Like This; a case for metaphor
Imagine everything we know about in one line, from the smallest thing to the largest thing. This line exists on the internet. It’s called the Interactive Scale of the Universe, and requires a now-defunct Adobe Flash plugin, but it’s worth the hassle. I hover through it on occasion to orient myself, and I recommend the practice.
On the far left side of the scale are the incomprehensibly tiny things, like neutrinos and quarks, then to the right, a great deal larger but still super tiny: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then come atoms, DNA, viruses, blood cells, skin cells, and mist particles. Much further in, a human egg and a dust mite roughly share the width of a hair, which is where I can start understanding, though at that point we are already past the midpoint, entering the right side of the scale.
On the far right is the entire known universe, which of course I can’t comprehend or express, though there are numbers to describe it. About an eighth of the way in from the edge is our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is the first thing I understand, though as I zoom further, through a bounty of other galaxies and celestial bodies, I start to think maybe I don’t. One third in from the right is our sun. A huge thing surprisingly close to the center. In quick succession come all the planets, including Earth, and then the USA, whose width coast to coast is about the same as our moon’s diameter.
At that point, I’m home. In shrinking order I see the Grand Canyon, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, a Redwood tree, a Blue Whale. The floorplan of a simple house and a Saguaro cactus are still considerably larger than me. Even a sunflower stalk and a giant earthworm are longer than I am tall. Then finally, me, represented in the tool as the stick figure man on a public bathroom sign.
On the scale, the size of a person sits right of center, though solidly in the middle. And while one could argue this is because we humans did the measuring, I find something curious about this position.
All my life, the spiritual communities I’ve known have urged me to focus on the right side of this continuum: the vast, brain-crushing enormity of all that we know, to say nothing of what we don’t. The ensuing humility is valuable, for sure, though it’s worth considering who really benefits from my smallness. Space-inspired humility is good for dialing down the drama of everyday emergencies. It can help create perspective when things are out of balance, and reminds me, when I feel paralyzed by responsibility, that there is only so much within my control. But the “so much” there is, turns out to be quite a lot. In fact, to nearly everything on the left side of that scale, my power is god-like.
My body is made of hundreds of trillions of cells, 90% of which are not human, not “me.” I house microorganisms, bacteria, and other things I don’t think much about. And the systems which are arguably me have their own needs and rules. My skin, organs, blood, nerves and bones all demand my attention and care, some more than others. But that only speaks to the physical; I also harbor memories that I constantly edit, futures I invent, and interpretations of the present which influence and compose my realities. What’s more, my emotional experience is itself a world of shifting color, texture, and form that I have trained for years to intentionally steer (with mixed results).
When I consider the impact of my choices on the physical worlds inside of me, I feel bad, to be frank. I’ve been an unjust ruler. I’ve let invading armies of bacteria run rampant inside my borders. I’ve deprived my body of nutrients out of laziness, grief, and vanity. I’ve made my liver a slave, poisoning myself for fun more times than I can count. And even my healthier efforts have been brutal. I’ve ordered bacterial genocide over and over again. I’ve unceremoniously murdered and destroyed cells which did nothing but offend my style.
To my body, I am a harsh, moody, and impulsive dictator. Nevermind my emotional, mental, and spiritual worlds. But my miniature atrocities help me understand those that appear to happen in the kingdoms larger than mine. Perhaps I am but a molecule living in the body of an equally well-meaning but unjust god.
Seen in this light, I identify 3 kinds of things in the universe: Things Smaller Than Me, Things Larger Than Me, and Same-Sized Things. And within this framework, I am lord of the smaller things, subject to the larger things, and ought to regard the same-sized things (which are people) as both fellow lords and fellow subjects.
