Don Paterson's aphorisms on love

Big Frank has received an e-copy of Don Paterson's book of aphorisms, "Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work and Death" from his buddy Magne (check out his blog for pop quotes and aphorisms by Paterson). Paterson is a poet and musician who teaches at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This book full of aphorisms that will make you pause, reflect, sometimes reject, others laugh, but almost always pay attention. Big Frank has included a few below on the trajectory of love:
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Sometimes I wonder if there is an invisible amanuensis on hand at the beginning of our love affairs, scribbling down the improvisations of the first few hours. Too often it seems that they provide the entire script of the melodrama to come, from which we soon find ourselves incapable of straying a word.

The most erotic things that can be done to you are those that are driven by the purest selfishness on the part of your lover. Charity, on the other hand, is the great anaphrodisiac.

I would never claim to have her measure. However she gave me mine. My gratitude is. . . complex.

I was terrified when I suddenly realized her entire conversation took place in inverted commas. She didn't dare mean a thing.

Like a fool, I let her know she was on my mind all the time. Specifically I was telling her that I haunted her; then wondered why the news appalled her so.

She insisted on absolute honesty, so I told her everything. I never saw her again, but at least I had spared the next guy the same ordeal.

Always an error to make someone profess what they will not volunteer—especially in love, where the spontaneity of its declaration is all the language ever holds of it.

I asked her what she thought had given our relationship its longevity, and so initiated—I quickly realized—the first discussion of our relationship we had ever had. We were finished in a month.

I was so practiced in disappointment, I absorbed the blow of her leaving me almost effortlessly. Allowing yourself to be constructed by the lover means you have been a different man from the start; I merely left his body behind like a husk, and let him take the punch. (I watched him double up, as from above.) the loveless wraith of me was then free to wander, looking for my new instructions

Closet-Man

Big Frank has been reading leaping poetry and prose poetry. Russell Edson is where they come together. If you take a look at his other poems you will be able to visit a world where you start out in this world, and then through his poetry you go somewhere else - returning with something else in mind.

The Reason Why The Closet-Man Is Never Sad

This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms,
just hallways and closets.
Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to
happen . . . Closets, you take things out of closets,
you put things into closets, and nothing happens . . .

Why do you have such a strange house?

I am the closet-man, I am either going or coming, and I
am never sad.

But why do you have such a strange house?

I am never sad

---- Russell Edson

Resignation

Big Frank is taken with poems on the theme of acceptance or resignation. There have been a few previous posts on this subject from Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Of course, no mention of acceptance or resignation is complete without bringing in the Stoics and Big Franks's main man: Marcus Aurelius. Below is another poem on this topic - this centering not on birds at sea, or the animals in the field, but birches and oaks.

Resignation

I like trees because they seem more resigned

to the way they have to live than other things do.

--Willa Cather

Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

---- by J. D. McClatchy

Back Then

Then

The slow movement – so slow; now in recollection;
Like a shadow of the unseen moving away
From the present in the past; a shadow
That got snagged in the memory and can’t
Be released; this image of you, this near absence
Internalized and turned from image to thought-stopped
From that pause to calm expansion of time.

That moment; figure frozen in flow from –
Away from for now and now for then;
The prelude to it warmly unspoken
The sequel in abeyance cooly prolonged
But in that foreshortened and so still
Still now and then your eyes leading you
And mine like a hole into which you’d fallen.

---- Big Frank Dickinson

"In chains of the mind locked up"

Big Frank tries to keep his eyes open; there is such a tendency to lose yourself in the inner chatter, the unending reevaluation and incessant planning that the mind muddles on with ignoring the fascinating collage of life that tumbles on around you. Abandoning this blocking-out opens up such a puzzling array of phenomena. If you look there is always something out there (outside of you) to lift your spirit, to open a door of new interest, to shock, to sooth, and to illustrate the great mystery of life in which we humans participate.

Today Big Frank saw:
Gangs of prisoners dressed in orange picking up trash along the road. They were accompanied by guards, and seemed as intent on cleaning the roadside as if it were their own backyard. Not one looked up, not one was slouching or loitering. So, why is that? When you see volunteers, or youthful road cleaners (not dressed in orange) they seem to do this is such a haphazard way. Were they given explicit orders: no looking at anyone who drives by; no tarrying, no missing even the smallest piece of paper; etc. etc. Or is there some other explanation; Big Frank doesn’t know.

A raven perched on a light pole preening. This is a more common sight in the wild than in cities. Crows tend to congregate more in urban areas than ravens. However, this was on the edge of the Spokane River, so maybe that explains it. He might have been part of a vanguard of urban raven settlers.

A lone woman standing with head bowed, praying outside a family planning center. This center usually has one or more such attendants. Yesterday there was a man in an even more fervent pose holding a bible. He had various ribbons attached to his coat, and a large standard perched atop his car and held in place by a thick phone book.

A college sports award banquet that Big Frank attended this evening had a stark contrast between how American male athletes dressed and how the women athletes dressed. While about 50% of the women athletes wore dresses, or made some attempt to dress up; only three male athletes put on ties or jackets: one from South Africa, and two Hispanics. Is there something going on here with guys, or what?

This evening Big Frank went for an night walk and the clouds were illuminated from below. There were giant puffy configurations that covered the sky. These were mottled dollups of clouds covering the sky. At dead north looking directly down on Big Frank was the unmistakeable figure of Urizen - straight out of a William Blake engraving (see the above figure). And so Blake has the final word tonight, from his poem "The First Book of Urizen":

Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity,
In chains of the mind locked up,
Like fetters of ice shrinking together,
Disorganiz’d, rent from Eternity,

Names

Big Frank has been thinking lately about how lucky he is that he is Big Frank rather than Fig Bank not that there is anything wrong with figs, but a bank full of them would be much too sweet for even Big Frank to deal with. It’s funny about the names that we get saddled with as babies. Most of us just grow into them without a second thought. However, take a second to think about what it is that you would name yourself if you could – or if you had to. We become so accustomed to our own names that it is as difficult to think of ourselves with a different one as it would be to put on a different face. Our name is part of our assumed identity, and it is a recognized right (the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child identifies the right to have one’s own name as one such right).

Your name is a sign of you – it represents you, and is one of the first such outer representation that you point to as you: “Hi, I’m Big Frank.” (I’m hanging my identity on those sounds – those letters.) Your name when uttered by others is their acknowledgement of you, and it pleases you to hear yourself greeted with that word that means you; it massages your ego and boosts your self-esteem. The absolute minimum benchmark for knowing someone is to know their name. If you don’t know that you have no claim to knowing them. Conversely, you call someone by another’s name at the risk of alienation; and the more intimate you are, the more lasting the damage if you use the wrong name – under some circumstances it can’t be taken back (see Don Paterson’s poem on this – The Gift).

What happens when you change your name? Well few people change their given names, but women often take their husband’s names when they marry. How does it feel to shed one name and take on another? Philip Larkin has a poem on just this topic – his view of what happens to the abandoned name.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

---- Philip Larkin