almost immortal

The closest one can get to immortality is when they can’t find your body.

7 Aphorisms from Bob Perelman

7 Aphorisms from “Autobiography by Aphorism” by Bob Perelman, in Virtual Reality (Roof Books, 1993)

In my local Stop-n-Shop they have a book donation area. You are free to drop off books and to pick up what’s there. Of course there are many bestseller novels, class-assigned books, decade-old fad self-help books, etc., but among these, over the years, I’ve found a few good books.

Since the pandemic it’s been slimmer pickings. I’m generally looking for slim volumes (poetry books), and I found one of interest last week: Virtual Reality (Roof Books, 1993) by Bob Perelman. He’s known to be associated with the language poetry movement. A whole section of this book is printed upside down, you have to flip the book to read the text. At first I thought that this might be an intentional ‘dada’ move by the poet, but it’s clearly just a major screw-up by the printer.

Leafing through the book I came upon a section called “Autobiography by Aphorism.” Like haiku within haibun, there are seven aphorisms interspersed within blocks of prose. It’s hard to tell if Perelman takes these aphorisms seriously because they’re surrounded by wildly digressive prose that is not at all autobiography by any common notion. For example, here’s the last run of prose with its trailing aphorism:

She reaches behind her neck to undo her pearls and habit, willing the moment to sleep. Obedience dreams of pressed precise glyphs, groupings, curves, wakeup calls under sunny trees, a plunge to obsession in the mire, classes where the units strip right down to the White House. But that is all hearsay. Meaning slips into something less natural.    

—Nothing is more beautiful 

    than being able to set a bad example.        

Without the accompanying prose, here are the prior 6 aphorisms in order of appearance and preserving the original formatting:

             —Extremely happy and extremely unhappy

    men are exactly alike.

 

—The writer is the one

    who is always the author’s favorite.

 

—There is a great difference

    between praise and blame.

 

—Most of the world’s troubles come

   from making a mistake.

 

—Terrorism is essentially the rage

    of literati at a banquet.

 

—Nature never happens twice. 

 

different times

There but for the chance of time, go I.

moments and larger things

We live together in shared moments, while monuments and mountains stand behind each of us.

utter clutter

In cities we feel the weight of things, human clutter closes in on us.

money talks

Often I've found a large roll of fifties and hundreds to be more powerful than a fist.

off-line

No way to connect to the internet, no way to breathe underwater.