The Purpose of Metaphor

As a dear friend of mine said the other day, “ALL good writing contains metaphors. Otherwise it reads like a stock report or a grocery list.” I think that’s so true. One primary purpose of metaphor is to arouse interest in our readers, and to add color and feeling to our efforts to articulate whatever we’re writing about. That’s the province of poets and songwriters.

There is a subtler purpose for metaphor, however, and that is to point the way to things that are difficult to describe directly.

The word “ineffable” means “that which is incapable of being expressed in words.” In Hoodwinked, I argue that there are aspects to our being human that are ineffable. When someone asks us who we are, we usually start with our name, what we do, and perhaps other personal characteristics. We almost never get to the ineffable aspects of who we are.

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That’s where metaphor comes in. Metaphors can point the way to those aspects by helping us visualize hopelessly inadequate (not to mention dry and boring) descriptions of the ineffable.

Here’s an example of such a metaphor from Hoodwinked. It’s called the planetarium. The planetarium is a mechanism that allows us to project ideas into visual representation. While we have the language to accurately describe how planets and moons orbit their host stars and planets, projecting those movements onto the inside surface of a dome helps us visualize what orbits look like, and can even evoke emotion because of the sheer beauty of the night sky.

It’s probably fairly obvious that the laws by which celestial bodies appear to move about were figured out by people who observed those motions. That’s our common assumption about how abstract ideas, such as the laws of celestial mechanics, relate to our observation of the world. First comes the observation, and then we come upon the law which describes what we’re observing.

However, there exists another way of seeing this relationship between our ideas and what we observe. Without claiming this is a better way, or the “right” way, we can choose to see the physical world as a projection of our ideas about it.

The ordinary, or default way of seeing this relationship places us humans as passive observers of a world that doesn’t care what our ideas about it are. That relationship can be seen to be profoundly disempowering. But seeing the world as a projection of our ideas puts us in the driver’s seat.

But is that explanation true? How would you test that theory? I guess you’d have to assume it as a premise, change your idea about the world, and see if the world shifts accordingly, over time of course. Try assuming that the physical world to which you awaken in the morning is a projection of your inner understanding of who you are and of your relationship to the world around you. That view gets rid of blame and irrational fear by placing you at cause: the creator of your own experience. See if it works for you!