12.26.2020

hard case

Being ignored was his armor.

12.22.2020

oncoming traffic of a kind

On the road we pass many things, but we often fail to notice time going by us in the opposite direction.

12.18.2020

avenue aphorism

Each avenue in the city is a kind of aphorism.

12.12.2020

can do, not know

Entertainment and sports are fields where you can get very rich without knowing shit.

12.09.2020

tip jar

Management allows the workers to put out a tip jar on the counter so their customers by tipping can be complicit in the underpayment of the workers.

11.27.2020

thrown together

A new WPA: The US government should pay urban youth to go into rural communities and to work during the summer. Agriculture, odd jobs, even to work retail at the Dollar General...it's about being together and sharing the space.

11.15.2020

there is no road

Aphorism or poem, parable or poem, proverb or poem, prayer or poem—poem proper, whatever that is. Who knows what to call Machado’s short writings cast as poems? The musings of a poet walking in the countryside, through small towns, beside rivers, across empty plains. Certainly these writing ring like old church bells; for centuries marking the hours, days, lifetimes. Certain themes persist: truth, being, experience, the journey, words, selfhood, and of course the poet in the world.

One thinks, that had Machado lived in our times, these poems would have found success on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. I say this not to demean them, but to acknowledge how wide and far such writing could travel in our culture with its hunger for simple revelation and a humane vision. Perhaps these poems fall into that category of writing we call ‘wisdom literature’. Machado, who so much valued solitude, would be horrified at the thought of a hundred-thousand followers.

Shall we walk a while with Machado and listen:

I never chased fame,
nor longed to leave my song
behind in the memory of men.
I love the subtle worlds,
almost weightless, delicate
as soap bubbles.
I like to see them paint themselves
In colors of sunlight and float,
Scarlet into the blue sky, then
suddenly quiver and break.

--
Our hours are minutes
when we anticipate knowledge
and centuries when we know
what it’s possible to learn.

--
The best of the good people
know that in this life
it’s all a question of proportion;
a little more, a little less…

--
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

--
You say nothing is created?
It doesn’t matter; with the clay
of the earth, make a cup
so your brother can drink.

--
You say that nothing gets lost,
and perhaps what you say is true;
but we lose everything
and everything will lose us.

--
Looking at my skull
a new Hamlet will say:
here is a nice fossil
of a carnival mask.

--
Look in your mirror for the other one,
the one who accompanies you.

--
A new age? Is
the same forge still blazing?
Does water still flow
in the same riverbed?

--
In my solitude
I have seen very clearly
things that are not true.

--
Wake up singers!
Time for the echoes to end
and the voices to begin.

--
Don’t search for dissonance:
because, in the end, there is none;
people dance to any tune.

--
The eyes you are yearning for,
don’t be mistaken,
the eyes you see yourself in
—are eyes because they see you.

--
Let’s not be in a rush
for the glass to overflow;
it must be filled first.

--
When I’m alone
my friends are with me;
when I’m with them,
they seem so distant!

--
Pythagoras said:
Sow mallow,
but don’t eat it.
Buddha and Christ said,
Greet the blow of an ax
with your fragrance, like sandalwood.
It’s good to remember
the old sayings.
There time isn’t over yet.

—Antonio Machado, There is No Road (White Pine Press, 2003), Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney translators.

11.12.2020

pure park

A golf course is a park where one is free from encountering other races and social classes.

[Trump's golf resorts and the set at the local country club come to mind here.]

11.10.2020

fall into the real

Reality is our failure to live in the ideal.

11.07.2020

rewarding oneself

He relaxed by testing himself not by treating himself.

10.01.2020

unsafe self

How to preserve one’s verve?

9.11.2020

mystical subatomic

We need another mystic like we need another quark.

