I stumbled upon a breath-taking essay which provides language and perspective to understanding and expressing life’s challenges. The words are accurate and affirming. They offer a way to relate to the world which I find both comforting and true.
This is from Annie Sand’s “On Metaphors and Snow Boots.”
“In her essay “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss notes that the diagnostic words we use to describe physical pain are all metaphor: “burning, stabbing, throbbing, prickling, dull, sharp, deep, shallow.” So, too, are the words I use to describe anxiety: stuck, scattered, heavy, leaden. We use these metaphors so freely that we don’t even think of them as such.
Metaphor provides a scaffold to build into the spaces beyond our comprehension. When we struggle to describe a physical sensation, we use a comparison; when some scientists seek to explain the interactions between neurons, they liken the brain to a computer. By doing this, we put the unknown in terms of the known, in an act that both illuminates and obscures: after all, a brain is both like a computer and not. Metaphor rushes in to fill gaps, to make meaning, and to conceal.
In her seminal book Illness As Metaphor, Susan Sontag notes a similar process of metaphoric meaning-making in the language surrounding illness. “Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is often ineffectual, tends to be awash with significance,” she writes. “The disease itself becomes a metaphor.” In the nineteenth century, that disease was tuberculosis, often equated with spiritual and artistic transcendence: Keats, frail and ethereal, drowning in his own blood at the age of twenty-five. In the process of assigning metaphor, we use familiar concepts to partially illuminate what we cannot understand while ushering the rest out of view. This rescues us from uncertainty. It comforts.”
A Life of Wonder 