Metaphor as Illness
If a woman chances during her menstrual period to look into a highly polished mirror, the surface of it will grow cloudy with a blood-colored haze.
— Aristotle, On Dreams
Illness is not an event; it is a condition.
We would like it to be an event, a progression that ends in a cure.
But disease is apt to waver, wander, to spiral in circles, refusing to end unless — until — you do.
In addition to being diagnosed with Acute Zonal Occult Outer Retinopathy, or AZOOR, and having troubles with blue lights appearing randomly in my vision, I have had unexplained scarring on my left cornea for more than twenty years.
The doctor who first noticed the scarring, like every doctor I’ve seen since, gave me an Amsler Grid to take home and put on the fridge.
An Amsler Grid resembles a piece of graph paper with a large dot in the middle. You’re supposed to stare at the dot with one eye closed and note whether any of the surrounding lines look wavy, blurred, or are absent. It is a self-test for macular degeneration.
All these blind spots and lights and grids feel like metaphors for how, when I try to ignore things, or hide them from myself, they have a way of popping up unbidden.
“The body’s treachery is thought to have its own inner logic,” wrote Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor. By means of this magical thinking, disease is correlated, in a funhouse mirror sort of way, with character.
I’m a poet, so of course I have a metaphorically-inflected disease.
Virginia Woolf once wondered at how few literary works explore, or even acknowledge, the bodily realities of illness. Instead, she observed, “Literature does its best to maintain that … the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.”
As Anne Boyer puts it, “I’ve read some books, thus my ambivalence about literature.”
In the late 1700s, a charlatan oculist calling himself “Chevalier” John Taylor traveled throughout Europe in a coach painted with the sign of an eye, and a Latin inscription meaning “Whoever gives sight, gives life.” As part of his peripatetic practice, he treated Bach and Handel, and is thought to have blinded them both.
After a long career of botching cataract surgeries and maiming musical geniuses, Taylor himself died blind.
As Wallace Stevens wrote, “Reality is a cliché.”
Stevens pointed to metaphor as the escape-hatch. But philosophers from Aristotle to Derrida have argued that the point of metaphor is not to escape reality, but to expose, amplify, and reveal it. Even if — and perhaps precisely because — unmediated reality can never be precisely pinned down.
After reading about the Chevalier, I am grateful that there is no invasive treatment — or any treatment — prescribed for AZOOR. As an article in the American Journal of Ophthalmology drily concludes, “the value of treatment is uncertain.”
To quote every mother everywhere, “It won’t get better unless you leave it alone.”
The word “metaphor” literally means to carry over, or transfer, as in transferring the characteristics of one thing to another, naming one thing as another.
These transfers are not always obvious. As the analytic philosopher Max Black wrote, metaphor “disappear[s] when it is successful.”
The body, too, goes unnoticed — a mere platform or container in which our brains move around and we have sex — until it does something inconvenient.
It is, of course, nearly always doing something inconvenient.
After I sought help for blurry vision, my ophthalmologist discovered that I had several large blind spots, and diagnosed AZOOR. Because the blind spots were the focus of many subsequent appointments, I assumed that they were the cause of my blurry vision.
About five visits in, I mentioned this to my doctor, who explained that there was no way that the blind spots would cause the rest of my visual field to blur. “Looks like nothing we’ve been doing in any way addresses that!” he said cheerfully.
All very understandable, really. The blind spots were confirmable and could be tested. Blurry vision, though? Anything could cause that.
And anyway, the blurring cleared up by itself over time.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that many common English phrases describe arguments in terms of warfare: debaters maintain entrenched positions, fend off counterattacks, and launch decisive blows.
This metaphorical frame is so familiar that we hardly notice how such phrasing discounts the degree to which arguments are not like battles, or don’t have to be.
I’ve noticed something in the past few years. I’ll glance at a sign and my mind will report back something totally different than what the sign actually says. Is this a symptom of my eye problems — that my brain is trying to fill in missing information? Or is it just a symptom of my personality — restless, jumping to conclusions?
I hate going to the doctor but, like many anxious people, I’m convinced that my every itch, twitch, and bump is the sign of some terrible and fatal problem.
Although he sometimes makes tender light of this tendency, my husband’s the one who sent me to the doctor when, several years before my blurry vision and AZOOR diagnosis, I complained of seeing blue lights before my eyes.
Multiple doctor’s appointments and disturbing tests later, the conclusion was: You see blue lights before your eyes.
At the time that Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, cancer sufferers were thought to be frigid, uptight people whose inability to emote had caused their insides to curdle.
Such a metaphorical frame is unthinkable now, when the disease’s most public faces are mothers fighting breast cancer and children with leukemia.
Instead, we envision cancer patients as warriors who will not flag or stop or falter, who refuse to negotiate with this terrorist disease.
