Swinging for the Fences on Metaphors (Especially Sports Metaphors)

The Joy of Metaphor

 My calling is all about communication. What I’m trying to convey is always something I think is not only true but also important. I’m trying to have an impact—to get people not only to see the truth of what I’m saying, but to have its meaning come through. I want a message to move people to feel, and perhaps to act, differently because of what they’ve heard from me.

Because, as an author, I’m always swinging for the fences, I have a lifetime of experience of seeking a bigger impact than I get. I’ve gotten on base a fair amount, but hitting the ball over the fence is a rarer event.

So, since my days being trained in the academic mode, I’ve come to see an important part of my task as finding ways of increasing the impact of the ideas I am trying to convey.

One of the best instruments I know for that purpose is metaphor.

We can feel something special about metaphor if we simply compare a metaphorical statement with its literal equivalent. Consider the line “the Lord is my shepherd.” One might say that what it declares is the same as “the Lord is watching over me with my security in mind.” I expect that I’m typical in finding the metaphorical statement as conveying a great deal more than that—not necessarily in cognitive terms but in terms of the feeling embedded in the image: the sheep who grace under the watchful eye of the shepherd making sure that a wolf does not fall upon him. I feel protected.

We can feel the same thing in other familiar metaphors. The need to “walk on eggshells” conveys the feeling of how things can break down too easily. The idea of seeing “light at the end of the tunnel” captures both the present darkness and the promise that things will be better.

The metaphorical image delivers a whole package…

The metaphorical image delivers a whole package: the asserted connection that the familiar A is like unfamiliar B, plus the rich set of feelings and meanings that get transferred onto B through its similarity to A.

I’d like to venture a hypothesis: Evolution made this operation quite fundamental to the processes of our consciousness. We evolved to recognize patterns and generalize on the basis of perceived similarities—and, when we connect something new with something already known, to experience with respect to the new thing a whole package of emotions and motivations associated with the old.

“Once burnt, twice shy,” as the saying goes. Without recognizing in a new situation the possibility of repeating the painful old experience, getting burnt is more likely to happen again. Shying away from such repetition is adaptive.

It’s been widely observed that a dog who has experienced the trauma of being beaten by a man will henceforth react fearfully to men.

The dog seems to be thinking and feeling this way: I was beaten by A who was a man. Here’s another man – B — I know nothing about. But what I learned with A leads me to think, what was true about A might well be true also of B. (Likely a more survivable strategy than acting like B is a complete unknown.)

So the perceptual connection the dog makes—B is like A in being a man—comes with the whole impactful package: emotion (fear, hostility) and the consequent motivation for action (avoidance, or even attack).

This suggests why metaphor can speak to us more deeply than many other ways of conveying ideas. As we evolved to think, it wasn’t for the purposes of a head-trip. It was to apprehend quickly what we might be dealing with (by interpreting the present experience in terms of what has been experienced in the past) and to respond to the circumstances in a way that has a good probability of being adaptive.

Upon that ancient foundation, evolution built the distinctively human capacity to recognize patterns at increasingly abstract levels. With our expanded neo-cortex, we can see the same pattern operating in realms that on the surface look entirely different—and through language, convey to other people the pattern we have seen.

Metaphor draws upon that capacity. It says, in effect: Here is something you already understand. Now see how the same pattern appears in this other realm. And with that connection can come not just the recognition of a similarity, but some of the whole package of feeling and meaning that that the familiar thing carries with it.

Metaphor draws upon that capacity. It says, in effect: Here is something you already understand. Now see how the same pattern appears in this other realm.

We can see how the connections that metaphor makes convey such meaning and feeling with them in some of our most familiar poetic metaphors:

• “No man is an island.” An island is separate, self-contained, cut off from the mainland. Donne’s metaphor tells us to see ourselves otherwise: each of us is part of something larger. And the image carries not only an idea but moral meaning. If I am not an island, what happens to others concerns me.
• “Two roads diverge in a wood.” Frost takes something abstract—the choices that determine the course of a life—and gives it a physical form we know intimately. We come to a fork. We cannot travel both ways. Choosing one path means leaving another untaken, with the understanding that the choice will be consequential.
• “Out, out, brief candle!” Shakespeare gives mortality an image. A human life becomes a small flame, burning for a little while, vulnerable to being extinguished. “Life is brief and fragile” conveys the proposition. The candle makes us feel it.

In each case, something familiar enables us to apprehend something less easily grasped. But the connection does more than clarify an idea. The familiar image brings with it some of the package of feeling and meaning that has become attached to it in our experience.

