As I anticipate the release date of the American- Vietnamese award-winning poet, Ocean Vuong’s second collection of poems “Time is a mother”, I decided I would keep myself occupied by going through some of his other works when I luckily came across his “Personal Theory on Metaphor”-as a figurative language. I must admit it was/is (as I have gone through the piece like ten times over) a good read. Informative and expository for writers, would-be-writers, and students of the art alike, is my submission but then you don’t have to take my word for it. See below in his own words. Now, I admit it is a long read, but then it is time well spent. I assure you. the next words are his, although I have taken the liberty to make some edits for an easy read.
Ocean Vuong:
I’ve gotten so many responses from folks the past few days asking for a deeper drive into my personal theory on metaphor. So I’m taking a moment here to do a more in-depth mini essay since my answer the the Q/A the other day was off the cuff (I was trying while walking to my hair cut appointment).
What I’m proposing, of course is merely a THEORY, not a gospel, so please take whatever is useful to you and ignore what isn’t. Before I begin, I want to encourage everyone to forge your own theories and praxi for your work, especially if you’re a BIPOC artist.
Often, we are perceived by established powers as merely “performers”, suitable for a (brief) stint on stage-but not thinkers and creators with our own autonomy, intelligence and capacity to question the framework in our fields. It is not lost on me, as a yellow body in America, with the false connotations there in, where I’m often seen as diminutive, quiet, accommodating, agreeable, submissive, that I am not expected to think against the grain, to have my own theories on how I practice my art and my life.
I became a writer knowing I am entering a field ( fine arts) where there are few faces like my own (and with many missing) in field where we are expected to succeed only when we pick up a violin or a cello in order to serve Euro-Centric “masterpieces”.
For so long, to be Asian American “prodigy” in art was to be fine-tuned instrument for Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. It is no surprise, then, that if you , as a BIPOC artist, dare to come up with your own idea, to say “no” to what they shovel/have been shoving down your throat for so long, you will be infantilized seen as foolish, moronic, stupid, disobedient, uneducated and untamed. Because it means the instrument that was once in service of their “work” has now begun to speak, has decided, despite being inconceivable to them, to sing its own songs.
I want you, I need you, to sing with me. I want to hear what you sound like when it’s just us, and you sound so much like yourself that I recognize you even in the darkest rooms, even when I recognize nothing else. And I know your name is “little brother” or “big sister”, or “light beam” or “my-echo-returned-to-me-intact”. And I smile. In the dark I smile.
Art has no rules-yes-but it does have methods, which vary for each individual. The following are some of my own methods and how I came to them.
I’m very happy ya’ll are so into figurative language. It’s my favorite literary device because it reveals a second IDEA behind an object or abstraction via comparison. When done well, it creates what I call the “DNA of seeing”. That is, a strong metaphor (Greek for“to carry over”) can enact the autobiography of sight. For example,
what does it say about a person who sees the stars in the night sky- as exit wounds?
What does it say about their history, their worldview, their relationship to beauty and violence? All this can be garnered in the metaphor itself without context- when the comparative elements have strong, multifaceted bonds.
How we see the world reveals who we are. And metaphors explicate that sight. My personal feeling is that the strongest metaphors do not require context for clarity. However, this does not mean that weaker metaphors that DO require context are useless or wrong.
Weak metaphors use context to achieve CLARITY. Strong metaphors use context to support what’s already there. BOTH are viable in ANY literary text. But for the sake of this deeper exploration into metaphors and their gradients, I will attempt to identify the latter.
I feel it is important for a writer to understand the STRENGTHS of the devices they use, even when WEAKER versions of said devices can achieve the same goal via different means. Sometimes we want a life raft, sometimes we want a stream boat- but we should know which is which (for us). My focus, then will be specifically the ornamental or overt metaphor. That is metaphors that occur inside the line- as opposed to conceptual, thematic, extended metaphors, or Homeric simile(which is a whole different animal).
My thinking here begins with the (debated) theory that similes reside under metaphor. That is reside under metaphor. That is, (non-Homeric) similes, behave, cognitively, like metaphors. This DOES NOT mean similes do not matter (far from it) as we’ll see later on, but that the compared elements, once read, begin to merge in the mind, resulting in a metaphoric OCCURRENCE via a simileac vehicle.
