an annotation i wrote in october

Heather Hunter
Annotation

The Use of Metaphor to Ground Consciousness
In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Rattle of Wheels”

In Naomi Nye’s short essay “The Rattle of Wheels” in Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places, the narrator uses metaphor to both expand and ground the narrator’s consciousness as she undertakes the most primal and transformative human act: bringing new life into the world. The narrator describes the scene of the hospital delivery room while linking that scene through metaphor from herself to her new child to others in the maternity ward, the human lineage of mothers, and to the cosmos beyond.
This essay serves as a good example, for me, of the way in which metaphor can be used to link individual consciousness through the use of objects to the grander scope of life, to a collective and universal consciousness. By grounding her experience of childbirth in metaphor, Nye is able to universalize, memorialize, and contextualize the experience of adding one new life to the universe.
In the first paragraph, Nye uses imagery from the sea to create a sense of urgency and expansiveness to mirror the outpouring of childbirth and its effects on the changing and expanding consciousness of the mother. Nye likens the maternity ward to almost a Coast Guard emergency when she sounds the “rolling alert” of the rush of nurses down a maternity ward hallway toward the “islands” where expectant mothers lie in hospital beds. In this opening paragraph, Nye uses images harkening submarines and sea monsters for a woman’s body. The high hospital beds have “special buttons for raising, lowering”; the body is an “island on which the tailbone ached and the startled breasts grew and grew.” In a relief effort for the emergency, a rattling comes “as a boat coming to save us, the answer to our unshaped cries” (101). Through the metaphor of the sea, in the opening paragraph, the narrator’s consciousness reaches beyond the island of the hospital bed.
Next Nye moves from the mother’s body to the child and her earthly agreements. The child becomes a “compact swaddled bundle” which she must “negotiate.” It is the mother’s responsibility, a new duty, to negotiate a life-giving transaction. She must connect “rosebud lips” with “raw and blossoming nipple” to “make it hold.” Here Nye grounds the mother’s duty in the earthly metaphor of a negotiation while remaining metaphysical by asking about the relationships between the bodies. What will make this bond hold? She answers: “Something like electricity. Tapping into the source.” Using electricity as the metaphor of connection between mother and child, Nye universalizes and then deconstructs again asking “But who was the source? Was he? Was I?” Grounding the narrative once again, the narrator relates that she has been instructed to hold him “like a football” but does not find the metaphor of that earthly object helpful (101).
After establishing the cosmic nature of the experience, Nye moves on to metaphors of grounded preparation. She attends “a bath demonstration” overhears “anguishing over names.” But again she bursts into metaphor again when the objective label of boy or girl cannot capture what she deems “an Angel, a Miracle.” While embracing metaphor Nye rejects a reduction of life, of consciousness to the labels of “sex and weight” (102).
Nye finds more common terms for her baby inadequate: “petite” and “simply yellowish.” She sees her baby more transcendentally as in the hospital nursery she watches him “soaking in the glow,” and her husband continues the metaphor likening the baby’s “barely flickering an arm or leg” to “some beachcomber.” Nye refuses a reduction once again when she watches him “bask” in the “chamber of incubators” (102).
When a volunteer tries to commercialize the experience of childbirth to a post-rollercoaster picture display, trying to sell her a “portfolio of ugly First Day Photos,” Nye weeps. She needs to see her child and her experience as having a life beyond this first day being under the incubation light. She rejects the idea of taking home only “scrunched-up eyes and closed fists,” of potential of death, of “relics, ancient sad baby stories” poking “their fingers into fitful dreams.” Reconnecting with the outer world to reassure herself, the sky is “booming and blackening repeatedly” creating a metaphor of change and continuation lasting beyond her doubtful moments in a new life. This peculiar June has “endless rain, streets flooded” with not just one baby but “babies pressed to our side.” The weather in June becomes a metaphor for many lives that will change and continue (102).
The next metaphor of the human saga extends to the sad fate of others. When a stricken father collapses against a wall and blurts “My baby didn’t make it and my wife may not either,” the day changes, and so does the role of the nurses. Every woman a potential mother, Nye asks why the nurse did not “take him in her arms too?” (103).
Our potential as endless children, endless grievers, is expressed through the metaphor of the narrator buried in “swaths of clean linen, the stacked towels.” She has buried herself “in a closet, sobbing and sobbing.” This crossroads has propelled her again into larger metaphor, the tears of her eyes now the “abundant wellsprings, like the endless dripping of the stone cave in Syria where I’d prayed for this baby.” Nye creates the metaphor of the abundant potential of life when the craggy nun directs her to “drink, drink from the pool at the bottom, fill my bucket…” No matter the population, “…if a hundred people filled their buckets at once, the level would not go down.” The narrator drinks the water, which she uses as a metaphor to that has nourished her to this sacred moment where babies eyes are “haloed,” their empty hearts “hallowed” (103).

