April Aphorisms

 

The most essential musical punctuation: the repeat sign:  :|

What if...

What if some ancient, obsolete religion turns out to be it.  The afterlife, for example, will follow a system of rewards and punishments never revealed to anyone except for one tribe living long ago, whose belief system died out when they happened to have been conquered by a neighboring people. This sounds absurd and unfair. But then does that mean that a religion being widespread or currently practiced increases its chances of being true? Wouldn't this must be the most vulgar possible form of epistemological relativism? 

***

Recently, some baptisms, performed over many years, were judged invalid because one particular priest had used we instead of I.  It seems improbable that humans could know the pronouns preferred by the deity.  This information would have to be revealed, and then to be preserved inviolate for centuries. Yet this grammatical problem is only a trivial manifestation of a much greater question...  

One of greatest ideas every, back from 9 years ago or so

 I'd like to imagine a computer that could design a human that could beat it at chess.  

Time Travel Aphorisms

 

I travel in time, but only in one direction, and at the expected speed.

***

There are two varieties of time travel: aging and memory. Often practiced simultaneously.

***

Time travel does exist. It is called getting older.

***

"Before the invention of time travel..."

***

Le temps, c'est moi.

 Get over thyself.  

More sofismas

 The world is a daily invention. 

Slowness is only a privilege of the speedy. 

He died of the disease he himself baptized.

Every reading of a text is valid, except that of its author. 

You hammer me with stupidly soft words. 

If you win, you have not yet played. 

He who edifies, destroys. 

What can they know of wars, those who've never lost one?  

I want to go to where they recognize I'm a fugitive.  

Those who shave too close are making a mistake: smoothness scratches.  

*****

Any selection of the sofismas made by me would be biased: in favor of the ones that resonate with me, or that I can understand or easily translate. Thus the parts I would be leaving out would be aspects of his thought that are not attractive or comprehensible, a systematic bias, then, not an accidental one. 

Sofismas

 Vicente Nuñez (poet from Cordoba, 1926-2002) has these aphorisms that he calls "sofismas." I'm thinking of doing a translation of some of them. But I don't understand them all. There are several thousand...  Maybe this will bring me out of my Bronk obsession.  

The conversation of a rich man has never been enriching. 

Consumer society tries to bite the archaic coin--something it cannot do. 

You are who you ought to be when you are with the one you ought to be with.*

Every day I unknow you less.

Excessive proximity is always aggression. 

Everything is a fossil, even language.  

True elegance is the false kind. 

Without language there is no behavior. 

All friends are friends because they are enemies of themselves. 

They cough, therefore they speak. [or, they cough, then they speak?]. 

I know who am am not, but I am not who I do know. 

God help us from sleeping far from our insomnia.  

We speak the same tongue, but not with the same tongue. 

I still have not been able to find my ablative absolute. 

_________

*"Se es quien debe ser cuando se está con quien se debe estar." The translation conveys the idea but not the wit the unusual use of reflexive construction. 

Bronk

 Reading poems by William Bronk makes me think Bronk-like thoughts, things that he might have written but in fact didn't. I cannot guarantee that I'm getting the tone or substance or Bronk "right" in any meaningful sense.  My idea is that all his poems are saying that our constructions of things, all our ways of keeping track, are inconsequential and do not get at reality.  I'm seeing that through a zen lens now, but when I started this series I did not yet know about this aspect of zen.  Now I see many poems as zen like in this sense, pointing to the "don't know mind."   

Ultima necat

 I translated some poems from this book, Ultima necat, by Cordoba poet Manuel Álvarez Ortega. The title is ultima necat, so I looked it up. It comes from a Latin saying sometimes found inscribed on clocks: All the hours wound, the last one kills.  Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat.  

The entire book seems to describe funereal rites. 

Neco is a verb that means to kill, but used more metaphorically. Cognate to Greek necro.  

***

Granada is a Ford. Seville is a Cadillac (gm.). Cordoba is a Chrysler.  So the big three US automakers divided up the three great Andalusian cities?  Shouldn't that be an antitrust investigation.  

The most eloquent disguise

The most eloquent diguise

is to be yourself.  

Phrases the don't make sense: a story shorter than its title

 "Before the invention of time travel...."  

aphorisms

Most people are not "most people."

Ruin an aphorism by prefacing it with "studies show..."

The hard part is not the blindfold, but the piano.

There is no such thing as an "Ashberry."

All art is "visual art."

The glissando destroys everything that has come before.

After “happy hour” comes melancholy hour.

Idioms and Proverbs

I'm giving my "Idioms and Proverbs" course in the Spring; I just found out this morning.  This will be a linguistics course rather than a literature one, so emphasis will fall on phraseology rather than "the short form" as a literary genre.

Dream of the Anti-Aphorism

There was a new genre discovered, in this dream. It was called scheherazade [phonetic approximation?], and I was investigating it / trying to explain it somehow.  Though short, it differed from the aphorism in that it was delicate and non-obtrusive rather than heavy-handed, axiomatic, and sententious. Most examples were much shorter than aphorisms. When I awoke I realized I myself was the main expert in this genre, because it was my dream.  I cannot quote you any examples.

Every time I read this novel, the same characters die.

Aforismos / Unheard Melodies

Dios aborrece las apuestas, sobre todo las apuestas sobre su propia existencia.

