Metonymy-Metonymy may be instructively contrasted with metaphor. Both figures involve the substitution of one term for another. In metaphor, this substitution is based on similarity, while in metonymy, the substitution is based on contiguity.
Metaphor example: That man is a pig (using pig instead of unhygienic person. An unhygienic person is like a pig, but there is no contiguity between the two).

Metonymy example: The White House supports the bill (using White House instead of President. The President is not like the White House, but there is contiguity between them).

In cognitive linguistics, metonymy refers to the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity and is one of the basic characteristics of cognition. It is common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it.

Attention
Acting vs. behavior

Class 1
Intro self..reference FreeStreet and other influencers…
Encourage the notion of resistance to contempt prior to investigation. You get what you give in this process.
Discussion of the authentic action of the mind- impulses, both followed and resisted.
They are all writers, this is not about teaching how to write, and it’s about finding a different access to writing.

Practice:
Breath work:
- Hypnotise with slow meditative prompts to transition from simple everyday breathing to conscious breathing; imagining the stomach visibly rising and falling with each breath.
-Heart rate-accelerations with push ups or downward facing dog, then write.
-8 count standing to falling, then write.
-(all writing with no “I” or “me”- encourages impressionistic writing as opposed to diaristic).
-write the duration of a breath, noticing how it changes as they breathe faster when they get moving
-Stand in front, each one at a time, for one minute on the timer, then repeat with breath. Write after sitting down. Discussion of what one has to fall back on, the discomfort of being looked at, what strategies on employs to get through it. How focusing on the breath makes the minute go faster, discussion of “performance time” distortion of perception of time, can use breath as a unit of measurement.
-Assassin
write
-Bomb and Shield
write
Discussion Topics: what is flow, how to pay attention, the equation attention leads to focus leads to concentration leads to being in the moment, which is awareness. Stress the notion of practice generally, learning how to do something means you don’t have to be perfect at it. Introduce the idea that the transition from body to writing should be as short as possible, directly bringing whatever body energy into writing energy.

Class 2
-Breath practice:
-Using the image of filling a glass with water from the bottom to the middle to the top, emptying from the top to the middle to the bottom…
Write
-Write length of breath again
-Introduce the notion of an impulse in the body. They imagine a place between their eyes, touch it with their finger, then imagine a string pulling out of that place, stretching into infinity, and pulling them. They can follow that impulse or resist it. Build from one point to two to infinite points on the body with impulses stretching out of them being followed or resisted.
Write
-Physical writing- pick a noun and write that, not from the point of view of it but write dog, or chair.
-Stream of consciousness-word association round circle, creating group flow.
-Stream individual speaking into writing- create the momentum of the individual stream from speaking aloud into writing.

Discussion Topics:
Free association is group stream of consciousness.
Derangement and stream of consciousness- if derange senses how does the stream change?
1. To disturb the order or arrangement of.
2. To upset the normal condition or functioning of.
3. To disturb mentally; make insane.
Appolianaire, rimbaud, artaud, Mallarme, beats
Release and flow, expansion and contraction, continue to stress that the entire point of the practice is to return to focus when your attention wanders.

They are women. They speak cheerfully to each other, knowing they are being overheard. Their husbands listen to them talking, straining to hear for any private information being exchanged, or even for the melody of privacy. Away from their building they only say hello and pass cordially. Where they really meet is the front lawn of their building, two perfect squares of grass bordered by sidewalk and a fence. They lay in the grass, in the late afternoon, while their two daughters play on the sidewalk. The sun is low in the west, shadowed by the building into distinct geometrical shapes of shade and sun on the grass. The younger lies on her back with her feet dangling in the sun, the older lies diagonally to her with only her face in the shade. Their two little daughters run up and down, their urine-jelly filled diapers bulging and distorting their body shapes. The girls pick up rocks from under the two decorative fir trees in front of the building, and throw them into the grass where they will later be found and spit by the lawnmower. They throw rocks at their mothers. The women loll. They wince when the rocks hit them, but they don’t move away or caution their children. The younger woman scratches at her dirty jeans, the crotch smell rising, a miasma. The ice cream bell rings in passing, the train can be heard from blocks away, but the women don’t listen; they steam and wilt, melting into the grass silently together. When the screech of the gate from the rear of the building signals the return of the younger woman’s husband, the women flutter their eyelids and roll onto their sides, coming to kneeling, for a moment like lumbering dogs awakening from a torpor. They gather their respective children, all without speaking, and go inside.

