What happens if what you once used to make sense of things no longer helps you make sense of things? What happens if the patterns and habits and metaphors we lean on do not serve us in the moments we need them? What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?
—Devin Kelly, “Out There: On Not Finishing”
Sabrina Orah Mark writes that the original Greek word, μεταφοραί (“metaphorai”), means “transports”. It is, she says, emblazoned across every moving truck in Greece. “To metaphor is to move the contents of one house into another.” For almost a year, I’ve spent no more than three months in any one house. I spent November ‘19 to February ‘20 in Sydney with trips to Auckland and Shanghai and two changes of residence. Back in Auckland, I weathered successive coronavirus lockdowns in two different houses, neither of which was my flat. I’ve been living out of a small black suitcase and a blue Dakine backpack, my closet like a grave of all the things I used to do and dress for: going to an office for work, to classes and tutorials, to restaurants and bars, to hiking tracks, to beaches. More fundamentally, though, I’ve been uprooting almost everything that I believe in — politics, religion, friendships, love, the true meaning of life.
A few months ago, I would’ve turned this into a metaphor for immigration. I would’ve plumbed its depths to understand how my parents felt when they journeyed from Malaysia to New Zealand to start a new life with two young children, knowing barely a soul. I would’ve drawn conclusions that illuminated the diasporic experience and how jarring it is to feel displaced, how necessary it is to feel at home, how empowering it is to be able to find home anywhere. It’s a metaphor that served me well for many years, and it was an area of my identity that certainly needed addressing. Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity gave me great mileage and with it I swept up the fragments of the shatter I felt I was living and arranged it into something almost beautiful. I became comfortable in not quite fitting in anywhere. I sat with regret and bittersweet acceptance in having lost my mother tongue, and I learned gratitude for what I had once always scorned. It prompted me to reach out to others and build a community of people feeling equally lost and confused. So many things that would otherwise have been an irritant and that could’ve become far more troublesome found within me a place of peace. In essence, all I did was tell the story of myself to myself in a different way. Once the story felt right, I could lay it to rest.
And this may be exactly what I need again at a future stage in my life when I become an immigrant yet again in a foreign land, home slipping from my grasp. But for now, it’s run its course and I feel as if I’m sitting in a car, turning the key in the ignition, and the engine strains and gutters but refuses to start. I’m confused and I don’t know how to move forward — I’ve moved the contents of my crisis into the wrong vehicle. The unease sits at a deeper, more existential level, and if that level doesn’t work, then the whole game is up. And so I’ve been casting around for a new metaphor, all my angst slung across my back like the few belongings I’ve been carting around, trying to find a familiar vessel into which I can jam it that will help me explain myself to myself.
I suspect, however, that what I am seeking will bring me closer to the thing-in-itself, or reality, or truth, or whatever you want to call it. Even as metaphors clarify, they also shroud. When I wrote poetry more successfully than I do now — that is to say, at all — I dealt in an endless stream of metaphors, partly because the last thing you’re supposed to do in poetry is say it instead of show it, but mostly because I didn’t know how to confront the thing head-on. I could only dance around it, feeling my way through entrances that were easier to pass through. Looking at the sun is too painful so I light a bonfire and watch it, I burn my hand on a hot stove, I gather roses and marigolds and sunflowers that match all the hues it paints the sky and I say yes, the sun, I know it.
But do I really? I was listening to ‘Everybody Is Dressed Up’ by American Football, and the line, “everybody knows that the best way to describe the ocean to a blind man is to push him in”, hit me. I am in a state of upheaval because I never had any real philosophical grounding. Cultural identity, racial identity — none of these will give me a satisfactory answer to what the meaning of life is or what we’re ‘supposed’ to do here. The search for an appropriate metaphor can sometimes lead one astray from the truer question because one ends up fixating on the metaphor as the issue itself. While the metaphor can address an issue that needs attention, it can become a distraction if one isn’t careful. And as Aaron Lewis writes, many people cast off the metaphors of religion to find new “gods”, new metaphors that are “palatable to secular minds”. They think they’ve transcended their past states, when really they’ve just found new structures in which to find their security and fill their longings.
