Aphorisms

APHORISMS

Even the desert blooms.

Flowers grow a very great distance from the sun.

Twisted logic is the tendrils of an evil spirit.

A partial truth is always more dangerous than unalloyed truth or a varnished lie.

When you do not say what you mean, you cannot be trusted in anything you say.

Guess what?—“a white lie” is a racist idiom.

Deepest blue, the desert sky is untainted, barren because it harbors no rain.

Eternity does not distinguish between the fresh-faced moon and the world-weary sun.

In a street fight a sword is mightier than a pen.

Whoever said a dog’s bark is worse than his bite hasn’t been bitten.

Good governance is hard to find.

A penny invested is a penny gambled.

A soap that floats has value only inside a bathtub.

The government that lacks transparency evades accountability and in all probability has something to hide.

The law used to perpetrate crime and to sanction impunity for crime is the misrule of law.

Propaganda is the gruel eaten by prisoners of the state.

Politicization of the judiciary weakens it, ensuring that those who have less in life will have even less in law.

Intelligence with integrity is fair-mindedness, without integrity it is venality.

The purpose of education is to teach not only critical thinking but also historical thinking, so that all citizens develop the capacity to evaluate ongoing changes from the standpoint of past transformations.

Today the biggest single reason for famine is war.

Anyone who lies is doing the devil’s work. It is his telltale signature.

Genuine democracy, which subsists in the democratic values and principles internalized by the people, is subverted when criminal leaders controvert the laws embodying the people’s deepest aspirations for freedom from tyranny.

A good book is a good friend you engage again and again.

The Apostle Paul inveighed against scoffers, calling them fools, yet he did not suffer the Gehenna threatened by Jesus.

A government of values and principles is degraded by a regime of patronage and corruption.

An untimely death waylays the conversion of the damned.

Democracy is a work in progress, fascism a work in regress.

Forgetfulness is the incomprehension of those who misconstrue the past.

Remembrance is the vision of the future.

Kindness’ roots are nourished by compassion.

Cruelty is a volcano. It thrives on the magma of abuse.

He who does not take a stand sits on his rights.

The heart makes up its reasons.

The right to information is a necessary check against the abuse of power. It is an essential means whereby the oppressed seek, pursue, and obtain redress for just grievances.

You can’t have fake news and democracy, too.

Charity culminates in humanity.

Originally published in Cacti Fur (April 25, 2018)

Ten Greatest Poets – Pablo Neruda, Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century

PABLO NERUDA, GREATEST POET OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, Pablo Neruda, pen name—and later legal name—of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, has been hailed as “the greatest poet of the twentieth century” by Gabriel García Márquez, himself winner of the same prize in 1982. Although the title’s bestowal by Márquez is debatable, there is no doubt that Neruda is one of the most important poets of Latin America in the twentieth century. In this respect, he could also be considered the greatest.

Choosing a recent or contemporary figure by declaring their lasting relevance to future generations is always tricky because we lack the perspective of long history, but if we don’t make a choice, we end up settling for our unsatisfactory reluctance to risk premature judgment.

More than a handful of poets of the last century, some still living, could qualify, besides Neruda, for inclusion in the top ten. Among them, we are inclined to mention Edward Estlin Cummings, or “e. e. cummings,” all lower-case letters, as his name was often printed in his published works. Cummings passed away in 1962. He introduced his highly innovative poetry at the beginning of the last century, the influence of which extends to the present day. He spectacularly broke free of nineteenth-century conventions of poetic form, experimenting with grammar, syntax, diction, meaning, and particularly the visual arrangement of words on the page, effectively engaging and often delighting the reader, and successfully creating his own unique, instantly recognizable voice. Cummings was a revolutionary in the best sense of the word. Nearly half a century after his demise, his cleverly inventive poetry endures, and it is especially popular among the young.

Cummings was not selected for inclusion in the top ten for two reasons. First, we already have an American, Walt Whitman, in the list. Second, it is only appropriate that a worthy representative of the rich, expansive culture and heritage of Spain and the colonies of the former Spanish Empire, Central and South America in major measure—as a whole, populous, important, and influential—should make the list. If we add up the various populations of this grouping of countries, excluding the 18 present-day U.S. states that were formerly Spanish, the total equals approximately 850 million today.

Neruda is recognized as a master of the lyric and the epic, but critical reviews of his work tend to judge him a better lyric poet than epic.

