My heart is overflowing with a good theme;
I recite my composition concerning the King;
My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

—Psalm 45:1

The heart of an artist's life is metaphor. I'm not sure how to say that with the impact it deserves. Maybe this: Metaphor is the currency of the artist's inner economics. That might convey the appropriate weight at this numb end of the nineties when a person in a position of authority can put one's daughter or dear woman friend to convenient sexual use and then lie about it, and it's perfectly OK as long as we all have money in the bank. Or so it is if we can trust the polls.

Metaphor is the currency of the writer's inner economics. Metaphor is where the artist works every hour of work. And not only works in it, and habitually thinks in it, as most do even when they aren't working, but the very act of creation itself is metaphor. That letter you wrote is.

The finished work an artist produces is metaphor. It isn't quite the thing it self, or life itself, as the artist knows, or that artist would be in deep trouble. And it isn't like life, which is a simile. There is greater power of engagement in it than simile, or the artist wouldn't be able to continue because the work, first of all, has to hold the artist's attention. Nor is any finished work the truth itself, quite, though it may contain threads of truth. The proof is that en during writers keep producing more books.

The artist who creates noteworthy work, and in addition professes to be a Christian, inclines toward truth in a way that others may not, as in "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Such definitions of truth generally lie beneath most of what Christians say and do, and they exert an authoritative impact. That impact is especially felt by a writer, or so I find—a worker in words fashioning metaphors for The Word as King.

When any artist does actual work, however, a sense of each essential I've mentioned—of this being the thing in itself, life itself, like life, or better; in deed, the truth itself—all will appear if the artist is good. They will be present in the actual artwork. If not, the work fades, because those essentials first have to enter the artist if they are going to re main with anybody else. And they first have to overtake the artist before a transfer of them can be made into a form similar to, but different from, the essentials themselves.

That's a quick definition of metaphor. That's exactly what writing, the putting of words on paper to represent something other than words, or painting, the placing of brush strokes of paint to represent something not paint, is all about. In all the arts, metaphor reigns supreme, but it seems easiest to see in writing—at least for one who writes.

Coleridge had to see and experience Xanadu in a certain sense in order to describe it—before he was so rudely interrupted. But what we have when we pick up the poem is not Xanadu or even Coleridge's Xanadu or his vision of it, but a transfer or transposition of it into language—that poem printed in that page of this book. Over that moment of transfer into a different form, a writer is acting on faith. Any writer is. And over that moment, Xanadu (or whatever else) better be more real to the writer than the fingers making the transfer. Your fingers better not get in the way, any more than the knuckles of the untimely person from Porlock about to rap on the door. The writer, a servant to metaphor, as each writer should be, can't be self-absorbed. As a writer, you should be so immersed in your metaphor that you can lean against its buildings and trees.

The form Xanadu takes in its final transfer is the carefully worked page. Carefully worked so that the sense of what has been transferred is held as in a web. The web itself is a metaphor made of words. The transfer of those essentials or portions of them, or some sense of them, to the form of the printed page is what we've come to know as metaphor. Isn't it? Because to a writer, metaphor is more than merely a technique or a figurative way of speech, as in the classic example from Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage." The world, for the moment transposed, is a stage. Words have formed it. All the men and women are merely players on the stage, Shakespeare goes on to say, extending his metaphor.

We know the world isn't really a stage, where we worry about all the splinters, but in ways, isn't it? We see it with reborn eyes. All of us have our entrances and exits, Shakespeare says—our births and deaths, as I interpret it, or we seem participants in a vast drama. Or we feel confined in a role whose meaning escapes us, with scenes that seem ordained, since interrelationships with others occur too frequently to be coincidence. Or the world is the platform on which our lives are enacted in a way that, to some, is like "a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more."

Another metaphor from Shakespeare, from the mouth of his metaphor Macbeth. In all these instances, something has been transferred to a realm that's different from, but similar to, its usual one: world = stage, drama = life (or however you happen to experience it; we shouldn't enter others' metaphors unless we're asked), and the process by which a name or description is transferred to some object different from, yet analogous to, that to which it is properly applied, is metaphor.

(I'm leaning on the oed's definition, I admit, because metaphor is so much a part of a writer, it's difficult to define. Flannery O'Connor once said she often felt like the elderly lady who would say, "How do I know what I want to say until I put it down on paper where I can see it?")

