Antistasis (an-ti’-sta-sis): The repetition of a word in a contrary sense. Often, simply synonymous with antanaclasis.
Time was important, but I felt like I was running out of time. I had fallen down a marble staircase. Despite the fall and the injuries I felt privileged. They were the same stairs Mozart had fallen down after a night of drinking. Unlike me, he had stood up at the bottom of the stairs. He walked up them and composed one of his greatest musical wotks, Don Gionetti. It is about an Italian shoe repairman who is overcome by glue fumes, falls down a flight of stairs, wets his pants, and is bitten by his own dog, Mandrake. While he is sitting holding his bleeding hand, Mandrake runs away, but a woman appears wearing a powdered wig fashioned after a tree trunk with a bird’s nest holding a cheeping sparrow. Don Gionetti reaches out and crushes the bird with his hand. “How annoying your hair is madam,” Gionetti says holding up the dead bird. The woman pushed Gionetti down and his head hit the sharp edge of one of stairs. He groaned and dropped the bird. By some kind of miracle it flew back to its perch in the woman’s hair and began cheeping again.
“I am the Marquess of Bolly-Brooke. You are a drunken dog. I out- rank you by the distance from London to Inverness. You are scum. You are filthy. You smell like a barn housing pigs. Your linens are surely soiled. You are a Rotter, a cut-purse, and a seducer of innocents, like me.”
There is a puff of smoke and Gionetti turns into a well-dressed bearer of a royal comportment. “Come my dear, let’s go to “The Rook and Pawn” for a couple flagons of shandy—my treat!” Gionetti suggested.
Off they went together into the unknowable future, lacking in well-functioning faculties like most people of Royal blood. They woke up together with a third person in the bed. He was very apologetic as he expressed his gratitude for a most memorable evening. Neither Gionetti nor the Marguess remembered him being there, although the Marquess thought he looked a lot like her betrothed, sir Norbert of Sticky Gables. .
Clearly Gionetti and the Marquess are part of the 18th century’s lost generation.
They ate lobster three time a day, along with drinking gallons of shandy and smoking tobacco from clay pipes. Mozart had perfectly captured the ethos of time, doing his best work, a work which was to some extent autobiographic.
I am currently writing a musical play titled “Under the Rug. I won’t provide a synopsis here. Suffice it to say the “carpet” is Persian.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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