
Both of these are metaphors of hope and promise, words that will live forever, a permanent response to an end he seemed to see coming.
Metaphors of Ecology
Many years ago I was invited to a gathering of nature writers and ecologists in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. We were meeting to brainstorm effective metaphors for ecological restoration. The gathering was organized by Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmentalist philosopher and nature writer.
Moore wondered how writers could talk about restoration so that more people understood the concept, so that it fit their frames, so that the idea of ecological restoration didn't bounce off them.
Most metaphors for ecological restoration have been medical in nature, Moore said. A forest is healing, it is recovering, it is renewing itself. Ecologists have a prescription for restoring a forest's health. We watch its rebirth.
But a cutover pine flatwoods is not sick.
New Metaphors
“If these old metaphors aren't working, what metaphors might?” asked Moore. This was the question that the participants addressed during the days we were together. Moore assembled the participants into small groups and tasked each group with inventing a new metaphor for environmental restoration.
Re-creation? Since the primeval world was creation, is restoration re-creation, us humans assisting as lesser gods in a new creation?
A tapestry? Is creation a tapestry, woven by millions of years of evolution, and we the re-weavers or the darners?
An orchestra? Is restoration a kind of orchestra, a concert of returning species?
Restoration as Marriage?
Colleagues in my group decided to liken restoration to marriage.
Marriage has no destination in mind, but is a process—as is restoration.
Home is a place of intimacy, sustenance, sanctuary, return—as is a wild place.
A home houses a family of beings—as with an ecosystem.
Further, we would never presume simply to manage our family or home. Therefore, love should be included in the “management” of a forest.
The Marriage Vow We Wrote at the Metaphor Gathering
Let’s see what we can do to joyfully create an enduring home together, for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives.
Extra Goodness
Poet Stan Gregory worked with Kathleen Dean Moore on the New Metaphors gathering. He recently alerted me to the location of a video recorded our final evening together. On that evening the groups presented their idea in some sort of artful way. Here’s my group of rockstars. The footage is a bit dark and grainy, but still interesting. Here’s the video of the New Metaphors gathering.
After reading this piece, I will never think of Home again the same way. We tend to take home (personal home, earth, world) for granted, but I won’t be able to after reading this.
Looking forward to Let Metaphor class!