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My heart is overflowing with a good theme;
I recite my composition concerning the King;
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.
—Psalm 45:1
The heart of an artist's life is metaphor. I'm not sure how to say that with the impact it deserves. Maybe this: Metaphor is the currency of the artist's inner economics. That might convey the appropriate weight at this numb end of the nineties when a person in a position of authority can put one's daughter or dear woman friend to convenient sexual use and then lie about it, and it's perfectly OK as long as we all have money in the bank. Or so it is if we can trust the polls.
Metaphor is the currency of the writer's inner economics. Metaphor is where the artist works every hour of work. And not only works in it, and habitually thinks in it, as most do even when they aren't working, but the very act of creation itself is metaphor. That letter you wrote is.
The finished work an artist produces is metaphor. It isn't quite the thing it self, or life itself, as the artist knows, or that artist would be in deep trouble. And it isn't like life, which is a simile. There is greater power of engagement in it than simile, or the artist wouldn't be able to continue because the work, first of all, has to hold the artist's attention. Nor is any finished work the truth itself, quite, though it may contain threads of truth. The proof is that en during writers keep producing more books.
The artist who creates noteworthy work, and in addition professes to be a Christian, inclines toward truth in a way that others may not, as in "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Such definitions of truth generally lie beneath most of what Christians say and do, and they exert an authoritative impact. That impact is especially felt by a writer, or so I find—a worker in words fashioning metaphors for The Word as King.
When any artist does actual work, however, a sense of each essential I've mentioned—of this being the thing in itself, life itself, like life, or better; in deed, the truth itself—all will appear if the artist is good. They will be present in the actual artwork. If not, the work fades, because those essentials first have to enter the artist if they are going to re main with anybody else. And they first have to overtake the artist before a transfer of them can be made into a form similar to, but different from, the essentials themselves.
That's a quick definition of metaphor. That's exactly what writing, the putting of words on paper to represent something other than words, or painting, the placing of brush strokes of paint to represent something not paint, is all about. In all the arts, metaphor reigns supreme, but it seems easiest to see in writing—at least for one who writes.
Coleridge had to see and experience Xanadu in a certain sense in order to describe it—before he was so rudely interrupted. But what we have when we pick up the poem is not Xanadu or even Coleridge's Xanadu or his vision of it, but a transfer or transposition of it into language—that poem printed in that page of this book. Over that moment of transfer into a different form, a writer is acting on faith. Any writer is. And over that moment, Xanadu (or whatever else) better be more real to the writer than the fingers making the transfer. Your fingers better not get in the way, any more than the knuckles of the untimely person from Porlock about to rap on the door. The writer, a servant to metaphor, as each writer should be, can't be self-absorbed. As a writer, you should be so immersed in your metaphor that you can lean against its buildings and trees.
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