This thinking is not entirely my own, but one informed by my interest in Phenomenology. Founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century and later expanded by Heidegger, Phenomenology is, in short, is interested in how objects or phenomena are perceived in the mind which renewedinterest in subjectivity across Europe, as opposed to the Enlightenment’s guest for ultimate, finite truths.
By the time Husserl “discovered” this, however, Tibetan Buddhists scholars have already been practicing Phenomenology as something called Lojong or “mind training”, for over half a millennia. Whereas Husserl believes, in part, that a finite truth does exist but that the myopic nature of human perception hinders is from seeing all of it, Tibetan Lojong purports that no finite “truth” exists at all.
In Lojong, the world and its objects are pure perception. That is, a fly looks up a tree and sees, due to its compound eyes, hundreds of trees, while we see only one. For Buddhists, neither fly norhuman is “correct” because a fixed truth is not present. Reality is only real according to one’s bodily medium.
The reason I bring this up is because Buddhist philosophy is the main influence of 8th century Chinese and 15th-17th century Japanese poetics, which fundamentally inform my understanding of metaphor. While I appreciate Aristotle’s take on metaphor and rhetoric in his poetics, particularly his thesis that string metaphors more from species to genus, it is not robust influence on my thinking. After all, like sex and water, metaphors have been enjoyed by humans across the world long before Aristotle- and evidently long after. In fact, Buddhist teachings, which widely employ metaphor and analogy, predates Aristotle by roughly 150years.
Now, to better see how Buddhist Phenomenology informs the transformation of images into metaphor, let’s look at this poem by Moritake:
“The fallen blossom flies back to its branch.
No, a butterfly”
When considering (western- dominated) discourse surrounding analogues using “like” or “is”, is this image a metaphor or a simile? It is technically neither. The construction of this poem does not employ metaphor or simile. And yet, to my eye, a metaphor although not present, does indeed HAPPEN. What’s more, the poem, which is essentially a single metaphor, is complete. No further context is needed for its clarity. If context is needed for a metaphor, then the metaphor is (IMO), weak- but that doesn’t mean the writing, as a whole, is bad. Weak metaphors and good context and bring us home safe and sound.
Okay, so what is happening here?
By the time I read “butterfly”, my mind corrects the blossom so that the latter image retroactively changes/informs the former. We see the blossom float up, then re- seee it as a butterfly. The metaphoric figuration is complete with or without “like” or “is”. Buddhism explains this by saying that, although text IS thought, it does not THINK. We, the readers must think upon it. The text, then only curates thinking.
Words, in this way, begin on the page but LIVE in the mind which, due to limited and subjective scope of human perception shift seemingly fixed elements into something entirely new.
The key here is proximity. Similes provide buffers to mediate impact between two elements but they do not rule over how images coincide upon reading.
On the page, text is fossil; in the mind, text is life.
Nearly 500years after Meritake, Ezra Pound, via Fenolosa, reads Maritake’s poem and writes what becomes the seminal poem on Imagism in 1912, which was subsequently highly influential to early Modernists.
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough”
Like Maritake, Pound’s poem technically has no metaphor or simile. However, he adds the vital colon after “crowd”, which arguably works as an “equal sign”, thereby implying metaphor. But the reason why he did not use “ are” or “is” is telling.
Pound understood, like Maritake, that the metaphor would occur in the mind regardless of connecting verbiage due to the images’ close proximity. We would come to know this as “association”. Even if the colon was replaced by the word “like”, the transform, through a bit slower, would still occur. In fact, when I first studied Pound years ago, I had trouble recalling whether this poem was fashioned as a simile or not- mainly because the face change so fully into blossoms each time I try to recall the poem.
Now, let’s look at a simile that, to me, metaphorizes in the same way as the examples above, in the line we saw before Eduardo C Corral:
“Jade moss on the tree
intensifies, like applause”
The origin/tenor image (moss) is connected to the transforming element, (applause). This metaphor suggests, not an optical relationship, but a BEHAVIORAL one. Both moss and applause are MASSES that accumulate via singularities grains of moss and pairs of hands clapping to forma larger whole. By comparing these two, Corral successfully suggests that moss grows at the RATE of applause, creating a masterful time lapse effect. Applause speeds up the moss growth, connoting rejuvenation, joy and refreshment. That something as mundane as moss deserves a potent statement of alterity, that the smallest flourishing deserves celebration, which in turn suggests a subtle yet powerfulpolitical critique of hegemony.
