Art, Metaphor, and the Politics of Revival

To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now –
   Our problem world –
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered, free – help me!
All you who are dreamers too,
   Help me to make
   Our world anew.
I reach out my dreams to you.
   - Langston Hughes

Reading stories with very young children can bring us face to face with the most primal dimensions of understanding. Their minds – and I am thinking here of the four- and five-year-olds I’ve been reading stories with each week in the Old South Church preschool – are complicated by the inherent tensions between language and experience: at this early stage in their cognitive development, they are at once intensely literal and animated by a fantastic imagination, a tension they do not always gracefully negotiate. Last week, reading a lovely story about Emily Dickinson with these children (Michael Bedard’s children’s book entitled Emily, illustrated by Barbara Cooney), I encountered all this anew. At the outset of the story, a little girl living across the street from the Amherst poet discovers a note left in the mailbox by this elusive neighbor. Carefully tucked in an envelope together with a handful of dried and pressed bluebells, it read: “Dear neighbor, I am feeling like these flowers. Revive me with your music. It would be spring to me.” We’d only just begun the book, the children and I, but already I felt their confusion at this use of non-literal language. What could it mean to “feel” like flowers of any sort, pressed or living? How could music, or any other art, be “spring”?

Such playful language is metaphorical, of course, and metaphor is one of the basic building blocks of human language. Aristotle wrote extensively about this in his Poetics, defining metaphor as “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” Metaphor constructs a relationship between two otherwise unrelated things: we say one thing, but mean something entirely different – as, in this case, “I am feeling like these flowers” or “[Your music] would be spring to me.” Through such a simple device, the reader comes to know that this is a story set in winter, one well suited for a New England February, and that the poet is longing to escape the clutches of melancholia that often set in during this cold, dark season. She yearns for music to “revive” her spirits.

Art can have this effect on us. In its spell, we often find ourselves awakening – in ways that either disturb or delight us. Art calls us beyond the familiar. It invites us to imagine something else, and dare to reach for it – “the world outside our world of here and now,” in the words of the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967). And this is the profound function of metaphor: it enables us to imagine something that is not (yet) present, to announce the way the world might be. Metaphor is in this sense a sort of revolution in nuce, calling us to think differently, to imagine more generously, and even to live more authentically. Metaphor embodies this essential work of the arts, “carrying” us from one place to another. In modern Greece, in fact, metaphorai is the word designated for vehicles of public transportation: in Boston, one rides the “T” but in Athens, one takes a “metaphor” to travel from “here” to “there” – to reach across the distances!

Hughes captures the importance of this reach in his little gem of a poem, “To You.” Here, he invites us to live beyond the limits of “our problem world” toward “dreams made whole, unfettered, free” – which is to say, to live into the power of the root metaphors of freedom and equality not for some but for all. Astute readers will notice Hughes echoing Jesus’ call to be “born anew”: “All you who are dreamers too,/ Help me to make/ Our world anew.” And it is his use of such metaphor, the cradle of prophetic imagination, which opens us to this world-birthing work. Poetic vision of this sort calls us beyond the safe, familiar, if often also small world of our experience toward dreams of a truer world, a nobler culture, a more just society. Such vision calls us to “reach out [our] dreams” to others, and open ourselves to their dreams.

This is what democracy looks like, when it is on the way toward enactment, a journey that depends upon the power of dreams promising to “make our world anew.” But this requires communities like the church where citizens are willing, as the poet suggests, to “sit and dream, to sit and read,/ To sit and learn about the world/ Outside our world of here and now.” This will require of us that we learn to reach for dreams that draw a wider and more inclusive circumference of dignity within our society, pledging ourselves to “liberty and justice for all”: for our friends and for those we either distrust or fear; for those like us and for those quite different; for neighbors and yes, even for our enemies. Some in our nation, in and beyond the churches, are settling for smaller and less noble dreams than this. But many are rising with disaffection from the familiar politics of fear and retaliation. They are looking for change, longing for the coming a new spring. They too, with the poet in Emily, are yearning to be revived by the music of audacious dreams.

Mark S. Burrows
Theologian in Residence at Old South Church (Boston) and Professor of the History of Christianity at Andover Newton Theological School