![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Meta on metaphors. Hahahaha that was too easy.
Let's talk about metaphor.
Disclaimer: Okay, straight up, I don't know what I'm talking about. I learned some things once that helped me find a *way* to think about metaphor, and that's what I want to share. Thing is, the way I think and feel about metaphor is pretty much based on some old dead guys and their theories about poetry and linguistics (they called themselves Imagists, and their philosophy really is a lot cooler than their poetry). So, in order to say how I approach the concept of metaphor, I'm mostly gonna share with you how I interpreted these old dead guys' ideas. But, this isn't about facts or history or philosophy, it's about how I explain metaphor and all that to myself in my head. I guess my point is, I'm not trying to tell you something you don't already know, but express my thoughts. But I tend to get explain-y, so pardon the tone if I feel all lecturey.
1. Words have nothing to do with the actual things they represent. (with the exception of onomatopoeia).
This was a big thing in linguistics and philosophy; I don't know, something about Saussure, Wittgenstein, and a whole bunch of other dead guys. Okay, the point is, the word "sun" has nothing to do with the actual sun. It's just a random order of sounds someone chose; there's nothing about the big fiery ball in the sky that is inherently connect to the sounds of the letters, or the shape of the letters, or the feel of the word. Unless, of course, you're talkinging onomatopoeia: the word "hiss" represents the sound a snake makes, and the word "hiss" itself does sound kind of like the sound a snake makes. So onomatopoeiac words are in some ways intrinsically connected to that which they represent, but most words aren't.
(The idea behind this goes a little deeper: i. reality is unknowable. ii. people percieve reality through a filter or veil, in order to use reality, process, deal with it. So, there's a gap between reality and perception. Language is part of that "veil" between the two. It doesn't deal with real things, but rather tokens that represent real things. Now, we communicate in language, everything we do in life has to do with language, we even think in language, but it's sort of the way we use dollar bills: everything happens in terms of numbers and paper, and sometimes the solid gold these numbers and papers represent gets lost. An artist's job--according to this way of thought--is to pierce through the "veil".)
2. Therefore, words no longer have the capacity to create concrete impressions of the actual things they represent.
Let's say there's a process that goes on, when you hear/read a word: i. You see the word "grass". ii. Your brain gives you a concrete impression (the reality) of "grass" itself--green shoots of stuff coming up from the ground. iii. Your brain makes the connection--it goes, "oh, that stuff", and bingo, you understand what is meant by the word "grass". For you, the "concrete impression" might not be visual. It might consist of how fresh-cut grass smells, how grass feels when you roll in it, and, very importantly, memories of the time your brother dared you to eat a piece, of emptying the lawnmower bag on a hot day.
What #2 is about how we've cut out that second step, those concrete impressions (instead of connecting back to reality, communication is solely about perception of reality). Maybe when man first started naming things, and maybe when you were little and didn't know words to things, you heard the word "grass", you called up your concrete impressions of grass, and then you understood, but these days, you hear the word "grass", and you know immediately what that means without once *really* thinking about grass itself, the reality of grass, that bright green stuff that prickles sometimes but can be strangely soft when you lie on it, the smoothness of each stalk and the fresh smell of it.
(Some words do still have the capacity to create concrete impressions, reality. Certain words work as triggers for certain people; for instance, "rape" or "abuse" might always call up a very specific memory, feeling, or image for some people. But for the most part, these words are rare, and of course different people who hear the words recieve different impressions.)
What usually happens is when I say "lemon", you do not immediately process a specific lemon in your head, but rather the idea of lemon. You don't think about that real lemon, that too pithy lemon you had in your tea last Tuesday, how when you went to squeeze it you hit your friend Becca in the eye with its juice, how the seeds sweated out of it and how it looked like a broken happy face smile in your cup. Or whatever. When I say lemon, your are not thinking of one lemon, but an idea of lemon. Your lemon is not my lemon, and with nothing more denote my lemon than the mere word "lemon," never the twain shall meet.
