Search for the etymology of the word metaphor and you’ll find fragments of Old French, Latin and Greek, which, when translated, mean ‘to carry over’, ‘to bear’. When I visualise these definitions, I can’t help seeing the former as a husband carrying his wife over the threshold, the latter as a more burdensome relationship – perhaps one marked by imposition. ‘Odd how a thing is most itself when likened,’ Richard Wilbur remarked. But how is that thing also compromised through comparison?
This question looms largest in my mind when I’m writing about animals. Given the way it foists a human agenda onto nonhuman others, anthropomorphism is sometimes considered a dirty word. Yet, I’m curious as to how these figurative devices can stray from cats in bow-ties and bananas in pyjamas in order to create intimacy as well as estrangement. Perhaps because of these interests, much of my writing starts with research. ‘Kind’, for example, emerged from a day spent at an owl sanctuary where many owls have become ‘imprinted’: a term used, in this case, for animals who become so familiar with humans that they begin to take on certain human behaviours. Likewise, ‘A Note’ was influenced by my reading on bees: in particular, their practice of leaving pheromones to mark used sources of nectar.