I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

I am a child of metaphor, born from magic and genetic instinct so strong that it shatters the literal, sending shards of otherness into living space. And each shard is a sacred facet which holds its own, offering a way to grace, a path beyond the thing into a nether world of possibilities. This knocks my socks off every time.

American author Bernard Malamud writes: I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. The Sanctuary of Metaphor is a bountiful one in which one can feed the multitudes with a single loaf. Not just choosing between two roads in the woods but taking the one less traveled by, choosing a life path that has made all the difference. [“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost] Not just fog but yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes. [“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot] Not just faces in the crowd but petals on a wet, black bough. [“In the Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound] Not just the hands of a man and a woman but their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. [Rabbit Run, John Updike] Two loaves where there seems to be one. 

As a child, my play was grounded in metaphor. Nothing was ever as it was, as it seemed. Narratives spun naturally from rocks-turned-precious gems, boxes-turned-doll palaces, a single piece of rope-turned-tourniquet-for-battle wounds. Some may call it make-do-ness, but I prefer to think it was more magic than utility.

One particularly muddy morning in the park as I was working with a group of preschoolers in a city-sponsored program, I had to tell the kids that we couldn’t take the balls or jump ropes out that day. When they whined, I offered up a solution: We could pretend that the merry-go-round is our spaceship. Thirteen preschoolers said nothing but their faces said everything. You’re crazy, lady. There’s no spaceship here. I persisted: But we can pretend this is our spaceship. Still, no takers. So, I jumped aboard the merry-go-round and called out: We have to take off in two minutes! Two minutes until the storm hits! Let’s go everyone–take your places. Hurry! And that was all it took to double the loaf we had been dealt that muddy morning. We rode that merry-go-round-turned-spaceship until snack time, when I led a then reluctant and sweaty group of three and four-year olds to the shade for Kool-aid and graham crackers.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and statesman]

I do believe that metaphor is one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. It is, indeed, a tool for creation that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, the literal into the symbolic, the concrete into the abstract. There is little more magical than this transformation in a world gone soft from those who continually attempt to rescue us from all that is difficult. Well-intentioned as these folks may be, they are no lovers of metaphor.

The magic of metaphor requires investment, a willingness to see a thing for what it is and what it may be, to work with the writer or speaker to uncover the intended meaning. Metaphor asks for a willing suspension of disbelief: It is a field of lavender, but what else? What more? Seated before the magician, we wait expectantly for the rabbit to be pulled from the hat. We invest ourselves in the act. We hold fast to the truth of metaphor: one loaf will become two right before our very eyes. And when it does, there is no applause greater, no celebration more pure than that born of metaphorical magic.

Aristotle writes that The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar. In his essay, “Education by Poetry,” Robert Frost claims that metaphor is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go, but it is the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up.

To relish noble metaphors, to apprentice ourselves to the masters of metaphor, to train for the mind’s furthest–this is truly all there is of thinking. With apologies (somewhat sincere apologies) to ACT, SAT, and any other standardized intelligence tests, there should be but one true test for matriculation: that students successfully read, understand, and elaborate upon a noble metaphor. Give them a great poem, a literary or philosophical passage, and charge them with going the distance, probing and performing their magic on a thing until it becomes the intended other. Frost called this process ulteriority: saying (or seeing) one thing in terms of another. Ulteriority is not for sissies, and it literally separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. It is more than sufficient to discern the genuine graduate from the pretentious pretender.

Writer Joseph Campbell says that If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And just what metaphors will we change? America was once a melting pot that became a salad bowl. Finding these metaphors lacking, some argue that we must change the metaphor now. To what? Only time and the multicultural lobby will tell. But as Campbell claims, this metaphor will undoubtedly change the world.

And as much as I love a great metaphor, I admit to also loving really horrible ones. Like these that came from the Washington Post Style Invitational Bad Simile and Metaphor Contest:

1. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
2. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just
   before it throws up.
3. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
4. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East
   River.
5. McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
6. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
7. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
8. He hung from his arms like a piñata, and Mary was the birthday-boy with the stick.

These student writers may not be ready to matriculate with their peers, but oh there is a place for them in this world! Metaphors-gone-wrong have sustained me through many lonely hours of paper-grading. Alone, after everyone else had gone to bed–or retired to more entertaining things–I laughed long and loud and, for years, kept a notebook of the hall-of-famers. What more can you say to a student who has just given you hailstones that leap like maggots when you fry them in hot grease but thank you! From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

Years ago when our church van broke down at noon in a small Nigerian town, we were told that it would be hours until someone could make the repairs, and we could be on our way. When others saw defeat, I instinctively saw opportunity. I tore a single sheet of paper from my notebook, and muscle memory took over as my fingers folded, creased, and folded until an ordinary piece of paper became a sleek aircraft. I could feed the 5,000 (actually more like 25) with this. For an hour, this paper airplane–made precisely the way my dad had taught me–transported all of us from the oppressive noonday sun and the tedium of nowhere to go and nothing to do. We traveled to places we had only seen in picture books, exotic places of fairy tales and dreams. Until a well-meaning Nigerian gentleman shooed the children away when he thought they had worn out their welcome.

You see, I have lived with and trained under a metaphor master, my dad. His paper airplane-making skills were only the tip of his craft, though. He taught my siblings and me to see the ordinary objects of our world in terms of something else and to use language well so that we might take others with us as we transformed one loaf into two. In his composition handbook, A Shape A Writer Can Contain, he writes:

Let’s say you want to write, or try to write, or are asked by your teacher to write. You sit there in your desk. Throughout your elementary school years, you have sawed, squared, and planed that oak which is the English sentence. And you have stored those sentences in your mind. But now you don’t know what to do with the lumber in your attic. What you need is a blueprint, some shape you can contain while you go on and inward with your thinking.

This metaphor has sustained me throughout my life–as a teacher and an individual. It has served me well when I desperately needed a shape to contain my wonderings and wanderings and when I strove to lead others who also needed such a shape. I have lived as a two-loaf person, blessed among single loafers.

How do you begin to measure the worth of such an apprenticeship? Honestly, I’m not sure that you can. But I am convicted that you must share the wealth by apprenticing others in metaphor. There will be those who turn their backs and hold their noses, preferring anything and everything literal and one-dimensional. And then there will be those rare ones whose astonishment in the presence of a great metaphor is reward enough for your efforts.

In the Sanctuary of Metaphor, I think it best to let Robert Frost to have the last word here:

       Unless you are at home in the metaphor … you are not safe anywhere.