Metaphors we live by

Walking composition

“Some things just ain’t easy to repair
The person who came here was broken
Can you fix it, can you care?”
— “What They Call Us,” Fever Ray

Last month I pulled a very sad box out of the garage. Three sad boxes, actually, one of potatoes and two of apples, but the box of potatoes was the saddest because those came out of my garden. I spent most of a warm-enough autumn day last year sitting in a shady patch of grass brushing dirt off of each one, and here they were frozen and thawed and beginning to mold.

We got about halfway through the potatoes by January, but the bizarre weather pattern of deep, intense cold followed or preceded by days of warmth and rain were too much for my careful winter packing to contend with. Ditto for the really excellent apples I’d bought from the seasonal produce stand near the airport. Only managed to eat half a box of those and the rest had to go out to compost.

Which means that one of my projects this year has to be figuring out better storage for the potatoes, apples, and onions (most of the onions did okay, but I think that’s because we used them up before they thawed again after freezing). I was prioritizing building a small greenhouse, since the seedlings struggled so much last year due to lack of heat, but I’ve got to figure out some form of cold-but-not-freezing winter storage or there’s little point to much of the digging and growing and weeding and harvesting.

I was recently listening to an interview with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future, who talked about the brittleness of global supply chains and working on relocalizing food and teaching more people how to small-scale farm where he lives in England, and while he talked I thought of those lost potatoes and apples and then of the root cellar by the house I grew up in—a literal but good-sized dirt hole through a trapdoor and down some steps under the lean-to outside the kitchen—and the massive crock of pickles my mom used to keep on the kitchen floor, and all the other skills I’ve had to learn or rediscover when growing and gathering food. The variations in how to store carrots; why not to put onions and potatoes together; how to keep apples from freezing. All the canning and pickling that has to get done in the very hottest weeks of the year. How you end up with years’ worth of canned tomatoes because you never use as much as you think you will, and how the jam all gets given away as gifts because nobody in the house actually eats much of it. How you need a backup plan for all the frozen meat and fruit because the power will sometimes go out. (And why does freezing take so much plastic?) What is best dehydrated instead of frozen, and how to get fermentation to succeed when your kitchen is, like mine, rarely warm enough. (Still working on that one.)

And the flip side of it all, the inside-out systems most of us can’t escape depending on, the ones that mean I don’t really need to grow potatoes or onions or store apples and carrots through the winter. The ones that rely on damaged land and extracted labor elsewhere so that I don’t have to do these things. The ones that build dependence but still fail everyone: Why can’t I find my kids swimsuits in summer, when they actually grow out of them, but can easily buy my daughter fresh organic raspberries in January? Who’s picking those raspberries? Who’s packing them? Where is the plastic shell container made? Where are all the kids’ swimsuits in August? Why did the jeans I bought less than six months ago fall apart? Why do I need to special order a little connector to fix the toilet seat that’s been broken for months? (It’s a toilet seat! How does that have specialized parts?)

It makes no sense and it’s exhausting and deeply unjust and such a waste in so many ways. What are we all doing here?

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Some time back, I wrote about being tired of metaphors. Not tired of metaphors exactly, but of the ways in which many of us use metaphors. How easy it is to turn almost anything into metaphor—in my case, it was thistles and knapweed into white supremacy and patriarchy, when really the thistles and knapweed are very real problems that need non-metaphorical solutions in the form of my labor. (You can eat thistles but only so many, and knapweed not at all. Nothing can except sheep.)

And yet, working as a copy editor involves a mindset in which every single word is filled with a rich, all-of-creation’s-worth world of metaphor.

(I probably spent more time considering that word “world” as I wrote this than almost anything else. Think of what it means! What your own meaning of it contains, and what it leaves out. Look it up in an English-language thesaurus and notice which adjacent words expand its meaning, and which limit it, and how. In Russian, the word for “world” is mir, which is also the word describing the traditional [pre-Soviet] shared-resource village commune, and is also the word for “peace.” The word “world” not only contains worlds; it contains different ones in different languages, even different ones within the same language.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since realizing that most people—even most writers—have no idea what copy editors do. Sometimes my copy editing job does involve fixing commas, though rarely. Proofreading at that level isn’t something I do often anymore, or only incidentally as I’m working. Most of the time it’s handling language like it’s a live wire. Every word weighted with meaning, both from the writer and from the readers who will eventually absorb the text (and does the writer care about the reader’s reception? That question plays a role, too. Many do. Many don’t. Many who think they don’t actually do in the end). Every word full of promise and potential and tripwires.

In their now-classic book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson unraveled the idea that language is a fixed thing, that individual words have objective meaning. Even the framing we give to a sentence holds assumptions about the way we see the world. “Argument is war,” for example, is a metaphor reflected in the way our dominant culture talks about arguments, their examples being: “Your claims are indefensible; I demolished his argument; I’ve never won an argument with them.” Or take the implications of their contrasting statements “love is a collaborative work of art” versus “love is madness.”

“If love is madness, I do not concentrate on what I have to do to maintain it. But if it is work, then it requires activity, and if it is a work of art, it requires a very special kind of activity, and if it is collaborative, then it is even further restricted and specified. . . . the meaning a metaphor will have for me will be partly culturally determined and partly tied to my past experiences.”