"Time," Vladimir Nabokov writes in Ada, "is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors." By his elegant assertion, I suspect Nabokov means that time, in its ebb and flow, is a quicksilver element agreeable to the ferment and forming of metaphors. Metaphors are the sealed containers, the messages in bottles, set afloat in time's current.

"Time … worships language," W. H. Auden states in his elegy for W. B. Yeats—that is, time, in its predictable forward flow, which we measure by minutes and hours from the time we can reason, merely passes away, while a metaphor made of language, that sealed-off message, might be read for many years. Time bows to language, or dissolves in awe at it; we pick up the bottle on the beach. A metaphor. In the lyrics to one of his songs, Bob Dylan says, "Time passes slowly when you're lost in a dream"—another side to the same subject. Any dream that affects the flow of time, whether a daydream or the full-blown version that arrives in sleep, is a metaphor, just as a movie is.

Time is the link here to metaphor. Time is the primary element that writing, the making of metaphors, measures itself against. The rhythms of language move across time; and timing, the arrival of the right detail at just the right moment, is present only in the best prose. Our hearts tick and thud in iambs, and time deals out our body's limits. Metaphors also age and might bear up poorly against time. They die in a decade or live for centuries, so that time, at the other end of the scale, the present, is a gauge of the en durance of a metaphor.

I'm not saying that when a writer sits down to work, he or she automatically thinks, "Now how can I make this metaphorical?" Or, more to the point, "What's the proper metaphor for this?" That would be anathema to the creative spirit, somewhat like a prophet in his off-hours, on a dull day of no inspiration, thinking, "Now what attributes can I give to God to impress his character on my readers?"

That would be heresy. But so, I believe, is the idea that writers work at metaphor in a clinical way. This idea is advanced by the "close reading" of modern literary criticism—or was be fore it was detonated by deconstruction. True, a writer's work is in metaphor, and his medium is metaphor, and metaphor blooms through sentences and reappears in couplets as a crowd (you might say), a host of golden daffodils. And a novel is merely an extended metaphor—at times an awfully extensive one, as with Tolstoy's War & Peace—or a novel is just as surely a metaphor as it is Randall Jarrell's wry but reasonably accurate description: "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it."

Let me insert a colored slide here, labeled, "The novel as metaphor for the hard-edged quotidian of the everyday." Or, because that wouldn't fit on a slide, let's say, "Life as we know it," which is approximately the same thing: an aqua swimming pool reflecting over its surface clusters of leaves, a chainlink fence, quivering bricks of an apartment building; telephone wires above that. You dive in, take the plunge, paddle or stroke your way across, and when you step out on the other side, there is the reflection still wavering over its surface, unaffected by you (although your senses register the immersion and you're dripping)—a kind of quaking mirror picturing the reality of another world. This is a novel. It's as different from the surround of life as that pool in its containment, displacement, grit, substance—anything you want to reflect on—and as elusive as the reflection of life floating over its bulk.

Metaphor isn't exclusive to artists. It is used by pastors who shepherd a flock—a metaphor that suggests the ragtag of divisive followers you'll find in a church. In another context, Bech: A Book, John Updike refers to a person who has to deal with such people as one "to whom innocence, in its galoshes of rudeness and wet raincoat of presumption, must always appear as an angel to be sheltered and fed." A wonderful metaphor that reminds me how characters can take on quirks that surprise their creators.

Metaphor is home to philosophers and linguists and mathematicians and scientists—all those who use symbolic logic. It is the musician's province as well as the painter's and sculptor's and filmmaker's and politician's (think rhetoric). It is used by teachers and parents and anybody who has to translate the physical world, or an element within it, into terms understandable to another.

But writers' hands are the most callused from metaphor. And they are not callused, let me say again, from using metaphor in the deliberate manner many assume. A metaphor that is self-consciously cute or learned—or any other self-consciousness you can think of—is as offensive as a person who is.

There are exceptions, of course. One merely has to think of the studied manipulations of Nabokov or Borges or Byatt to see that. But even these writers aren't so much exceptions as variations. The manipulations they practice will be as bruisingly real to them, I can as sure you, as Studs Lonigan to another, or their work wouldn't engage them enough to carry you along breathless to its end. Artists study what is and serve as minor experts in that. The key word is serve. They should be servants to what is. The is may exist as an external panorama or the inscape of a person. The job of the artist is to effect a transfer that conveys the essence of the original so that what is communicated to the onlooker is, "This is it."