9.08.2020

Mignon McLaughlin

Mignon McLaughlin went by the nickname “Mike.” The mix of the sophistication of her French first name with her down-to-earth American moniker seems to fit her aphoristic style. There is something of the salon and of the saloon in McLaughlin’s aphorisms. McLaughlin, a short story writer and playwright, worked for slick magazines like Glamour. She and her husband (a novelist and contributing editor to Time) were part of the smart set, hobnobbing with playwrights, comics and writers for some of the leading periodicals based in New York city during 1950s and 60s. Many of her aphorisms you can imagine being spoken at a cocktail party, with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other. McLaughlin's aphorisms wipe away the sheen of gaiety and good company to cast a colder eye on the upperclass and literary society. Difficulties in male-female dynamics (in more sexist times), drinking, gossip, the rivalry of friends, play a major part in her aperçus, with many making almost an alter-ego out of the now unfashionable term the ‘neurotic’: “Neurotics would like to sleep all the time, and to be awakened only when there is good news.” But there is fun, too, in these aphorisms fueled by the wit of a woman one wishes one had rubbed elbows with.

Here are some of Mignon/Mike’s aphorisms:

Love looks forward, hate looks back, and anxiety has eyes all over its head.

True remorse is never just regret over consequence; it is regret over motive.

Children expect to eat when they’re hungry; our job is to teach them to eat when there’s food.

The ideal home: big enough to hear the children, but not very well.

Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.

We can never understand other people’s motives, nor their furniture.

We hear only half of what is said to us, understand only half of that, believe only half of that, and remember only half of that.

The three horrors of modern life—talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.

With each passing year one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.

The people you admire most you usually don’t know very well.

Money: in its absence we are coarse; in its presence, we are vulgar.

Everybody can write, writers can’t do anything else.

Slavishly we imitate; and slavishly, rebel.

Don't be yourself—be someone a little nicer.

Mignon McLaughlin, Aperçus: Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin (Brabant Press), introduction by Josh Michaels.

about as

Probability theory is about as close to determinism as I can get.

8.29.2020

field to site

A field with several invasive species, none so destructive as those orange-flagged stakes set out in a rectangle where the excavation would soon start.

8.24.2020

many heroes hereabouts

Here a hero, there a hero, a hero everywhere.

8.18.2020

being is to obey

Living in a country where you must obey in order to be.

7.28.2020

scary stuff

Fantasy is for those too faint-hearted to face history.

7.18.2020

blindly beating

He has hung out his favorite piñata once again and has begun beating at it blindly.

7.15.2020

supernatural appeal

Because nature itself is so hard to explain, the supernatural appeals to people because it can so easily be explained away.

6.16.2020

retrospective prophets aplenty

They can always dig up one or another Nostradamus to say I told you so.

6.09.2020

feed and need

Happily for so long they’d lapped at the trough until one day they raised their heads as if to say it wasn’t enough.

6.03.2020

long may it wave even aflame

The greatest compliment one could pay to our/US flag is to acknowledge that a citizen who feels aggrieved by our government or its actions has the right to burn it.

6.02.2020

facial expression

He could play hard and not scowl.

5.21.2020

after-the-fact analysts

You don’t get any credit for identifying a problem or solving a problem in retrospect. Only action in real-time matters.

5.05.2020

kinds of solitude

Solitude is sweetest when elective, saddest when by circumstance.

4.04.2020

deadfall

Being a smidge over 6-feet tall, I was glad that with social distancing should I fall dead in a line at the grocery store, I’d only brush past one of my fellow human beings.

3.18.2020

step up

He preferred solitude to company, so when the virus hit he volunteered for quarantine.

2.19.2020

hive mind

Great cities are the minds of civilization.

1.24.2020

next day

It’s the next day that matters.

1.19.2020

the aphorists

In La Rochefoucauld’s aphorisms there is the feeling of drawing rooms, the air heavy with the dust of powdered wigs and pungent perfumes.

He's fond of negative phrasings which is perhaps a reflection of his cynical nature. Cynicism is one thing, but he’s often wrong, too, about human nature, or he overstates his case, which is perhaps inherent to the aphorism as a literary form.

1.08.2020

if not you

Remember, everything one does, could be done by someone else.