By Keith Frome
Buffalo, NY – My nickname is Captain Metaphor. If my mind formed the lens of a microscope and you looked through and twisted it back and forth to focus on anything in your view, you would not be able to see the object as anything but a metaphor for something else. Lately, my five-year old joyfully plays a Harry Houdini type game in which I hold him tightly, and he tries to escape using his budding strength and different ways of leveraging his body. A normal father, without the metaphor lens, would just enjoy grappling with his son. I, on the other hand, view the game as a metaphor for my son's growing independence and his rush along the path of maturation as he tries to bust out of the family nest. With this focus, the game has become a bittersweet contest for me.
When I was gripped recently by the rare condition of bi-lateral kidney stones and squeezed in the most excruciating pain on both flanks, it helped to think of my condition as akin to the writing process, where the pain of an internal stimulus was a necessary condition for creativity and expression. When the first surgery failed to nab the pesky stones but did widen certain passages for future stones to speed along on, it was helpful to think about surgical procedures in terms of strategic planning: that one's immediate goals may not be met but certain conditions can be created for future success. Did these musings sound weird to my wife as I talked about them in the recovery room? Yes, but she is used to me by now.
I know the reason I've come to think this way. My grandfather, Weller Beardsley Embler, is responsible. He was one of the early pioneers in the general semantics movement in America. He served for most of his career as the Chairman of Humanities at Cooper Union in New York City. My grandfather argued that that all language is metaphorical; we just aren't always aware of it. The metaphors we use create the kind of world we inhabit. Metaphor, in his view, was not just the tool of literary artists but also the basic linguistic structure of everyday human thought. Linguists still reference his example that academic arguments are always cast as fights and battles. Wouldn't the university, he asked, be a different culture if we chose a different metaphor for the practice of academic argument? What if we thought of it as a dance?
Perhaps his fascination with the elliptical ways of language was why he was considered by many to be a bit aloof. I must say, I never interpreted his demeanor in that way. In fact, I found my grandfather to be quite attentive, albeit in a quiet and subdued manner. He never lectured to me. Instead of talking about writing, he just gave me paper and a typewriter. Instead of talking about art, he gave me clay. We dug in the garden and painted porches at his country house and trucked old books to the used bookstore and went to the Museum of Natural History over and over again to look at the shrunken heads and bought The New York Times at the cigar store on the corner of 103rd and Broadway every Sunday.
There was only one time he ever explicitly referred to his research with me. It was a remark apropos of nothing on a late Vermont summer afternoon. He said, "Did you ever notice that club soda tastes like your foot is asleep? That's a simile, you know."
I remember it blew my mind. I haven't been the same since.
Listener-Commentator Keith Frome is headmaster of the Elmwood-Franklin School in Buffalo.