That’s what I increasingly seek as a writer. Getting an idea accurately from my mind into someone else’s is not enough. I want the meaning to make the journey too.

The more difficult the unfamiliar thing is to grasp, the more important is metaphor’s ability to make the unfamiliar more comprehensible. Which is why the great spiritual teachers have so often spoken in metaphors: for at the heart of their teachings is often that which cannot be captured adequately in literal language, and is especially difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

Metaphor is a favorite language for conveying the ineffable:

• To convey the nature of the ineffable “Tao,” Chung Tzu tells us it is something that is like water, in how it “flows.”
• To tell his listeners about “the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus tells his listeners that the Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven that a woman works into dough until it spreads through the whole.

So metaphor serves two vital roles: communicating the barely communicable, and helping even what CAN be communicated land with greater force if the right metaphor is used.

 

THE POWER OF SPORTS METAPHORS IN THE MODERN WORLD

 What makes a metaphor “right”? One requirement certainly is that the Familiar Thing is, in fact, familiar to the audience for the metaphor.

That requirement that the audience be largely familiar with the Familiar Thing was easier to meet in the world of the Psalmist and of Jesus than it is in ours.

Their audiences lived in societies in which people’s lives had much more in common. Some were peasants growing crops, some were shepherds watching sheep, some were bakers working leaven into dough. But these different activities belonged to a world that most people knew something about.

So the Psalmist could say, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and expect his listeners to possess a rich understanding of what a shepherd meant to his flock.

And Jesus could continually draw his metaphors from that same shared world. He could tell stories about planting seeds, about stewards entrusted with responsibilities, about a mustard seed growing from something tiny into something much larger. He could say that the Kingdom of Heaven was like leaven worked into dough. These were earthy images that connected with how people understood their own lives.

More than in archaic civilizations, modern civilization has a vastly more complex and widespread division of labor, resulting in correspondingly less overlap in the kinds of lives people live. Salespeople, teamsters, teachers, secretaries, lawyers, plumbers, computer programmers: each inhabits parts of reality that may be quite familiar to the people alongside them at work and largely unknown to everybody else.

That creates a problem for someone who wants to use the Familiar Thing to illuminate something less familiar.

Where, in such a differentiated society, can we still find a world of experience that a large proportion of us share?

One answer is sports.

Sports are not the only part of our culture that millions of people share (think popular entertainments), but they are an unusually rich—and often unusually intense—shared world. Put people who have little else in common together in a sports bar and they can spend hours absorbed in the same drama on the screen. And sometimes the shared experience becomes enormous: two million New Yorkers pouring into the streets to celebrate the Knicks’ championship, or the huge crowd in Oslo welcoming home Norway’s soccer team.

And millions of us have memories of trying to do the very things we now watch the sport’s best athletes doing on the playing field. Years of youthful experience give a great many of us a bodily memory of what we see happening in a sports event. Even as we spectate, our own bodies subtly mirror some of the movements being made by the players with whom we identify. The body is part of the package that sports conveys.

Sports have another great advantage as a source of metaphor: what’s meaningful in the action is visible to us.

Watch a great athletic performance and the drama is right there in front of us—the fighter on the ropes, the outfielder leaping to snag what would be a home run, the basketball player in the paint contorting himself to get the shot off between the defenders’ arms. A lawyer composing a brilliant argument may be doing something exciting, perhaps even of historical significance (Brown v. Board), but no spectator from across the room would glean any of that human struggle.

Sports put important human patterns out where we can watch them unfold. Courage and fear, competition and cooperation, strategy and improvisation, individual excellence and teamwork, choking under pressure and rising to the occasion—all become visible. And by identifying with the players and the action, and by identifying with the players and the action, the fan can feel part of the drama.

So considerable meaning can be conveyed by a well-chosen metaphor that draws upon the drama of sports.

• In the home stretch — nearing the end of a long effort, with the finish line now in sight.
• Keeping your eye on the ball — not allowing distractions to make you lose sight of what matters.
• Leveling the playing field — making the conditions fair so that everyone has a genuine chance to compete.
• Moving the goalposts — for when someone has, in bad faith, changed the terms of the deal.
• The ball is in your court — you’re the one who must now act.
• Taking one for the team — the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the larger cause.
• Passing the baton — handing responsibility for carrying something forward to someone else.
• Dropping the ball — failing to do the part that was yours to do.
• Down for the count — apparently defeated, with little or no chance of getting back into the fight.
• Throwing in the towel — acknowledging that the fight is lost.
• A Hail Mary — never giving up despite the odds, and making one last desperate attempt.

Now, coming down the home stretch, having swung for the fences, I’ll settle for having stuck the landing.