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January 22, 2009Bucolic diaeresisnot to be confused with diarrheic colic!ANACOLUTHON, PROLEPSIS, ZEUGMAOr how about anaphora, litotes, chiasmus; hysteron proteron, asyndeton, ecphonesis; apostrophe, onomatopoea, aposeopesis; tricolon, metonymy, anastrophy. “A METAPHOR IS A LIE!”Stephen Colbert exclaimed to inaugural poet Elizabeth Anderson. “Why don’t you say what you mean as opposed to dressing it up in all this flowery language?” e.g., Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? vs. You’re hot! I love having smart friends. Kathy R. and I are at Monk’s Kettle trying to come up with the title for my next (this) column. First she suggests three figures of speech (she is a classicist, I am a writer) because we have just seen Charlie Kaufman’s awful directorial debut, “Synecdoche, New York” down the street at the Roxie. Well I’m pretty sure by now I’ve lost my Colombian friend Oscar (English is his second language); he confessed some of my words are too difficult for him. Instead we settle on the name of the $17 glass of beer (barley wine) I am drinking, “Highway to Ale,” but she sends more suggestions in an email. Her favorite is not a figure of speech but a metrical designation, bucolic diaeresis. (“That sounds painful,” said her friend). I decide that one tops the charts, even though my own favorite figure is the tetracolon climax (a rhetorical device alluding to four successive anal orgasms), or as Groucho Marx rendered it, “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly, and applying unsuitable remedies.” Either way, you’ve been fucked in the butt. I LOVE ALL THAT FLOWERY LANGUAGEbut if I’m employing it, it is most often without forethought or my making note of it. I don’t stop and think, “I’m going to cook up some chiasmus to take this sentence to another level.” Although I do have a short story draft called “Hysteron Proteron.” But I have given myself a former-English-major headache. I am excused. INAUGURAL BLESSINGS“I want him to fail.”– Rush Limbaugh’s inaugural wish for Obama. “Ah, fuck you ya fuckin’ fuck!”– the author’s inaugural wish for Rush Limbaugh. AN ASSIGNMENT AT MY WRITING WORKSHOPhad us looking back to the year we were half our age. That year, for me, was 1981. IT WAS HALF A LIFETIME AGO.I was 26 and had the blahs. “Blah,” I would spontaneously bleat, listlessly, like the trailing-off baa of a sheep, without even an exclamation point’s worth of emphasis. My job? Blah. My apartment? Blah. Philadelphia? “I have bled these city streets dry,” I said, deadpan. And my love life? Well, there I had not the blahs, but the blues. I’d been bored and blue before. Twice I’d roused myself by moving to new digs with new views. But this malaise was different, a dead end affair. A no-affair affair, with the comely young man from my modern fiction class, whom I’d “cultivated” by writing lengthy letters to, during his Italian semester abroad—only to have him come home and meet someone else. As a writer, I hesitate to tell the truth about the night he took me out to dinner to give me the news, because “Feelings” was playing in the background. Freakin’ “Feelings,” if you can believe it. The record accompanied the first tear to roll down my cheek: “I wish I’d never met you, boy!” It is too tacky to be true, and I can’t have you, my readers, suspecting I invented a scene at once so corny and sadistic. Still, I continued to love this man, spurred on by his silent acceptance of the love letters that never stopped flowing from my poor besotted pen, which neither of us would mention when we saw each other. That was our secret deal. He lived with another woman, but I could pour out my heart as long as I understood he was not going to return it in kind. Ultimately this was cruel, because it kept me bonded to him, despite other relationships that would come and go. I had tried, I even “left” him once, said I couldn’t handle this friendship. But we ran into each other, and it started all over again. I knew I would never be able to truly free myself of this hopeless attachment as long as I was in the same city with him. So I moved again to a new apartment—this time in Portland, Oregon. IT WAS HALF A LIFETIME LATER,but it was my whole life surrounding me, piled on the floors of my Lower Haight flat. If I were dead, this would be exactly the sort of estate sale I’d go wild at. “Did you see this French porcelain piss pot?” A steal at twice the price. I had it all, from