I recently did a foolish and terrifying thing, and looked at the Twitter comments made whilst I was speaking at a conference. There was nothing too horrible, or too horribly true, but one person did say I was 'a bit metaphor-tastic'. Which is probably fair comment, really.
I generally hold by the power of metaphor for reinforcing and potentially revealing things, not just in poetry but in work and leadership generally. Some people like to think of themselves as entirely rational, but I'm afraid I don't quite see life like that - and one of the most powerful 'un-rational' tools we've developed is language and metaphor. (That word, tool - that's a metaphor.) Obviously this can be abused, of course, and one can also mistake a good metaphor for something that's true or workable. (There's an interesting introduction to this by Jacky Lumby and Fenwick W. English in a chapter from a fantastically-titled book Leadership as Lunacy here.)
The above video shows David Lynch getting very metaphor-tastic about ideas. He talks about ideas as fish, some deep down, big and abstract, some nearer the surface, 'putrified.. funny', and then says 'I'm looking for a certain kind of fish that are catchable for cinema'. Just listening to David Lynch for a couple of minutes brightens my day so hopefully it'll do the same for you. If like me you're a Lynch fan you may get distracted by what appears to be a mini-school of Lynch parodies: If David Lynch directed Dirty Dancing, for instance, a Sesame Street tribute to Twin Beaks, or my favourite, a Lego-version called Twin Bricks. And a funny series from a man who is Not David Lynch. Don't say I didn't warn you.
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