Abbaser [George] Puttenham’s English term for tapinosis. Also equivalent to meiosis: reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature (a kind of litotes: deliberate understatement, especially when expressing a thought by denying its opposite)
I’m no hero. I’m no coward either. Well, I say Mount Everest is a Tibetan molehill. You may be thinking I’ve gone off the rails, but I’m talking about the power of attitude. My attitude can cut Mount Everest’s altitude down to a pimple on a Buddhist monk’s butt. I’m going to climb that little bump or my name isn’t Carl Young.
The mountain’s so-called height makes it seem insurmountable. It symbolizes strenuous walking along an upward incline. It symbolizes heavy breathing, expensive climbing boots, sore muscles, constipation, and memory loss. It is one of the toughest symbols in the pantheon of archetypes, perhaps bested only by the valley—the warm and sticky linear fissure in the soul of nature. Like a Venus Flytrap it entices its unwary prey into its sweet abyss. Its edges are littered with fallen saints overcome by passion and frozen in time. The valley must be shunned at all costs. If you succumb to its glistening slippery rim your life will become a repetitive treadmill of desire forever distracted, forever wanting to slide into the abyss head first. Amen.
I was going to Tibet to conquer Mount Everest for myself. To struggle with the perils and bury my fear. I would be a man—a man’s man, a manly man, a man among men. I took the bus from the airport. I could see Mount Everest everywhere I looked. Mt. Everest was ubiquitous, but it looked fake, like a piece of cardboard with a picture on it. I hired a Sherpa from “Cut Rate Sherpas.” His name was Gunga Dill. I asked him about my cardboard cutout theory and he laughed. That was it, he just laughed.
We loaded up the next day to begin our trek to Basecamp Jerry Lewis. Evidently, there was a French influence operative here. I had bought a BarcaLounger at the market for climbing breaks on our way up. With some difficulty Gunga was able to load it on his back.
POSTSCRIPT
The narrative abruptly ends here. Mr. Young was run over and killed by a ghee delivery truck before he even had a chance to don his expensive climbing boots. Gunga kept the BarcaLounger.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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