A lit tree, piles of wrapped packages, smells of baking, perhaps a fire in the fireplace, a family gathered. These are all images most of us associate with the Christmas holiday in America 2018. They are domestic or in-gathered images of purchased and stockpiled happiness. Christmas in consumer-land, wonderful in its way. But oh how different from the primary images (poverty, night, cold) and the governing metaphor (a journey) found in both the religious and secular literary texts associated with Christmas. For instance, when we read T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” right from the start our romantic or pious ideas of the wise men’s journey are shattered. It is the “dead of winter,” “the worst time of year to make a journey.” The whole way these magi heard voices “singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” When the group of astrologers from the East finally reached their destination, the narrator sounds underwhelmed: the place was “satisfactory.” Yet, he claims he would do it again. There was something compelling, something world-changing about the experience. What was it? See what you think.
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
It’s curious, isn’t it, that the magus narrator says nothing concrete about the baby or the birth? He doesn’t try to describe the nativity scene that many of us set up under our trees. The momentous event seems to have been an internal change, a personal rebirth. The man—an old man—tells us his story from some time in the future. How far in the future, we don’t know: after they returned to their “places”— “these Kingdoms,” where they felt like aliens. Maybe even after the baby, born in a stall, suffered crucifixion (“three trees on a low sky”). What’s impressive about the poem is that the Magus is moved, changed forever but doesn’t understand intellectually the meaning of the miracle: “were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” There was a birth “certainly,” but the birth was also his own, and it was inextricably bound up with “death,” understood (I think) metaphorically as death of an old self that is necessary to become something new. The journey is both death and birth.
In many Christian denominations, we have four weeks of preparation for Christmas, and this preparation time is called Advent. It is a time when we are supposed to be preparing our hearts because the Christ, God’s Word made flesh, needs to be born there again and again—not in a stable, not two-thousand years ago. Our journey to death and birth never ends. If we take away one thing from the T.S. Eliot poem, I think it’s that the Magus should not have gone back to his old place. Instead, he should have continued the journey, which seems to be what he longs to do. “I would do it again,” “I should be glad of another death.” Because it is only through the mini-deaths of old ways and alien dispensations that we become new or, to use the metaphor, are reborn. Interestingly, the liturgical readings during this last week of Advent have been full of journeys, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is presented as quite the traveler. She “set out and traveled to the hill country in haste to a town of Judah” to her cousin Elizabeth’s house, having heard that Elizabeth was “with child.” She journeys to Bethlehem on a donkey while very very pregnant, where she and Joseph cannot find decent accommodations. The journey is much more than a literal trip, and most of us probably have an easy time grasping that it is also a way of talking and thinking about personal change.
American poet, Robert Frost, claims that poetry educates us in the use of metaphor—saying one thing in terms of another; and he claims that regular speech is full of metaphor. Listen for a moment to a passage from Frost’s “Education By Poetry”: “People say ‘Why don’t you say what you mean /’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.” Frost illustrates his point with the metaphor of evolution. The metaphor is simply the metaphor of the growing plant or of the growing thing. “And somebody very brilliantly,” writes Frost, “said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing. That is all.” Frost is trying to point out that people need to be “at home in the metaphor,” and what he means is that we need practice thinking with metaphors so we understand “how far [we] may expect to ride them and when it may break down with [us].” If we aren’t “at home” with metaphor, we aren’t “safe” according to Frost because we are not “at ease with figurative values.” When Frost says we need to be “at home” with metaphor, it’s a funny kind of provisional home he imagines us occupying. The word “metaphor” combines the Greek words “meta” (between) and “phero” (to carry), and it generally means to transfer between, as in transferring characteristics of one thing to another. To be at home with such a figure is to dwell provisionally in a home we are constantly extending and expanding through our own imaginative activity.
In recent conversations with my elderly mother, who suffers from dementia, I’ve noticed that when I am able to shift the talk out of a literal register and into a metaphorical one, she is more peaceful. Mom was transferred to a nursing home for rehab after a bout with pneumonia that immobilized her. She’s regained quite a bit of mobility and wants out, wants to go home. The trouble is, she can’t go to her actual house at 22 Sylvan Avenue. She was a hoarder, and the house is not safe for her. In addition, the cost for round-the-clock care at home is just too high. “Mary Jo, I need someone to rescue me. They are holding me against my will. Maybe you can call the South Glens Falls Police.” When I ask her where she wants to go, she says HOME—without any hesitation. And I have to say, “But 22 Sylvan is no longer possible, Mom.” Then, she says she wants to go to the place she was before, which was an assisted living facility where she had slightly more freedom. I understand her impulse. She wants to go back to her place. Though other people interpret such a request as a sign of dementia, it makes perfect sense to me. She wants to return to a past time before the hip injury when she could drive and play golf and do Christmas. She wants to return to her place, and she doesn’t quite grasp that she is on a new kind of journey. At Thanksgiving, I brought her a book, written by the late Billy Graham when he was 93. The title of the book is Nearing Home. I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, Mom could begin to think about home in a less literal way. Home is any place where she is loved, where she is welcomed, where the lame shall walk and tears shall be wiped away.
I’ve noticed the way metaphor comforts and challenges my adolescent daughter as well as my elderly mother. My husband and I adopted Katya, who insists on being called Kat, from Kazakhstan when she was nine months old. She has been volunteering at the Genesee County Humane Society for the past five months. I encouraged her to do this, thinking the responsibility would be good for her and pave the way for jobs to come. But I didn’t anticipate how good it would be for her mental health. Like so many adolescents these days, Kat suffers from anxiety and depression and jokes that working with the animals is “better than therapy.” What I didn’t anticipate is the way the work seems to be salving whatever unspoken hurt exists for her about her original loss. She uses the word, “adoption” frequently—even when another word or phrase would do, and adoption is now a very positive event. Even when she’s developed a love for a Lilly or Chance or Vader (cat, dog, guinea pig), she is happy when she reports that they “got adopted.” Getting to be the person who “socializes” and facilitates the transition from “orphanage” to “forever home” for these fur-babies has helped Kat gain a sense of control over her own journey from a baby-house in Uralsk to a family’s home in Flint, Michigan. She, too, has her own journey to make, and the deep metaphorical resonances of her job at the shelter seem to be helping her negotiate this time when she anticipates leaving home for college.
“How can it be true? This world grows so old now, how can it be new?” The answer provided in this Advent church song is, predictably, “Emmanuel” (a name that means God with us). But in order to experience the new, to feel rebirth at Christmas, we must hasten—and not just toward the mall. Mary set out in haste to visit her pregnant cousin. The unnamed Beloved in the biblical Song of Songs (an erotic poem also read during Advent) is compared to a “gazelle,” and he “comes / Springing across the mountains, / leaping across the hills.” It’s not too late to make the journey the wise men made—and remember, they felt like fools. Traditionally, Christmas is twelve days. The magi don’t “arrive” until “little Christmas,” which is also known as the feast of Epiphany, celebrated on January 6th. “Epiphany” is a literary term as well which means “realization” or a “feeling of knowledge” or, as Robert Frost would say, “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.” There is time to look, to remember, to dwell, to visit, to feel, to have an epiphany. But to have one, we must get moving: “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come!”
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