I’m fond of metaphor. It’s probably the most common trick in my literary arsenal – especially when joined with a little hyperbole – and for that reason alone I know I have to keep a watchful eye over them when I write, lest they get too far away from my purpose that they obscure instead of clarifying.
So, in the first, rough draft of my previous post, when reaching for examples of things that are “archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to,” I wrote “tuberculosis and the catherine wheel.” Tuberculosis seems to make sense; it’s a word that invokes the diseases of yesteryear, before vaccines and clean hospitals; and it’s ugly, at odds with the antiseptic vision of medical care we hold today. But that catherine wheel: at first, it seems well enough; it’s an image of medieval barbarism, and a vicious one at that. It has the right balance of antiquity and masochism to sit alongside the reference to TB. It was sufficiently over the top to arouse, but not quite absurd enough to send the whole thing careening off the road. And yet something wasn’t right.
Is the catherine wheel a thing of the past? Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, phrases like “waterboarding” and “stress position” and “illegal rendition” have entered (or reentered) the lexicon. In this climate, who’s to say the catherine wheel won’t yet see a renaissance? And then it wouldn’t be a relic; and then the analogy doesn’t hold.
Which left me with just one example when the rhythm of the sentence required two. What belonged alongside tuberculosis as a relic of things past? I considered an extinct animal (the wooly mammoth, perhaps); but the phrase was intended to suggest things that we are happy to have behind us, things which we are glad to have moved on from. I don’t know about you, but I think the world would be a more interesting place if the wooly mammoth were still with us, immune to the spears we throw at it, unconcerned about our privileged place in the world, unaware of the gods on our side.
The gods on our side. There it is. If there’s anything certain about the American political establishment today, it’s that the worshipping of one god (and a particular one at that) is not on the decline. I deleted “catherine wheel” and typed in “polytheism” instead.
