Everybody Poops and Everybody Aphorizes: Emerson, Thoreau, and James Richardson

“Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one’s better.”  That's from the movie World War Z. The speaker is a brilliant young Harvard M.D., who might seem a more likely savior of humanity than Brad Pitt.  

Lake Michigan, a Little West of Mackinaw Bridge

From www.dictionary.reference.com and www.thefreedictionary.com . . .   

Aphorism:

A pithy observation that contains a general truth. A concise statement of a scientific principle, typically by an ancient classical author.

1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion; adage                 2. A brief statement of a principle.

Synonyms: maxim, saying, adage, precept, proverb, moral Amish Buggy, E. of Sault Ste Marie, Ont.

From http://literary-devices.com/:   “An aphorism is a concise statement that is made in a matter of fact tone to state a principle or an opinion that is generally understood to be a universal truth. Aphorisms are often adages, wise sayings and maxims aimed at imparting sense and wisdom. It is to be noted that aphorisms are usually witty and curt and often have an underlying tone of authority to them.”

Blind River, Ontario

  Banjo Reasons for resisting or hating aphorisms:

  1.     I don’t trust certainty.  Basic info is one thing: today is a Wednesday in July of 2013. Okay.    But if someone says he knows the gods, the gods are friends of his, and they want us to eat cotton candy today . . .  because “Wednesday” sounds like “wedding” and we must overeat sugar at weddings . . . when someone starts adding inferred or symbolic meanings, from the clouds or the Academy, our red-flag antennae should start to hum.  

  2.     Almost by definition, aphorisms are condescending. How much should I listen to anyone  speaking from on high to me, at me?  

  3.     Aphorisms are, or sound like, oversimplifications of complex ambiguities.

Rush Hour, I-75, South of Mackinaw Bridge, Northern Michigan

  4.     A bugaboo of our times is our demand for speed; aphorisms pretend to offer high-speed truth, bumper-sticker truth, fortune-cookie truth, although a moment’s thought reveals that most truths worth having do not come in nutshells. 

        Perhaps I'm just aphorizing about aphorisms. Like most people, I think, I sometimes find myself trying to reduce the universe and human experience to my own aphorisms, which might be like trying to write my own Bible.

However, the poet and Princeton professor, James Richardson, in his book Vectors (2001), has made me aware of how un-final, open-ended, subtle, and poetically pregnant aphorisms can be. Here are just two of the briefer examples:

#4.  Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says I do not have to. 

#6.  Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.

Does any of the above explain my caution—maybe it’s a love-hate response—toward Emerson and Thoreau? They play Daddy to my Child, even when they tell the truth. Yet they knock my brain’s socks off rather often.  

Here’s Emerson (1803 – 1882) at age 61 in a journal entry (an entry that also instructs us about the importance of commas, for his opening word, "Within," is a crucial pause):  

“Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.”

In 1845, “. . . the best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers . . . .”   

Hovering

I like the possibility of ending the sentence there, on the hummingbird note of “hovers,” but Emerson goes on, “that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing, unpossessed, before him.” That’s pretty good too.

What did we all write in our journals today?

Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas": Ways of Being and Saying

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation

There are two kinds of language, two kinds of experiencing, two ways of being in the world in Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas.”  The first mode begins in the opening two lines; it’s all about the left brain and analysis, cognition, deduction, intellect, abstraction. The very subject is “thinking” in a meditation that’s the beginning of a comparison essay:

            All the new thinking is about loss.

            In this it resembles all the old thinking.

In this mode, some of Hass’s declarations are downright aphoristic when separated from the whole poem, and, to take a negative view of aphorisms, we might say they’re like fortune cookies or bumper stickers—apparent truths without benefit of discussion or examples and experience from the tangible, palpable world, or the world of intuition, ambiguity, mystery, magic, sensuous delight.

If there’s a positive view of aphorisms, it’s probably based on the way they pin down a piece of Truth in a precise, pithy, and seemingly valid way. Some synonyms or related terms might be epigram, axiom, platitude, maxim. Here are some fairly aphoristic lines from Hass that tend toward elegance, subtlety, complexity and loftiness more than most axioms do: 

            All the new thinking is about loss.

            In this it resembles all the old thinking.

                                                each particular erases

            the luminous clarity of a general idea.

            a word is elegy to what it signifies.

            talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

            pine, hair, woman, you and I.

                                                            desire is full

            of endless distances.

Red-Bellied Woodpecker, Faver-Dykes S.P.,FL

These lines are clearly going for big wisdom and philosophical insight, and they might be faulted for trying too hard. But Hass truly fleshes out the poem with vivid, often gorgeous images of the physical world.

                                                       the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch

                                                                                    holding

            her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

            I felt a violent wonder at her presence

            like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

            with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

            muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver                                     fish

            called pumpkinseed.

                                    the way her hands dismantled bread,

            the thing her father said that hurt her,

In these quotations, I hope the differences between abstract, aphoristic expression and concrete imagery are clear as two different modes of being and awareness.

Moreover, at the center of the poem, Hass offers two lines that encapsulate the two kinds of mental operation.

     talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

     pine, hair, woman, you and I.   

Pike's Pond, Lenox, MA

The first line is general, summarizing, abstract declaration, ending in one of the greatest abstractions of all, “justice.” But immediately the following line plunges completely into the physical, concrete, immediate world, so that a dualism is clear. 

Of course, the most emphatic image of sensuousness, and the victor if there’s been a contest, is the single, italicized, repeated word and physical image, blackberry. Can the “good flesh” continue? 

Hass is too wise to choose between black hats and white hats, but he would like a world and a life in which “numinous” flesh could go on and on, physical and mortal on the one hand, spiritual, mental, and endless on the other. And he imagines a third “numinous” hand, which contains both ways of being—the temporal and the eternal—and thus requires no choice by the human. To try to articulate that world, all he can do, ironically, is repeat a single word, the odd, beautiful center of sensuality:  blackberry.

I don’t mean to force some happy (or haughty) ending about Thanksgiving when I say Hass might be giving us something good to be thankful about—something more elevated and meaningful than gorging on turkey or lining up at 1:00 a.m. to gather more stuff.


Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation