Six Word Memoirs

Big Frank has been reading "Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak". This is a compilation of six-word memoirs submitted by the readers of Smith Magazine. An idea which the magazine had done earlier, "Not Quite What I Was Planning" one submission: "Found true love, married someone else". Here are a few excerpts. It seemed like a good idea, and there are some good ones, but by and large ... most are flat, uninteresting, and cliche. These are probably the best of the best. Big Frank has saved you having to read the book - don't bother.

"Forgot why I left, went back."

"People can't want what they want."

"Not him again, said my mother."

"Therapist: You went back after that?"

"Happy enough was her tentative reply."

"In the beginning I showered daily."

"He should have married the television."

"Worried the dog liked him better."

"Moved in no ring moved out."

"I'm your one that got away."

"She came back, I wasn't home."

The Happiness Hypothesis

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank is reading (again) Jonathan Haidt’s great book, "The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt takes as his central metaphor for humans an small lawyer riding on top of an elephant. The elephant is the sum total of all of our unconscious urges, desires, thoughts, and feelings. The lawyer then creates explanations for what the elephant does. It has little to do whatsoever with the truth, but it creates the illusion of understanding. The book then through references to a number of psychology experiments and stoic and eastern philosophy attempts to show how pervasive our unconscious is and how we better maintain happiness while riding this the wild beast that we inhabit. Here are a few quotations that Big Frank likes:

“man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun"

Sen-ts'an, an early Chinese Zen mater, urged nonjudgmentalism as a prerequisite to following 'the perfect way' in this poem from the eighth century:

The perfect Way is only difficult for
those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then
be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference, and
Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear
before you, for or against.
The struggle between ‘for’ and
'against' is the mind's worst disease.

"Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance."

Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter

Big Frank has been reading John Hodgman's "The Areas of My Expertise". This book is really a book of lies, but interesting ones. Hogman states in the introduction: "Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. (Or for that matter, as true.) Proof of which maxim is the fact that I just made it up." In this amazing book Hogman includes matters historical, literary, cryptozoological, and much on hoboes, food, drink, squirrels, lobster, eels, haircuts, and what lots of information on what happens in the future.

One of Big Frank's favorite chapters is on jokes that nobody laughs at. Here is one that Hogman includes:

"A Duck goes into a pharmacy. He says to the pharmacist, "I need some ointment for my beak. It is very chapped. The pharmacist says, "We have nothin for ducks here."

Big Frank encourages you, kind reader, to tell this to your friends and check it out for yourself; it will not produce laughter. Big Frank also encourages you to write your own - it is not difficult. Here's one of Big Frank's own: "A rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar. The rabbi orders a beer and is served. The priest orders a glass of wine and is served. The minister orders a whiskey, and the bartender tells him, 'We don't serve whisky'.

Super Sad True Love Story

Big Frank is reading a great novel by Gary Shteyngart: "Super Sad True Love Story". Like all super true, and super sad love stories it is indeed super sad and super deluded. It takes place in a super sad future in which America has moved into a political nightmare where the Bipartisan Party - read sole source of power - reigns supreme and tyranizes the population. Everyone in the novel is constantly distracted by their "apparat" - read cell phone/computer/camera/etc. The main character - Lenny - falls hopelessly and foolishly in love with a Korean-American girl. The chapters alternate between his diaries and e-mail/texts of Eunice, his love interest. For anyone who has ever been in love with someone hopelessly unobtainable and who is also aware of the constant distraction of the "apparats" this is a great book - a sad critic of where we are and who we are.

The Conquest of Happiness

Bertrand Russell again . . . yeah, Big Frank knows; this thread is getting pretty long. Big Frank just has to ride this thing out and it could be some time. Russell wrote a lot (around 2,000 words everyday of his adult life), and he lived to the age of 98, so he had a lot to say about a lot.

Big Frank just finished Russell's book, "The Conquest of Happiness". It is a little bit dated; he wrote it in 1930, and he devotes a considerable amount of text to the upper crust of society and a slim layer of professions (artists, scientists, and businessmen). Women in his book are largely women of leisure and of the upper class. As a result, much of the book can be skimmed, but there is still a lot of useful advice on how to conquer happiness. His approach, conquering, requires effort, by his own admission; happiness is a matter of attitude, engagement in life, purposeful thinking, and the overcoming of obstacles to happiness.

The greatest obstacle to happiness, according to Russell is being self-absorbed. Russell in the first chapter relates how he learned to enjoy life more: "Very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. . . Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself, and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly on external objects; the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

Russell goes through a variety of the causes of unhappiness: competition, envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania, etc. 'Worry' can be centered on many of these unhappy tendencies. Russell calls for a look outward to the external world as one way out of worry: "One's ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist."

In the final chapter Russell contrasts the happy and the unhappy man. The unhappy man: "One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so little variety in life. the man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion." On the other hand, "The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands of affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. the man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it."

Nonevents?

Paul Graham works the everyday. One especially interesting set of juxtapostions is between New York and North Dakota. Take a look at his archive for this set of photos. It is from his new 12-volume book project titled "a shimmer of possibility". The work is arranged in a set of picture sequences of "non-events". If you follow the link above - go through Pittsburgh and there is New York/North Dakota. This is the stuff of life that most people don't take a second look at. Graham does and he reminds Big Frank of Walt Whitman's catalogues and some of what Dennis O'Driscoll has written.

Whitman in his "Song of Myself" catalogues the events of his day

"The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the
clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and the pelts of
snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites . . . . the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter -- the sick man inside, borne to the
hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd -- the policeman with his star quickly working his
passage to the centre of the crowd;
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,"

Now here is Dennis O'Driscoll from the poem "Forever" in his collection of poems entitled "RealityCheck".

"Forever the girl upending the nearly empty crisp packet and
savouring life to the full, to the last salty cheese-and-onion-
flavoured crumb.

Forever the old ladies who smile at babies like politicians and
suspect the meter reader may not really be the meter reader.

Forever a freckled builder in high-vis jacket swinging his lunch
bag as he clocks in at the chipboard hoarding.

Forever the teenagers who can't pass up a hat display wihtout
trying on preposterous headgear in a department store.

Forever the tall schoolboy with ponytail and full-length leather
coat. And forever the small one, pate shaved almost bald, nursing
a cigarette like a sore finger."

These are the stuff of life - the non-events of life:

"Forever. And ever. All going well."

What It Is: the book

The list of What It Is's continues. "What It Is" - the book, is most certainly unlike any book you have ever read. And if it hadn't been for Big Frank's sister - Kathy - Big Frank would have never read it either. So thanks to Kathy for sending it to Big Frank!! Right smack in the middle of the cover, which is richly illustrated with all kinds of wacky drawings of monkeys, ghosts, strange birds, aliens, flowers, fish, and other colorful doodle-like drawings is the question: Do you wish you could write? This is what this book is all about. It is, as the cover points out: Dramatically illustrated with more than color pictures. What more? The whole point of the book is to bet you, the reader, to step into your dramatically illustrated gallery you carry around all the time, and perhaps rarely look at.

The author is Lynda Barry, who, we are told: "Has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, issustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike." This book has most likely come out of all the creative writing classes that she has taught. It's all about images and leads the reader to that discovery through a series of questions. I include 10 below. Answer them and you are well on your way to becoming a writer youself!

1. To follow a wandering mind means having to get lost. Can you stand being lost?
2. What is a monster?
3. What is a realization?
4. Can images exist without thinking?
5. Can you have thoughts without languages?
6. What is an attachment?
7. What is an inclination?
8. Is realization intentional or unintentional?
9. What does the TV see when it watches you?
10. Who may be coming soon?

And that is What It Is!

Better

Atul Gawande has written a wise book that has lessons on how to be better that apply beyond medicine. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance offers Gawande’s keen insight on how medicine can be better without having to rely on scientific breakthroughs or on technological innovations. Rather he gives advice on performance in diligence, doing right and ingenuity. In his section on diligence he demonstrates how virtue when applied to such simple routines as washing hands can make the difference in controlling antibiotic resistant bacteria. He also shows how strict adherence to protocol is what will determine whether polio, like small pox before it, can be eradicated completely. Diligence in collecting data and examining it to improve performance is what has significantly lowered mortality rates among the wounded in battle.

The next section of the book is equally good: the ethics of examining undressed patients, doctors in the death chamber and when is further treatment the wrong choice. In the final section he examines the different success rates of various medical centers and offers some insights on why the best are the best. Finally, in the afterward of the book Gawande shares some remarkable advice on how to become what he terms a positive deviant. Here’s his advice:
1. “Ask unscripted questions.” If you do this you will discover the unexpected. This applies both to people that you interact with as part of your job, and those you work with.
2. “Don’t complain.” As Gawande says, we are all tempted to take this route – we all have something that we are uhappy about. However, as he wisely puts it: “It’s boring, it doesn’t solve anything, and it will get you down.”
3. “Count something.” Numbers are revealing. However, they can also be boring, so his advice is to count something that is interesting to you. If you do, you will find something interesting.
4. “Write something.” In writing you step back and think about a problem. It forces upon you a certain amount of thoughtfulness. It can also put you in touch with a community of others thinking about what you write.
5. “Change.” He advises to be an early adopter of change. Avoid being a skeptic who resists changing anything. If you seek out the inadequacies of what you do you will find ample room for change. Look for something new to try.

It seems to Big Frank that these five pieces of advice apply far beyond the field of medicine. With all the self-help books out there, all the leadership books out there, and all the books on how to improve business/management/sales etc. etc. these five seem to have vast promise.

Speak Memory - a review

Vladimir Nabokov's memory certainly does respond to his injunction that he gives it to speak. His memory is amazing. The book was originally published in 1947 when he was 48 and deals most extensively with the first 16 years of his life while he was still in Russia, along with a more cursory treatment of his time in exile in Great Britain, Germany, and France. He actually begins with an examination of his awakening consciousness! The real beginning of his sentient life he dates to an exact moment when on his fourth birthday he went for a walk, holding his parents' hands. Maybe this is what writers need in order to fill their store of material for writing. Nabokov's is brimming over with extraordinary detail.

His memory tells the story of his parents, their parents, along with a whole tree of aristocratic ancestors that anyone would be proud to be descended from. He has particular love for his parents and great admiration for his father. The rumble of the coming storm of communism is heard from the beginning of the book. Given the precipitous fall from all the comforts and excesses of the richly aristocratic life he was privilged to have, it is amazing that he recalls that fall with little more than a shrug. It is also amazing that given the long time that the storm clouds were seen that the family didn't have more foresight in preparing for the inevitable exile than to rely on a maid's gathering up of a few loose jewels.

Two impressions of this book: first of all the extraordinary vocabulary Nabokov trots out - a reader's vocabulary can be enhanced by reading this book. See how many of these words, gentle reader, you know the definitions of: hypnagogic, photism, synesthete, chromatism, lamellate, serfage, regardant, ophryon, decalcomania, tarlatan, tabanid, dipterist, anastomosis, nicitating, massacrous, breloque, amelus, syncopal, and inanition.

Secondly, and more interestingly, his extraordinary insights. First of all his capturing of the confidence and rightness of childhood: "A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee enters the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." His insights into the positional nature of poetry: " . . . the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same time a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screendoor of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Doctor Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instananeous and transparent organism of events of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithica, N.Y) is the nucleus." And finally and most touching his thoughts on the radiant nature of love: "Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Somethings impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helpessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. . . . I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."

This is a memoir of exquisite precision, of uncanny insights, of remembrance without nostalgia. Reading it puts you in the company of an extraordinary writer with a unique history and equally unique view of existence: " . . . a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Love Poetry

Love Poetry

Big Frank has been reading James Fenton’s excellent anthology of love poetry, entitled "The New Faber Book of Love Poems". It is a hefty tome that arranges the poetry by authors, alphabetically. He included everything from Amercian folk songs (Frankie and Johnny) to blues licks, the usual list of great lyric poets (Burns, Blake, Shakespeare, Rossetti, etc.), and many many new discoveries. What he does especially well is to capture the full scope of love better than most anthologies. Typically you get the ying and yang of love: the wild passion accompanying its birth, and the woe after it has collapsed. Fenton includes the poems reflecting what lies between the 'I love you.”, and the ‘Oh, no; it’s all over now.’ It is this fullness that gives the anthology its richness.

In the introduction Fenton summarizes this quite well: “I love you. You love me. I used to love you. You don’t love me. I want to sleep with you. Here we are in bed together. I hate you. You betrayed me. I’ve betrayed you. I want to kill you. Oh no! I have killed you. Such are the simple propositions on which these lyrics elaborate.”

Perhaps it would do well to start at the end of the progression - an end that becomes a beginning. Here is W.D. Snodgrass on the lingering introspective reflection of lost love. A poem that captures the spurned lover in yet another of his backward glances – his revery of “what if”:

The Last Time

Three years ago one last time, you forgot
Yourself and let your hand, all gentleness
Move to my hair, then slip down to caress
My cheek, my neck. My breath failed me; I thought

It might all come back yet, believed you might
Turn back. You turned, then, once more to your own
Talk with that tall young man in whom you’d shown
In front of all our friends such clear delight

All afternoon. You, recalled then the long
Love you had held for me was changed. You threw
Both arms around him, kissed him, and then you
Said you were ready and we went along.

