Anatomy Of A Drowned Metaphor

What happens when we fill water under a bridge?

No.
What if instead we reversed the current? What if we dammed it, accumulated it, let it rise until it pressed against the bridge's underside making the whole structure creak with pressure?

The image just feels wrong. Backwards.
Like holding your breath when you should exhale.
We're supposed to let water flow under bridges, not trap it there.
But that wrongness is a point.

But wait, what are we even talking about when we say "water under the bridge"?

It means: that's in the past, let it go, what's done is done.

The water flows, the bridge remains, and we walk forward without looking back.

Analogies are used constantly in the realm of explanations. I think it's a great way to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar or how we build conceptual bridges (there it is again) between domains.

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Ana- comes from Greek, meaning "upon, according to". It's the same prefix in anatomy (cutting throughout, dissecting to understand). It carries this sense of return via moving through something to see it whole.

Logos means word, proportion, which is the underlying structure of things.

Put them together and "analogy" means a proportion between things, as in it traces back through what's being compared to find the structural rhythm they share.

Kind of like having to go backward to move forward. You descend into origins to rise with understanding. The flow goes both ways.

Flow and Forgetting

Now come back to the bridge with this understanding.

"Water under the bridge" works because of flow and forgetting.

The water represents time, events, also hurts, as in pain/suffering and the bridge represents our present selves, elevated above the past.

The water flows away downstream, and we never have to think about it again. The metaphor's power comes from its directionality: weight to weightlessness.

But what if we fill the water under the bridge?

Suddenly everything inverts. The past doesn't flow away anymore, now it accumulates and begins to rise. What we thought was resolved presses upward against our foundations. The bridge, which seemed so permanent and stable, now groans under hydraulic pressure from below.

At some point, the water reaches the crossing itself, and you can't tell anymore where the bridge ends and the river begins.

This is what unresolved tension largely feels like to me.

The pressure builds in the place we're not looking and this keeps the dam closed somewhere upstream in our psyche.

Variations on Water and Bridge

Other bridge-water combinations:

• What if the bridge itself was made of water?
  Ah, then connection becomes fluid, temporary, responsive. The structure that holds is also the thing that flows and changes.

• What if we burned the water instead of the bridge?
  Probably an impossible image that makes you think, what if we destroyed the medium of our forgetting rather than the means of our connection? What if we evaporated our ability to let things go?

• What if we built bridges over troubled waters, while the trouble was still actively troubling?
  Interesting, construction during chaos. Creating connection despite turbulence and not waiting for calm.

Metaphors aren't fixed. They're flows. And like water, they reveal different things depending on which direction you encounter them from.

Sometimes the best way to understand how we've been thinking is to think backwards through it. To let the water rise until we're forced to see the bridge differently.

Foundations only reveal themselves under pressure and what could be thought as long gone is still there, pooling in the places that aren't examined.


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