3. Good writing will recreate concrete impressions of the actual things words represent.
Say you forgot for a moment what the word "blue" meant. I might remind you by pointing out real objects--Spike's eyes, Illyria's hair, the sky. You would then have concrete impressions of blue: feel a warm summer day under a blue sky, see Illyria's hair, remember Spike's eyes as they tried to tell Buffy he loved her. You would remember blue, feel blue, see blue, experience the reality of blue. From these concrete impressions you would make the connection, that is, find the thing in common: blue. You've discovered what blue means.
Right now, you say the word "blue," and you probably don't see it in your head, you don't feel it, you don't see it. You simply understand it so you can use it (it's about perception and not reality). But if you forget the word "blue," you need to reinsert that step, that step where there are specific images, feelings, memories, associations, that step where there's a concrete impression (reality), and only then can you understand what is meant by "blue", and use the word "blue" to understand what a writer/speaker is saying. You need to experience blue in order to rediscover the meaning of blue.
A good writer can't make you forget what "blue" means, but she can cause a reader to experience blue, and also to rediscover blue. She pierces through the word used to represent "blue" (the veil) and connects you of the reality of blue itself. This she does through association, through simile and metaphor. A good metaphor or simile doesn't let you just skip over the word "blue". A good metaphor or simile forces you to make a connection: "hey, remember blue? Color of Spike's eyes, Illyria's hair, the sky?" It connects to something from which a reader/listener will gain concrete impressions. The reader then experiences blue, and says, "oh yeah, blue."
Usually, I view metphors and similes as honing down to something specific: e.g. "I don't mean a general blue; I mean the color of blue that is Illyria's hair." But I don't think that is as constructive of a way to think of it as trying to get the reader to experience blue, whether it's a general blue or specific blue. Here's why:
3a. Clichés also no longer have the capacity to create concrete impressions of the actual things to which they connect a word.
If metaphors and similes are only about honing down to something specific, "blue as the sky," "blue as the sea", and "blue as sapphires" would all have different meanings. If you really think about it, they do--those objects all represent different shades of blue. But these clichés are so common, they've lost their meaning.
Now,"cold" is a word you hear and, as I have described above with "grass" and "blue", you read right over it, understand it without recieving a concrete impression. You don't shiver, don't smell snow, don't taste ice cream, don't remember that one winter when your grandfather was leaving and you ran out barefoot in the snow to say goodbye to him. Now, take a phrase like "cold as ice". The first time someone said, "cold as ice", whoever heard it couldn't just read over it; she had to stop, make the connection in her head: ice, what's the thing in common between cold and ice, what is the reality of both cold and ice, the reality behind the words? It's that stinging feeling, it's stick to your tongue, cheek-reddening,*shiver*,--I get it, cold as ice!
The simile subverted the automatic connection between the word "cold" and the understanding of cold; it reinserted the step in between, the step where there's an image, a smell or taste or memory, the step where the listener/reader had to make a connection between a concrete impression (the physical object of ice) and a word. You were rediscovering the meaning of the word "cold"; someone reminded you of a concrete cold you could relate to--you know, cold like snow, cold like a flagpole on a winter day--oh, you mean cold.
But the phrase is so overused that these days, when you hear "cold as ice", you don't think about actual ice at all. You might as well just say, "cold". The reader/listener reads over it and translates to "cold", to just the understanding of "cold", without the concrete impressions that remind you of the reality of ice, what ice is, actual finger-reddening, cheek-nipping pain of an icy wind, or the tongue-tearing, hot eye-watering feel of too much ice in your mouth.
Now, "ice" is pretty general too, but this happens even with the most specific cliches. First time I heard: "cold as a witch's tit in a brass bra," I got this very distinct impression of an ice witch type thing, with her hair all icicles and frosty, with these whithered boobs that burned they were so cold, with this Leia-thing on that if you put your mouth on it, you'd come away with half a tongue. But now when I hear it, I think oh, it's cold, and I tell my brother to shut up.
Conclusion: So, in the end, what makes a good metaphor or simile isn't the specificity of it, but the originality of it. An original simile/metaphor forces the reader to make a connection, find the thing in common, between one thing and another. In order to find that connection, the reader has to have concrete impressions, has to experience the reality behind the words.
Really Cool Examples:
a.
Green
The sky was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
--D.H. Lawrence.
