I spend ungodly amounts of time in Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport—B.W.I. I live in Massachusetts, teach in Baltimore, and Wednesday night after Wednesday night find myself catching the last flight up to Hartford, Connecticut. Airports have become, for me, as churches used to be, places to contemplate the shortcomings of one’s life and soul. What I recall best about my weekly, enforced childhood trips to our neighborhood Presbyterian church are impressions of discomfort: the unforgiving hardness of the pews, the scratchiness of hand-me-down Sunday clothes, the rank smells of close-packed bodies ill-masked by ill-chosen perfumes, the prodding queries of the minister, and the haunting suspicion that the sermon this time would never halt. Eternity—that heady proposition, that high, vaulted covenant and threat—would now and at last be demonstrated for us, with a flow of words that rose and fell like the sea and like the sea never reached a final rest.
What I will eventually recall best about my weekly, enforced trips to B.W.I. are impressions of discomfort: the unmercifully harsh lighting, the rank press of bodies in the security lines, the suspicious, prodding glances and shameful semi-stripping before the eye-of-God body-imaging scanners, and, most of all, the strident, crackling ruckus of disembodied voices over the P.A. system, which now and then, blessedly, seem to pause for breath, but which, ocean-like, never reach a final rest.
There was a piquant pleasure on the night when I first put these two experiences—morning churchgoing, evening airport-going—side by side. I’d been idly and only semi-consciously asking myself what these nocturnal intervals at B.W.I. reminded me of, and now, suddenly, I’d located my metaphor. Of course I’d long known that the two experiences were yoked—known it profoundly, deep in my bones—but I hadn’t yet brought the linkage up to the light, made it explicit: to be sitting in this Baltimore terminal at the age of sixty is like sitting in a Detroit church in my teens.
To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.
Back in college, in one of those roots-of-civilization survey courses that flourished in the days before the near-simultaneous birth of irony and multiculturalism, I was told that the greatest similes and metaphors belonged to Homer. It’s in Book 1 of the Iliad that we’re given our first taste of the “wine-dark sea,” and I don’t suppose anyone ever has better evoked the mesmerizing, inebriating thoughts that marine motion moves in us. In Book 8, we come upon the famous image where the Trojan campfires become constellations. And in a number of places, Achilles is likened to a lion. But as equations go (ocean equals wine, campfire equals constellation, leading warrior equals king of beasts), these don’t represent leaps of any sizable or significant distance. To my mind, the deeper pleasure in metaphor lies in creating unexpected equations, perceiving likeness in the land of unlikeness.
I don’t suppose any literary metaphor or simile has ever struck me more forcibly than when, in my early teens, I first read the opening of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
“Prufrock” is an amazing poem for all sorts of reasons, not least because over the years its opening image remains so fresh, so disconcerting. Those first lines are an oxymoron: an expected, dependable surprise. Over time, a sense of familiarity may slow and solidify Homer’s bounding lion and bounding warrior, petrifying them into statues, but Eliot’s inert body on the operating table continues to twitch and pulse.
One of the profoundest pleasures of verse lies in the way a poem’s constituent elements—meter, rhyme, diction—can trigger surprise where meaning alone would suggest there isn’t any. I think of the final stanza of John Crowe Ransom’s splendid “Parting, Without a Sequel,” in which a woman has just put into a mail carrier’s hands a letter severing relations with her lover:
The concluding metaphor runs very close to cliché (cold as ice?). But the over-all effect is perpetually startling. This is partly because of the rumbling clangor of the trisyllabic rhyme (the biggest and boldest such pairing in the poem) and partly because the introduction of the serpent abruptly conjures up a divine, slithery fall from grace, and partly because the mode of transport itself seems so unlikely—not a truck, or the black horse or hearse of popular imagination, but a wobbly, wayward cousin to a velocipede.