En Cuba mi condición de turista me impedía escribir. Toda observación posible iba a ser la de un turista. Entonces, ¿para qué? Sabía, además, que esto no podía ser de otra manera, aun antes del viaje.

Leo la secuencia "hubiéramos podido sospechar" y tengo que sospechar de estos tres verbos, por gramaticalmente intachables que sean.

El apellido más sabio es "Barbudo." No obstante los que llevan este apellido no lo son. O pueden serlo, pero no por el apellido.

La revisión de un aforismo requiere tiempo.

La invención de una música sin palabras nos condujo, después de varios siglos, a una música sin sintaxis, sin prosodia, sin árboles morfológicos.

Cualquier oración de Kafka, sacada al azar de su obra, es un aforismo.

***


How difficult to gather all one's belongings from hotel room or train!

The aphorism project can never amount to much. It simply accumulates more and more bulk. As it grows larger, it is increasingly repetitive and pleonastic, never becoming coherent or achieving epic scale.

Imagine a group of people with a genetic quirk that made their excrement very valuable. (We don't have to work out what the value of their shit is, for the purposes of this allegory.) They are wealthy but constrained in their movements and socially ostracized. They live in a compound and are fed a restricted diet.

A concert at which every member of the audience is thinking: I could do it better. Even though nobody in the audience happens to be a musician. And the musicians playing are themselves excellent.

Imagine hopscotch chalkings on a sidewalk. (In a child's hand but meticulously done.) After a few days the squares are smudged and faded. It has rained but very little. Write a poem or story based on this image. This is my gift to you.

The phrase "unheard melodies" never actually appears in Keats's "Ode."

Sontag denounced the aphorism, but she needed an aphorism or two to do so.

My father once called someone a superb poet. It was that word that got me: the idea that someone could be superb at that, be described with that exact word and no other. I still feel the peculiar resonance of that adjective forty years later.

When someone corrects what you throw out as a casual hyperbole, misunderstanding your rhetorical flourish. But then this hyperbole turns out to be exact. So both of you are wrong.

What if self-mastery were a real thing? What would happen if we acted as though it were real?

The best place to write aphorisms is in the blank pages at the end of a book of aphorisms.

A fear of a parking ticket, even when I have walked down town.

I have been a specialist in the 1950s for much longer than there was a "1950s."

Buy expensive paper, but only write on torn envelopes.

Aphorisms linked thematically no longer work: they become notes toward a dull treatise on something.

***

The idea of self-consciousness, self-awareness, or self-control is intolerable. Who exactly is controlling whom? The very idea of the self introduces an intolerable self-division.

***

With a really good spy movie the spectators never find out who the spies were.

***

Poetry is a visual and a performing art, but everyone wants to concentrate on that narrow space in poetry that is neither.

The Short Form (again)

I think I could do my short form course as a short unit within a longer course on modern poetry. I had thought of doing a course based on Poundian ideas (melos / phanos / logos) but the short form would fit in there somehow as well.

Not that it is exclusive to phanopoeia or logopoeia. It certainly cuts across those categories. I wouldn't dare to do an aphorism course as a stand alone unit, since I wouldn't get the numbers of students needed to make the course make.

Sonnets

If by dull rhymes our English must be chained,
And, like Andromeda, the Sonnet sweet
Fettered, in spite of painéd loveliness;
Let us find out, if we must be constrained,
Sandals more interwoven and complete
To fit the naked foot of poesy;
Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gained
By ear industrious, and attention meet;
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage, let us be
Jealous of dead leaves in the bay-wreath crown;
So, if we may not let the Muse be free,
She will be bound with garlands of her own.

There is a theme in English romantic sonnets of the "contraintedness" of the form. There is this one by Keats and some others by WW: "Nuns fret not ..." The idea that the sonnet is narrow, a constraint. Shakespeare and Donne (or Milton) would not have thought about it that way. I've italicized some words that emphasize some negative aspects.

See Frost's "The Silken Tent," which continues the theme of ties, and bondage.

Short Form: Sonnets and décimas?

Are sonnets and décimas forms of the "short form"? I would say that sonnets are short, 154 syllables Spanish. Décimas are 80 syllables. I'm not sure brevity is the point of these forms, though. All short lyric poems are not examples of the short form. Brevity itself has to come into play.

I'd be glad to be corrected if you have a better idea.

The rap on brevity

We know that "lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno," for example, or "brevity is the soul of wit." The rap on brevity, though, is that it is simplistic. The idea that what fits on bumper stickers or "sound bites" represents a superficial knowledge. That the short form is authoritarian because apodictic. What can you say in a 140 character tweet? We've all heard this arguments. Whenever someone quotes Kissinger to the effect that academic politics are vicious because the stakes are low, my heart sinks. The person seems to think that the aphorism explains something (it doesn't) that K. said it first (he didn't) that this is the first time we're hearing this (it isn't) and that we will be impressed by the quotation (we aren't and won't be). As though academic politics were more vicious than, say, invading Cambodia?

The narrator of Cinco horas on Mario quotes from Proverbs but then doesn't understand the biblical verses. She speaks in a serious of idiomatic expressions, clichés, cursilerías, and proverbs in order to express a deeply conservative philosophy. The book, then, is a wonderful compendium of linguistic items. Every single page contains dozens of them. The fact her language is like this is supposed to explain something about her, her rigidity and lack of imagination.

The Celestina, the proverbs are there for there bitter cynicism.