In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Catch a Falling Star 
Skyscapes of the Cloudy Mind
I admit it. Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise. It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.
If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother? And this doesn’t only apply to living your life. It applies to taking pictures of the sky too. Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting. (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum? Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)
Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it. In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors. What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending? They say that variety is the spice of life. And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather parsley or oregano. If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?
So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds. (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “ought to be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)
It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye. But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring. Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.
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Filed under clowns, commentary, foolishness, humor, photo paffoonies
Tagged as clouds, humor, metaphor, sunrises