A Natural History of Yearning

At risk of getting too pedantic up here, one thing I’ve noticed is that often when we talk about metaphor, we’re actually talking about simile. We’re poetically likening one thing to another thing. And similes are very handy—I myself have bandied about more than my fair share along the way. But I’ve come to prefer the quiet authority of a true metaphor. Not saying that something is like another thing, but saying that it is that thing. And performing this feat of semantic transmutation so vividly and so concretely that the reader accepts it as truth. […] simile requires little more than imagination and intelligence. Simile by dint of its phrasing seems to doubt itself. It’s polite and socialized and it leaves room for the possibility that others see the world in a different way. Semantically speaking, metaphor doesn’t apologize or try to justify itself. A proper metaphor hurtles its audience deep into the private mythological landscape of the writer. It imparts upon its audience a sudden, bracing fluency in the writer’s private symbolic language. Metaphor is artless and unaffected and feral. You could say it’s raised by wolves, but more to the point, it’s raised outside of words. A good metaphor makes me shiver, as if a ghost has passed through my body, because in a way it has. Metaphor is a kind of immortal certainty. You might not agree lastingly with the words you’re reading, you might not even be able to later recall the electric sensation of summoning and possession and resurrection that shot through you when you encountered this writer’s words. But in that one moment, you walked freely within their symbolic domain, preserved and untouched and momentarily more tangible than your own. In that moment, the fog never could have rolled in on anything besides little cat feet.

A Bird Made of Birds by Sarah Kay