The house of our consciousness is made of words. The place
we live and the windows we look through are language-woven artifacts. Living in tense times, as we are, words
nowadays especially count. A tweet
can reverberate with unsettling waves across the planet. Words, magnified wildly on the
Internet, can drive one to suicide, cause a riot, inspire murder, even trigger
a civil war.
Language shapes experience through the rainbow of its
infinite meanings. I am,
consequently, drawn to the books of poet, photographer, and master anthologist,
Phil Cousineau. Cousineau cares
deeply about words and always writes from a soulful perspective. The author’s recent—he
has written many books—is a meditation on the love of language and on the art
of writing.
Here’s the Rabelaisian title in full: The Accidental Aphorist: A Curiosity Cabinet, Aphorisms, Maxims,
Epigrams, Laconic Lucubrations, Fragments from the Notebooks, Back Thoughts and
Afterthoughts (Sisyphus Press, 2017).
So this is a book composed from a miscellany of notes,
unused or early fragments of thought, sundry observations, gathered together
under the rubric of the term aphorism. An element of chance permeates the
structure of this cabinet of curiosities, and the title takes us into a world
of accident and contingency: a book of aphorisms clustered around themes that range from the flights
of sport to the flights of mysticism.
Ordinary experience is like a cabinet of curiosities, a
stream full of unpredictable transitions and dreamlike disruptions, bubbling up
from our subliminal selves or else descending on us from the world outside. A strip of accidental aphorisms is perhaps
a more accurate portrait of a mind than a well-crafted narrative with beginning,
middle, and end.
An anthology of aphorisms is like a mirror of life, a broken
mirror perhaps, with glittering shards and splinters in seeming disarray. A moment of articulate existence, an
aphorism must be brief, but also complete. A few examples:
“Live for the chase with the hell-hounds for the
unachievable meaning of the world, the hunt for the deeply real, it being just
enough to give you a ferocious sense of purpose.”
“Beware of the soul eaters. They’ll have your wife for breakfast, your children for
lunch, and you for supper.”
“Coming around to the lacerating possibility that the source
of depression is not being who we really are.”
The ineffable, consumption, depression—not obviously
connected themes, but in each a depth of utterance, and a note of finality—or a point of departure. Such is the aim
of the aphorism; it must fulfill itself in the short compass of its life. So in a sense every aphorism is a
parable of life.
It implies that we are strong enough to celebrate the
closure of existence—that one can say: I have lived my moments, moments that
were full and perfect. I have touched divinity and dreamt the impossible. I
have made my marks, traced the tracks I left, and leave to you these aphorisms
of my journey.
Cousineau has formed a book from asides, excesses, trains of
inventiveness that crystallized but ended by the wayside. The beloved rejects, the discards that
pulsed with unrealized life—a region of himself haunted by residues that might with
a touch spring to new life. They lay there poised, isolated, disconnected;
afloat among the sleeping shadows of the subliminal mind, waiting to be evoked.
Perhaps in every soul lay images, feelings, tones, defined but
undirected, in states of uneasy indetermination. They have no pattern and no firm purpose, but they are part
of us, dormant yet restless, the neglected wellspring of our inner aphorist.
Aside from the metaphysical leitmotif of a book of
aphorisms, Cousineau’s is both memoir and manual of instruction on the art of
writing. One salutary effect is a quickened
desire to select, shape, reshape, condense. In a good aphorism, the things
adroitly left unsaid excite the imagination as much as what is said.
Another effect of aphoristic practice, induced by
Cousineau’s craft, is a feeling of lightness of mind. The body of our thought is words; that body can be agile or leaden, slender or obese, light-footed
or dragging and ponderous.
Aphorizing is thus a type of exercise meant to enlighten our minds as
well as our discourse.
But it’s not easy, as Chuang-Tzu knew who wrote: “Joy is
feather-light--but who can bear it?”
I’ve commented on the aphorism as a literary form. The offerings in this book vary in
range from playful to mythic. On
the same page, for example, we find: “The function of the mind is to identify;
of the imagination, to strangify.”
This is playful and invents a useful word. Souls are dying from the
familiar, and there’s a whole poetics of strangeness here, but delivered with a
light touch.
Just below, on the same page in this novel of bright
moments, follows an aphorism that we could call a short short story: “I have
always lived with a stranger in my soul.
I can’t get him to leave.
So I’ve been building a room for him in the attic. It’s taking
forever.” One could write a long
commentary on this, but saying so will have to suffice.
Phil Cousineau has turned the aphorism into a spiritul
exercise. By pruning our verbal
mass, he seems to be saying, we may graduate to a new lightness of being, and
with practice maybe even learn to levitate on the wings of our prose style.
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