D.H. Lawrence was a kind of fringe Imagist poet. I love this poem because if he had said "the sky was blue", you would read right over it. The sky is always blue; we always say the sky is blue; it's practically a tautology. Instead, you're forced to come up with the reality of the sky, and the color green, and try to figure out how to make the connection. The result for me is always a rediscovery of green, a concrete impression of that sky, an experience of a real night.
b. "Lawson’s eyes are the corner of blue on the American flag. You can almost see the stars waving in them when he salutes." Shanshu Blue, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
germaine_pet
This makes me experience the American flag--not just how it looks, but how I feel when I look at it, how I still get tears in my eyes when I hear the National Anthem--and that, that pride, hope, pain--that's the connection, not just the color; that's what Lawson's eyes look like.
c. "Spike kisses like talking." Stick Shift (Redux), bystultiloquentia
The first connection I made was lips moving--that's the thing in common between kissing and talking, right? By revealing in the next few lines that no, this isn't the connection the author was making, I was forced to reevaluate, to consider how Spike talks, and try to connect that to how he might kiss. The author goes on to say: "He has no preferred pattern. Every phrase is new. Buffy's whole bodypays attention. The kiss seems to rise from somewhere deep inside him..." but now she's got me thinking about how Spike talks, how much passion is there, how much truth, how much condemnation and supplication, and I'm making all these connections between how Spike talks and how he kisses, and it's like I've never heard him talk or seen him kiss before. I loved that.
d. "She is pressed between them like a flower inside the pages of a book, like something rare and precious they would keep." All Ways, bykita0610
Okay, so what connects the flower and Buffy is how they're pressed, and the author explicitly states the other commonalities: rareness, preciousness. One of the reasons this one hit me so hard is the author spent the piece building Buffy into this force, this incredibly strong presence, this mover and shaker of these two men. Now that she's calling Buffy a pressed flower (something I'm forced to come up with a concrete impression of, the reality of a pressed flower: it's dead. It's frail. It's a possession, something pretty and owned) she's practically saying the sky is green--showing with just one phrase how Buffy is moved and shaken by them.
Uh, More Conclusions? Problems with the idea?:
a. The Imagist Dead Guys were poets (eta: I mean, their philosophy was meant to be applied to poetry), and these ideas to some extent are better applied to poetry. The Lawrence poem is bizarre; it makes you think outside the box. Poetry works as a series of startling images or impressions, but often in a story you want the reader firmly inside the box. You don't want the reader trying to fit their head around green sky when you've already moved on to Spike and Angel having lots and lots of sex.
b. Metaphors and similes are more than just the allusion, they're about how you phrase the allusion. There's always Lynne's famous "He kept the medal in a drawer and wore the hardness around his eyes" (Sense Memory) to consider (she'll never ever live it down; it's so fucking beautiful). Lynne could've said, "his eyes were hard, like the medal", but that simile wouldn't have had anything near the impact the way she worded the metaphor had.
c. This also works beyond metaphor and simile, it's about phrasing--it's about using the unexpected adjective, the one that makes you say, "how does that adjective connect to that noun?" because it's a construction you wouldn't've thought of before. Like "paisley lights [...] kaleidoscoping in front of his eyes" (in this Riley fic)--light kaleidoscoping is in some ways a cliché metaphor (The Beatles did it in, or something), so much so you don't experience the meaning any more--but kaleidoscopes have paisley light, and who thinks about that?--to the extent whereros_fod has just helped you to make the connection, experience it, rediscover that whole metaphor.
Okay, so that, all that, is how I think about metaphor. It's what I bring to writing, to a fic, when I sit down and start thinking about how to describe things. I hope it didn't come off as too lecturey or lessony or "look at me," because what I really want to talk about is how you think about metaphor. What do you think it is, what do you think it does, how do you think about it, in what way? What's your process for writing them, coming up with them, thinking about them? How long does it take you, do you experiment, do you make the noises to hear what you might compare them to, do you go outside and look around for an object to which to parallel Spike's eyes? What are your favorite metaphors, similes, descriptions of this sort, in fic or profic, what are the ones that stick in your head? Have you thought about this the way I think about this, does this strike a chord with you, do you have anything to add, do you think I'm nuts, do you like to look at light fixtures? Let's get into the ooshy gooshy of writing. Because it's fun.
