Sonya Huber’s essay, “The Lava Lamp of Pain” is included in her collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System.
When I was starting out as a writer, I would sit at my computer and think, “Okay, now it’s time for a metaphor.” I didn’t know what the image would be, but I had the strong sense that some kind of cool language thing was needed in that moment on the page. So I’d start brainstorming, something like this: “He was so angry. He was a…gorilla…tornado…freight train.” And so on. Metaphor was not my strong suit. Later, in grad school, I would read poetry by the Surrealists and understand that I had, until then, chained my imagination too tightly to the thing I was trying to describe. My metaphors were either too predictable or not actually metaphors (He was so angry…he was a really angry guy). I needed a way of thinking about metaphoric language that could give me enough energy to break away from the most immediate connotations of an image in order to explore less obvious aspects of it.
Sonya Huber does exactly that in her essay, “The Lava Lamp of Pain.” It’s included in her collection, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. You can also read the essay online at The Rumpus.
How the Essay Works
The opening paragraph sets up the essays premise and the general direction that its metaphors will take:
Pain moved into my body five years ago. It wasn’t the whack of an anvil or the burn of a scraped knee. This pain sat warmly on the surface of my hands, and reached up to my elbows like evil pink evening gloves. It was a sort of swimming cap clenched on my head with blue plastic flowers at the base of the neck, and a nauseating blur in the eyes. At other times the pain was a cold ache at the knuckles, with a frazzle in the stomach and a steady and oblong ache from hip to hip across the pelvis. It was a rigid curled twang in the toes like the talons of a predatory bird.
This language is pretty straightforward, mixing similes (“like pink evening gloves”) with metaphor (pain in her head was “a sort of swimming cap” and pain made her toes “like the talons of a predatory bird”). The passage culminates in this image:
I didn’t know then that I had become a lava lamp of curling invisible storm clouds, filled with a surge of mute motion that might be its own kind of fierce beauty.
This image isn’t so literal. There isn’t the same kind of one-to-one connection between body of pain and lava lamp the way there is with rigid toes and bird talons. It’s the sort of great image that makes readers despair and think, “I could never write something that good.” But Huber didn’t write that image right off the bat. She worked up to it. In fact, the entire essay is filled with sentences that are continually working their way toward something, the way that a car stuck in snow will rock back and forth until it finally breaks free.
Here is another example:
I was the bitchy patient, crying after each doctor’s appointment, crying with fear when they told me they didn’t know what next. I was desperate to be the woman I’d been before. I wanted to claw my way back to the body I knew.
Instead, I was a slave to the sky. I noticed that an impending storm could knock me flat.
The first sentence (“I was the bitchy patient”) isn’t even a metaphor. But it takes the same syntactic form: I was… She uses that form again and again (“I was desperate” and “I wanted to”) until she hits up on “I was a slave to the sky,” an image that isn’t literal and that gets carried on for an entire beautiful paragraph.
She also uses a different syntax. Instead of “I was,” she uses a comma to create the opportunity to riff on an image, becoming less and less literal. Here’s an example:
In place of that quiet physical body, I would have to adapt to a noisy one, a body with the city-buzz of pain always in the background, a chatty zinging body with a thousand-signal radio-buzz jackhammer snatches-of-an-infomercial baby-crying Vincent-Price-ghoulish-laugh violin-cymbals.
When people (and you still hear this sometimes) say that writing can’t be taught, what they really mean is that raw imaginative power can’t be taught. Either your mind can come up with something as great as “lava lamp of pain” or it can’t (or it will come up with something in between can’t and great). But what can be taught is the creative process that creates the opportunity for an imagination to be as great as it can be. This is what Huber does again and again in this essay.
The Writing Exercise
Let’s create the opportunity for imaginative language and metaphor, using “The Lava Lamp of Pain” by Sonya Huber as a model:
- Lay out the basic outlines of the subject. Huber does this at the start of her essay by describing what happened (“Pain moved into my body”) and what it felt like. Metaphor and simile only work if you know exactly what you’re talking about, whether it’s a particular person or place or event or state of being. Start with the practical.
- Take first steps into metaphor and simile. Don’t swing for the fences right away. Take a few practice cuts at easy pitches. Huber does this when she compares her pain to a swim cap. Try using this sentence starter: “It was sort of like…” We do this in conversation all of the time. Don’t worry about being literary. Just use whatever image comes naturally.
- Attempt a bigger image. Huber writes the lava lamp image. But notice that she approaches it from a place of uncertainty: “I didn’t know then that I had become…” Sometimes, when you try to write, “It was exactly this way,” it sets the stakes so high that your imagination shuts down. Use the “It was sort of like” phrase for as long as seems necessary.
- Get into a rhythm. Huber writes some version of “I was…” over and over. Yes, in workshop this sort of repetition is often discouraged, but that’s why it’s important to remember that workshop isn’t the real world. Real readers don’t care about workshop rules. She repeats that syntax until something brilliant pops out.
- Riff on an image. Huber gives herself the image of a noisy body and then runs with it. You can do this with any metaphor or simile that you write. Simply add a comma at the end and play a kind of game with yourself, like you do with kids (everyone name a fruit that starts with the letter A). How much stuff can you associate with the image you’ve written?
The goal is to warm up your imagination and let it run for a while.
Good luck.