When I first got the notion to approach things this way, over ten years ago now, it immediately replaced every myth, framework, and religion I’d previously borrowed from to navigate my life. I saw plainly that I was both a god and a mite. A sovereign ruler and an infinitesimal speck. I felt both truths alive in me, side by side. And I discovered quickly that attempting to rule my interior realms with harmony and integrity was difficult, which made it easier to let go of the grudges I held toward the godbody I was living in. After all, she was just as likely to be an obsessive, exhausting, wounded diva with a heart of gold and a taste for cheap drama.
This idea served me well, and still does to a degree, though it has a capital flaw. In designating the universe this way, I’d equated physical size with power, and power with authority, both of which are inane ideas, made evident by COVID-19, a very tiny thing, many orders of magnitude more powerful than I am, over which I have no authority and questionable influence.
The pandemic called us to question our choices, from the personal to the global, yet as we reviewed and rebuilt almost every aspect of our lives, we were gifted the demonstration of how unfathomably powerful the invisible can be. Its power was not in its size, but in the way it moved and multiplied: just as it is with us, and just as with the invisible moving through us–our feelings, beliefs, voices, energies, and, powerfully, the metaphors they use as vehicles to move and multiply. There are more concrete channels for the proliferation of ideas, of course, but metaphor is special, because it offers the ability to leap between realms, small to large, concrete to abstract, simple to complex, mechanical to ephemeral, and back again. We can cross disciplines, states of matter, and bodies of knowledge. In this way, metaphor is a universal host for ideas, and will take them as far as they are true enough to travel.
Shortly after NYC locked down, I dreamed I moved through an empty junkyard smuggling in my arms the severed fingers and toes of everyone I loved. It was gross, yes, but later that morning, filing for unemployment with a friend over a grainy video, I said the word “severance” and saw the word “digital,” still sensing my arms full of fingers and toes, and realized, no matter who they may be, apparently my godbody makes dad jokes.
Many of us have spent our lives and careers hoping that our small actions might find power through some kind of logical domino effect, and we’ve exhausted ourselves arranging the pieces. We’ve denied the unexplainable, drawn a circle around the professional, and named everything outside of it irrelevant or forbidden. We believed it was right because it was rational. Scientific, we imagined. But even science holds more respect for mystery than that. Its laws beg to be challenged and broken. Science constantly seeks to expire its findings for newer, deeper understanding. And it does this by placing attention on what is yet unknown.
In my aim to understand human behavior, I’ve tried most to befriend what confounded me, and often made difficult friends. But what I’ve encountered has redirected my view over and over again. Through metaphor, I’ve entered the painful through the tolerable, confronted the terrifying by cross-examining the trustworthy, and forgiven the unfathomable by finding its kin in the universal. The journey is not simple, and often unclear. It is rife with glitches, spooks, and an impressive neural network of trap doors. But it is my deep belief that these crossed wires are precisely where our attention belongs. Synesthesia is not a misfire, after all. It’s a hint.
But in circumstances with no (known) precedent, it is fair to ask where one might look for a rhyme. What could be a simile for where we are now? No doubt, any one of us would be delighted to solve this problem elsewhere, but where else might its truth live? I’ll give you this compass: when something is true, it is everywhere.
In week one of quarantine, like everyone else, I eagerly started my apocalypse garden, sprouting old vegetables in the window from an IG tutorial on happy accidents. It was no trouble scavenging scissored off green onions and abandoned ginger sprouts, rubbery carrots and wilted herbs. And I saw in just days, the butt of a celery is automatically prolific. It needs nothing but the trauma of being cut off from everything it has ever been or made, which are the same thing, it turns out. I have one in a bowl of water, shooting up a perfect, tiny version of itself in the center of its wound, with no deliberation whatsoever about how, or why, or what to make. It is important to note that the stalks won’t do this by themselves. Neither will the crude base create a new world with the old one still showing off.
Waiting for the coffee one morning, I leaned in close to the neon burst, its bright green poms shooting up from a severed heart, and asked “how do you do it?” And she opened her hands to present herself and her broken yet thriving neighbors–I swear to god, smiling–and said, “like this.”