In Siegfried Sassoon’s poem The Dug-Out we have a different kind of fear expressed than the oft-expressed fear of loss. Here it is not the loss of the lover’s love; it is not the lover going off with someone else, or leaving for loss of feelings. Here it is the fear of the loss of one’s lover through the death of one’s lover. The knowledge that, with certainty it will happen makes it all the more disturbing as Sassoon expresses so well.

The Dug-Out

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold,
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep shadow’d from the candle’s guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head . . .
You are too young to fall asleep forever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.


Don Patterson’s “The Gift” expresses the horrible emerging from the well intentioned gesture – the gift. Here it is almost like Blake’s “The Rose” – love’s fragility and the parallel destroyers that accompany us in life – even when in love:

The Gift

That night she called his name, not mine
and could not call it back
I shamed myself and thought of that blind
girl in Kodiak

who sat on the stoop each night
to watch the daylight fade
and lift her child down to the gate cut
in the palisade

and what old caution love resigned
when through that misty stare
she passed the boy to not her bearskinned
husband but the bear.


Alice Oswald has a sonnet that takes a brighter look at love: love expanding into everything. Here it’s like an inhalation and exhalation; love’s private present luck-blessed alarm that echoes back off everything and is reflective of everything.

Wedding

From time to time our love is like a sail
And when the sail begins to alternate
From tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail
And when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
And if the coat is yours, it has a tear
Like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
To draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
And when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions . . .
And this, my love, when millions come and go
Beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
And when the trick begins, it’s like a toe
Tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
And when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
Which is like love, which is like everything.

John Fuller captures the ambiguity of love in “Two Voices”. Here is the dichotomous full view of love – a Blakean voice reminiscent of “The Clod and the Pebble” or “Thel’s Motto".

Two Voices

Love is a large hope in what,
Unfound, imaginary, leaves us
With a beautifying presence.
Love always grieves us.’
So sang youth to the consenting air
While age in deathly silence, thus:

‘Love is a regret for what,
Lost or never was, assails us
With a beautifying presence.
Love never fails us.’

James Fenton’s “The Alibi” humorously and poignantly captures the alienation of love and the ridiculousness of haughty smugness:

The Alibi

My mind was racing
It was some years from now.
We were together again in our old flat.
You were admiring yourself adjusting your hat.
‘Oh of course I was mad then,’ you said with a
Forgiving smile,
‘Something snapped in me and I was mad for a
While.’

But this madness of yours disgusted me,
This alibi,
This gorgeous madness like a tinkling sleigh,
It carried you away
Snug in your fur, snug in your muff and cape.
You made your escape
Through the night, over the dry powdery snow.
I watched you go.

Turly the mad deserve our sympathy.
And you were driven mad you said by me
And then you drove away
The cushions and the furs piled high,
Snug with your madness alibi,
Injured and forgiven on your loaded sleigh.

And then we have Robert Burns, he of the “And I will luve thee still, my dear,/ Till a’ the seas gang dry.” Well, maybe not quite that long. For in addition to “A Red, Red Rose” Burns also wrote “Wantonness”.

Wantonness

Wantonness for every mair,
Wantonnes has been my ruin;
Wety for a’ my dool and care,
It’s wantonness for ever!

I hae lov’d the Black, the Brown,
I hae lov’d the Fair, the Gowden:
A’ the colours in the town
I hae won their wanton favour.

W.H. Auden often writes of the grief of love: :”I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” In “The More Loving One” he confirms his choice to be “the more loving one” even if it be in the indifferent gaze of the loved one.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark subline,
Though this might take me a little time.

Well then, not all are as willing to be “the more loving one”. Take Elizabeth Thomas, for example in the aptly titled “The Execration”. This well addresses the “I hate you” – phase of love – not often included in such anthologies.

The Execration

Enslaved by passions, swelled with pride,
In love with one whom all deride;
A carcase well, yet mind in pain,
Reduced to beg, but beg in vain;
To live reserved and free from blame,
And yet incur an evil fame:
Let this! This be the wretched fate
Of Rosalinda, whom I hate.

However, we can't leave the great anthology on such a note. Let's part with an unexpected treat, ironically from the first poet included in this book, Fleur Adcock. This poem speaks well of our time perhaps more than of times past: the emphasis and value of friendship in love.

Happy Ending

After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies - those
they had willingly displayed - but a frail
endeavour to apologise.

Later, though, drawn together by
a distaste for such 'untidy ends'
they agreed to meet again; whereupon
as though what they had made was love -
and not that happier outcome, friends.