A couple of years ago I got thinking about the grandfather clock I had picked up at an auction for not too much money. It was a beautiful thing; built around 1820, slender and delicate, with the most gentle sound of a bell, like a ghost of time, marking out the hours. It got me thinking about time and how it holds the universe together, and in that daydream I had the idea for this sonnet. I hope you like it.
PS: I still don’t think I’ve got the final line right, so am working on it!
I Bought A Long Case Clock
I bought a long case clock, whose motive weight
through wheels, escapement, pendulum and gears
spins time with gravity. Now contemplate
how Time has Weight to mark our passing years;
how gravity’s a mystery whose effects
are seen in Heaven’s Movement and the Tide –
revealed by bending starlight, it directs
unseen: forever present, yet implied;
how Time’s the precondition for the chain
of causes linking future, present, past;
and how this impulse secretly sustains
our World: it was the first, it will be last.
All this my clock provokes: how this machine
the Infinite implies…
…and hands unseen
Copyright (c) 2010 Matthew Wingett in all media
Someone told me I was widely regarded as a psychopath. I told him: “You can’t get that one by me. There’s no such thing as other people.” – Matt Wingett
So, this is the rewrite of the poem I wrote a few days ago. I have attempted to tidy up the meaning and improve the metre. Have had to lose a rhetorical flourish for the sake of clarity, but I think that is no bad thing. Would love to know what you think. Cheers!
.
“Ghosts!? You think a corpse can emanate
across The Void (so empty, dark and wide)
a spectre of past life? Disincarnate?
And why? To act an omen? Be our guide?
Really! No distant world beyond can light
the soulless night – bend nature’s laws – and send
a messenger! This lonely truth is right:
Not one thing lasts beyond its natural end.”
I held my tongue. I could have answered back,
except – a thousand, watchful, pallid eyes
hushed me, glinting from the silent black.
Standing still beneath those star-filled skies
I knew that for each present long-dead sun
I need not speak: Their argument was won.
Copyright (c) Matthew Wingett, 2010
So, this is the first draft of a sonnet that I wrote last night. It came out of an idea I had while reading a book on cosmology. Wonder what you think? It’s the first draft only, so I may fiddle with it later. I have called it:
.
Evidence for the existence of ghosts
.
“Ghosts!? You think a corpse can radiate
across The Void (so wide and dark)
a spectre of what’s past? Disincarnate?
And why? To send an omen? Make dogs bark?
Really! No ghoulish world beyond can light
the soulless dark, bewilder nature’s laws, extend
beyond the grave. This lonely truth is right:
Not one thing lasts beyond its natural end.”
I held my tongue. I could have spoken back,
except those long-dead shades whose pallid eyes
that glimmered hushed me from the silent black.
Standing still beneath those star-filled skies
I knew that for those present-long-dead suns
I need not speak. Their argument was won.
.
Copyright (c) Matthew Wingett, 2010, in all media
Okay, so I’ve got to share this with you because I think it’s one of those unusual words that I didn’t know existed. I was just reading Seamus Heaney’s notes on the Anglo-Saxon poem, “Beowulf”, and this really unusual word jumped off the page. When I find new words I get as excited as an amateur naturalist finding a new species of beetle. Here it is:
“Synecdoche.”
It’s pronounced to rhyme with “select a key” – so: “Si NECKED a key”, with the stress on the second syllable.
The context it was in was to describe the Old English word “ecg”, as used by the Anglo-Saxons. It is pronounced “edge” – and interestingly enough, means “edge” – as in the edge of a blade.
Now, here’s the thing. In Anglo-Saxon writing, the word “ecg” doesn’t only mean the edge of something. It stands for far more – because it can also means “sword”. What happens is that the part of the object referred to gets to stand for the whole thing. So, “ecg” by transference, also means “sword”.
That’s synecdoche.
You’ll hear synecdoche all the time in modern English, where the part stands for the whole.
For example: “Here comes Big Mouth,” is a good example, although in this case, you could argue that the part stands for the hole. Another example would be: “Who’s the suit?”
And it’s not only used this way. It can also be used the other way round, where the whole stands for the part. “The street was jumping for joy” doesn’t normally mean that houses, lamp posts and gardens were involved in uplifting athletic activity. Just the people, normally.
Another form of synecdoche happens when you talk about the container of something when you mean its contents. For example, when you say: “I’m just going to boil the kettle”, you don’t actually mean that you are going to get a kettle, put it in some form of crucible and watch it first melt and then bubble off as kettle vapour. Nope, as far as I understand it, you are going to boil the water in the kettle. And when you say “Do you take plastic?”, it doesn’t mean you can pay for your goods in empty milk cartons.
