“Belt Magazine is a digital publication by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest. Founded in 2013 as an antidote to shallow, distorted representations of the region, we challenge simplistic national narratives by paying local journalists, writers, photographers, and poets to cover their communities with depth, context, and the kind of rich insight that can only come from a deep relationship with a place.”
Please read more about Belt’s mission here. It hits very close to home, and I’m so proud to now be part of it. Thank you, Ryan and Belt!
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
My dear friend John Hardt just released a new track for which I wrote the lyrics (and he cleaned them up to fit). He said “I want to write an Oasis song called ‘Radio Jesus.'” I think we pulled it off.
If you’ve been submitting stories or poems to journals for more than a day or two, you’ve probably seen something like this:
Dear Writer,
Unfortunately, the work you submitted was not the right fit for us. Best luck placing it elsewhere.
Best Wishes,
The Editors
It’s impersonal, not exactly brusk, but certainly right to the point. The good thing about these kinds of responses is that you know right away that the good folks at that prestige mag aren’t writing about your Pushcart nomination.
A week or two ago, the writing community on twitter had a laugh (and a justifiable “ew, David,”) about a round of rejection emails that opened with the word “Congratulations.” I think the rest of the email said something like “this piece wasn’t for us, but congratulations on being invited to submit to our next contest” or something.
I mean, that’s a pretty gross move.
If you’re new to all of this, I give you the Not So Secret Hierarchy of Rejection Letters.
1: The standard form letter like the one seen above. Not very gratifying, but don’t take it personally. You’re busy, they’re busy, and that’s just how it goes.
2: The form letter with your name and the title of your piece. Pretty standard practice. I think I get more rejections with this level of personalization than without.
3: The personalized rejection letter with a personal note telling you how much they liked your story, even though it’s not for them, and encouraging you to send them more. In the super-competitive and completely subjective literary world, this can feel almost as good as an acceptance. When you’re at this point with a specific piece or a specific market, you know that the editors really looked hard at your piece, thought about it, and saw enough promise (or whatever they look for) to personally encourage you as a writer. No one owes you that, so when you get it, it’s a good thing. Follow up with a thank you.
The most important thing to remember? We’re talking about subjective responses to art. You will “fail” often, especially in the beginning. The thing is persistence (and very often, revision).
On average, how many metaphors do human beings use in the course of daily speech? It’s a lot more than you probably think.
Skip the next section to get right to the answer. Read through if you’re interested in how I came upon the figure. (It has to do with New Testament Greek and various interpretations of what the Apostle Paul has to say about an issue in the early church in Corinth regarding prostitution. I should note: by no means do I wish to add to the demonization of sex workers. Rendered in English, the language of the passage in question, which I do not quote below, requires, I think, a trigger warning. With that said, there are important contextual and historic details that do not make it into “plain English.” In short, Paul seems concerned with Christians engaging in pagan rites through what as known as temple prostitution.)
*
I was doing some reading on the metaphorical linguistics of the Apostle Paul, chasing a hunch that what he has to say about prostitution in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 may be metaphorical, or, at the very least, practical in ways that have nothing to do with sex work. What if, for example, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians wed to Donald Trump considered the possibility that they were engaged idolatry? Certainly, that’s not a new charge. But passages like this excerpt from Psalm 146 haven’t seem to taken hold:
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
We know a thing or two about the ways some evangelicals and fundamentalists, when convenient, fixate on sex. What if the real sin is joining yourself (and by extension, in Paul’s thinking, joining Christ) to the bacchanal of hatred, racism, carnage, and terror that was January 6? If a certain set of self-identifying “conservative Christians” yawn away the charges of idolatry, maybe something more scandalous will be more convicting.
So I knew all about dying metaphors, but I had never heard of frozen metaphors (given the context, the term brought to mind old jokes about Calvinists). There seems to be some conflation, at least on Wikipedia, between frozen and dead metaphors. Frozen metaphors seem to have gone more fully and more finally through the process of literalization. I had never really thought of “table leg” as a metaphor of any kind, or even a turn of phrase. I have always thought of it as the literal object. What else would you call the leg of a table, anyway? Was there some point in the history of English language where “hands of the clock” was considered a poetic expression? When we think of metaphors, it’s usually in the context of literature, polemics, propaganda. Turns out they’re right in front of us in the every day use of things we take for granted.
In the end, of course, we might admit that because we can only know objects through our senses (Kant, and others), every single one of our experiences is a kind of metaphor. In that case, to use another, Gibbs is probably low-balling.
This footnote is from Wanamaker, Charles A. “METAPHOR AND MORALITY: EXAMPLES OF PAUL’S MORAL THINKING IN 1 CORINTHIANS 1-5.” Neotestamentica, vol. 39, no. 2, 2005, pp. 409–433. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43048553. Accessed 12 Jan. 2021; the original Gibbs paper is here.
It feels weird to tweet and write and talk about fiction and poetry and pretty much everything right now.
Thinking about what makes “right now” different from “last week” makes me realize again that the mere fact that I’m not constantly pushing uphill against systemic, entrenched hatreds and injustices means I’m already privileged. It means that the way I’m able to move in the world is also one of the constant calls lulling me to forgetfulness and ignorance of this fact.
I don’t come here to post answers or suppose that I have them. I come here thinking out loud. Even that’s a privilege.
Chris Cocca 