Reaching from the narrator back into the maternity ward she hears the “parade of rattling” far down the halls. The new lives of the babies have become “little bundled worlds on wheels each heading toward a different door.” The wheels rattle to “halts at bedsides” where there is the occasional yelp and cry, and then the baby’s individual consciousness and cry extends and “stitched all our rooms together” (104).
The narrator’s transcendent understanding is halted by her individual panic. She reduces the potential of her transcendent offspring through her sudden worry that he’d gone from “chilly to frozen.” Like a small boat, he could slip away while she was sleeping. Metaphorically back at sea, she pounds her call button “till the drawl flooded my speaker.” In her panic, her baby and the wheels converge. “The wheels are heading back to the nursery already and my baby never arrived!” (104).
The individual mother’s terror is likened to “the gap of centuries,” the “aching pit of longing.” Her terror of loss becomes the “lineage of mothers, bruised and troubled, echoing behind me . . . . rosaried Mexican mothers keeping vigil at Our Sacred Heart, chanting stroking Arab mothers, the mothers of Calcutta stoking dung fires before their tumbled cardboard shacks.” One mother’s pain becomes the ache of human survival everywhere.
Back at sea, the old questions return: “Would faith follow the fear?” The narrator sets us loose into the sea once more as “the intercom bellowed.” The vast turbulence of the sea is replaced by the metaphorically manageable “bottle” and “breast pump” (105). These items serve as containers of nourishment, lifeboats of simplicity and steady continuation.
And yet the metaphor of being adrift does not end with the solution to one day’s worry. The narrator then “tumbled into dreams” where “hugging the fatly anonymous hospital pillow” like a lifeboat, she dreamed of the lips of babies “that sucking pull” which pulls her both into her future, the baby’s future, and into the sea of the unknown. And yet, like a siren, the baby’s “fine-tuned whimper” pulls her back to earth. Despite the panic, her consciousness set adrift, there is the metaphor of the baby as a new lifeboat, a new wave to follow embodied in “unfolding fists around a finger.”
Nye’s final move is to use metaphor to create one last transcendent and yet mundane image. She is “dreaming the earth’s secret rattle as it turned in space on its ancient implacable hinge.” Transforming the commercial properties of a rattle into an item of metaphorically cosmic scope, Nye posits both a secret shape and secret sound for the earth. The earth’s “ancient implacable hinge” is still sounding and shaking in the hand of a baby, in the terror and agonizing longing of a mother, propelling us forward.
Through the use of the sea as a metaphor, Nye has set the reader adrift in the ocean. It is an ocean through which we have all come with no memory and to which some of us return as participants in its universal terror and reward. The lifeboats to the fearful consciousness of mothers and fathers in the maternity ward are nurses and babies. In the world Nye has created, incubators transcend their status as warming machines and become lighthouses, sun-like beacons where babies bask as beachcombers.
From one mothers’ consciousness to the lineage of human history, to its longings and its pitfalls, Nye has connected human beginnings through the rattles of wheels, charging us forward into unknown seas where the cries of babes connect us in our waking hours, where their lips suck, sigh, swallow, and pull us continually back to earth, where their fists continue to unfold around a finger. The sea, the fist, and the cry can all threaten to pull us under. Yet they also contain the promise of keeping us afloat amidst the dream of the earth’s rattle.