But cancer isn’t a terrorist. It has no ideology. Cancer is literally a mistake, an ungoverned multiplication of cells. You don’t fight a mistake; you correct it.
But mistake’s another metaphor — one which, if adopted, would place blame on those patients whose cancers prove “uncorrectable.”
I am dismayed by the metaphor inherent in the very word “patient,” as in one who waits for the duration. I am an impatient.
In Aristotle’s view, metaphor is superior to literal expression precisely because it is beguiling. By inviting us to compare dissimilar objects, metaphor appeals to humanity’s love of solving puzzles, of uncovering the hidden.
But for every successful uncovering, there may be a false exchange, a dubious correspondence, a wrongheaded solution.
Why take these kinds of chances?
In a 1667 book that influenced the development of scientific writing, Thomas Sprat implored the members of the Royal Academy of London to avoid metaphorical descriptions, and instead to precisely describe observed phenomena.
After all, as Lyn Heijinian put it three hundred years later, “Can a tropical shoreline or a turning iceberg ever usefully be said to be ‘like’ anything?”
Aristotle thought so, if the metaphor was right. Of course, he probably also thought he was making sense when he compared dreams to the red haze a menstruating woman’s gaze leaves on a mirror.
AZOOR is a metaphor for the same thing for which all diseases are symbol and sign — the condition of being alive.
Some metaphors for you: Being afraid is like being alive. Being in pain is like being alive. Being uncertain is like being alive.
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how,” said Agnes DeMille. “We take leap after leap in the dark.”
But that doesn’t mean we can’t hunt for the light switch.
Another metaphor there. The conflation of light with knowledge and reason.
Even the word “idea” comes from the ancient Greek “eidos,” meaning “to see.” We perceive invisible ideas by the unreal rays of an imagined sun.
Recounting a news item, my husband tells me that scientists have implanted a memory in a mouse. They have made it think that it received an electric shock in one room when, really, it received a shock in another, totally differently room. It now reacts with dismay to the “wrong” room.
In one sense, this story is not metaphorical. There were actual scientists, an actual mouse, and an actual experiment in which the mouse was made to recall something differently than it happened.
But in the sense that the story took place in a world that we understand solely by the medium of human consciousness, it is nothing but metaphor, a parable loaded with symbols, signs, portents, and premonitions.
In “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf describes two problems confronting any woman writer. First, she must strangle the ‘Angel in the House,’ – the collective voices, internal and external, that tell her not to try at all. Woolf writes that although she solved this problem for herself, each woman must solve it again on her own terms.
But “the second [problem], telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.”
Sidney Bradford, a machinist in his fifties who was blind from childhood, was one of the first recipients of a cornea transplant. Although he regained his sight, he became unable to work, confused by the look of objects he had formerly manipulated solely by touch. He committed suicide two years later.
Or he may have just died after a long illness. The accounts I have read of Bradford’s life state that it was either one or the other, but disagree as to which.
Where the accounts agree, however, is that the cure was worse than the disease.
Illness is obscene in its reality. No wonder we hurry to clothe it in metaphor, to drape it in wooly lengths of symbolism.
“Just let me slip into something a little more comfortable.”
According to Joanna Bourke, “bodies {in pain} are not simply entities awaiting social inscription, but are active agents in both creating social worlds and, in turn, being created by them.”
Language is an instrument of this creation. As Martha King observes, “Words are intrinsically connected to one’s body.”
And always inadequate to the task of approximating or fixing into place the reality around us. As Derrida has it, language is spoken from a position of blindness.
Borges went blind. So did Milton. And Bach. And Monet. And Handel. And Galileo.
In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord quotes Ludwig Feuerbach as stating that “the highest degree of illusion {is} the highest degree of sacredness.”
Borges agreed, opining that representing silence with the noise of three military bands is more intelligent, sophisticated, artistic, and valuable than representing silence with silence.
But silence isn’t just like silence. It is silent.
And Joyce. And Degas.
Because our language is approximate, “We must,” writes Derrida, “expose our]selves, run through space as if running a risk.”
In transferring the qualities of one thing to another, every metaphor necessarily marks a divide, saying this is the way across.
Thereby implicitly denying that there is any other.
Among metaphor’s risks — that we will perceive similarities without substance, distinctions without difference.
And the way that we perceive reality matters.
During the Battle of Copenhagen, the future Lord Nelson, having previously been blinded in one eye, ignored a lieutenant’s news that he was being signaled to fall back. Placing his spyglass against his blind eye, he blandly stated, “I really do not see the signal.”
If Nelson had lost that battle, his story would be a cautionary tale of the consequences of ignoring reality.
But he won.
We perceive nothing directly, or clearly, without the intervention of mind, memory, metaphor. And yet we run the risk. We call ‘em like we see ‘em.
The least we can do is look hard.