Erik Erikson, the analyst of youth and history, wrote "'Reality' is man's most powerful illusion." Dostoyevsky said, "Almost every reality, even if it has its own immutable laws, nearly always is incredible as well as improbable. Occasionally, moreover, the more real, the more improbable it is." Nabokov said that any time we use the word reality we should put quotes around it, as Erikson dutifully did. Metaphor must feel like what was transferred, and in order to shape "reality" in that way a writer has to work within the structures and limitations of language. Unlike other practitioners of metaphor, the writer is left with one medium and master and tool (other than his or her sensibilities and a few objects available even to children)—language and language alone.

Worse, within the transfer from the original to the page, the writer crosses not only a physical realm—from here to there and from that to this—but a metaphysical one where for a moment all that exists is the hope that this springy squiggle of words that seems about to arrive will span the wide white abyss of a page. Wordless blankness. Until that transfer is made, the writer exists by faith.

Which should eminently qualify Christians, one would assume, to be writers. They should be at the top of the heap, the deepest and most dimensional and profound, as they generally were until this century. Every step they take should be in faith toward the Truth that created worlds from words by the power of speech, the breath of his mouth. Metaphor enables our arrangements of words to take on flesh. Metaphor makes words flesh. Metaphor opens our eyes to applying The Word. So metaphor makes the world of The Word fresh.

The Word itself uses the metaphor of story and parable and other forms to apply teachings that would otherwise be bare rules. In a real and metaphorical way, we take in with our mouth and eyes and all our senses the substance of Spirit made flesh.

I believe there never would have risen from humankind the idea that flesh-and-blood characters could be fashioned from words if The Word hadn't come in the flesh. Jesus. This holds for all of the arts when they assume a metaphorical substance that communicates some attribute of God. The reality of this is always more exciting than any theory, when we hold or stand in front of such a work, or hear its music run through us and realize, This is it.

For too many of us, our senses are too dulled to enter that moment. We're so used to TV explaining everything for us as we sit passively that we're offended if we have to work with a work of art to establish a relationship to it. Can't we do that, I wonder, as we would with a sister or brother whose views differ from ours? Metaphor is the outpoured substance of a person's inner being.

If we can say to one young person, "There's no other work quite like this," we've released that person into an astonishing blessing—acknowledgment of the individuality written in him or her by I AM. Before a writer puts down the first words of a poem or book, a metaphor for it already exists, or there wouldn't be anywhere to head: a profile, a geometry, a haze of color on a horizon, or a sudden rhythm for which, to restate Igor Stravinksy, all you do is find the words. Rhythms assaulted him with such force, he says in The Poetics of Music, that he learned all he had to do was find the notes for them.

Writers not only watch the metaphor form but see into it, past any loopholes it contains, and then coax it into unfolding like a length of familiar landscape. They sense its substance as it takes on detail and dimension, so that to look up and encounter the room where this is taking place can be a shock. (Parents with young children, take warning, and emerge from your metaphors slowly, like a deep-sea diver, before you answer any important question a child has asked.) Imagine how many times Lewis had to blink back his study and the typewriter keys to keep Perelandra present.

So I do not seem so cavalier when I say a writer does not sit down and plan metaphors, which is the perspective of many scholars. I must add: Where did most of us learn to love reading and writing but from scholars? Their perspective puts its stress on one aspect of writing, however, and I want to stress another. The work in metaphor for the writer is more accurately a life-and-death matter.

If that seems fatuous, count the writers who have ended in suicide, even in recent years. This life-and-death aspect of metaphor is, I'm sure, how it should be for anybody committed to expressing life. You might spend days struggling with your sensibilities and the page in a way that seems at the border of madness. Sometimes it is. The search for the right word to color a phrase to complete a sentence with the proper weight to tip it into the pooling metaphor will tap, or can tap, the best writer's last reserves.

We all struggle in this way at times with temptation (though few struggle to the shedding of blood), when for moments everything seems blanked, as if we're at our end, our personal Armageddon, and our body is the battleground for opposing forces—as a friend once described it to me, in an apt metaphor. At such moments, writers come to understand how Faustus sold his soul to Mephistopheles—Marlowe's metaphor for Satan—to get that paragraph right! A falsely placed dedication can turn as desperate as Faustus's at his end. "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament," he cries, enabled by his torment to see attributes of God in creation, as few of us do. "One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!"

What writers face in the most searing of their revealing moments is this: I might be a god. The first and everlasting sin. It doesn't help that mentors are inclined to teach young people that the ultimate attribute, that of Creator, can pass to the creature, making us mini gods, all. A seasoned writer registers the temptation to be supreme, above even any dirty descent to earth, and keeps that metaphorical, a servant to the work.

