Old man – new approach. Less planned. Random, even. Making sense, but not excessively. Tangentially. Through the back door. Up through tectonic plates and lo! – tsunami!
(Fool’s gold, surely? Words drop in, group themselves and thus are shaped, planned. You want a verbal accident. Knowing accidents are not made; they only happen.)
So I’m a fool. Another penalty of old age. Wanting that which I may not have. Damnit, the sentences get longer as planning sticks in its snout. Down sir, down.
(I told you so.)
Begone, sir. You are predictable, a source of clichés. Three a penny. The leaden clump of the said-before. Give me the new new. The true new. The blue new. Aha! Can new be blue? Is it – might it be? – unexpected?
(And so self-delusion creeps in. Signs of senility.)
The hell with you. If I’ve got senility I may put it to work. And bring about that verbal accident. Unplanned words round a grain of sense. Blue words. To turn your fresh-faced nonentity blue. Even ultramarine. Hey, I didn’t see those four syllables coming.
(I’m proud of being blue. It’s a logical political colour.)
Alas for you. Blue on this side of the Atlantic lacks honour. On a face it signals lack of oxygen. You may snuff it before I do. And I may resurrect my old trumpet and play Land Of Hope and Glory over your coffin. Badly. Intentionally.
(Uh-uh.)
And that – at least – was unexpected.
Immediate word association psychology game produced "resurrected."
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: I'm unfamiliar with that game. The above is a form of dialogue pared down to essentials but with a few (pared down) passing thoughts thrown in. Re-reading it several days after I wrote it, I suspect I have overdone the paring down. The message is one for our times yet I fear it may require inordinate effort to uncover. Nevertheless, the post is original and that was what I was striving for.
DeleteIt's nice to see you enjoying yourself.
ReplyDeleteColette: Yes I was but I think it was at the expense of my readers. Send me a stamped addressed envelop and I'll mail you an expanded version of the post which should be tickety-boo.
ReplyDeletePsychologists aim to define their patients by giving them a word which the patient has to reply to with a single word IMMEDIATELY. I'm not sure how the analysis is done but presumably if he says "cabbage" and you reply "cauliflower" you may be rated as normal, but if you replied "breast" he may come to a different conclusion. The same idea is employed by putting an ink blot on paper, folding the paper in half then opening it and asking the patient to say what the resulting image looks like.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: It's not a game. In fact the psychiatrist reels off a number of words and looks for correlations in the patient's responses. The other procedure is called The Rorschach Test. I have a feeling that that both procedures are considered outmoded these days. What puzzled me in your initial comment was which word (of mine) you were responding to. I'd provided a number.
ReplyDeleteOh your are picky. I called it a game in a jocular fashion hinting that I didn't have much respect for it myself which you allude to as now being an accepted stance in more modern times. The point of my comment was to inform you of my immediate reaction, whether logical or otherwise and arose from an overall impression rather than any particular word. You would then have to take the part of the psychiatrist and make out of it what you will. All good fun eh?
ReplyDelete