Taylor Johnson's "Similes"

Thoughts on the generalization of language.

Similes

Nothing is like jail. Nothing resembles it or approximates it. Nothing is like being detained, except for being detained. Nothing is slower than time then. Time is measured between who you were before being handcuffed and who you'll be stumbling out the jail onto the small-town street with no one to talk to. Who you'll be is measuring each breath that isn't metallic air. How is the air after the bruise on your rib? It's nothing like air. Nothing is like being alone when you shouldn't be alone. Alone is the fear of being watched and not speaking for weeks. Nothing is like a cage but a cage. I tell this to myself. Knowing where I've been. Knowing where I have to go.


from Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020)

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I have been meaning to read Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance ever since it came out a few years ago, and, standing in a bookstore the other day, I picked it up off the shelf and turned immediately to this prose poem. It’s a jarring first line — jarring, I think, because it is so apt and so true. The first three lines set up a point of view that is not just a point of view but is also a point of fact:

Nothing is like jail. Nothing resembles it or approximates it. Nothing is like being detained, except for being detained.

I think I found myself drawn to this poem because of the way it operates on two levels (and certainly not just on two) that I feel alive with energy. One of those levels offers an overarching critique of the way we come to utilize similes and metaphors. And another of those levels points directly at the way in which our society often makes casual a kind of carceral language, a language that plays with prison in a country where — at this very moment — nearly two million people are in prison nationwide, and where Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at almost five times the rate of white Americans.

These two levels of today’s poem are related in that the former — the critique of metaphor and simile — names a failure of the imagination, and the latter — the critique of a reliance on a kind of carceral language — names a way that we continue to inhibit the imagination through our institutionalized way of communicating. I’m thinking of a moment from a book I’ve mentioned before — Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism. In a long passage in that book, Wang writes:

The project of dismantling the welfare state was intimately tied to constructing urban black Americans trapped in zones of concentrated poverty as deserving of their situation. Coded racism was used to construct poverty as a personal moral failure…The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration. Antiblack racism, and not merely the profit motive, is at the heart of mass incarceration. Thus, the title of this book, Carceral Capitalism, is not an attempt to posit carcerality as an effect of capitalism, but to think about the carceral continuum alongside and in conjunction with the dynamics of late capitalism.

Wang’s critique names that the relationship between race and class and imprisonment is no accident — that it is the result, in fact, of an intentional policy and design move rooted in racism. There is, in her words, a “carceral continuum.” This is reinforced in her book when she offers this anecdote:

In the film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, a woman named Charisse Davidson from the St. Louis area describes her experience of spending time in jail after refusing to pay a steep fine for the crime of having a trash can lid that was not properly affixed. Her case is not an isolated one: residents of more than a dozen majority-black municipalities in St. Louis County have sued the cities on the grounds that the revenue-generating schemes that ensnare residents in cycles of debt—and then jail them when they cannot pay—amount to a kind of debtor’s prison.

Here, Wang makes clear that this racist and carceral structure is rooted in even the most mundane and ordinary policies — that, in point of fact, even what is done about the lid of a trash can has the potential to be grounded in a systemic and institutionalized racist idea.

These moments in Wang’s book exist, at least for me, in conversation with the final lines of Johnson’s poem, which are rooted in the deep, experiential humanness of identity:

Nothing is like a cage but a cage. I tell this to myself. Knowing where I've been. Knowing where I have to go.

The repetition of that word — Knowing — offer a sense of humanness and subjectivity that Johnson’s speaker has ownership of. In other words, I read that word — Knowing — twice, and I think about the woman in Wang’s book taking out the trash. I think about how, underneath any bureaucratic set of words that outline some seemingly mundane policy is a person who knows — with utter certainty — how that language translates to their daily life, and what it means for them. I think, too, about another of Johnson’s poems, “Pennsylvania Ave. SE,” with its litany of blessings. In that poem, Johnson begins:

Bless the boys riding their bikes straight up, at midnight, touching,
if only briefly, holding, hands as they cross the light to Independence.

Aside from the fact that you could write so much about the sheer beauty at play in the craft of these lines (the way both “touching” and “holding” are bracketed by commas, enacting a kind of touching and holding, as well as the way these lines land on “Independence” as a kind of light, a hope, if only for an instant, or even, at the same time, a callback toward what was promised but is not) — okay, aside from that, there is a real tenderness that centers the deep and human complexity at the heart of whoever is affected by institutionalized and systemic structures rooted in racism or classism or misogyny or all of the above.