But servants suffer the temptation all of us do; that is, to let things slip, to neglect to weave the web as surely as we should, so that what is—the fly of this world, now a fly crawling on the fingers of that character—is not caught with the shining intricacy it should have in prose: a green-blue sheen and shudder of wings attainable perhaps only in rhythm. All of this takes further work.

Further work means discipline and stamina and patience, plus the constitution of a hod carrier, since metaphors can seem to carry in themselves the weight of the world. To bear that yoke is discipline. To bear it easily, giving up the other side to the one who, though he was God, knew authority was servant to the lesser, is to serve metaphor and others as we should. So we wait for the right phrase to form before it's pounced upon (if you move too soon, the fly is gone, vanished), as in gradual rewritings the metaphor more and more comes clear. We serve up clear, cold water.

The lapses I mention are especially visible in Christian fiction, it seems, and I number myself among the transgressors. I do not work as hard or as diligently as I should, nor have I produced as much as I could have. In Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, H. R. Rookmaaker says,

the Calvinist and Puritan movements (at least from the seventeenth century on) had virtually no appreciation for the fine arts, due to a mystic influence that held that the arts themselves were in themselves unworthy, unholy and that a Christian should never participate in them. … When the chances did come, much later, in the eighteenth century with the revival of faith with the Wesleys, or with the nineteenth-century revivals, the Protestant stream was no longer interested in the arts at all. … Today it is well known that within evangelical Christian circles there is little interest in the arts.

Rookmaaker wrote this in 1970, and it's safe to say the situation has hardly altered. His assessment helps account for the modest achievement of Christian art and points to a consequence still worse: the debilitating effect of such indifference on young people:

There is no artistic insight, nothing to point to, no answer to the relevant questions of the rising generation. Many want to be artists in a Christian sense—but have to find the answers for themselves. … Many have turned away from Christianity or, more tragically, from Christ, as they have come to feel that, if this vital aspect of human life is outside religion or faith, then something basic must be defective in the faith.

That vital aspect is in Jesus as I AM, the servant as Creator, not an impervious or superior being. But the metaphor of fiction is not a forum to teach doctrine, let me be quick to add. No reader wants to watch you walk from the wings of your world to its forestage to sermonize. The message is incarnate in the metaphor or it's not.

And once a work is done, a writer begins to see it for what it is, and learns from it. Writers are their works' best students as they are the best critics of it, or better be, if their writing is going to be any good. They know their work better than any reader of it, ever, past or present or future. They've been in side its metaphor from conception, and now as it further reveals itself they follow its lead. This is called rewriting.

They highlight portions, blur outlines that seem crayoned in, pare away what intrudes, all with a sense of making it more itself—the metaphor they knew from the beginning—and focus on specifics of detail rather than grand themes or the unity of its symbols and metaphors. Metaphor is the medium of their work. Their hands are always in it and there the focus lies, rather than on an outline for chapters or attentiveness to thesis sentences. That's the way their minds metaphorically work.

I want to return to that matter of truth, capital T. Christians say it exists, in its absolute sense, in the greater body of Scripture and person of Christ. To those looking in from the outside, this might seem a hindrance: those armies of unalterable law. But precisely because truth is unalterable, it holds our feet to the ground as firmly as gravity (whatever that is) and in this way frees us to follow all the turns that the world of creation within the world of metaphor takes.

The absolute quality of truth, like the source of it, is infinite, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Evil gathers where holiness gains. Thus drama; thus art. Scientific laws themselves translate the unalterable nature of that truth, as it manifests itself in the physical universe, into metaphors. These we call discoveries—Einstein's looping re assessment of linear time. Even his equation for it is a metaphor.

When we're grounded in truth, without having to hold our noses or equipment to the ground to define it, our outlook can be, ideally, infinite. This is Christian liberty in its highest form. This is a platform for expression and release of a kind we seldom encounter.

We should be giving thanks for this with our shoes off. This is holy ground, His tabernacle. The stories and metaphors of His word confirm that. Our hearts should be overflowing with a good report about this lovely matter, this good news; we should be practicing the freedom and gifts we've been given, touching on our King, and the tongues of our writers should be ready instruments, redeemed by him, printing an outpouring of our treasures in voices infinitely varied yet united by his Spirit. We should be moving ahead into higher heavenlies of praise, of charity and grace, and of yet more praise.

Larry Woiwode is a writer who lives in North Dakota.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.