Enallage (e-nal’-la-ge): The substitution of grammatically different but semantically equivalent constructions.
We was shocked—it’s like we’re sitin’ butt naked on a piece of bare wire plugged in the wall. Time ticked. The stars moved. We was shocked. What was unexpected slipped out of nowhere. Wasn’t that a wave—that tsunami of shock flooding our expectations away. Now they are replaced, but we don’t know it since our memories have been deleted by the shock, giving us only shock cutting our ties to the past like a cleaver, like a chainsaw made of molten metal searing the edge.
The feeling is odd. The deprivation of memory, especially long term, it leaves a hole in your consciousness you can crawl into to look for your past. Your identity has become like a flame flickering on a candle, consuming its wick in the present with its genesis consisting of the memory of when it was first lit ten minutes ago—not your birth and trajectory into the present.
And oh the shock! The tasteless colorless shock of our birth from the void—the null and the void, what we avoid when we grind our way through another day of mapless wandering, following nothing, going nowhere.
The shock. What makes the shock? What if we didn’t forget. What if we remembered what made us forget? Are we truly whole without being able to tap the trauma? Should we remember? Do we have a duty? Have we really forgotten or are we just trying to forget?
Is there a witness who can tell us what we underwent? Will that make a bell ring in our heads?
You assure me that we did not kill our mother with a hammer, dismember her with a hacksaw and bury her in the rose garden. You assure me. Your assurance keeps my memory blank, like some kind of special medicine made for fiends and serial killers.
I assure you that we did not kill our mother with a hammer, dismember her with a hacksaw and bury her in the rose garden. I assure you. My assurance keeps your memory blank, like some kind of special medicine made for fiends and serial killers.
But we are neither, as far as we remember. Hopefully, we will never know the source of our shock—the metaphoric shock of sitting on a wire, the literal shock of some real experience. We shall never know who plugged the wire in. As a shock, only a masochist would want to know it and experience it in memory. So, we are clear. We are free. There’s a lot missing, but it’s beneficial.
I found a tooth on the garage floor.
I have no idea where it came from. My sister told me to forget about it.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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