Mixed metaphors
Imperfect comparisons and beauty
There is a specific moment, in Lucy Dacus’s song “VBS” that I wait for every time I listen to it, a moment I like so much that I can’t help overlooking other well-crafted lines as I anticipate these particular ones:
Sedentary secrets like peach pits in your gut
Locked away like jam jars in the cellar of your heart
Waiting to be tasted and ultimately wasted
You were gonna win me over from the start.
It’s not exactly a mixed metaphor. It’s a mixed simile. Or a layered simile. I’m not sure what to call it. I love it and at the same time find myself saying: How illogical. Look at all the comparisons you’re piling on top of one another.
I should interject at this point to say that the ultimate point I’m going to make is not my own. But I don’t know where I got it from. Sometime in the last year I read something arguing in favor of mixed metaphors—those frowned upon messy entities you’re supposed to avoid, as a writer, and disdain, as a reader. But I can’t remember where I read it. It’s all, fittingly, mixed up in my brain. So while the Lucy Dacus example is my own, the thesis is not: that mixed metaphors, in spite of their muddledness, can be beautiful and somehow perfect in spite of their imperfection.
Let me walk through this, briefly.
Dacus’s verse starts with a simile. “Secrets [are] like peach pits.”
There’s some layering even within this simile. The secrets are sedentary. The peach pits are in your gut. This isn’t quite personification (people at office jobs are sedentary, but non-human things can be too.) Still, secrets aren’t usually described this way. And peach pits aren’t usually in your gut. Unless you swallow them, I suppose.
But there’s something so evocative about this. Especially if you listen to the lyrics as they’re sung. The note sinks at the word “gut.” You can almost feel it sitting there. The secret, the peach pit, the stone. Something heavy and small, inside you.
But then—in the middle of a comparison, then!—“Locked away like jam jars.”
Another simile. Within a simile. But what is being compared to what?
On the face of it: the peach pits are like jam jars.
Or: the secrets (which are like peach pits) are also like jam jars.
What?!
And these jam jars are locked away. As opposed to, you know, the ordinary jam that you keep in your fridge until it inevitably molds.
Or maybe like those kind of jam jars too.
The purist would say that such a comparison is sloppy. You’re mixing one comparison with the other, possibly comparing the comparison—which is not just confusing but confused.
However.
The movement between these comparisons gets me every time.
I feel the sink of the secret into my gut, the note that drops like an unintentionally swallowed peach pit.
And then I see those rows of jam jars—which have to be peach jam; they just have to be—glowing on a shelf. I see (specifically, subjectively) the rows of peaches that my roommate preserved in mason jars one August and that sat atop the wooden spice rack in the kitchen for over a year, because no one was sure if they were safe to eat. They glowed when the sun came through the window. They lit up, orange through glass.
The line continues: “in the cellar of your heart.”
We’ve moved from the gut to the heart, from that pit of discomfort to the organ associated with love, longing, ache.
So incredibly mixed. Bodily locations, comparisons, everything.
But aren’t feelings always this mixed? This odd?
The jam jars are “waiting to be tasted and ultimately wasted.”
Never mind that the peaches have already been tasted, the pits stripped of their fruit, either consumed or turned to jam. There’s a second waiting, where these jars sit and preserve and waste too. Or are opened and tasted, in all their sweetness.
I can’t fully explain everything that goes through my mind when I hear this part of the song. Except that the mixing of simile is exactly what makes the feeling. A straightforward comparison wouldn’t do it.
It makes me wonder, every time, about all the writing rules I’m not breaking because I think they won’t make sense. All the sense that’s made from illogically beautiful language.
I’m reminded of an interview with boygenius (the band of which Dacus is a member) in which they comment on breaking rules about repetition and rhyming a word with the same word.1 This exact rule-breaking also happens in “VBS,” after the peach pit/jam simile.
Your dad keeps his sleeves down through the summer for a reason
Your mother wears her makeup extra thick for a reason
When I tell you you were born and you are here for a reason
You are not convinced the reason is a good one.
For a reason, for a reason, for a reason. It has to be repeated for the meaning to sink in.
Likewise, I think the peach pit simile has to be mixed. It has to keep reaching for a comparison and not quite making it. Each attempt to bridge the gap between what actually is and what it’s metaphorically like ends up widening that gap, ends up saying: I can’t say, I can’t say, but here I go trying nonetheless, and isn’t it beautiful to try.
Their discussion of this starts at minute 8:30; the section labeled “Breaking rules.”