Metaphormorphosis (Allen)

 

One morning, as I woke from anxious dreams, I discovered that in bed I had been changed into a metaphor. Not just me, it turned out, as I poured my coffee. The coffee maker was a metaphor, too, and so was the coffee. Not only was nothing quite as it seemed. It – that is, the nothing that saturated all the things that I was investigating – also wasn’t real, or, I thought, as real as I would have expected.

 

Q: How long were you a metaphor?

A: About six months.

 

Q: What was it like being a metaphor?

A: What was it like? You want me to use a simile to describe what it was to be a metaphor?

 

Q: That’s not fair.

A: Maybe not. But did you know that the word “fair” derives from an early word for “to fasten or to place”? Being fair rests on making two out of one or orienting something. Pretty prosaic stuff. Not a lot of morality to that.

 

Q: I have no idea why you pointed that out. So describe to me life as a metaphor.

A: That’s hard to do without words.

 

Q: What am I missing here? I’m asking you a simple question and you’re acting like I’m offering riddles.

A: Just screwing with you. Words and statements are all metaphors. That’s all I’m saying.

 

Q: How can statements all be metaphors? Metaphors are used to show similarities in dissimilar things. The word for the primary thing in question isn’t a metaphor.

A: Are you sure?

Q: No. What’s your point?

A: My point? I don’t have one. My head curves at the top.

 

Q: Please stop this. Describe to me life as a metaphor.

A: Right. I woke up and I was a metaphor surrounded by metaphors. As you might suspect, by the way, since words were involved, this was more epistemology than ontology. That is, my sense of concrete self had dropped away, even phenomenologically. Thingness didn’t much show up. Having found myself a thin metaphor, I didn’t particularly notice my body much. And the things around me seemed to shine with meaning more than substance.

 

Q: You’ve already lost me.

A: Well, hell, think about how much of me that I had lost.

Q: Go on.

A: Coffee wasn’t so much the black stuff in the cup as it was noticing my concern for “getting myself up and running.” Where I put the cup when I was done was all about my concern for finding order in the artificial fear of chaos. How I managed the list in my head was a sorting out of me as a productive fellow. Everything I did from the most prosaic to the most elegant seemed to sort into a little story. And the me who was watching the story line noticed itself as both an actor in the story – one kind of metaphor – and as a recipient of the moral tale – another kind of metaphor. Between being an actor and being an articulator of meaning, and noticing how I was both, just about all of my time was filled. Being a metaphor is akin to being an abstraction, but it’s got a lot of good humor in it.

 

Q: Good humor?

A: Yeah. As the metaphor that showed up as me proceeded through the day – at the time I was physically a senior executive at a giant pharmaceutical distributor, so this was more than ten years ago – it got a kick out of how simple all the metaphors showing up were to parse and let go of.

 

Q: Did you get tired of it?

A: Not that I can remember. A little apprehension would occasionally arise, and I would check whether I was dissociative. If anything I felt more engaged and seamlessly attached to the so-called world around me. It turns out that all the little meanings and moral tales that show up are easy to swallow and kind of fun. I was just noticing them all instead of pretending that I already knew them. Being a metaphor among metaphors is dynamic as all get out. I kept all of this to myself, by the way, not out of paranoia but out of compassion for other people’s paranoia. People are so scared of abnormal, you know. They’re always worried that it might be an antisocial threat. But if I was crazy it wasn’t a lunacy I wanted to be cured of.

 

Q: Did the experience change over time?

A: Not so much. Whatever metaphysics was being explained to me sorted itself out without my awareness. From day to day being a metaphor among metaphors was much the same. The thinness seemed to reinforce the sense that all events are of equal weight, and the middle is always enough. But the main point was that making meaning is part of basic perception, and that I can’t stop making meaning and maybe I don’t want to. If my body is negligible while still operating – being fed, clothed, housed – and I’m still able to elicit preferences and interests for myself, paying more attention to the accompanying meaning than the mechanical exchanges seemed like freedom for those six months.

 

Q: It sounds like you learned something from living as metaphor.

A: One thing I eventually learned was that I wasn’t a metaphor. I was a series of metaphors that were fundamentally disconnected. As a metaphor among a dynamically changing so-called world of metaphors, the metaphor of me contained the same amount of dynamism and change as all of the metaphors around me combined. I was a role-player among the metaphors around me, which stood apart and conjoined at the same time. No one was in charge. It would sound disorienting if it wasn’t exactly orienting.

 

Q: Why are you telling me about this shameful time of your life?

A: It’s probably your shame, not mine. Also, Dogen is less scared of the equal sides of metaphor than most. He doesn’t favor the metaphoric over the literal. Oddly, by the way, the so-called metaphoric is usually more grounded in everyday, rudimentary survival words – resources and orientation, senseless natural events and flora and fauna – than the more abstract concepts that are being poked at. But that’s new to me. One thing I forgot to mention is that being a metaphor is essentially ordinary. And when I woke up six months later restored to physical selfness, that felt essentially ordinary, too, maybe more than it ever had.