And yet, I wonder if maybe the point of having a metaphor should be to no longer need the metaphor. That we should take a metaphor to its limit and move from image to ever more accurate image until the truth beneath it begins to clarify and emerge from what was once a myopic blur. This seems to assume, of course, that there is objective truth. To avoid that difficult decision, I think that all of us can at the very least agree that that there is a search we all embark upon in life, that we’re able to recognise when something has outlived its usefulness, and that metaphors are necessarily wrong because they are never the thing itself. Statisticians account for the distortion that happens in the samples they take because the sample is never the population; only the population holds its truth, which we cannot always access, and the sample gives us a glimpse of it and transports us ever closer.
This realisation has frozen me, rendering me unable to write. I feel that I have nothing solid to stand on, nothing to be for or against that I can attach words and images to with conviction. Once, when I was about 12 years old wading out into the sea, a small rip caught my foot and pulled me under, forcing my breath out and dragging me along the ocean floor. Luckily, I was wearing a life jacket so I fought to the surface, flailing, floating, trying to find my footing again. No one noticed, but in those brief moments, I barely knew which way was up or where I should be heading. It feels like that now. I have nothing to transport me to the next place. I have no home to inhabit and feel that I belong to. And so I have to confront the very thing which causes each successive metaphor to run out. I have to understand where meaning lies in life and I have to pursue that. Art leads us towards it, and the best art has something real to say in accordance with principles that are felt to be true. The difference between ambiguity and vagueness in writing, in Adam O’Fallon Price’s words, is that in ambiguity, the author understands things that the characters do not. In vagueness, “the author is as much in the dark as their characters”. Something similar goes for metaphor, I imagine. An effective metaphor, an effective transport, requires some insight that the reader does not have. Right now, I have no such insight. I sit in the dark, alone and afraid.
Paul Fussell, in the chapter in his book The Great War and Modern Memory on how literary the First World War was, explores the difficulty of using language and finding the appropriate rhetoric to convey the unspeakable horrors of war. He asks: “how are actual events deformed by the application to them of metaphor, rhetorical comparison, prose rhythm, assonance, alliteration, allusion, and sentence structures and connectives implying clear causality? Is there any way of compromising between the reader‘s expectations that written history ought to be interesting and meaningful and the cruel fact that much of what happens—all of what happens?—is inherently without ‘meaning’?”
Just as I was pondering all of this, I began making my way through John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series on Youtube. In the second video, he explains that metaphor is so powerful because it is how we make connections between ideas. Metaphors provide us with the forms of thought that will allow us to connect ideas, like inscribing symbols on a piece of bone to track the moon or carving a figurine to connect to ideas of fertility. This improves our capacity to make sense of the world. It literally generates meaning.
This makes so much sense to me. At heart, this enterprise of transporting one set of experiences into another image is one of making meaning. But if one doesn’t have the right kind of principles at the right level, then all the meaning that one tries to make will ultimately float away because it all has nothing solid tying it down. In storms and gale force winds, those meanings and identities simply won’t last. But what of the metaphors that persist? What about the images that stay with us, which seem like home to us, which we cannot outrun? What is invariant amongst all the variance is often what seems truest.
The series of metaphors and images I always return to is that of gardens and tending to nature. When I was growing up, my father always gardened. It was his sanctuary. We had plants in the house, plants outside the house, and at one point he even attempted to raise bonsai. And whatever I write, some kind of gardening metaphor creeps in, partly because nature is so commonly held in awe by humanity, because it’s such a tangible reminder of mortality, and because they form my most vivid and cherished memories. A kind of paradise that holds all the complexities of life within its palm, it is the one remaining lifesaver I cling to. Though it’s a kind of escapism, it’s also a confrontation of life, death, misery, joy. It is growth and development, and yet a remembrance of mortality. In that, I move forward but I also return.
And so, maybe it’s not that I need to outgrow metaphors entirely, but rather that I need to find the right ones to spark my reach towards reality. And along the way, some might even remain as themselves being true. A leafy houseplant. A tangle of herbs. An incline of fruit trees, some dead, some bearing sweetness. Here, I always find rest. Maybe this was the point all along. Maybe this is all there was and ever could be.