Mesozeugma (me’-so-zyoog’-ma): A zeugma in which one places a common verb for many subjects in the middle of a construction.
“Life is too boring to reclaim from the pits, my downward plunge, or life’s tragic rodeo.” I actually had these thoughts at one point in my life before I turned into the North Star and guided everybody home. I made a giant blue wing and sent it forth throughout the land. Soaring along, picking up passengers one by one, setting the tone for the future—wolves and lambs hanging out, the wolves turning into vegetarians by the magical power of B. Good. He played the guitar like the spirit in the sky blessing Heartbreak Hotel on Tuesday afternoon, giving everybody a little red Corvette for their special day.
Somebody said “It’s raining crabs in Disneyland.” This must be true at some level or it never would’ve been said, even if it’s a lie. If it is a poetic configuration we can retrieve its significance from the swamp of literalism. We must ask ourselves if there in fact any such thing as literalism—isn’t it just a deep rut in poetry’s road, so we’ll-travelled that it has become a road in its own right distinguishable from the poetic road, but as we know, not different, only observable, like a stain on a sweater or a floor. Nothing new here. Time to fire up the grill.
We’re having big fat wieners imported from Germany via jet. We have big fat buns. We have big fat mustard. We have thin sauerkraut to challenge our sense of continuity, to teach the first lesson of fracture’s ubiquity—how the world goes 1, 2, 4, thwarting our expectations, dashing our hopes and dreams. But, tomorrow is never today unless you have severe jet lag, like you flew nonstop lower class from Sydney, Australia to Newark, USA with diarrhea and shingles. That’s bad. Think about it. If you can’t think about it, you haven’t read it: to read is to think. Of course you can think without reading. You can listen. But the most important things can’t be read or listened to. Thinking entails taking what’s there and thinking about it. As soon as that happens, it’s like you’re pole dancing with what is. But that’s the best we can do if we want to “share” with others, to socialize and overcome our isolation. We are willing to sacrifice the unsharable for the shareable, by communicating.
Well, that took us nowhere—not like a bus or a subway conveying us to a well-imagined destination—even if we’ve never been there we can go map in hand, GPS in front of the face—pulled into time by a well charged Apple device—playing music, leaving messages, staying in touch, but not actually touching.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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