Myosotis sylvatica - Wood Forget-Me-Not. ‘Myosotis’ is from the Greek for ‘mouse ear’ and is so named because of the softness of its leaves.
The pretty blue flowers growing at the riverbank drew the attention of the girl he was in love with. The knight dismounted his horse and went to pick some. But the weight of his armour caused him to lose balance and fall into the water. Quickly, the current dragged him deep into the river and carried the knight away.
‘Vergissmeinnicht!’ he cried out. ‘Forget me not!’
The German mediaeval folktale sets the story in France, but it might just as easily have happened on the banks of the River Avon, near where I live. Forget-me-nots are perhaps the only flower that grows in my small garden without me needing to re-engage in the war of attrition with hungry slugs. It self-seeds from wild, and for whatever reason, the gastropod legion doesn’t seem as keen on it as it is on the things I try to grow intentionally. That’s probably a metaphor for something. It might even be a good one.
Bad metaphors were something that George Orwell was concerned about. Rather than shed light, they obscure meaning, he said; sometimes intentionally, when used by evasive politicians. In his essay 'Politics and the English Language’ he takes up arms against shabby writing, and the way in which it smuggles horrors into our lives under the half light cast by verbal camouflage:
“Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
A good metaphor summons a mental image that, like poetry, approaches an idea from an unexpected angle, and in that way makes it new, or strike us as new. One way to sharpen one’s writing, and clarify both one’s own thoughts and those provoked in the reader, is to ditch stale phrases. The injunction tops Orwell’s rules for good prose:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Trite journalism ignores rules such as these, and as a consequence often misrepresents the story the reporter is trying to tell, whatever his intentions. The same is true of visual storytelling, especially in the kitsch genre of second-rate television news correspondents, and hack photojournalists.
Combat photography is often riven by cliché. But Tim Hetherington was anything but a hack, and matched his bravery and single-minded purpose with a search for fresh means of conveying the insanity of warfare. His series ‘Sleeping Soldiers’ from Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley shows men in a war zone in a way that had not been seen before.
From the book ‘Infidels’ by Tim Hetherington.
“Look, this is how their mothers see them, they don’t have their gear on, they’re like these little boys and you never get to see soldiers the way their mothers see them. And here they are asleep, innocent, unguarded” - Tim Hetherington
Metaphor and simile are also frequently wielded clumsily in psychiatry and psychotherapy, often as damagingly, but in a different way. In matters of the mind, the doctor or therapist cannot access biological markers in the brain to diagnosis ‘illness’ - although the notion that they will soon be discovered has been held out for a long time.
The chair of the committee that compiled the modern ‘bible’ of psychiatry, DSM-5, was David Kupfer.
“In the future, we hope to be able to identify disorders using biological and genetic markers that provide diagnoses that can be delivered with complete reliability and validity. Yet this promise, which we have anticipated since the 1970s, remains disappointingly distant. We’ve been telling patients for several decades that we are waiting for biomarkers. We’re still waiting”
It has been more than another decade since he said that. So for now, without physical indicators, a specialist can only listen to the words a patient uses; and then deploy other words, very often as metaphor, to describe what they think may have happened, what they think is going on now, and what they think may be a good course of action for the future.
“It’s a bit like peeling an onion, isn’t it?” said the lady running a group therapy session one afternoon in 2012 at the Capio Nightingale Hospital on Lisson Grove, in London.
It might have been a Tuesday, or a Friday, but I cannot remember. I had lost track of time in the airless place, strangely bereft of natural light, except for a courtyard where we gathered to smoke obsessively. It certainly wasn’t a weekend - no groups at weekends. We were left to our own devices on Saturdays and Sundays, possibly to go for a walk in Regent’s Park with a friend or relative, if the consultant thought us safe to do so.
“There’s always another layer of meaning to reveal, isn’t there?” the therapist encouraged us.
I didn’t think there was, and I didn’t think of myself as an onion, and I told her so. “You present the metaphor as a clever insight, but it doesn’t withstand a moment’s thought: if you keep peeling an onion, eventually you have no onion. Just peel.
“And what would you do with that, then?” I asked her. She looked at me blankly.
‘Onions’ by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Kimbell Art Museum, Texas.
Slipshod language is the bane of those labelled as afflicted by psychiatric disorder. The labels are sticky. That can be bad for your job prospects, or job retention, or the way people might cross the street if they knew what your official label was. It is also bad for your family life, and for those who love you. It sows confusion, which adds to the fear they feel about what is happening.
We all know what we mean by ‘depression’, don’t we? Or perhaps only to the extent that we think we know what we mean by ‘sausage’. Sausages are a pretty broad concept, though, so you are well advised to get down to specifics if you want to distinguish a decent one from the ‘value range’ at your local supermarket.
The word has meaning, but is not meaningful. The same might be said of ‘depression’, and the many similes and metaphors used to explain it.
Inaccurate or vague words can suggest there is no way out of the state of mind, except to follow to the letter the advice of an expert charged with policing words. She may easily have conjured up the sloppy metaphor, however, yet will nevertheless cheerfully read off a prescription that can, if necessary, be applied by force of law.
“We note that you are not in full compliance with your medication regime,” is a sentence used on me several times in recent weeks.
An awareness of the limits of metaphor can help us find a way through the mire of mental distress; and not only that. One thing that troubles me a lot is whether I used my time well as a journalist, especially the weeks and months I spent at war. Did I cause more harm that good? Was it ‘worth it’, whatever that means?
“The jury’s still out on that one,” I said to a friend recently, my former boss at Sky News back in the 90s. And then I corrected myself: there is no jury, no courtroom here. And using a metaphor of judicial process is almost certain to lead a doubtful man to damn himself in absentia.
Instead of being tied to the metaphor like Ahab to the White Whale, discard it! And then you are left with your experiences, but unmutilated by the procrustean phraseology. If examined without the filter of metaphor, many of those experiences reveal themselves to have been full of wonder, and constitute genuine riches in the here and now, and wealth for future. They do not have to be a life sentence.
The best known poem by Keith Douglas, who wrote of the Second World War, is titled ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, Forget-me-not:
“Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.”
He wrote these words based on something he witnessed as a tank commander in North Africa in 1943. The body is that of the man who tried to kill him.
Douglas was to die on the beaches at Normandy the following year. The 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings was celebrated yesterday, Thursday June 6th. A commemorative coin was minted specially, and world leaders gathered to mark the occasion. There was solemnity.
Keith Douglas’s death didn’t come on the sands on the June 6th 1944, a Tuesday that year, however. He died three days after the landings:
“On 9th June Douglas's armoured unit was pinned down on high ground overlooking Tilly-sur-Seulles. Concerned by the lack of progress, Douglas dismounted his tank to undertake a personal reconnaissance during which he was killed by a German mortar. The regimental chaplain Captain Leslie Skinner buried him by a hedge, close to where he had died on ‘forward slopes point 102’”.
His personal in memoriam would be this Sunday, long after the dignitaries have marched on towards other dates in the diary and important events.
There is probably a metaphor in that, too.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The grave of Keith Douglas at Tilly-sur-Seulles.