Then there are the words in which you use a specific class name to refer to a single thing. I’m not sure, but I think the annoying habit of a friend of mine to refer to all women as a “Doris” might fall into this category. “I was out with this Doris the other day, and…” He’s a nice looking boy, and the only Doris I knew of was an elderly lady with a blue rinse with a penchant for knitting. When he tells me this, I see him in my mind with his hairy chest and open-necked shirt in a swanky bar, seducing a woman in pink carpet slippers and 1950s glasses, who will take her teeth out and put them in a jar at the side of his bed, before the evening is out. Which pleases me no end.
Finally, there’s the version of synecdoche which is a general class name that refers to a individual items. To be honest, this one I don’t really get. With “Prepare to abandon ship”, for example, it’s pretty obvious that it means the ship you’re on. You know, the one that’s sinking. Besides, abandoning someone else’s ship means getting on to it in the first place. Which I suspect would be counter-productive. I think that’s a form of synecdoche, but I’m not sure. Synecdoche is, after all a new word for me, so I am sure there is much more to learn about it. What I know is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, if anyone can shed a bit of light on that final class of synecdoche, I will be most pleased.
In fact, to be synecdochetic about it, I will be all smiles.
🙂
“Give a man a fish, and his house will smell of fish. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll have cats in his bins for the rest of his life.” – Matthew Wingett
Give a man a fish, and his house will smell of fish. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll have cats in his bins for the rest of his life.
A bit of a change today, with a limerick I dug up in one of my notebooks:
A bearded old midget from Baden
Found his body had started to harden
He dyed himself red
Put a cap on his head
And now he adorns someone’s garden
(c) Matthew Wingett, 2010
After the NLP session I did yesterday with a client, today I had the following text from a very much more smiley individual than the one whom I met before the session began. Bear in mind it was tipping down with rain when I received the text, which explains the rather cryptic first line:
I’m wet and fabulous! Spent most of yesterday laughing just because I can. Saw two friends last night. One kept touching my knee constantly to make me laugh! And there is something delightfully wicked about laughing out loud in the pouring rain. 🙂 Got the pic back briefly, but quickly shrunk it and moved it to the side then thought about something else!
This is what makes doing hypnosis such fun. I think of the client now, her hand suspended in mid-air as she sat in the cafe, internalising the learnings I had given her. It was like a textbook session. I will report back over time to let you know how she does.
I had a lovely result today. On a sparkling day in Southsea, I met a client in a cafe, over a cup of hot chocolate.
She was a young woman with a slightly lost expression, looking pained and a bit confused. Upstairs in the cafe, in the bright light of the Autumn sun, she sat across a table from me, telling me how she couldn’t get over a break up with a guy who was, essentially, one great big waste of space.
I have been so busy lately doing other things than hypnosis, and this was a great opportunity to dust off the NLP skills and give her a blast of reprogramming.
It was a lovely environment to do it in. Soft chairs, silence, clear light – oh – and the hot chocolate.
How did we make the change? First: I ran a series of metaphors about how we use technology to find places so much more easily these days. The email I sent her had a link to the cafe so she could immediately find out where it was, rather than have me take loads of time talking to her and giving her boring directions. Instead of blindly groping around searching for answers, we find what we are looking for with the help of novel ideas for more quickly… such a change in the speed with which we get to where we really want to be would have seemed impossible just a few years ago…
And then, on to the reprogramming. A simple disconnection of the current feelings from the memory, then moving swiftly on, finding positive emotions and getting her to journey with them into her future.
I kept looking over my shoulder as I put her into a trance and lifted her hand, doing good old-fashioned arm levitation to get her to reprocess the information I programmed in. I thought how strange it would seem if a member of the public walked in to the room, seeing her in a relaxed state, eyes closed, giggling as I tapped the anchor on her leg. She was an amazingly responsive client.
After this, when I asked her about how she felt about the break-up, she looked at me blankly and said: “What break-up?” before struggling to recover the memory. Then she added: “It’s weird… I feel lighter…” and she smiled a broad, happy smile.
We walked out into the sunlight, with her still wearing that broad, sunny smile. I will keep my eye on her, but I’m pretty positive we’ve nailed the depression.
Thank you Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. You showed me how to knock out another little patch of unhappiness in the world, and plant a garden there, all in about 45 minutes!