Think of how easy it is to misunderstand someone in face-to-face conversation, or to be misunderstood, much less over text messages or email or community chat channels. I enjoy working with language, but I might have become a copy editor in large part because I so deeply dislike having my own words misconstrued or assumptions made about my meaning, and want to save other people that pain. How we handle language with one another, in whatever medium, is about more than just the words. It’s about what the words mean to each of us, individually and together. Those meanings in turn affect how we respond, how we treat one another. Full of tripwires, as I said, but also full of potential.

In politics and social spheres, the desperation to fix meaning in place—like Lord Business with the Kragle in The Lego Movie—is an attempt to freeze all of us, life itself, into a static form acceptable to those dictating the definitions. To keep each individual experience from bringing their own meanings to language and stories. Lakoff and Johnson noted this when they were writing Metaphors We Live By back in 1980:

“The fear of metaphor and rhetoric in the empiricist tradition is a fear of subjectivism—a fear of emotion and the imagination. Words are viewed as having ‘proper senses’ in terms of which truths can be expressed. To use words metaphorically is to use them in an improper sense, to stir the imagination and thereby the emotions and thus to lead us away from the truth and toward illusion.”

This kind of belief in an absolute, objective truth often seems to me a fear of the rambunctious, glorious nature of life itself, of the way that humans simply cannot get it under control, no matter how hard they try. People who are scared of this reality try to control what they can. They’ll always fail in the end, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing plenty of damage in the meantime.

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Soil makes an incredibly versatile metaphor, but, as I’ve written about before, it’s also a very real substance necessary to life and subject to increasingly intense commodification. What kinds of metaphors would allow me to feel the weight of that reality, to help others feel it? To figure out ways to garden that allow food to grow and my hands to rummage happily in the ground, but don’t require extraction of the dirt and nutrients needed for life elsewhere? Where does metaphor turn into values and choices and practice, and vice versa?

Maybe I’m weary less of metaphors than of the easy ones threaded through mainstream English. Not because of anything detrimental it does to the language, but because there is such a desperate collective need to see the world and life and possibility differently than most of us have been taught to. Metaphors in mainstream language, like so much else, feel exhausted. I’m not even sure what “mainstream” means anymore, or what I mean by it.

I haven’t thought of a metaphor for the potatoes I had to drag out to the back yard last month. Maybe there doesn’t need to be one. I’m just a bit sad about it, and focused on doing better by them this year.

A society where few of us know how to store potatoes for winter, or can’t buy jeans that last a year before falling apart (honestly, come on, that’s absurd), but where I can easily find organic raspberries in January and order specialized parts for a broken toilet seat (talk about a metaphor for a dysfunctional culture)—that’s a society that needs a different way of envisioning its relationship to words as well as to life.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Anoushka Zoo Carter with Future Natures on the history of and ongoing struggles over land enclosures and 3 examples of current, successful commons-based and cooperative land use systems: “When the concept of private land ownership dominates, so do certain values, beliefs, and assumptions of how land and life is structured in society. Owning land as a private good is often underpinned by the desire to commodify it, meaning its exchange value (usually monetary) is prized above all else.”

• Evolutionary biologist David Sloane Wilson was on Your Undivided Attention talking about the success of evolution being in cooperation rather than competition. (If you prefer reading, Wilson had a great essay about this same topic in Nautilus a couple years ago titled, “I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand.”)

• Gary Juffa, governor for Oro Province in Papua New Guinea, was on the Planet: Critical podcast talking about illegal logging cartels, the capture of government, and how he came to see it all as a war on nature: “They came into Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and they kicked out legitimate timber companies. They’re entrenched, and they’ve taken so much control of the various state entities that are tasked with checks and balances. They’ve compromised all of them.” (The link is to Planet: Critical’s Substack page, but the podcast is on Apple, etc.)

• Political science professor Mike Albertus on the In Common podcast discussed his research on agrarian reforms in Latin America and what happens when land is privately owned but property rights are neither well defined nor defended. What happens when you own land but your rights of ownership are vague? (This was a good challenge for me with regards to the importance of private property rights where land ownership is promoted, and clearly was for the host, too, who also noted that, on the other hand, owning land in common or collectively in the United States is purposefully very difficult.)

• Kenneth sent me this interview in Quartz on the Amish relationship with technology that relates to a previous post about AI and technology in general—before adopting a technology, can we learn to first assess the damage it causes as well as the benefits it might bring? “It’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile. They particularly see those two as having a fundamental impact on their society and daily lives. . . . A huge part is that they shape our relationships with other people.”

• And Julie sent a great interview with Amitav Ghosh from Emergence magazine: “So what Black scholars and historians, especially, have been saying for a long time is now shown to be true without a doubt—that you don’t get capitalism without colonialism and slavery. The geopolitical framework for the emergence of capitalism was, I would say, temporally anterior to the emergence of capitalism, and it was essential.” (I’ve had Nutmeg’s Curse on my shelf for a while, but might read it sooner rather than later after listening to this.)

• Aeon with a 6-minute video that does a good job explaining the Prisoner’s Dilemma and how it could play out infinitely. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic game theory scenario. It’s referenced all the time and I have never understood it. I get the math; I just don’t get the social aspect. It makes a bunch of assumptions about human behavior that are based on a very particular mindset, and I’ve never been able to imagine myself opting to so readily sacrifice someone else. It’s classic, but weird. Or, perhaps, WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic).

• Poetry isn’t something I usually search out to share on here, but I really loved this selection from Kimberly M. Blaeser, especially “Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life.” An excerpt:

  "Each splinter of language
  bent    in complicated formulas of inference 
  of ownership
  as fog forgets  then remembers         form.
  But we find measure     in metaphor
  vibration     earth     timbre."