"Nothing, he insisted, is really like anything else. 'Oh, my God, he’s right!' Olds thought. 'He’s so smart! I’m so dumb! Oh, my God!'
But then she realized something: The two friends just had different brains. A little space existed between the two of them.... That’s exactly how a simile works. Olds has never been comfortable saying definitively, as metaphors do, that something is something else. She ascribes this to her terrifying childhood experience of religion, the idea that blood was wine, that body was bread. To this day, she clings to the comforting distance of that 'like.' Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread, sure — in the same way that a poem is like a real experience but not the thing itself.... [N]othing stands alone, nothing is ever only itself. And yet everything, in that vast network of mutual meanings, is allowed to remain exactly itself."
Writes Sam Anderson in "Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate/'No one should read more than one poem at a time from this book'" (NYT).
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23 comments:
If she is Catholic, she misunderstood. It was neither a simile nor a metaphor.
Like, gag me with a spoon
Simile and the world similes with you. Metaphor and you metaphor alone.
A metaphor is characterized by a pregnant use of the vehicle (metaphor having tenor and vehicle, I.A.Richards's coinage). Maybe she fears pregnancy. Similes are abortions.
Is anything really ever anything else? Metaphor is simile. Simile is metaphor. There's a stylistic difference between the two for poets, but it's not something the rest of us would have a life crisis about.
This was a snippet at aldaily.com:
Consumers of poetry no longer want intellectual rigor. They want the poet’s trauma, millennial irony, and wink-wink cleverness ...
I thought the snippet more interesting and more comprehensible than the article it linked to.
The denunciation of simile was like having her heart ripped out of her chest.
Old Ocean, with your crystal waves you resemble (by analogy) the parallel azure lines one sees upon the bruised backs of cabin-boys; you are an immense blue bruise slapped on the body of earth - I like this comparison.
- Lautreamont
Doug Pirhana could have learned a lot from this guy.
Makes me want to dig up the old 2011 video where Meade asks a lady with a sign depicting Scott Walker as Hitler if she thinks Walker is Hitler and she says, “Like Hitler.” Heavy emphasis on “like.”
Press Gangs - no just a British Napoleonic War eccentricity anymore.
Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, not simile, not metaphor. Try to live like that!
the idea that blood was wine, that body was bread. To this day, she clings to the comforting distance of that 'like.' Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread
These folks really ought to just not talk about religion at all.
It's not that blood is wine, etc. (or that blood is "like" wine, at least in the Catholic/Orthodox sacraments), but that wine becomes the Precious Blood of Christ, and the bread becomes the Body of Christ, which is the opposite of Anderson's formula. And, again, NOT a metaphor, but the actual real Body of Christ although retaining the appearance of bread.
"Years ago, a great friend, the poet Galway Kinnell, caused a brief crisis in her life when he denounced similes in favor of metaphors."
Poor thing. I'm sure she'll get over it. Some day.
/eyeroll
The technical distinction between simile and metaphor, supposedly the difference between saying A is like B (simile), and A is B (metaphor), doesn't track with what I hear in spoken speech. In both figures of speech, we all know that A and B are different, because they are never synonyms for each other. Both simile and metaphor gesture toward the similitude between them for the immediate communicative purpose. Simile seems to me a more explicit subset of metaphor, expressly referencing the similitude with "like" or "as", while metaphor can be either express in its evocation of similitude, or more implicit.
Certainly would not have guessed her to be a pro basketball fan.
Vim vs Emacs, now that's a crisis.
When people attribute such adult ideas to childhood experiences, it is usually untrue. We remake our ideas in conventient directions and give them narrative coherence.
As with hoaxes, anything that sounds too clever to be true usually is.
My love is like a cold wet nose . . .
Furze is the gorse of variety.
You know who else was like Hitler? Hitler!
“diary entries with line breaks.”
Fitting.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I guess I was in the 10th grade when I learned the difference between a simile and a metaphor. I don't know when Jesus learned that (in Greek and/or Aramaic), but when he said THIS is my bood spilled, THIS is my body broken for you, he knew what he was saying. He didn't mean THIS is LIKE . . . .
This doesn't mean that transubstation is or isn't real. That's a different issue, an issue of faith, but don't pretend that you can stick "like" into the Eucharist and solve all your doubts.
“Blood is like wine, yes; body is like bread, sure — in the same way that a poem is like a real experience but not the thing itself....”
Back in the good old days some folks took that approach to the sacrament of the Eucharist. They were burned at the stake.
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