The Liberating Force of Metaphor

The Liberating Force of Metaphor

I love to think about words and rhythms and rhymes and phrases. I love to think about food and diet and nutrition and health. Sometimes I think myself overly literally minded, when I listen to what someone says and fail to 'read between the lines' because I got sidetracked by reflecting on a strange and unintentional slant-rhyme in their sentence.

But the truth of the matter is that when I consider things from a step back, I really see that everything is a metaphor for something else, and so the school of life is providing me lessons in one topic that I can apply elsewhere, all over the campus. Another metaphor right there! 'Metaphor' literally means 'carrying through or across:' you take one concept and place it in a different context, replacing what usually stands there.

It's a process of substitution, and the context that has provided me with the most constant flow of lessons in this regard, the greatest sense of ease of understanding a deeper rhythm (an ulterior harmony) in how things fit together, is that of food preparation. In one of my dream 'parallel lives,' I am the chef and assistant gardener for a retreat center/monstery-type place, and play an essential role in the balancing of the community. I have an intimate knowledge of each individual's preferences, allergies, requirements in the food world, and produce communal meals that nonetheless allow for individualization and optimization of each person's plateful. Obviously, this is a metaphor for lots of other things too.

Although my more professional experience has been mostly with raw vegan preparation, I have prepared foods for all kinds of 'special diets' and, for the past couple of years, have been preparing food mostly for a motley little community of family, most of whom absolutely require 'standard' food, with a couple of more 'special needs' and whatever the heck I have currently been doing as I tried to marry my own physical parameters and preferences with my strong parameter of desiring to fit in with those around me. (Here's more on why I had to demote that parameter.)

It is so much fun to make a meal that 'makes sense' and fits together, for a variety of people with different needs, but using mostly the same basic ingredients. And to 'make do' with what is locally available but still produce a recognizable (very important to some people!) and delicious repast.

If you know what any one thing is doing in a recipe, you can substitute it for something else that can fulfill that same function.

You might say that it won't be the same with a substitution, but it will work. It is the most wonderfully liberating axiom, and I feel that if I can carry it with me into all other areas of my life, it will facilitate all kinds of growth.

I especially love that food preparation and dietary stuff is such a pervasive metaphor, because the word 'diet' itself had no such narrow meaning back when Hippocrates was using it. 'Diet' meant lifestyle, broadly speaking, including nutrition, exercise, hygiene, emotional poise: all the things that are understood as being components of whole health (of course, 'health' is a noun derived from 'whole'). So, when I do talk about food and diet, please understand that I am doing so with the gleeful awareness that there are metaphors being made about all the other facets of living a life.

Post-Script: How appropriate, when I, a poet who had been 'blocked' until recently, have just been thinking so much about metaphors in life, that I've just finished reading The Anthologist: A Novel by Nicholson Baker. It's a greet big metaphor to begin with: it is a novel told through the eyes of a blocked poet which contains enough good, or at least very thought-provoking, advice about poetry, meter, structure, etc, to consist of a kind of offbeat manual of poetry. And then, the narrator himself is obsessed with metaphor, with noticing how an observation in one situation can be carried into another (mowing the lawn, you can start anywhere and do the whole thing: with a poem, too, no need to start at the beginning). He develops this observation several times in far more detail than I have done here. Oh, did I mention that it's very funny too? Laugh-out-loud funny in quite a few places. Highly recommended.