9. Amy Hempel

“At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else. Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me.” -Amy Hempel

          

           Metaphors have historically been viewed with distrust. As James Geary notes in his book I is an Other, “Metaphor has often been considered a devious use of language, an imprecise and vaguely suspicious linguistic trick employed chiefly by charlatans, faith healers, snake oil salesmen, and poets.” Harmful in its ability to lead us away from clear thinking, the device was particularly derided by early modern philosophers like Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes who advocated giving up the use of figurative language entirely in their pursuit of purely rational conclusions. But it was also looked at askance by less elevated thinkers who favored what they took to be straight-shooting language.

            It’s a tendency with which I’m sympathetic, though perhaps for slightly different reasons than those of either our philosophic trio or their less erudite counterparts. Part of my resistance to metaphor, at least in my own writing, may simply be the result of a lack of facility with the device, but I think there’s more to it as well. After all, metaphors expand meaning and meaning can be exhausting. Metaphors ask us to see everything as connected. You may be looking at that lamp but you can’t simply see it and enjoy it and leave it at that. If you were a character in a story, the lamp might symbolize something as basic as a metaphorical light being added to your life. But even as a real person, the lamp has its own set of connections that you can’t help but associate with the object and which turns the dumb article into something more than itself. This can be enriching but it can also prove wearying.

            And yet, as Geary notes in his book—and as Amy Hempel masterfully illustrates in her 100-word story, “Sing to It”—there is simply no escaping metaphors. They are so thoroughly baked into our everyday language and ways of thinking, that we use them all the time without even realizing it. Furthermore, Geary argues, this is hardly a negative thing, as metaphors are the essential tool in the human learning process. How can we understand an unknown thing except by comparison with something known?

            Everything is bound together by association, nothing exists outside of context. It is how the human mind works, and it’s what enriches our lives. Whether it’s Hempel’s metaphor-averse lovers, the author of Leviathan, or simply our beleaguered selves, we need figurative language to make sense of our existence and we use it constantly no matter how hard we may try not to. And yet, what a relief it would be, if we could turn off this way of thinking. How refreshing if, just for a minute, we could live an existence where everything is only exactly what it is. If we could remove the pressure that comes from too much meaning. In a world where everything we see, read, hear, makes so many demands on us, what a rare pleasure to be allowed, however briefly, to simply be.