One of his earliest works, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published in 1924 when he was only 19 years old, established his reputation as a poet. This collection shines a spotlight on Neruda’s keen sensitivity and highly original lyricism. Consider, for example, the first stanza of “I Remember You as You Were”:

I remember as you were in the last autumn.

You were the grey beret and the still heart.

In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.

And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

Excerpt is from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (2006), transl. by W. S. Merwin, intro. by Cristina Garcia, page 15.

Neruda would return to the motif of romantic love multiple times, notably in One Hundred Love Sonnets, published in 1959. “Sonnet XVII” in this collection illustrates well his mastery of the lyric.

Our appreciation of any poet not writing in the English language depends substantially on the quality of the translation. Fortunately, the English translation of this poem by Mark Eisner is excellent.

ONE HUNDRED LOVE SONNETS: XVII by Pablo Neruda

Original language Spanish

Translated by Mark Eisner

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,  

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:  

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,  

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries  

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,  

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose  

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,  

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,  

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,  

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Each line of this splendid poem harbors a trove of meanings, imaginings, and feelings. They inhabit, as it were, a tenuous penumbra wherein figurative language simultaneously communicates and obscures. How does love exist “between the shadow and the soul”? Is there space in between? “Your hand on my chest is mine”—do these words express oneness of being with the beloved or do they describe some mysteriously separate union?

Neruda’s epic masterpiece, Canto General, published in 1950, is political poetry. Concerning this work, some have disputed his ideologically based claims—he was a Communist—besides his overall vision. Mark Strand, for example, in The New Yorker has written: “His largeness of spirit…in ‘Canto General’ was sometimes cramped by ideology.”

Neruda is at his best in the lyric. He might be described as the Sappho of the twentieth century. He has been styled “the ecstasist” by Strand.

Published in 1958, “Keeping Quiet” shows his lyrical flair. At the same time in this poem we come across the political Neruda. We encounter his deep passion for things political as well as his activist social vision.

KEEPING QUIET by Pablo Neruda

Original language Spanish

Translated by Alastair Reid

And now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth

let’s not speak in any language,

let’s stop for one second,

and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines,

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victory with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about,

I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead

and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve,

and you keep quiet and I will go.

Let’s “all keep still,” Neruda urges, so that “those who prepare green wars” would “walk about with their brothers.” “I want no truck with death,” he intones.

From his twenties into his thirties, Neruda was, we might say, a political mute. The turning point in his political development was the execution in 1936 by a fascist militia of the leftist Federico García Lorca, a fellow poet and dear friend. Thenceforth, Neruda turned anti-fascist, which in the calculus of the Spanish Civil War meant that he became a Communist. He maintained this ideological position the rest of his life.

When in 1973 Augusto Pinochet instigated a successful coup d’état against the regime of Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile, Neruda was a prominent target. The circumstances surrounding his death indicate that he had been poisoned, probably on Pinochet’s orders. Neruda died soon after he had been injected in the stomach by a doctor.

Numbers 11 to 20 Greatest Poets:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/12/numbers-11-to-20-greatest-poets.html  

Pablo Neruda, 1963

Ten Greatest Poets – Walt Whitman, America’s Poet

WALT WHITMAN, AMERICA’S POET

The twentieth century has been described as America’s century. And so it is. The century began with the cresting of the imperialist powers of Europe and saw the rise of Imperial Japan, taking its newfound place as a world power after defeating the Russian navy. Emerging from rapid industrialization during the nineteenth century, the U.S. joined the ranks of the imperialists. After two world wars, the U.K. and France slowly declined to the status of middle-level powers, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off in the so-called Cold War. The U.S. got the better of the ideological rivalry because of its superior economic system, and when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it seemed as if the U.S. as the leader of the Western bloc had indeed established a new world order in which liberal democratic ideology had become normative. We know today it is not the case.

America’s rise as a world player the beginning of the last century and its continuing position today as a leading great power, are among the bases for its major ongoing influence on world culture. Hollywood is known—if not always welcomed—worldwide, for example, and English, especially American English, is the lingua franca of international business. Contemporary conditions of world culture, we might describe it as a type of cultural hegemony, logically persuade us to include at least one American poet in our list of the ten greatest.

Walt Whitman, a consummately American poet, represents an astute choice. He has been called “America’s poet” by Ezra Pound, more to the point, “He is America.” Whitman sought to encompass the breadth and height and depth, indeed, the very being of America, the enthusiastic idea of it as well as the expansive reality, in his person qua poet, and from the standpoint of the poetic imagination we could say that, strangely enough, he succeeded, or very nearly so.

