On this and that, and other relationships

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Before and after

I was the fish, I thought – the curving, darting, slippery fish
– and you were the chips – straight cut, crisp, just right.
But then you slid out from the weeds: I saw your scales shine, your fins flash bright.

I am in and you are out. Or so I thought. The introvert – me; you – the social butterfly.
But I was wrong. You ramble the vast landscape within you,
and I fly wider than I knew.

You were sweet and I was sour. That’s how it tasted. Like I was corroded, needed correcting, while you were quite the luxury – sweet and rich.
But now, we’re picked and mixed, and who knows which is which.

I thought that I was back and you were forth. Mired in memory – me; you – forging onwards.
But now you’re fro
and I’m the one that’s to.

You were the cup, I thought, while I – wide open – spilled my fears all over the place.
Now you are down and I am up;
you are saucer, I am cup.
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this and that (binomial, informal) = various different things

Other binomials: before and after, fish and chips, in and out, sweet and sour, pick and mix, back and forth, to and fro, cup and saucer, up and down

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I wrote Before and after in 2018 in response to a writing prompt based on Gillie Bolton’s ‘binary pairs’ activity (2014: 109). Writing for wellbeing facilitator Nigel Gibbons invited us to write down a list of five or six paired words – the first that came into our heads. I wrote fish and chips, in and out, sweet and sour, back and forth, cup and saucer. We were then invited to think of someone in our life who we’d be happy to write about, assign one word in each pair to that person, and the other to ourself. That was the starting point for a piece of time-limited writing.

After I’d written my poem and read it back to myself, I gave it the title Before and after, having seen its theme of change in relationship – the change that occurs when we start to perceive the other person differently, because they’ve changed, or we’ve changed, or our perception of them has changed, or a combination of all three. 

For me, reflective creative writing is almost always an act of curiosity, discovery and insight. The power of writing this particular poem lay in the opportunity to play around with pairs of metaphor for myself and the other.
~ ~ ~

metaphor (noun) = a linguistic device that allows us to understand something (usually something abstract) in terms of something else (usually something concrete)

~ ~ ~

In therapeutic writing, metaphor helps the writer articulate difficult concepts. With it, we can ‘[grasp] the ungraspable’ (Bolton, 2014: 105); it serves as ‘a container for feelings which are too overwhelming to be tolerated’ (Cox & Theilgaard, 1997: 99) and offers an ‘oblique angle’ on Self (Hunt, 2000: 93).

Nouns are especially graspable. My poem starts and ends with the word pairs fish and chips and cup and saucer. These noun metaphors allowed me to explore qualities in myself and the other in a playful way. In the other verses, the metaphors make links to other aspects of concrete world, prepositions of place – in and out, adjectives of taste – sweet and sour, and adverbs of movement back and forth.

Metaphor isn’t just for poetry and rhetoric – it’s as an everyday part of language: ‘as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious’, according to cognitive linguists and philososphers Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 239). As an example, we all regularly use ‘orientational metaphors’, based on how the human body behaves:

HAPPY, CONSCIOUS, HEALTHY = UP: My spirits rose. Get up. Rise and shine! She’s at the peak of fitness.
SAD, UNCONSCIOUS, SICK = DOWN: He’s feeling down and depressed. She fell asleep. He dropped off. He came down with the virus.

Other everyday metaphors include:
IDEAS = PLANTS (the seeds of an idea) / CUTTING INSTRUMENTS (a keen mind) / FOOD (I need to digest this)
LIFE = A CONTAINER (live life to the full) / JOURNEY (reach a crossroads) / GAMBLING GAME (I took a chance).

Our minds are hard-wired to think in metaphor, to make the abstract concrete. The beauty of Gillie Bolton’s ‘binary pairs’ activity is that she gets us to think of the concrete part of each metaphor first so that we can then explore our abstract associations with it. Moreover, she gets us to think of paired words, leading naturally to thoughts about relationship.

In linguistics, fixed phrases like this and that, salt and vinegar and bright and early are known as ‘binomials’ or ‘binomial pairs’. Using and or or, they may link: 

nouns: e.g. fish and chips, cup and saucer, law and order,
adjectives: e.g. sweet and sour, loud and clear, neat and tidy,
verbs: e.g. pick and mix, rise and shine, wine and dine,
adverbs: e.g. back and forth, to and fro, sooner or later,
prepositions: e.g. before and after, up and down, in and out, and
determiners: e.g. this and that, more or less.

(There are also trinomials – cool, calm and collected, tall, dark and handsome, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for example, but that’s another story.)

Binomials are also known as ‘fixed pairs’, ‘irreversible binomials’, ‘frozen binomials’ and ‘non-reversible word pairs’ because we always put the words in the same order. We say bits and pieces, for example, but not pieces and bits, back and forth not forth and back, short and sweet not sweet and short. We also don’t usually change the tense or number of the words in binomials, so we can say rise and shine but not that we’ve risen and shone. We might have some bits and bobs but never a bit and a bob. That’s grammar. But in poetry we can loosen the rules, move things about, play, and challenge the conventional order: ‘now you’re fro and I’m the one that’s to’ and ‘now, we’re picked and mixed’.

I find that I return again and again to the theme of what is fixed and what is fluid, trying to find a form that is both flexible and robust – in poetic expression and in my relationships with others. Before and after celebrates a relationship that is more poetry than grammar – not fixed or frozen, but robust and flexible, playful and sometimes challenging, with a form and expression that is unique.

References

Bolton, G. (2014) Reflective Practice. London: Sage

Cox, M. & Theilgaard, A. (1997) Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Hunt, C. (2000) Therapeutic Dimensions of Creative Writing. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press