Pleased as I was to place church and airport side by side, my mind kept circling around misgivings that my airport metaphor was incomplete. In B.W.I., week after week, in addition to peevishness, fatigue, impatience, vexation, and unease (all the responses an airport properly brings on), a nagging uncertainty kept after me: What is this like? A simile was hiding underneath my simile…
On any given night, the more unappealing the airport became—especially the shriller and fiercer the voices over the P.A.—the closer I seemed to approach my buried memory or metaphor. Most of the voices were over-loud, sometimes to the point of distortion and indecipherability (at which point it seemed nakedly clear that their true purpose wasn’t informational but punitive). But worse than this were the occasional outbursts of frenzy. Some nights, for no discernible reason, as if some wildly infectious desperation were aswim in the air, a feeling of panic would reign. The voices (more often female than male, but hardly exclusively so) would be offering all the standard announcements—a man’s belt found at the security checkpoint, the delayed flight to Buffalo boarding at last—but delivered with the agitation of someone reporting that the sky was falling. Of course this was a punchy hour—when the last planes of the night were winging off to find a bed elsewhere. Punchiness in this case expressed itself in a tone of high-pitched disbelief, as though something without precedent were now unfolding: night was falling. The day was coming to an end, and who could have foreseen that such a thing would occur?
It was this surprising note of surprise, this astonishment at the everyday that eventually unlocked my metaphor. What does this remind me of?
Nearly thirty years ago, back in the mid-eighties, I got my scuba certification down in the Florida Keys. One of my required dives was a so-called night dive, though we didn’t begin at night: armed with underwater flashlights, we began at dusk, as everything was starting to dim.
It was my one and only night dive. I slipped into the water feeling scared and betranced and uncontrollably excited. As my instructor and dive-partner later remarked, with regret tinged by amusement, I must have been hyperventilating; in the end, we had to surface earlier than planned because my air tank was low.
Under the circumstances, my observations are scarcely to be trusted (though memories of that dive remain among the keenest of my life), but my sense was of a colossal and collective incredulity, suffusing all reaches and crannies of the coral reef. It was as if something unprecedented had begun to unfold: day was coming to an end. Perhaps I was projecting my own feelings. But it certainly seemed the crowded schools of fish were growing fretful and fearful in a way different from their daytime fret and fear. Here was something that they were wholly unprepared for. The sky was falling, or might as well have been, as darkness stole over them with an inescapability and stealth that no other predator could match.
I think I took so long to locate my metaphor because I associated B.W.I. with brightness and noise, and my undersea domain was dark and soundless (except for the panting and wailing of the fish, as supplied by my imagination). But once the connection was forged, the links seemed not merely obvious but inevitable: the air passenger’s upward journey in a pressurized cabin through an unbreathable and potentially murderous realm, the diver’s downward journey, via air tank and weight belt, into a zone equally unbreathable and murderous—both journeys enacted in a blackening world where jitteriness bordered on hysteria.
I’d found my metaphor, and I liked it enough that it took me a while to see that in its odd idiosyncrasy, its inapplicability to any life but my own, it might prove of no usefulness—might be unsuitable for insertion into either fiction or poetry.
Most of us have had the related sensation of waking in the morning from what feels like a momentous dream, so rich with wisdom and prophecy as to promise a spiritual deliverance, and, after effortfully hauling it up through the depths of memory, we discover when it breaks into full consciousness that we’re delivered nowhere. The wisdom we’ve so arduously conveyed turns out to be something along the lines of “The sun brightens things” or “It’s hard to trip up a centipede.” The dream changes nothing and we’re left right where we were. Actually, this might serve as a definition of sleep: our daily night dive that lands us back where we started.
Still, my inability to use my airport/coral reef metaphor felt like an authentic loss. Though I’ve never had much patience with the philosopher’s debate over whether the tree falling in an unpeopled forest makes a noise (of course it makes a noise—if philosophers can’t hear it, that’s because they’re talking too much and too loudly), I do subscribe to the related notion that the metaphor that fails to find its home in print, whether in poetry or prose, doesn’t fully exist. So, months later, it felt like a great comfort and reprieve to conclude that, translated into a medium different from those I envisioned at first, my metaphor might find a home after all. Here.
Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published earlier this year. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.
Illustration by Keith Negley.