Whitman celebrates America, that is, America as an existential ideal. Whitman sets forth his imaginative and poetic conception of America in his poem by the same title.

AMERICA by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53091/america-56d23215696b8

Whitman in this poem celebrates America consisting of people—“equal daughters, equal sons”—bound together by abstractions like “Freedom,” “Law,” “Love.” Implicitly, they are united by “Equality” and “Fraternity.”

The abstract concepts are essentially related to “Democracy,” which is a unifying motif in Whitman’s poetry. “Democracy” is a rubric encompassing Whitman’s existential ideal.

In “For You O Democracy,” Whitman exclaims, “Come, I will make the continent indissoluble, / I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon. …I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51567/for-you-o-democracy

When Whitman extols America, he is elevating an existential ideal, that is, his sanguine conception of a community of people inhabiting America, the land itself, who reify abstract ideals of democracy in their own lives. This conception is metaphysical because Whitman asserts its transcendental reality.

What’s more, the persona in Whitman’s poetry assimilates America. This claim is made multiple times, for example, in “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s signature poem:

“In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”

“I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The speaker in “Song of Myself” identifies with people, things, the entirety of psychic experience, everything, and then some more. He launches into majestic, sweeping, detailed descriptions in the first person.

“I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken,

Tumbling walls buried me in their debris,

Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades,

I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels,

They have clear’d the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.”

“I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,

And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,

And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,

But call any thing back again when I desire it.”

“I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,

The heave’e’yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,

The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color’d lights,

The steam whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play’d at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

“I hear the violoncello, (’tis the young man’s heart’s complaint,)

I hear the key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.”

The metaphysical being of the speaker zooms far into space.

“Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,

Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the diameter of eighty thousand miles,

Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest.”

The speaker ranges through time.

“The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”

He is everywhere.

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

Whitman the poetic persona encompasses America, extending beyond it to eventually incorporate the entire universe. He is “a kosmos.”

To achieve a rolling, encyclopedic effect, Whitman frequently resorts to anaphora, as in the example below.

“Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

“Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

Whether you love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. All Americans at some point in their lives have to deal with Whitman’s “cosmic” conception of America. To the extent that America exerts global influence and power, the rest of the world, I suppose, is also obliged.

Pablo Neruda, Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/06/ten-greatest-poets-pablo-neruda.html

Walt Whitman, 1887

Ten Greatest Poets – Matsuo Bashō, the Greatest Master of Haiku

MATSUO BASHŌ, THE GREATEST MASTER OF HAIKU

Japan is an overachieving nation whose influence in the world exceeds the size of its land and population. We can only speculate about the reasons for Japan’s salience, indeed, ascendancy. No doubt its island isolation, self-imposed, plays a role. The surrounding seas, a protective barrier, may have deterred invasion. Similar geographic circumstances mark the UK, which embarked on imperial conquest worldwide, a ferocious scramble among Western European nations that Japan sought to join during the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in exceptional carnage. Whatever the reasons for Japan’s visibility today, the fact is that Japan has succeeded in its drive to play a major role on the world stage. This insular nation presently has significant international influence.

Japan has been substantially influenced by China in its cultural development—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Chinese calligraphy, for example, are major influences. Notwithstanding, Japan transformed and adapted Chinese influences, likely impelled by its voluntary seclusion.

Japan has developed its own unique cultural heritage—Zen Buddhism, for example, a homegrown adaptation of Mahayana Buddhism; Bushido codes like The Book of Five Rings, a primer about swordsmanship and the way of the samurai written by Miyamoto Musashi in 1645; or ukiyo-e, a style of Japanese woodblock prints and painting that saw its heyday begin in the seventeenth century and end in the nineteenth century.

A distinctive Japanese cultural artifact is the haiku or hokku. Haiku is the late nineteenth-century term. When the Japanese established hokku as a poetry genre in the seventeenth century—the period when Matsuo Bashō thrived—they effectively invented minimalist poetry, and they were the first to do so. Although hokku had already been established as an integral part—the opening stanza—of the renga as early as the tenth century, it was only much later that hokku came to be recognized as a standalone poem. Renga is a Japanese collaborative poem created by alternating contributors.

Haiku, like ukiyo-e, has been notably influential in the West. The last century, haiku influenced the Imagists, the Beat Generation, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Pound’s most famous poem “In a Station of the Metro” was reportedly inspired by haiku.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This poem was originally published in Poetry (April 1913).

