Musings on Metaphor

I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been thinking, and metaphor helps me think.

By no means am I writing from a place of expertise here, there are poets and authors and storytellers that deal in metaphor for a living. All I have to offer is my recent experience trying to publish something (good or bad) every day.

When I am stuck trying to find something to write about, allegory greases the gears and keeps this train moving. Just as easily, however, the left side of my brain can work itself into a ditch trying to "figure out" what to say and how to say it.

After all, it was a metaphor that pushed me over the edge to start this "journey."

When the contrast between the two types of thinking struck me, I came upon a sticky note taped next to the book of Genesis in my Bible:

All of our language about a transcendent being that isn't part of creation but is the source of all creation must be metaphorical. All language is based on experience, and we use that language to create paradigms for the world. Metaphor does not negate the reality of the subject, it only describes it.

If we are human beings first, and our experience as human beings comes before the language used to describe it, it follows that all language is comparative. Words are just widely accepted metaphors that describe the "real" stuff we experience in the world.

But nobody thinks like that. It's the air we breathe. If you speak, you are inhaling and exhaling metaphor.

However, there are those who don't just passively breath metaphor, they sing it. They paint it. They befriend it. Words are only the building blocks. Teachers, poets, musicians, artists use allegory, repetition, melody, harmony to convey something much bigger, deeper, and more complex than we can consciously understand.

Art longs for something to be compared to. Something about the finite reaches for the infinite. Something "like" reaches for what "is."

Metaphor is the air we breathe and the instrument we play.