Disclaimer: Okay, straight up, I don't know what I'm talking about. I learned some things once that helped me find a *way* to think about metaphor, and that's what I want to share. Thing is, the way I think and feel about metaphor is pretty much based on some old dead guys and their theories about poetry and linguistics (they called themselves Imagists, and their philosophy really is a lot cooler than their poetry). So, in order to say how I approach the concept of metaphor, I'm mostly gonna share with you how I interpreted these old dead guys' ideas. But, this isn't about facts or history or philosophy, it's about how I explain metaphor and all that to myself in my head. I guess my point is, I'm not trying to tell you something you don't already know, but express my thoughts. But I tend to get explain-y, so pardon the tone if I feel all lecturey.
1. Words have nothing to do with the actual things they represent. (with the exception of onomatopoeia).
This was a big thing in linguistics and philosophy; I don't know, something about Saussure, Wittgenstein, and a whole bunch of other dead guys. Okay, the point is, the word "sun" has nothing to do with the actual sun. It's just a random order of sounds someone chose; there's nothing about the big fiery ball in the sky that is inherently connect to the sounds of the letters, or the shape of the letters, or the feel of the word. Unless, of course, you're talkinging onomatopoeia: the word "hiss" represents the sound a snake makes, and the word "hiss" itself does sound kind of like the sound a snake makes. So onomatopoeiac words are in some ways intrinsically connected to that which they represent, but most words aren't.
(The idea behind this goes a little deeper: i. reality is unknowable. ii. people percieve reality through a filter or veil, in order to use reality, process, deal with it. So, there's a gap between reality and perception. Language is part of that "veil" between the two. It doesn't deal with real things, but rather tokens that represent real things. Now, we communicate in language, everything we do in life has to do with language, we even think in language, but it's sort of the way we use dollar bills: everything happens in terms of numbers and paper, and sometimes the solid gold these numbers and papers represent gets lost. An artist's job--according to this way of thought--is to pierce through the "veil".)
2. Therefore, words no longer have the capacity to create concrete impressions of the actual things they represent.
Let's say there's a process that goes on, when you hear/read a word: i. You see the word "grass". ii. Your brain gives you a concrete impression (the reality) of "grass" itself--green shoots of stuff coming up from the ground. iii. Your brain makes the connection--it goes, "oh, that stuff", and bingo, you understand what is meant by the word "grass". For you, the "concrete impression" might not be visual. It might consist of how fresh-cut grass smells, how grass feels when you roll in it, and, very importantly, memories of the time your brother dared you to eat a piece, of emptying the lawnmower bag on a hot day.
What #2 is about how we've cut out that second step, those concrete impressions (instead of connecting back to reality, communication is solely about perception of reality). Maybe when man first started naming things, and maybe when you were little and didn't know words to things, you heard the word "grass", you called up your concrete impressions of grass, and then you understood, but these days, you hear the word "grass", and you know immediately what that means without once *really* thinking about grass itself, the reality of grass, that bright green stuff that prickles sometimes but can be strangely soft when you lie on it, the smoothness of each stalk and the fresh smell of it.
(Some words do still have the capacity to create concrete impressions, reality. Certain words work as triggers for certain people; for instance, "rape" or "abuse" might always call up a very specific memory, feeling, or image for some people. But for the most part, these words are rare, and of course different people who hear the words recieve different impressions.)
What usually happens is when I say "lemon", you do not immediately process a specific lemon in your head, but rather the idea of lemon. You don't think about that real lemon, that too pithy lemon you had in your tea last Tuesday, how when you went to squeeze it you hit your friend Becca in the eye with its juice, how the seeds sweated out of it and how it looked like a broken happy face smile in your cup. Or whatever. When I say lemon, your are not thinking of one lemon, but an idea of lemon. Your lemon is not my lemon, and with nothing more denote my lemon than the mere word "lemon," never the twain shall meet.
3. Good writing will recreate concrete impressions of the actual things words represent.
Say you forgot for a moment what the word "blue" meant. I might remind you by pointing out real objects--Spike's eyes, Illyria's hair, the sky. You would then have concrete impressions of blue: feel a warm summer day under a blue sky, see Illyria's hair, remember Spike's eyes as they tried to tell Buffy he loved her. You would remember blue, feel blue, see blue, experience the reality of blue. From these concrete impressions you would make the connection, that is, find the thing in common: blue. You've discovered what blue means.