We shouldn’t have to be reminded of humanness. It is everywhere; it is in the mundane and the ordinary; it is everywhere you choose to pay attention. And it sometimes — and sometimes beautifully — surprises you and, with it, takes hold of your attention. But even so, when I think of the policies outlined by Wang above, I think of how violence can be rooted in a kind of evil imaginary — an intentional use of the imagination to design something so cruel that it has two consequences. The first consequence is that it destroys people’s capacity to live, and the second consequence is that it offers a limited imaginary for others to access. Wang writes about how “criminologists, politicians, and policy makers worked vigorously to consolidate the image of the black criminal in the public imagination.” Such a point illustrates the evil imaginary at work: the way it imagines in the negative, as if people said let’s imagine less, so that others may believe in others less.

Imagination does not deserve so strange and cruel a use. I wonder if imagination is even the right word for such a thing. A weaponized imagination feels like no imagination at all.

I am reminded again of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, of a scene where Tayo is with the healer Ku’oosh, trying to remember whether or not — as an indigenous soldier fighting for the United States in World War II — he killed someone. Killing was so distant for Tayo, despite the intimacy of war. Silko writes:

But the old man would not have believed white warfare—killing across great distances without knowing who or how many had died. It was all too alien to comprehend, the mortars and big guns; and even if he could have taken the old man to see the target areas, even if he could have led him through the fallen jungle trees and muddy craters of torn earth to show him the dead, the old man would not have believed anything so monstrous.

That distance, that monstrous quality of the imagination turned against itself — what is the word for that? It cannot still be imagination. And so I turn to Wang again for a reminder:

Imagination is excess, is that which could never be contained by the prison, that which will always exceed it.

And with that, I want to talk about the title of today’s poem — “Similes” — and what it makes me wonder about the casual nature of our language, the way nothing is really like another thing, except when it is, and how important it must be to know the difference.

On the subway after I bought Johnson’s book, and after having chewed on this poem for a bit, and after having stared at the underground window that looks out at nothing but the whirring wall and its affixed lights, I wrote down something in my notebook.

All it said was this: a good simile levels distance — it creates an intimacy out of it. A bad simile creates distance when there should be intimacy.

Though I cringe at my use of words like good and bad (I feel there are always better words than these, such generalized words that do nothing to speak toward our own complexities), I think I stand by everything else I said. I do think that a simile that holds a kind of imaginative energy makes an intimacy out of distance. And I do think that a simile that feels damp and worn and no longer imaginative is a kind of thing that makes more distance than what exists. Such a simile would be like if I were standing across from you — yes, you — and if, as we were talking, we moved further away from one another. I guess that sooner than later, we would be yelling to even make our words work, and just later than that, we would have no relationship at all. We would be straining just to see one another.

Language can do this negative work, can’t it? It can pull two people who have the potential to be holding hands (think, again, of that word holding in Johnson’s poem above) away from one another, until they’re reaching, and then until they’re lunging, and then until they’re squinting, and then until they’ve given up on one another. Language can make more distance than exists. I think this happens all of the time. Such casual language, such generalized language, such opportunity for tenderness and intimacy squandered instead for distance.

I remember once, long ago, a Twitter (now X) thread spurred by a question that asked what would be missed the most if you left or were left by the one you loved. There were a number of answers, but the one I couldn’t un-think was the one that talked about language. Someone mentioned love as a language, a thing created by two people — something so specific that it rendered itself un-translatable. And it’s true. It’s so true. I would miss the same thing. I would miss the pet names, the nonsense vocabulary created out of intimacy and vulnerability and time spent together. I would miss the shorthand that love makes out of life, the shorthand that cannot be like anything because it is not like anything. The language that is its own thing, beyond metaphor or simile, because it is love, and because love makes out of our lives something incomparable to anything.

And some things are incomparable. In fact, most things are. But the beauty of poetry is that it takes that incomprehensible distance, and it attempts to remove it, and to see what happens. A simile can do that. So can a metaphor.

There will always be this impossible distance between us, this asymptotic gap we hope to reduce — day after day — with our words and our hands and everything else reaching, forever reaching, across whatever space, however small or large, exists between us. One beauty of language, that nonsense word you speak to me from the other room, is that it can make that gap so small that some other impossibility, call it love, can build its little bridge between us and let us say hello.

But the danger is when such a comparison is made out of two things when one thing shouldn’t exist at all. Nothing should ever be like a prison because a prison should not exist. By offering a simile that uses such an idea as one side of an equation, it gives validation to that side. It says that — because such a thing exists, it can be compared to other things, and, in comparison, it can become softened to the point of acceptance. When we make metaphors out of prisons, we also conditionally offer our acceptance of them. This is a dangerous thing. We do this all the time, with so much. To use language casually is to tacitly agree to our acceptance of what we — when we really think about it — believe should not exist. To make a metaphor is to make a world. We should try, I hope, to make a better one.

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