One day, a poster appears in the front window of the younger woman’s home, the window that overlooks the front lawn. It is a political poster, calling for the re-election of the incumbent. It doesn’t even fill the whole window, just a small blue rectangle in the lower corner of the building. The women come outside with their children, and everyone takes their places, women on the grass, children by the stones. This day, the older woman, hotter than usual, dressed in black polyester, must wipe the sweat off her face and neck. An ant crawls across her arm, irritating. As she shakes the ant away, her head turns slightly and the blue of the poster enters her peripheral vision. So she looks at it. This woman has extensive political credentials from her past, but the vastness of the problems, combined with the tedium of relating to the kinds of people who are involved in politics, drove her into submission and apathy. She never regretted leaving her righteousness behind. The sight of the poster is an electric shock. If the older woman had been speaking, she would have been rendered speechless. She stiffens, suddenly aware of the younger woman’s proximity to her. They are close together, close enough to smell one another.

The children are playing badly on this day, fighting. The older woman’s child is tender, sensitive, talkative, strange. The youngers’: a pistol, yelling, pushing, resisting her friends’ proffered kisses. They argue over the stones, who’s stone is whose, where to throw them, whether to hug. This conflicted play is not unusual, this is their way. The younger woman’s child throws a stone that hits the other child. Tears, the flop, there is a cut. This really would require the attention of the mothers, but the older woman is frozen in a paroxysm of unexpected emotion. The younger, who is pregnant, fries, placid, in the sun. The screech of the gate signals the end of the idyll, everyone knows their part and they pair off into the building as they have done before.

The older woman dreads mentioning the poster to her husband. He has no tolerance for the other side; considers it a defining factor of character, supporting those villains. She mulls it for a day and a night, surely he will see it soon, should she bring it up, or will he? She thinks back over everything leading up to the sight of this horror. The day the younger woman, then pregnant with her first child, knocks on their door in tears and asks, with no preamble, if the older woman thinks she looks alright in the evening dress she is wearing. Her belly swells, it is beginning to be the fashion to wear revealing clothes when pregnant, but her husband thinks it makes her look fat. The older woman likes the way it looks, she looks ripe and luscious, her long black hair and ample ass surrounding her belly like parentheses. She is complementary, reassuring. This is the beginning of a covert alliance, strengthened by the birth of the younger’s child, the older woman brings a lasagna, this is her ritual to all new parents, the hot meal. The husband, good looking, young, stiff, all white teeth and crew cut, accepts the lasagna graciously but without warmth. He is a youth pastor, the neighbors are not people of god, that is obvious, but they are kind and he can tolerate them. The new mother is more grateful, she is exhausted by the baby and is comforted by the presence of someone who has been through it before. She is not close with her mother, resents her litany of sacrifices, and likes the older woman’s off-handed practical matter-of-factness about the body, the baby, the world. The older woman is easy about things, the early medical scare where the young couple’s car won’t start and the older woman gives them the keys to her car without hesitation, the shy but burgeoning sharing of babysitting back and forth for quick trips to the store, the way the older woman calls the youngers’ baby Beautiful, like a name. A contentment with the slow growth of intimacy surrounds the two women like a glow, they are not friends, wouldn’t call it that, but they don’t really need to call it anything. No one out in the world would know they knew each other, but they recognized something together: that they had stepped over a line, firmly drawn, and could never go back.

All this the older woman pondered, worrying over the poster. She felt something had to be done, but couldn’t imagine what. Should she mention it to the younger? This felt so wrong, an intrusion, and not a part of the silent contentment they shared. She considered putting up a poster for the other side, but she and her husband hated the other side as well, just not with as much rancor and rage. She wasn’t for anyone, only against. And in a way, she respected the young couple for caring enough to put up any poster at all. The thoughts came in waves, she was awakened in the middle of the night by the certainty that their support stemmed from a Christian perspective, unquestioning and dutiful. This horrified her even more- they had a child and one on the way, how could they be so blind to the consequences of a re-election? Were they only ignorant? Or willfully bigoted? A day later, she sat in her car as the thought came: what could they possibly think of us? They must hate us, distrust us, find us suspicious. Are they judging us and even pitying us? The older woman found these thoughts so painful, she was taken by surprise. The grief was sharp, she wept. Her husband has only contempt, he acts completely in character, with pronouncements of the end of the children playing together, he must protect his child from the inculcation of these revolting, conservative ideas. The older woman argues for tolerance, a live and let live attitude that she doesn’t really feel. Her husband’s mother comes to visit, she is even more militant than her son, she considers putting up a poster over the one in the window, climbing on a ladder in the dead of night, just wiping out the offending beacon of wrongness. The older woman manages to steer her mother-in-law away from this strategy, focusing on the problem of what poster one could possibly replace the offending one with, for whom could one proclaim one’s alliance? There was no one.