Right now, you say the word "blue," and you probably don't see it in your head, you don't feel it, you don't see it. You simply understand it so you can use it (it's about perception and not reality). But if you forget the word "blue," you need to reinsert that step, that step where there are specific images, feelings, memories, associations, that step where there's a concrete impression (reality), and only then can you understand what is meant by "blue", and use the word "blue" to understand what a writer/speaker is saying. You need to experience blue in order to rediscover the meaning of blue.
A good writer can't make you forget what "blue" means, but she can cause a reader to experience blue, and also to rediscover blue. She pierces through the word used to represent "blue" (the veil) and connects you of the reality of blue itself. This she does through association, through simile and metaphor. A good metaphor or simile doesn't let you just skip over the word "blue". A good metaphor or simile forces you to make a connection: "hey, remember blue? Color of Spike's eyes, Illyria's hair, the sky?" It connects to something from which a reader/listener will gain concrete impressions. The reader then experiences blue, and says, "oh yeah, blue."
Usually, I view metphors and similes as honing down to something specific: e.g. "I don't mean a general blue; I mean the color of blue that is Illyria's hair." But I don't think that is as constructive of a way to think of it as trying to get the reader to experience blue, whether it's a general blue or specific blue. Here's why:
3a. Clichés also no longer have the capacity to create concrete impressions of the actual things to which they connect a word.
If metaphors and similes are only about honing down to something specific, "blue as the sky," "blue as the sea", and "blue as sapphires" would all have different meanings. If you really think about it, they do--those objects all represent different shades of blue. But these clichés are so common, they've lost their meaning.
Now,"cold" is a word you hear and, as I have described above with "grass" and "blue", you read right over it, understand it without recieving a concrete impression. You don't shiver, don't smell snow, don't taste ice cream, don't remember that one winter when your grandfather was leaving and you ran out barefoot in the snow to say goodbye to him. Now, take a phrase like "cold as ice". The first time someone said, "cold as ice", whoever heard it couldn't just read over it; she had to stop, make the connection in her head: ice, what's the thing in common between cold and ice, what is the reality of both cold and ice, the reality behind the words? It's that stinging feeling, it's stick to your tongue, cheek-reddening,*shiver*,--I get it, cold as ice!
The simile subverted the automatic connection between the word "cold" and the understanding of cold; it reinserted the step in between, the step where there's an image, a smell or taste or memory, the step where the listener/reader had to make a connection between a concrete impression (the physical object of ice) and a word. You were rediscovering the meaning of the word "cold"; someone reminded you of a concrete cold you could relate to--you know, cold like snow, cold like a flagpole on a winter day--oh, you mean cold.
But the phrase is so overused that these days, when you hear "cold as ice", you don't think about actual ice at all. You might as well just say, "cold". The reader/listener reads over it and translates to "cold", to just the understanding of "cold", without the concrete impressions that remind you of the reality of ice, what ice is, actual finger-reddening, cheek-nipping pain of an icy wind, or the tongue-tearing, hot eye-watering feel of too much ice in your mouth.
Now, "ice" is pretty general too, but this happens even with the most specific cliches. First time I heard: "cold as a witch's tit in a brass bra," I got this very distinct impression of an ice witch type thing, with her hair all icicles and frosty, with these whithered boobs that burned they were so cold, with this Leia-thing on that if you put your mouth on it, you'd come away with half a tongue. But now when I hear it, I think oh, it's cold, and I tell my brother to shut up.
Conclusion: So, in the end, what makes a good metaphor or simile isn't the specificity of it, but the originality of it. An original simile/metaphor forces the reader to make a connection, find the thing in common, between one thing and another. In order to find that connection, the reader has to have concrete impressions, has to experience the reality behind the words.
Really Cool Examples:
a.
Green
The sky was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone,
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
--D.H. Lawrence.
