I attended a writing workshop this week. The facilitator talked about transcending metaphor when writing about nature. I’m embarrassed that I’m not entirely certain what that means. We were invited to write a “narrative of protection”. But for me, writing charms has been a way of sorting my perceptions, not an attempt to influence reality. Besides: where can we look for protection? Protection against what exactly? Even if we reject the idea of symbolic duality, surely nothing in nature exists without internal contradictions. Even cancer is a part of the body it destroys.
Aren’t we all life, comprised of continuous deaths and rebirths at a cellular level?Aren’t we all beyond our own control in the most fundamental ways?
A paradox of striving and accepting comes up for me when I think about my life: my learning—now—to practice both. At least I can claim a balance between them, starting from the null point of my spiritual development.
Being passive isn’t the same thing as acceptance. And when I think of “flight, fight, freeze, appease,” I no longer believe in the duality of active vs. passive anyway. Language itself seems too reductive to be useful on a personal level: the labels, the words aren’t valid beyond great generalisations that aren’t true of any/one.
The facilitator offered prompts to begin exploring our ideas of nature: several species of birds, and a wolf. She also asked what the last animal we saw in our environment was. The rat certainly isn’t the last animal I saw, but it hasn’t left me.
I think things can be both a metaphor and transcend a metaphor. But the metaphor is still everything.
I was walking home from the train station, on my first day of work after a year of sick leave. Something in the street caught my attention. It took my brain several seconds to make sense of what I was seeing.
And then regret the effort.
It was a big rat. The size of a kitten. Its back half had obviously been run over by a car, and using its front paws, it was dragging its body across the street. “Her body,” I’d thought. The effort was intense and impossible not to empathize with. I willed a car to come. I wished that I believed in willing, or any kind of prayer for that matter.
In magic.
I remembered a large dog, so many years ago on a freeway in Kentucky—a split-second of a duplicate scene—before we hit it. I don’t remember who was driving, my then-boyfriend or me. It doesn’t matter. We told ourselves we ended its suffering. But the living body remembers the impact via wheel, axel, undercarriage, seat, to stomach.
I thought maybe I could find a rock big enough to drop on the rat’s head. That would have been the kind thing to do. But it was the thing I couldn’t do. Two minutes maybe, I stood there for what felt like a long time—what is a long time when one is trying to frame a paradox between compassion and destruction, when none really exists.
I walked on, and could feel my heartbeat in my stomach and my throat. A car came towards me, and I thought: “Aim for it. Aim for it. Please.”
But I didn’t look back to see…
I failed to do the compassionate thing. While I’m happy to have an instinct to avoid killing, that doesn’t mean that it is always the kind choice: sometimes it’s just the easy choice dressed up like a virtue.
I have spent a lot of my life walking on, and not looking back.
I have a deep mistrust of my own desires. When I’ve asked and received what I’ve asked for, my narratives often took turns worthy of an O. Henry short story. I’m grateful for the surprises that have come to me. It may have been a bit like being led through a dance, but it was still dancing.
Working on a kind of memoir now, I can see how the people/forces whose influence I’ve let lead my steps, or trigger my responses, have moved on—one way or another. My step-father is dead. My mother is dead. The cancer that killed her has been cut out of me. Can I trust myself now to offer myself protection?
Writing the transformation exercise, designed to help us “transcend metaphor”, I wound up turning myself into a woodpecker. Tap. Tap. Tap. Banging my head against the tree. It’s hilarious when I consider that everyone else was turning themselves into wolves and foxes. I suppose a woodpecker could offer protection: raining down bark on serpents, gouging out the eyes of bears. Very Shakespearean.
Death is a metaphor. And transcends the metaphor. No death, no rebirth.
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me when E. told me my writing lately has been as dark as he’s ever seen it. And maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing.
(excerpt)
When you really dig in, and drive love to the bone,
it will wear you down to a map of frayed nerves.
As naked as you've never been. More naked than the day you were born.
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen to my work. I hope it moves you somehow—and if it does, maybe you’ll consider sharing it with other readers?
I hope you have a great week!
Warmly,
Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.
A word about paid subscriptions.
At this time, I’m not trying to earn a living with newsletters. I pledge I will pay forward every subscription I get here on Substack. (Up to 100 subscriptions).
By choosing a paid subscription, you would essentially be giving three gifts in one: I get confirmation that my writing is valued. I get access to read great, inspiring work of my own choice. And another writer on substack gets money to support their work.
I hope you’ll think about it.
Give some love. All it takes is a little ❤️.
Transcend metaphor… this is such a complicated idea! My mind instantly turns to metaphors to try to “transcend metaphor.” I love how you digest this, with brutal honesty, and find the unresolvable paradox of duality.
Alternately, I'm quite satisfied with the "prompt" 'transfiguring the commonplace'. I know that sounds like a metaphor but transcending metaphor instantly makes me think of Icarus. Who would want to "get burned"?