Trusting the Subconscious

Writer and American academic Robert Grudin says, "Metaphor evokes both conscious and subconscious responses and produces, more fully than do logic and common sense, an awareness of the implicit connectedness of things." In this power-packed, insightful sentence, Grudin illuminates why it is that metaphor--saying one thing in terms of another--carries the inherent power it does: it engages the conscious thought processes, yes, but even more importantly, the unconscious mind. It is in that often-hidden realm where ideas spring forth and then fit themselves together, often with no seeming effort of our own. Suddenly, things just "work," or make sense in a way that before drove us crazy. Then, as Grudin points out, we see "the implicit connectedness of things."

I've been working on revisions to a completed novel, Resistance, and this morning, over coffee and a not-so-clear mind, a troublesome set of ideas and events suddenly came clear. But just before then, I'd been thinking about frost, and sky, and sunrise, and the other projects I needed to get done today. And here comes part of my problem, solved easily in the subconscious mind.

Resistance works on a simple premise: suppose what we commonly call attraction between two people, "chemistry" or "sparks," if you will, is actually electricity--real electricity, felt by the main character, Carrie, a teenage girl, who has an affinity for learning electrical concepts. What starts for her as a pleasurable set of experiences first endangers her life, then takes it over in her teen years, culminating finally in her desperate attempt to "short circuit" or end its control over her. In the meantime, though, she comes to see everyone and everything as electronic components on a circuit board--and her life takes on a very real metaphorical link to the voltage that pulses through her and between everyone else. Carrie even sees herself as the most common electrical component, a resistor, which takes voltage in and modifies it in some way (usually stepping it down) for use elsewhere in the circuit. In the meantime, though, resistors get hot--sometimes very hot--yet another use of metaphor to engage my subconscious mind.

I hope to send this one out the door again after a close brush with an agent earlier this year. In the meantime, I'm reaping Grudin's harvest, a growing "awareness of the implicit connectedness of things." And when it comes to dealing in the metaphor of electricity, "connectedness" is all there really is.