The poet, through the metaphor, has recalibrated the traditional modes of value placed on the objects (moss). And no other context is needed to see that.
You might disagree, but when I read Corral’s line, I don’t SEE an audience clapping BESIDE the moss. I see moss growing quickly to the sound of clapping. Although the simile is employed, the fusion of both elements completes the action in my mind’s eye.
Like in Maritake and Pound, metaphor has OCCURRED here- but without “metaphor”.
HOWEVER, the simile is still VITAL,Why?
Because the transforming element is abstract (applause) and looks nothing like moss. We don’t want moss to BE applause,we want the nature of the applause to inform, imbue, moss.
The line, I feel, would be quite poor, if it was formed sans simile:
“Jade moss is applause on the tree”.
The “is” forces transposition, which is here akin to slamming two things together without mediation. We also lose the comparison of behavior, and are asked to see that moss BECOME applause, which doesn’t have the same meaning as the original.
So, although the simile fusee into metaphor (via association) in the mind, such a metaphor would NOT have been possible without the simile.
Similis matter greatly- as tools towards metaphor. Why?
Because (thank God) our minds are free to roam. To summarize, one of the central strategies (and, to an extent, purposes) of the Japanese Haiku is to juxtapose two elements to test their synergy. This impulse is grounded in Shinto and Buddhist concepts of impermanence and structural malleability. This is, all things, even ideas and images, are subject to constant change- and such change is the most pervasive nature of perception.
The Haiku then becomes the perfect medium to test such changes. This principle is of central importance tome because it is rooted in non- dualistic (or non- binary) thinking. The poem becomes the theater in which fixed elements can be transformed, their borders subject to being dissolved, shifting towards something entirely new- to “create”, which is the Greek root to the word “poet”. The metaphor, then is more like a a chemical, whose elements (like hydrogen and oxygen), placed side by side, becomes water.
In this way, Buddhism’s influence on my work, and, specifically, my use and understanding of metaphor, is a foundational QUEER praxis of alterity.
The reason why I emphasize the malleability and simile’s impact is that, although syntax and diction can side a metaphor towards its more luminous embodiment, the ultimate key to its success is you, the observer.
YOU have to look deeply and find looking relationships between things a disparate world. In this sense, the practice of metaphor is also, I believe, the practice of compassion. How do I study a thing so that I might adds to its life by introducing it to something else?
At its best, the metaphor is what we, as a species, have always done, at OUR best, which is to point at something or someone so different from us, so far from our origins and say “Yes, there IS a bond between us. And if I work long enough, hard enough, I can prove it to you- with thing called language, this thing that weighs nothing but means nothing to me”.
In the end, it is less about how you set up your metaphors (you will eventually find a way that suits it and you) but more about how you recognize your world. THAT is not easy to teach it comes with patient practice, with a committed wonder for a world that at times might be too painful to look at. But you must and you should.
Good metaphors, in the end, come from writers, who are committed to looking beyond what is already there, towards another possibility.
This calls that you see your life and your work as inexhaustible sites of discovery and that you tend to them with care.
That’s it. That’s the true secret to a strong metaphor: care.
Lastly, I want to recommend the work of BIPOC poet and theorist, Thylias Moss, who discovered the Limited Fork Theory, a theory which suggests that the mind engages with the world, and especially with ideas, including text and art, the way the times of a fork engage with a plate of food.
That is, only so much can be held on the fork/ mind with each attempt to consume, and that no “work” can be possessed in its entirety, which I find happily congruent with Lonjong.
What a wonderful anti- imperialist and forgiving way to engage with our plant and it’s phenomena. Thank you,Mrs.Moss!
And thank you for sticking around through my little seminar I hope this has been helpful
Again, this is just my 2(5) cents!
Now I’mgoing to sleep for four days.
In the meantime,
me-ta-phors be with you.
_O.