Writing practice: more imagery
[ok more of this first…]
Integrity encompasses many things. Intellectual integrity means you constantly work to expand your perspective and knowledge, to eliminate the adjectives and adverbs when you try to identify the facts of reality, to take ego out of your thought progression when examining the facts of a situation.
Emotional integrity means you, through intellectual integrity, maintain control over your emotions so they don’t allow your ego to cloud your thinking or affect your actions.
Physical integrity means keeping yourself, to the extent you’re able, fit and healthy so you don’t burden others with your unhealth and so you can help protect yourself from, and dissuade others from engaging in, actions that can impair your ability to maintain the other forms of integrity.
Professional integrity means constantly working to expand your value, and your capacity for value, to the marketplace so that you can provide better and better goods/service to your employer/customers, so that your work is infused with your personal integrity – no cheating, scamming, or shortcuts. Yes, you try to make as much for your product/service as the market will bear, but you do so honestly by producing the best you can for the most you’re able to receive for it, and constantly working first to improve what you produce and then to receive more for what you produce – one must come before the other. And between receiving less for what you produce than you think you should vs more, you receive less while still working to improve so that your value to the marketplace eventually catches up to the value you’re providing. Trying to go the other way around goes back to cheating, scamming, or shortcuts.
Economic integrity means living within your means so that you don’t burden others with economic problems, in the same way that physical integrity means (to the extent you’re able) you don’t burden others with your unhealth, and professional integrity means you don’t burden others with your incompetence. For me personally, I really like the concept of putting the bulk of my money away in relatively secure debt (instead of riskier investments such as stock, especially these days) because it forces you to earn more than you spend and then to have the emotional strength not to spend the money or gamble it, but to earn a modest but secure income from it. In this way, your spending power far exceeds what you do spend because you’re only spending your interest and not the principal, so you grow a more and more solid economic foundation, and you let your very modest spending increase slowly as you earn greater income from an ever-growing amount of principal. And whatever you do spend on riskier investments, you only spend that which you can afford to lose without burdening yourself or others with your loss. And of course part of this is constantly building your knowledge and emotional strength so that you spend the time to, to the best of your ability, understand the investments you make (whether debt or equity) before you invest – otherwise it’s just gambling on the professional and personal integrity of others, and that shifts the burden of maintaining and building integrity from yourself to others. Of course, to function in society we must rely on the integrity of others, but we don’t shift our burden onto them because they have their own burden. So if we shrug off the personal responsibility of understanding the investments we make then we are simply abdicating our professional and economic responsibility to others – not terrible if we are gambling with money we can afford to lose, but as we invest more of our worth then we more and more rely on others while abdicating our responsibility to maintain our own integrity and a solid personal foundation. And then if we lose more than we can afford and look to others to pay for our loss, well that’s about as far from integrity as you can get.
[ok back to imagery]
Looking at Hamlet right now, and Shakespeare uses, among other types of imagery, synecdoche (part to describe whole or v.v.) and metonymy (describe a thing by an associated thing). Synecdoche such as “Friends to this ground” to mean friends of Denmark. Metonymy such as “When he th’ambitious Norway combated”, associated Norway with the king of Norway. He also plays with meanings of words, using one aspect of a word’s meaning in its use, such as “You come most carefully upon your hour” and “Of unimproved mettle”. Then there’s also what I guess is standard metaphor, such as “Stand and unfold yourself” and “your ears, That are so fortified against our story.” Also there’s I guess anthropomorphism “And will not let belief take hold of him.” So it’s this constant beautiful playing with language – the whole thing is playful, the imagery dancing through almost every line. Anyway, my examples might not be exactly right for each type, but that’s the idea:
- Synecdoche (part for whole or v.v.)
- Metonymy (associated thing for a thing)
- Playing with one aspect of a word’s meaning
- Standard metaphor
Ok, so just play with this:
The tiptoeing of time. He speaks most humidly. Earth’s stormy veil. The petaled fields. A lumpy field of short stories engraved in stone. His scars were talking. The hollow-toothed politician. Unfold your motive.