More Metaphor, Please

On food and poop, hospitality and sunsets, and knowing "whose blood is in our heart"

The Sower (Sower at Sunset,) Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

Let’s talk about metaphor.

This week on The Reader & the Writer, Rhea and I finished our discussion of Everything Sad is Untrue. In the second episode, we began a discussion on Daniel Nayeri’s brilliant—if not initially awkward—use of food and poop as a way of talking about the truest thing about a person and a culture.

If you wanna know how rich somebody is,, just look at what they eat and how they poop…. so for instance, you could see some dude grab up a bunch of taco salad with his hands and shove it in his mouth like a bear and then go off into a porta-potty on a construction site and you know that guy is probably dirtier than the bear.

Or, you see people in Edmond who buy boxed cereal and bottled water, and you don’t even know where they poop. Probably every bedroom in their house has a bathroom with candles and potpourri and stuff….

Poor people don’t get to choose what they eat, and they don’t get to hide where they poop—that’s why we think of them as animals….

But you can tell a lot about cultures too, by how they handle pooping, cause it’s the other half of the cuisine.”

Through several different food and poop stories, Daniel (our narrator) shares truths about individuals and people groups that have nothing to do with food and poop, but everything to do with hospitality, generosity, and focus toward otherness, or the lack thereof. But rather than tell us straight out, he gives us images to light up our minds, carry us across the ripples of words to meaning—and meaning is the destination any user of language is always trying to land.

I have this notion about metaphor and our culture that I don’t have worked out yet, but I’m going to say it anyway: I think our culture is in desperate need of living into metaphor.

What makes me think this?

When I think of the work of metaphor, I think of something like a pop-up book, only even more alive and three-dimensional. It is an enlivening of a specific subject toward tangibility and a kind of universality that doesn’t dilute complexity and difference, rather is made more real and beautiful by it.

Metaphor creates a real and living web of connectivity.

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” -Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

O my Luve is like a red, red rose
    That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody
    That’s sweetly played in tune.  -Robert Burns "A Red Red Rose"

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PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage....   -George Herbert, "Prayer"

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But what I see in our culture is a movement of disconnectedness and silo-living. Our public discourse is incurious and unimaginative. We are glutted with the self and the therapeutic. We are so busy navel gazing, we have lost the ability (or, are in the process of losing it) to recognize connections we can make. We don’t have reference points for connecting one thing to another for meaning making. We are unpracticed and our sight has grown weak. Without clear vision we are losing our images, thus losing our cache of words for connecting: subject to image, us to one another.

Case in point: one of our recent and widely-touted “metaphors” on love goes like this:

Love is love.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s circular thinking.

The word metaphor finds its origins in the Greek word: metaphora, derived frommetapherein, meaning “to transfer”; or “carrying” across. The word meta means “across”, and pherin means “carrying over.” It was first used to express the transferring of ownership from one to another. In a speech he gave at the 2024 Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing, Anthony Doerr described metaphor as a “ferry ride from A to B.”

Doerr also made the claim that it may be a moral act for artists to “shake up a thing,” through metaphor; “compare the unexpected,” and “turn the thing like a log in a fire.”

“This is the magic of language,” he said. “Every time you read something it fires images.” (emphasis mine)

Image is a key word when it comes to metaphor. It also takes metaphor and moves it toward the realm of sacrament.

Sacrament is typically defined in any dictionary as “a religious act that is a sign or symbol of a spiritual existence.”

Sure. It is that. But sacrament is more deep and broad. It is an outward sign of an inward grace.

With sacrament we see and experience a thing—a sunset, for instance—as both the thing that it is—a sunset—but also as a sign of God’s eternal light in our lives; a light that is multifaceted, multi-hued, giving to all it reaches and penetrates a radiance and saturation of life that is beautiful and complex and unattainable on one’s own.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” -John 1:1-4

Toward the end of Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel is reminded by his teacher that it isn’t food and poop that Daniel says is ultimately the truest thing about a person, rather, it is whose blood they have in their heart.

This is metaphor turned sacrament, ferrying us from image to Image. Knowing whose blood you have in your heart. It is first connection, last connection, and the way into every other life-filled connection in between.

Those are some of my initial thoughts on metaphor. I know I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I’d love to hear what you think of any or all the above. Is lack of living into metaphor our problem? Is there another way to train our sensibilities, grow our curiosities, and broaden our imaginations without practicing and putting ourselves in regular contact with metaphorical language?

Let me know what you think!

Happy Friday, everyone. :)