D.H. Lawrence was a kind of fringe Imagist poet. I love this poem because if he had said "the sky was blue", you would read right over it. The sky is always blue; we always say the sky is blue; it's practically a tautology. Instead, you're forced to come up with the reality of the sky, and the color green, and try to figure out how to make the connection. The result for me is always a rediscovery of green, a concrete impression of that sky, an experience of a real night.
b. "Lawson’s eyes are the corner of blue on the American flag. You can almost see the stars waving in them when he salutes." Shanshu Blue, by
germaine_petThis makes me experience the American flag--not just how it looks, but how I feel when I look at it, how I still get tears in my eyes when I hear the National Anthem--and that, that pride, hope, pain--that's the connection, not just the color; that's what Lawson's eyes look like.
c. "Spike kisses like talking." Stick Shift (Redux), by
stultiloquentiaThe first connection I made was lips moving--that's the thing in common between kissing and talking, right? By revealing in the next few lines that no, this isn't the connection the author was making, I was forced to reevaluate, to consider how Spike talks, and try to connect that to how he might kiss. The author goes on to say: "He has no preferred pattern. Every phrase is new. Buffy's whole bodypays attention. The kiss seems to rise from somewhere deep inside him..." but now she's got me thinking about how Spike talks, how much passion is there, how much truth, how much condemnation and supplication, and I'm making all these connections between how Spike talks and how he kisses, and it's like I've never heard him talk or seen him kiss before. I loved that.
d. "She is pressed between them like a flower inside the pages of a book, like something rare and precious they would keep." All Ways, by
kita0610Okay, so what connects the flower and Buffy is how they're pressed, and the author explicitly states the other commonalities: rareness, preciousness. One of the reasons this one hit me so hard is the author spent the piece building Buffy into this force, this incredibly strong presence, this mover and shaker of these two men. Now that she's calling Buffy a pressed flower (something I'm forced to come up with a concrete impression of, the reality of a pressed flower: it's dead. It's frail. It's a possession, something pretty and owned) she's practically saying the sky is green--showing with just one phrase how Buffy is moved and shaken by them.
Uh, More Conclusions? Problems with the idea?:
a. The Imagist Dead Guys were poets (eta: I mean, their philosophy was meant to be applied to poetry), and these ideas to some extent are better applied to poetry. The Lawrence poem is bizarre; it makes you think outside the box. Poetry works as a series of startling images or impressions, but often in a story you want the reader firmly inside the box. You don't want the reader trying to fit their head around green sky when you've already moved on to Spike and Angel having lots and lots of sex.
b. Metaphors and similes are more than just the allusion, they're about how you phrase the allusion. There's always Lynne's famous "He kept the medal in a drawer and wore the hardness around his eyes" (Sense Memory) to consider (she'll never ever live it down; it's so fucking beautiful). Lynne could've said, "his eyes were hard, like the medal", but that simile wouldn't have had anything near the impact the way she worded the metaphor had.
c. This also works beyond metaphor and simile, it's about phrasing--it's about using the unexpected adjective, the one that makes you say, "how does that adjective connect to that noun?" because it's a construction you wouldn't've thought of before. Like "paisley lights [...] kaleidoscoping in front of his eyes" (in this Riley fic)--light kaleidoscoping is in some ways a cliché metaphor (The Beatles did it in, or something), so much so you don't experience the meaning any more--but kaleidoscopes have paisley light, and who thinks about that?--to the extent where
ros_fod has just helped you to make the connection, experience it, rediscover that whole metaphor. Okay, so that, all that, is how I think about metaphor. It's what I bring to writing, to a fic, when I sit down and start thinking about how to describe things. I hope it didn't come off as too lecturey or lessony or "look at me," because what I really want to talk about is how you think about metaphor. What do you think it is, what do you think it does, how do you think about it, in what way? What's your process for writing them, coming up with them, thinking about them? How long does it take you, do you experiment, do you make the noises to hear what you might compare them to, do you go outside and look around for an object to which to parallel Spike's eyes? What are your favorite metaphors, similes, descriptions of this sort, in fic or profic, what are the ones that stick in your head? Have you thought about this the way I think about this, does this strike a chord with you, do you have anything to add, do you think I'm nuts, do you like to look at light fixtures? Let's get into the ooshy gooshy of writing. Because it's fun.
no subject