When the beat drops, you dance.
...and it goes without saying, when the beat drops out, you stop dancing.
I was never really good at “musical chairs.” It might be that I didn’t quite get the logic of deliberately disrupting music, or that I was always too elaborately dressed for parties. I didn’t enjoy watching either.
And speaking of music, here is my favourite French song of the week:
The game of musical chairs, also a metaphor for life’s instability, uncertainty and changeability: an allegory for people’s search for their place in the world, oftentimes, never finding it until the end of their lives. The children’s party game punctuated with laughter and animation, joy and playfulness, can also serve as a reminder that life is, well, not that great.
A friend reminded me in recent conversation that everyone is in a race, and as we sprint heedlessly toward the next goal or the next milestone, we miss the changes that happen to and around us; we pay more attention to the things that are not going well and ignore all the joy and laughter that we experience in our lives à la musical chairs. Between all the chaos and scrambling to find a seat, each contestant has a few minutes where they get to feel pleasure, moving to the rhythm of the music and getting cheered on by the audience – moments of what should be unfettered joy, but rather marked with anxiety and stress.
When the loser is eliminated, one extra chair taken away, a metaphorical symbolism for how [likely] one has to fight for their place in the world. A reminder that joy is [often] fleeting. That the rhythms you dance to might be one of chaos and uncertainty. That it doesn’t matter how well or how badly you dance, how much we pay attention to the rules of the game, how effective you think the strategy of slowly dragging your feet across the dance floor would be when the music stops, you still might be slower than the next person and you could be the one who gets chopped in the next round.
Then the music starts again, and you have to dance, or at least pretend to.
Metaphors like this one are pervasive in everyday language, helping us understand, describe, and make sense of the world around us and our experiences. But how and why are they formed? What are the factors that go into conjuring the perfect metaphor? Are they even necessary to begin with?
In Technosymbiosis, N. Katherine Hayles argues that the metaphors we use to describe the relationship between humans, artificial intelligence, and the environment, determines how [we] relate to the technology. The relationship which would determine not just what we think about, but how we think. For Hayles, the metaphors that we chose to describe the things around us [Artificial Intelligence in this case] shapes our attitude and determines how we interact with [the technology]. Good metaphors encourage participation and open discussions. Bad metaphors engender fear and discourage participation.
Metaphors have evolved from simple rhetoric to tools that give form to an otherwise abstract concept; illuminating where dark, sharpening where blur, as in the subtleties of emotions. Some metaphors help us make sense of concepts that we don’t necessarily agree with, or like. In Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontang writes:
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
But, metaphors can be as limiting as they can be empowering. Take science metaphors for instance, which, employed largely to communicate scientific findings and observations, can also have sociopolitical implications, reinforcing and propagating harmful and outdated stereotypes. For example, medical advancements in the management of AIDS only happened after the name changed from GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). When it came to fore that the disease did not only affect gay men, public attitudes shifted the narrative from discrimination and stigmatization, forcing critical intervention and research funding, and the discovery that the causative virus could be transmitted through mediums other than sexual intercourse. The world has come a long way since AIDS was described as a “plague” carrying connotations of death and destruction, or as “punishment” for immorality and deviance.
Metaphors have also been criticised for oversimplifying complex concepts leading to false conclusions. Sometimes they add new meaning to words, and create a world where none existed before. As Sontag argues in her critique of medical metaphors, the way that illnesses are described can give it a reputation that adds to the suffering of those who have it, for example, the implication of medicine's militarized metaphors for diseases. Take the “War on Cancer” for instance. The metaphor of war indicates that, as with all wars, the enemy must be vanquished at all cost. The implication, especially for early victims of this metaphorical invasion, was that their bodies were turned into a battlefield, the cancer cells as invaders to be destroyed at all cost, and the doctors, soldiers at war.
The implications of this violent rhetoric is that the treatment of cancer itself has historically been warlike – from radical and ultra-radical mastectomies by ruthless surgeons who had no hesitation to cut out as many tissues as they could justify from the bodies of their patients, leaving many injured and permanently disfigured, to pumping patients full of combinations of multiple high-dose toxic chemicals (mustard gas was being especially used in chemical warfare during WWI), which pushed patients almost to the brink of death, sometimes over. Failing to win the battle against cancer, then, indicates weakness and a personal failing on the patient’s part.
But, this is not a case against metaphors, rather one FOR choosing them more carefully. Beyond helping us make meaning of our lives and our experiences, metaphors also shape perceptions and influence our feelings and actions. Neuroscientists suggest that metaphors are not merely rhetorical seductions, but they have the ability to alter the brain’s cognitive functions and thought processes. I guess, if you think about life as a battlefield, every setback, every confrontation, and every diversion from the norm would feel like a threat to be met with likely unnecessary force.
Yet, as in life, metaphors are not static, they evolve and adapt to context, accounting for all the aspects of our lives, even those buried underneath rubbles of nuance and uncertainty. If illness is a battle, how do we decide when to surrender? When to comfort and when to inspire hope? When life is no longer a battle but a journey, a storm to weather, when do we constrain? When do we impose expectations that may or may not be impossible to meet? If metaphors influence our lives and our relationship with the world around us, how do the metaphors we choose account for all the aspects of our lives — new love, broken relationships, big unexpected changes, the community that falls along the way and the ones built along the journey? How do our metaphors account for the world that is yet to come? Do we bury our dead metaphors because that is the only way to truly be?
Do we ever truly escape the limits of language, or, as in musical chairs, we dance around them, forcing meaning into context and forever dancing around metaphors, trying to make them mean more than they can?
Perhaps the key lies in choosing metaphors that evolve with us and account for all of the complexities of our lives. For me, life is seasonal. Just as the earth moves through different seasons — Winter for stillness and rest, albeit gloomy and lifeless; Spring for new beginnings, growth and rebirth, albeit wet and pollen-filled; Summer, hot and uncomfortable on somedays, but a season of sunshine, flourishing, and joy; and Autumn, a time for release, harvesting, transitioning, and letting go — natural and dynamic.
Choosing your own metaphors can be an act of empowered meaning-making; reinterpreting your experiences, redefining and realigning with your values, rebuilding approaching time and seasons with flexibility and resilience; dancing when the music starts, and stopping when the beat drops out.
You’re a such beautiful writer. I want you to know that you have such a wonderful way of putting words together in a way that makes the reader pause to reflect. What a talent 💚💚💚💚
Another well thought out write up.. this piece is too relatable.. “when the beat drops, you dance”