the first floor lamp I bought for my first apartment thirty years before, right on up to the black ceramic cat I’d just acquired at the thrift shop (a mistake). I had been a collector of collections. Now, whatever their colorful history or folk art appeal, they were all just dead-weight things I had to lift and lug out the door. I was leaving, not from the blahs, not out of boredom, but necessity. I couldn’t afford to stay there. Not as I wished to live, without compromise, in the City—not as an office worker devoting my time to someone else’s career—but as a writer, pure and simple. My flat would give me the resources to do so. It meant more than money; it was the time that money would buy. My heavy furniture, upright piano, artworks, mirrors, grandfather clock—all of this was just stuff; I could give it away, sell it, donate it, but my papers! There were a lifetime of them as well, boxes studding the floor like headstones. Photos, clipped articles, writings, memorabilia [tetracolon climax alert!]. It boggled my bipolar mind. My most earnest fantasy is to have them all categorized, alphabetized, cross-referenced and easily accessible [tetracolon climax!]. Only then will I be able to untangle the Medusian ganglia of my thought process. If I could bring order to the papers, I’d bring order to myself. Yep, that’s what I like to tell myself. I even still had my college class notes. I yanked a lecture out of one pile and squinted at the faded blue mimeograph. “The half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in a sample to decay. The half-life for a given isotope is always the same; it doesn’t depend on how many atoms you have or on how long they’ve been sitting around.” I STRUCK A BLOW FOR FREEDOMwhen I wadded the handout up and lobbed it into the recycling bin. Even that slight a release lightened the load. Taking stock, I reflected that I and the 26-year-old self I’d been half a lifetime ago, were in the same position now, a major letting go and moving on. As a young woman forging my path across the United States, I’d been full of hope, excitement, curiosity, anticipation [tetracolon climax!]. I could describe myself like this, 26 years later, about my “new life” in the Mission, but not with the same fresh, driving desire to live at all costs. How I wish I could recapture some of the raw unself-conscious power and energy of that time, for when have I last felt a thrill like that sudden gasp of breath as I rose my foot onto the cab of the yellow Ryder truck, my future unfurling in front of me like a flag. NEXT UP FOR REVIEWwas a plastic barrel of 30 years of fashion statements, each piece almost a costume displaying the phases of my life: Danskin leotards, shirt dresses, corduroy jeans (girl, what were you thinking?), dickies, thrift shop bargains I wouldn’t wear but were too good a deal to leave behind, items crocheted by my mother, “kicky” sundresses and sexy dance dresses. One by one I threw them into the thrift shop garbage bag. I shed entire shelves and selves as floral prints went flying, animal patterns arced through the air, harem pants billowed, flouncy skirts flounced, “office” shirts with shoulder pads stood at attention. I shuddered with both disgust and relief. And popped my gum, summarily. At every job I’d had, I’d daydreamed, “Someday my life will have nothing to do with any of this. I’ll wonder how I let it go on for so long.” For me, by then, so long was too long. Why had I for years let myself lead half a life, giving my whole day away to others, to serve their cause, not my own, just to pay a mortgage? It had been a good home, but also a high-priced seven-room storage locker for my stuff. Enslave myself to this? Uh-uh. No. What made a mortgage more important than what I wanted? So. I’d given up my home to live as a writer. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. It didn’t matter how much stuff I had, nor how long it had been sitting around; the decayed isotopes of that half-life fell away like ash. I’m on my own, beholden to no one, living in San Francisco as a writer, pure and simple. And that’s the story of how my half-life, became whole.
The author with friend Kathy, and what’s-his-name in the back. Photo copyright and courtesy of Shannon Sutherland ------------------------------------------------------------ I need an LSD trip to the moon
I'll see you on the dark side copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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