Slowly the days pass, and the poster sits in the window, fading with the sun. The election draws near, the older woman feels the tension stretch and pull, elastic. She does nothing; only turns her back on the poster, like it is in a perpetual state of removing it’s pants, and she turns back only in time to watch the younger woman coming in and out of the building, growing large with the child inside her.

She told herself that cooking it at the highest temperatures would help, believing that heat would heal and disarm the past expiration date. She supervised the table setting, the water glasses, the napkins folded in a funny way by the kid in the family. Tonight it was a diamond. She thought, that’s the hardest thing on earth, a diamond. Watching the outside of the chicken through the oven door as it cooked, as if that would reveal the rot; it looks fine, it looks good, it looks perfect, it looks fine…

The guest arrives, the chicken comes out. She sniffs it surreptitiously in the kitchen, carving it and sniffing it, serving it and sniffing it… Conversation, laughter, all couched, for her, by the waiting. Waiting after dinner for the first sign of gut wrench and roiling nauseal upheaval, waiting with a morbid assurance that vomit will be the end of the evening’s activity. She experiences a stretching out of time, her mind telling her that every moment is the last good one, now the storm starts, now, no, now…She watches each person, any sign of discomfort or a passing grimace is the beginning of it…she is sure…

The heaving doesn’t happen. No one gets sick. Except she is sick with tension.

So, after all was said and done, she had to reconsider what she thought she knew about rot.

She had only been wearing black. Maybe it was time for a change. If white clothes used to represent purity or some kind of simplicity or elegance, or lightness, or grace, now white clothes had the feeling of being in the service of something, like being a slave of a kind, or being employed by someone making her wear white clothes, or as if the clothes have to stay white, but of course they cant, and so she would be dooming herself to failure forever, and the person who was making her wear them was going to always look at her with a small private sneer because her shit stains or cum drip or coffee spill or sweat pit or drool line or snot wipe or blood smear was always going to be advertising her for the juice producer that she was. If it was very very hot, and the white clothes were like a kind of benevolent relief to bleached bones, shading out the sum of the beating down individual rays, one would have to think, by all means, wear white clothes. But if the reason for wearing them had to do with some kind of tremendous profound decision, a decision to change, where she was going to wear white clothes by god forever, then that was an obnoxious reason for wearing them. They made everyone else uncomfortable, and she knew it, everyone looks at white clothes and thinks they should be dressed more flowingly or ritualistically or simply or coolly or abstractly or less hotly or darkly or demandingly or frankly, and so feel indicted by her white clothes. She would have to take the white clothes away and turn them into rags. Once she’d have wiped up all kinds of things with the white clothes now turned into rags, if she had any energy for a project she might sew them back together into clothes again, careful to leave no stain under a seam, but parade the stains as a cool new pomo pattern. Once the coffee is cleaned off the counter and there isn’t any more mustard drip, and she’s found time in her busy schedules to sew up some clothes, not even with a machine but by hand because she never figured out the damned machine and spent more time on bobbin comprehension than it would have taken to make the damned clothes, so she does it all by hand anyway, and she does a bad job so that everything is haphazard a little, and she tries on the clothes that used to be white clothes and then were rags and now are stained up ripped apart and sewn back together clothes again, is she going to be grateful? Is she going to be grateful that she changed?
She sits and stares at the pundits. They seem to speak directly to her, prophesying Babylon and mortuary fanfares, candy apple sugar teeth and fancy hassle almost premiers. She hears really only one thing: its over its over its over. Wake up and get ready for it to be over, get dressed and get ready for it to be over, eat quick, its about to be over, stop whining, its already over. She wonders how they got to be pundits anyway, who licensed them for punditry, because she had a lot to say when it came down to it, she could lay it out on the self important egg waggers who represent what? Not her position, because if any of them were ever to find themselves in her position, she sure as shit would have no mercy, like none was done to her. She squints closer, her bad eye a melon splat in her vision, David Gergan already melon-headed to begin with and more so as she switches from Walgreens 4x magnifiers to dark glasses to nothing, restless to find her way back to real vision like it used to be. It usting to be something else is a dead trap of grey parachute folding freefall dinge, because even if they all act like they know, facebooking and texting, shoulder patting and bump hugging, sympathizing and empathizing all over her, they don’t know, they don’t know at all. They cant know, and thus, by virtue of her knowing, she is the true expert pundit of righteous anger analysis and detailed sufferance cataloguing. Get her on there with Wolf fucking Blitzer, she’ll destroy them with incisive dissolving laser rayed deaths head precipice wavering. They will hear and know, then, what real insight is.