Hey My Fellow Writers!
Do you love metaphors? I love a metaphor like a baby, any baby of any size, loves the geometrical thrill that is the gridlines in a box of chocolates! I even love the orange cream ones the baby tries and then spits out, her palate not ready for the complexities of cocoa and citrus. I lap the abandoned ones up like an anteater with a hill all her own.
I can work a metaphor until it is a dead, deader than dead, daubed with a damp rag, reduced to ash on a pyre, topped with its earthly treasures, the lot of it sent off to Valhalla while we drink on the sjaund. To death.
I believe analogies are to long car rides as kisses are to the blurry “s” punched by an old Remington.
Do you do this? When I am at my most earnest — say, trying to explain a new idea, or trying to push through a misunderstanding with a beloved — and I’m floundering for a way to connect our brains to make things clear, I might suggest that the thing, the complex thing we are discussing, is JUST LIKE a library card catalog/U-6 soccer/boiling sugar/pants/2 Darrins/looking for a lost dog/Antique Roadshow/martinis/bed-wetting/families who wear matching khakis in group portraits/that time I tried to make yard art version of Duchamp’s fountain and broke my toe/Lucy and Desi’s sex life/the Vietnam War Memorial/glass snakes/Santa Claus/Myers-Briggs/being a bridesmaid/Groupon/women who give birth without knowing they are pregnant/my 3rd grade Little House on the Prairie diorama/Marie Antoinette/sleep deprivation among the homeless.If I think I’ve landed on the perfect connector all is sunrise. I’ve Got It! Now it will all be clear! I’m a bee moving pollen from stamen to pistil, ambrosia matchmaker, the honey will run clear and sweet now!
Blink.
I blame prepping for the SATs for the the way I am. Mastering the analogy section was supposed to net the American Dream. I blame being a writer. Or it’s the other way around. I have to write to give these damned Venus Fly Metaphors a home. This page is their plot of land, their metaphorical metaphor garden, and I’ll plant and weed, water and offer ladybugs to eat the slugs, I promise.
Someone I met this week described herself as a person who couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag. That’s so very sad. Stuck with no oxygen in a lunch sack is no way to go out. I told her I’d pipe in air, like from the ceiling of an airplane, but of course I’d have to administer mt own mask first. Or we could try to pop her out like a birthday piñata, which could be dangerous, but at least there would be candy. Or, I told her, she could maybe buy a vowel.
You get me, don’t you?
(I thought I wrote about the fountain, but I can’t find it to link it in. Maybe it’s in the missing six months of archives? Maybe I just thought I wrote it? This garden needs some weeding. Land needs to be tilled and turned. Harvested crops need to be put up, and plots need to be rotated. That kind of thing.)
In love with your syntax, in fear of your Triple Word Scores, and begging your forgiveness because you know I hate proofreading more than Dinesen hating hearing foreigners say “Ngong,”
Your Friend, with words