The Best Metaphors Are Epiphanies

Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

I’ve been attending a Quaker meeting since last August, a gathering that observes an hour of silence. It is nearly as opposite as it could be from the church services of my youth, which could go on for three hours or more with loud preaching, tambourines, and sometimes a cacophony that the faithful believed was angelic tongues. I often withdrew into books to escape all that noise. I find a similar peace in my Friends meeting, which is almost an anti-ceremony — a paradox of absence and attentive presence. 

Something happened in a meeting not long ago that made me think about metaphors, how they often come like visitations, whether there might be secrets to crafting them well in our poems, stories, and essays. 

I hear an ironic echo of my Pentecostal roots in the Quaker notion of “the light.” George Fox taught that there is “that of God” in everyone, and sometimes this inner light prompts people to speak in meetings. It’s not an original metaphor — nearly every religious tradition is built on the light/dark binary. The light is also indistinguishable in concept from the visitations of the Holy Spirit that many in my childhood church claimed to feel.¹

Writing has always been the closest I could come to that kind of transport.

The sharing that happens in my Quaker gathering is meant to be spontaneous, unedited. Sometimes I think of us as the First Draft Club, airing thought experiments before they are fully formed. There is a humility about it that I never saw in fundamentalist circles, where spontaneous utterance was taken as the literal Word of God — unassailable truth — typically relayed by a bearded patriarch.² 

While it’s true that the Quaker light also seems to prompt older white men to speak in meetings more frequently than anyone else, I am grateful that my gathering includes many women who share their leadings. Indeed, it was one of my sisters who offered the touchstone for today’s essay.

Katie, as I’ll call her, broke the silence by acknowledging how difficult it was for her to speak publicly after having been taught, all of her life, to silence herself. How many insights were we missing, she wondered, from those who felt as many leadings as others, but not the same liberty to share them? Quaker belief rests on radical equality and consensus. Katie didn’t say this explicitly, but following those principles ought to encourage more people to speak, not just the usual suspects. By admitting her own qualms and self-censorship, she invited others to exercise a similar freedom — so that we could all benefit from seeing the world in surprising ways. 

I keep a little notebook with me during Friends meetings. The simplicity of the hour, and the fact that I spend much of it with my eyes closed, means that ideas surface that can’t break through the cognitive noise at other times of the day. And so almost immediately after Katie spoke, I wrote “the tree with the lights in it” in my notes. 

This is a reference to Annie Dillard’s anecdote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about a blind girl whose sight is surgically restored and who describes what she sees in novel ways. One of her more baffling phrases is “the tree with the lights in it.” No one can puzzle out what she means, as it is not Christmastime. But one day Dillard has an epiphany of her own when a cedar tree is transformed by morning light:

I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.  It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

I had forgotten that Dillard’s awakening came from a cedar tree. In my memory, it was an aspen grove, where leaves sparkle when a breeze lifts their light undersides, that helped Dillard understand what the girl had seen. But the upshot was the same: a blind girl who was seeing the world for the first time helped Dillard perceive it in a new way. 

Every great metaphor is an epiphany like this — first to the writer and then to the reader. One reason I have never felt at ease in corporate spaces is that they are riddled with clichés. I once heard a vaunted alum speak at my old college — he was supposedly the face of liberal arts success — and I cringed at how easily he tossed off platitudes. I felt like a fish out of water. It was like pounding a square peg in a round hole. Suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. 

It’s the kind of thing you hear from coaches and athletes after games. They must know that their words aren’t hitting what they’re aiming at, but it’s the only language they have. Even announcers, whose job is storytelling, can only keep stating the obvious about “athleticism,” as meaningless a word as there ever was.  

Platitudes abound in business and athletics because they are placeholders for real communication, a kind of palliative for silence. They don’t ask too much. This may be why few well-worn metaphors hold up under scrutiny. How many people who compare themselves to fish out of water really feel the desperation of the dying? Wouldn’t the result of being hit by a ton of bricks be obliteration, not revelation?

A metaphor should twist the kaleidoscope through which we see the world. I borrowed that one from Loren Eiseley, but it’s good, isn’t it? A metaphor should feel like a gamble, like a Dave Chapelle act that could bomb or soar. If there is no chance of it failing, a metaphor doesn’t ask enough of us. Jay Allison says that the best stories require the teller to step onto a highwire, that there is no electricity for an audience without that risk. If a story feels too pat to the teller and the hearer, it’s as if you’re both just walking across the floor.

Dillard gets carried away in the passage above by piling metaphors upon metaphors, ending with that crack in the mountains, which slams back into darkness, leaving us searching for the next outpouring of light. I don’t need my visitations to be so grand, but I do need them to lift me at least a little out of myself. I want to see a new thing, to be shaken awake, not just rehearse what I already know.

In the silence after Katie spoke, I meditated for a spell on the relationship between light and enlightenment, how we depend on one another for revelation. My own thought experiment might never have taken flight if Katie had kept her struggle to herself. 

That very morning I’d read a poem by my mentor, Ted, who frequently shares new work on Facebook. Ted doesn’t try to pry open the mountains, but his poems are filled with sudden insight. Here are the opening lines of “At an Intersection.”

A young woman in blue running shorts
and a sleeveless white T-shirt
is running in place on the curb, waiting
for traffic to pass, her pony-tail swinging,
elbows locked, white fists clenched
as if around two invisible candles.

You’ll never see a runner in the same way again, will you? 

Here are a few other tiny revelations from Ted’s poems. The hawk who drops “like the head of a hatchet” into a ditch. The crow “flying like a signature / over the soft white endpapers of the year.” And his comparison of a magician shaking a pink scarf from his sleeve to a Christmas cactus which “has suddenly shaken / a half dozen blooms from the tips / of its fingers.” 

There’s no way to force a good metaphor. The mountains really do have to crack open and slam shut for you, if you hope to touch a reader in that way. The best you can do is cultivate the habit of watching for these visitations, placing yourself in their likely path. For me that means a daily diet of reading, the discipline of writing even when I don’t feel like it (by which I do not mean freewriting, but the hard labor of struggling with language until it hits close to the mark), and the willingness to sit in silence for an hour at a time. If I hadn’t carried Dillard and Kooser into Friends meeting with me, Katie’s message might not have conjured any associations at all. 

Even if you can’t control the outcome, you can optimize the conditions for crafting better metaphors. Here are a few exercises from my writing practice to yours. If they don’t detonate at your desk, carry them with you while you watch and listen for the mountains to crack open.