I have a lot of lists in the notes app(s) on my phone. Books I want to read, books I’ve already read, trips I want to take, little joys I like to document, etc etc. One of them that’s particularly relevant to this here Substack is a dumping ground of ideas for potential essays I might like to explore. Many of these concepts are half or quarter or eighth-baked or worse, unlikely to make it into a full-fledged piece. Others are pretty obvious and ripe for exploration. Occasionally, there are two or three or more that are actually sort of about the same thing. Here’s an example (word-for-raw-word), which I’d like to use as a jump-off point for something I’ve been thinking about in a variety of contexts lately:
What do we trade for structure/meaning (in writing, in product frameworks, in life)?
The failure of metaphors (convo around meaning-making but also in context of something like Israel-Hamas)
The first bullet is pretty high on the list, which simply means I wrote it down early after kicking off Footbridge, so it’s roughly 5 months old. The second is, as you might expect, something I wrote down only in the last week. In both cases, I feel like what I was getting at is the extent to which language can be deployed in the pursuit of clarifying complex ideas, and also where it falls short. I’m interested in this concept because, well, I like to write, a practice that’s concerned pretty much exclusively with finding novel ways to materially render otherwise intangible things—thoughts, feelings, sense experiences, invisible systems, and so on. It’s of course not the only way to do so—there are many more ways to communicate than with just words. But here I am, doing just that, so to this medium we’ll stick for now.
Okay. Back to the substance of the two bullet points up there. Again, I think they’re getting at the same thing—what do we trade for structure/meaning when we write an essay, fold something into a digestible framework, shape an experience into a familiar aspect of life? Similarly, what is lost when we create a metaphor to capture something ineffable by attaching it to an understood concept? In short, the answer to both is simple: essence.
As the world’s foremost meaning-makers, we humans are absolute experts at warping the essence of a thing or set of things into a representation we understand. And on an individual level, I find the vast majority of collective metaphors super useful for navigating a complex and confusing world. I can look outside my window and identify a tree as a tree without thinking about it. When someone tells me shit hit the fan, I immediately understand that a situation is not great. If God is invoked in basically any context, independent of my religious views it’s clear to me that we’re talking about a higher power.
On the flip side, there are definitely times that established frameworks and metaphors frustrate the hell out of me, even—especially—if I understand how they work. There’s the fact that the book I wrote can only go the traditional publishing route if it’s framed to agents and editors in reference to something that already exists (in my case: “Fatherboy is Detransition, Baby meets The Kids Are All Right set in the Bay Area tech world). There’s the reality that in order to get a simple task done at my very large corporate employer, I often must at minimum fit it into a stoplight chart to articulate the tradeoffs of a larger decision and spend a significant amount of time getting alignment around said chart. There’s the perplexing abundance of flattening terminology used to cast the deeply complex conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in simple terms.
Genocide. Apartheid. Colonization. Fascinating terms. These are fascinating terms to apply to the Jewish people. And I’m not even trying to skirt the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza right now, or the completely abhorrent violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians—actions emboldened by Netanyahu’s far-right government for quite some time. But my goodness. The contortion you have to engage in—blindly or willfully—to believe without a shred of doubt that Israel is currently waging genocide, apartheid, colonization, and has been for 75 years. This, of the only country in the world whose very existence is consistently and violently questioned. The only “safe” harbor for a people who have spent thousands of years drifting around, enduring forced assimilation, pogroms, and outright mass murder. As a Jew, I find them to be metaphors that really call intent into question. At best, they’re at least partially inaccurate. At worst, they’re flagrantly harmful.
In the application of these terms to this time and place, what is traded? What is lost? Well, many things. Nuance, for one—which as I wrote about last week is the exact thing I’ve been craving as a left-leaning Jew without particularly strong ties to Israel. Clarity, for another. While metaphors are meant to behave as clarifying devices, they become exactly the opposite when they’re thrown as blankets over jagged, diverse, and precarious landscapes. That’s what I mean when I say the essence of something disappears the second you define it. Most of the time, this act is fairly innocuous. Every now and then, it’s extraordinarily dangerous. That’s what I see in the ongoing discourse around one of the most complex issues of our time, and to put it lightly, it disturbs me.