Try to See It My Way.

Metaphor as Meeting Place, Seizures, Neuropsych Tests, and Shirley Kaufman’s“Blue Shirt”

It’s hard to explain what having a seizure feels like to someone who’s never had one. It’s impossible to describe, but I’ve tried. All you can do is use metaphor and approximations: It’s a runaway train. It’s like you’re in one of those pneumatic tubes at the bank or drug store whooshing to get somewhere mysterious and crucial. 

When ordinary, bare description fails to explain our subjective experience, we improvise and riff. We point outside (sometimes far outside) our experience to some mutually-understood like-ness, a meeting place or convergence with the person who asks: So, what is it like to have a seizure?* We explain a thing by using the not-thing (a zooming tunnel, time travel, Neil Young’s guitar solo in Cinnamon Girl), or the sensory experience (It smells like oranges) or the aftermath/effect (a circle of your peers’ faces looking down at you from above when you open your eyes lying on the floor of Health Class in 8th grade).

We contort and strain and explain in order to be understood–sadly, maybe less so to understand–all the time. Other people’s brains confound us, especially the ones in the heads of the people we love and think we know. But we do try. When we’re being gentle and expansive, we ask each other things like How do you see the world? Is it like this for you? Most of the time, though, comparing notes and trying to align is frustrating and mundane: Don’t you love that house we always pass? (No, I never noticed it.) Take the exit past the blue water tower on 93 (You mean the green tower?) Don’t you remember…? (No.) I thought you’d like that movie. (Hated it. Do you even know me?) Being misunderstood is lonely, disorienting, destabilizing. Sometimes just irritating, and sometimes enraging. Etc. One of this week’s works, Shirley Kaufman’s poem “Blue Shirt,” gets at this. 

One person’s basket of vegetables is another’s Roman arch. Kaufman’s poem carries forward the esoteric questions we wonder as kids, but then put aside so we can function, pay bills on time, get along with people, etc.: Do you see the same moon I do? How about the moon’s yellow– is your yellow my yellow? Is your pain my pain? We’ll never know. So.

Years ago, both my husband and my son took neuropsychological tests around the same time, for different reasons. Their thinking styles were similar; we knew that. But there was one question on the test that cracked open our understanding of how their brains worked– about how they saw and how they thought.

The question showed pictures of a table, a desk, and a chair, and asked what they all had in common. How would you answer? We’ll wait….

If you’re like most people, you answered: They’re all furniture. If you’re like my husband and son (I would probably love you, but also…): you answered: They all have legs. 

It was a revelation, both retrospectively and perpetually, and one that has made us better appreciate and understand our two part-to-whole thinkers. It makes perfect sense that my husband the fine art photographer takes photographs of things like corners of rooms, very close up. Set apart into frames, these corners make a different kind of sense on their own. Isolated from their usual occupation as corners, they become something else entirely. Something beautiful, soothing, proud. My husband is also a home inspector– a details guy. They all have legs.

Corner 68 (Morgan Cohen)

My son is a guitarist who happens to have ADHD–a super funny, unusually smart, odd-bird love who is one of the most parts-to-whole people I can think of. He’s what you call “time-blind” (it’s a thing.) A muller of details, he often comes up for air five minutes into conversations he’d been “in,” lagging behind the current topic/flow. Not because he hasn’t been listening to you, but because he’s been on a deep-dive with something you said five minutes ago. Once you know this about him, it’s easier to appreciate his elapsed questions and delayed observations, far-out connections, unusual metaphors and invention ideas, and requests to pause the TV. 

This week, along with the Shirley Kaufman poem, I’m sharing one of my favorite things to read and recreate with students in the classroom. It’s a kind of language play that isn’t quite poetry (although it was first published in a literary journal before Harper’s, so maybe that’s a take-back?) Anyway, it’s called “Substitution Chart” by J. Robert Lennon, and it’s a litany of substitutions like the kind you’d use cooking when you don’t have an ingredient you need. The kind with an equal sign in the middle, as in:

 ½ cup buttermilk=1/2 cup milk and 2t lemon juice.

If you’ve ever tried to substitute lemon and milk for buttermilk, though, you know that the equal sign in this case is an approximation of the truth. It’s just biscuit-ruining shorthand. Lennon plays with “this equals that” in a wild, generative way. His substitution chart, along with the ones students have written themselves over the years, are like little cockamamie odes to the beauty and pratfalls of trying to communicate your way of seeing.

As you can see, Lennon’s chart pushes it, using so many degrees of shorthand that it can read as nonsense. But, as students and I have found over the years, it can result in a kind of crazy accuracy that’s hard to explain or reason with. 

On Students Writing Their Own Substitution Charts

Just like with the furniture question on that neuropsychological test, you learn a lot about a person’s brain when you ask them to do a substitution chart: the connections they make; what they use for reference points; how their experiences and objects stack up; what’s painful and irritating, glorious, funny, comfortable. And how far out, by degrees of separation or levels of “meta’-ness, they’re willing to go to make themselves understood.

One of the best and most disarming things about doing substitution charts with students is that you can’t talk about them too much without destroying something fundamentally good about them. If you do, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself, like a joke you try to explain. If you’re an English teacher, and you have a couple times a week when language humbles you into silence, I say you’re doing a pretty good job. 

Excerpts from Students’ Substitution Charts:

Dirt between bathroom tiles=hair gel

the school library=yearly checkup

sunday morning=being underwater

Taking a test after school=distant relative’s Bar Mitzvah

collarbone=cigarette

Miso soup=cat nap

receipts=baby photos

overpacking=forgetting your wallet

Yelled at by your mom=dry shaving

Cracked ribs=skipping meals

busywork=overflowing toilet

One roll duct tape=three roles Scotch tape

grasshopper=morning kiss

curtain=eye patch

Field of grass=blank computer screen

Runny nose=pants falling down

Getting caught=catching

Eye contact=eavesdropping

Stubbed toe=sand in the tuna salad

yoga=safari

rumors=scraping your knee on gravel

creating=destroying

* (The poem “Question” comes pretty close…)

As always, let’s have a chat about any of this in the comments section!

xo