‘No energy’, ‘slow down’, ‘limits exceeded’. When I told a friend how tired I was on Sunday, I noticed the imagery: my words sounded like quotes from the eight o’clock news. The energy crisis and the war as analogies for my health. Now in this case I myself committed an attack on my body, by doing too much, and yet my thoughts were directly with Putin. Due to the war, new short cuts in my brain, alternative associations arise. IKEA = yellow-blue = NS = great tit = blue tit = blue-yellow = Ukraine. And so on.
Even when I played my old favorite Bert&Ernie CD on Monday Make something of it the dialogues reminded me of the blown-up Crimean bridge. Ernie has made a tear in Bert’s favorite book, who wants retribution: “Then we should actually destroy something of yours too. Because now only something of mine has broken and that is not fair.”
Of course, those comparisons quickly fail. squabble in sesame street is miles from a bomb crater in Kiev; a sabotaged pipeline is different from an overstimulated brain. The associations are primarily an attempt to get a grip on the elusive, to say something at a time when language falls short. For that reason I was a big fan of metaphors for a long time: I thought that with successful imagery you can avoid misunderstandings.
Years ago I read Psychology Magazine about ‘autobiographical listening’: the phenomenon in which someone tells something (about a broken heart, an aversion to peanut butter) and the listener immediately reacts from his own perspective. “I have that too! In fact, I…” The listener tries to empathize, but misses the target (empathy). You can see association as autobiographical thinking, in which everything is interpreted in such a way that it fits into one’s own frame of reference.
Of course, associations do not always arise unconsciously. Politicians like to use metaphors deliberately. Think of Mark Rutte who says that healthcare workers are “on the front line of the fight against corona”. NRCcorrespondent Floor Bouma wrote last week how French President Emmanuel Macron uses his turtleneck sweater as a political statement: with the warm garment he would like to show his energy-efficient attitude. And then there’s Putin himself, who describes enemies of Russia as Nazis: imagery as war propaganda.
The danger of associating is that you get carried away with it. An excess of metaphors, unconsciously or intentionally, can lead to misunderstanding. Corona is not a battle, my body is not a Nord Stream pipeline and Putin is certainly not an innocent Sesame Street character. If only because Bert eventually repents and saves Ernie’s rubber duck.
Arguing, he wisely concludes, is never the solution.
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 12, 2022