The Road to Hell Is Paved with Metaphors

To change destination, flip the metaphor

The book I’m reading, An Immense World by Ed Yong, draws maps of animals’ worlds. It looks at how different species create their navigation maps, indeed the topography of their worlds (their Umwelts, in the relevant terminology), using their predominant sense. What drives the reader to keep turning page after page is the perpetual wonder: our human reality becomes but one version of the world, instead of hard truth. As Yong himself puts it, such awareness is a call for humility: “It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness.”

Take smell. Ants raise alarm and summon their colony for defence or food by means of pheromones. “An ant without olfaction is an ant without a colony, and an ant without a colony is barely an ant at all,” Yong writes. Smell also enables them to identify dead peers. In an experiment, a few ants were daubed in the chemical element that an ant corpse emits; as a result, the rest of the colony treated them as corpses, carrying them over to the garbage pile, although the “corpses” were as alive as themselves. “What mattered was that they smelled dead,” Yong points out.

Seabirds use the smell of seawater, given off by krill and plankton, not just to spot food, but to draw “smellscapes” of the underwater geological formations, which provide orientation, for example in finding their way back to their nest. Snakes draw similar smellscapes with the sensors on their tongues, and sniff the hot female nearby, assessing its size and health. Yong writes: “A male can even be fooled into vigorously mating with a paper towel that has been imbued with a female’s scent.”

Truth, you might reflect? Reality? It’s all in our sensorial maps. Which are but one of the endless versions of the truth.

Our human Umwelt is predominantly visual. But a much subtler Umwelt takes shape through our words, a second dimension, an alternative space to be.

George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By is a book I might have mentioned in a past post. He clearly distinguishes the metaphors used as literary devices (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) from those we use in everyday language. It’s the latter he examines – and they’re the fascinating ones, I find.

Anger or similar emotions, for instance, are equivalent to heat and / or pressure (boil over, simmer, blow hot and cold, heated argument), while fear tends to be cold (cold feet, shiver, freeze). Colours are frequent symbols of emotions, too, as well as weight (light-hearted) or the touch of a surface (soft skills).

Many other examples are easily available, where what we do mentally or emotionally is paired with a mental picture, such as the last straw, cling on (to...), let go, chill, a half-full glass, dark (as in terrifying, or very painful), and many others, nearly undetectable in the high-frequency daily jargon we use.

So what, you might ask?

If words compound our second Umwelt, imagine what would happen if we deliberately re-framed those notions by putting them in other words? In other words, work on the words to achieve transformation on the deeper level, in our experience of life.

My grandma, a young woman in the early 1930s, living a modest life in rural Transylvania, was dubbed the local Greta Garbo. I still remember her, an almost eerie beauty, in one or two old pictures (lost with the debris of my private earthquakes – see? just did it, used a metaphor). And what did Greta Garbo do? Did she laugh a lot? Or rather, peer enigmatically, with ineffable wistfulness, at the camera?

Grandma took her role seriously. She was a wistful beauty, refusing herself fulfilment and happiness. Having to choose between her love and the suitor pushed forward by her mother, she chose to say adieu to her prince: at the street corner, she reaching out her hand to him, he kissing it, then slowly, painfully drawing back, fingers clutching at fingers, one by one – as she told me decades later, tears running down her cheeks as a seventy-year-old.

Had she chosen herself the role of a Greta Garbo, the forever unconsoled beauty? What if she’d chosen a different name to identify with? A lithe singer-dancer like Ginger Rogers? Instead of Anna Karenina, a fashion model, or a working-class girl in an all’s-well-that-ends-well comedy.

Grandma hung on to a role, not just to a word, you might say. But that role was captured in a name.

So here are a few more examples of words flashlighting an inner topography.

Life as a choppy sea

A friend I used to know many years ago kept referring to her life as a choppy sea. We would sit for hours, woman-to-woman stories of this or that going on in our lives, from romance to being-sick-of-it at work or handling the ex. She always said things like,

“just when I thought I had my head above water, finding my balance for a sec, bam it knocks me in the head with a splash”

“as if I wasn’t struggling enough already, life’s showing me there’s more”

“where this life is carrying me, I don’t know, but it sure gives me a rough swing.”

I noticed that one day and told her, “do you hear yourself? You always look upon your life as a bitch, as a rough sea, as a constant struggle.”

“Of course, that’s what it is, for me at least!”

“But I mean, your words! It’s always the same images you have in mind.”

She wouldn’t see my point. Of course she used those words, she meant them!

I wondered if there was a chance she might become a happier person if she chose to dispose of those images by working on her wording.

That which endures is the loss – or the joy?

In a dark moment a few years ago, I was dwelling on my disappointment with a recent situation, and as we often do when sinking in self-pity, I looked back over my “whole life” and what did I see? All the joyful encounters that had turned out as disappointments, all the family I had around me that had disintegrated by death or strife – and concluded:

That which endures, in the end, is always the loss.

But somehow, that rang so clear in my mind, as if someone else had said it. The words. The verdict. And I thought, hold on, what if I reverted this statement? It could be... like this:

That which endures, in the end, is the joy.

And I looked back again over my “whole life” (the same as a moment ago), and what did I see? All the joy that the later disappointment or disintegration couldn’t erase: it had been there, and nothing could change that. I was the one who could erase it.

I was bowled over. Was that what it took? A linguistic flip – and there it was, a shift in my worldview?

Taking a step back from the words in my mind made me see there was a choice: linguistic at first, a mere little trick, a major epiphany the moment after.

Forever Quixote: who / what do you call yourself?

I have written about this here, but I’ll do it briefly again. Years ago, I called myself Forever Quixote. Obviously, I was wrangling with the dilemma of truth versus self-deception, blaming and shaming my imagination, my readiness to see the best in people as soon as they became significant in my inner world. Choosing that nickname again and again (just like grandma’s Greta Garbo) only kept me in that role for ever more, reinforcing the pattern. Whatever happened, I crashed against the wall of the truth again, because that was how my world was formatted: a dividing line between truth and my unfailing, hopeless Quixote of a Self.

I didn’t question that recurring image, that formatting of my inner landscape, as I had questioned my friend’s recurring metaphors of a choppy sea and spiteful enemy.

So how did I discard it?

I didn’t. Life did. It came up, it happened.

Years later, I came across that nickname in an old note. I remembered. Did I still relate to it? No.

I had come to see a vast space around that dividing line. There were so many other lots spreading out, around the border of truth, popping not so much the question what is truly out there?, but

What do I want to find out there?

Can I believe in it?

If it’s not real, can it become so, in time? What would it take?

Can it be created (replicating creativity in other things I do, such as writing)? And if I can, what else does it take? Who else needs to create it together with me?

Such was the slow demise of a role, of a name, of a semantic field around truth and deception.

Bottomline

Have you noticed that the people who talk a lot about trust have, actually, trust issues themselves? Those who use letting go every three sentences might be those clinging to a dogma? The managers who preach about collaboration are keen to have you talk, but they make their own decisions behind closed doors?

It’s worth listening to ourselves – and to others. Scrutinizing recurring mottos, metaphors, nicknames, roles. Searching for key words – key as in meaning, but also as in frequency of use.

These might be the invisible spots of our mental landscapes.

Like the ants daubed in corpse pheromones.