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro

Almost everyone who reads poetry in English nowadays knows what haiku is, at least the English version of it. Haikus in English—not translations—are continually published. Many literary journals are devoted to publishing haiku, exclusively or together with related poetry genres. Haiku contests in English abound. Could this flourishing interest be the consequence of Western fascination with Japanese exoticism?

Bashō is the foremost exponent of haiku. George Leonard explains.

“Sōin (1605-1682) and Saikaku (1642-1693)…developed certain tactics that classic haiku would later employ: a fondness for images rather than explanations and for jump cuts between those images that cause interesting and suggestive clashes. At their best, the poems work the way film works, by a rapid montage of images that generate a meaning of their own.

“… In 1660, the same year as the English Restoration, Sōin founded the ‘Damrin School,’ and haiku rose toward high art while it simultaneously became intimately connected with the Zen Buddhist vision. …No one disputes Sōin’s historical importance. However, all authorities agree that Sōin’s student, Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) is the genius who perfects haiku.

“…To understand Bashō’s relationship to all subsequent haiku, one has to think of Shakespeare’s relationship to all subsequent English poetry. I could stretch the parallel and claim Sōin as Christopher Marlowe, a great innovator who sows many of the seeds Shakespeare will harvest. Marlowe began writing verse dramas in English iambic pentameter…lifting the form to high art. Shakespeare, his younger contemporary, perfects English iambic pentameter and the drama based on it.”

(Quote has been edited.)

See: http://www.georgeleonard.com/articles/japanese-haiku-and-matsuo-basho.htm

Complete names: Nishiyama Sōin and Ihara Saikaku.

Bashō is acknowledged to be the first great master of haiku, and some consider him the greatest.

Towards the end of his life, Bashō was widely admired. He was recognized for his artistic achievements. After his death, he was venerated for centuries to the point that the Shinto religion in 1793 deified him.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, his work was subjected to critical commentary, particularly by Masaoka Shiki, an accomplished Japanese poet and literary critic who coined the term “haiku.” Shiki is one of the four “immortals” of haiku.

We might be asked why, despite many worthy candidates from Japan, we chose Bashō for inclusion among our ten greatest poets. Our answer is that Bashō crossed cultural boundaries to find a large, appreciative audience, not only among native English speakers but worldwide. No other Japanese poet, however excellent, is comparable in this respect.

Japanese haiku is a sophisticated poetry genre, and to appreciate it fully one must become acquainted with the conventions and idiosyncrasies of the art form. Consider, for example, the following Bashō haiku.

A monk sips morning tea.

It’s quiet.

The chrysanthemum’s flowering.

Available online is the following analysis and commentary about this poem:

“To the uninformed, this simply says that the poem was written around spring time. The chrysanthemum or ‘kiku’ actually flowers in autumn, thus the Japanese see it as a symbol of autumn. But there is more to the flower than a reference for the time of year. The chrysanthemum’s mere mention in this poem gives the haiku an entirely different meaning. In Japanese culture, the chrysanthemum is also a symbol of perfection. A Shinto belief (Shintoism places very high value on respecting nature), the Japanese see the way the chrysanthemum blooms as orderly and beautiful. The flower’s petals unfold layer by layer from the outside inward and radiate like the sun. Order is important to the Japanese and is reflected in their everyday lives. The chrysanthemum is, to them, a natural representation of this order. So important to the Japanese is this flower, the title given to the throne of the emperor is the ‘Chrysanthemum Throne.’ If one looks, one will also see that the imperial family seal of Japan is actually a chrysanthemum motif. From this, we can say that Bashō believes that the scene he is currently viewing to be a thing of perfection.”

See: https://www.scribd.com/document/257764292/Analysis-of-the-Poetry-of-Matsuo-Bashō

Nuances of Japanese haiku do not readily carry over in translations into another language. However, the translations can still be appreciated as short poems.

The power of short poems derives principally from understatement. Understatement arouses the audience to fill in the details, so to speak, so that they are thereby engaged.

Following is a small selection of haikus from Bashō’s oeuvre translated into English.

Bashō’s most famous poem is about the old pond and a loud frog.

The old pond—

a frog jumps in,

sound of water.

I like this translation best because it is accurately concise.

“Harold G. Henderson provides a Zen interpretation by attributing symbolism to the frog’s leap: The jump into the pond symbolizes a sudden leap to satori, or spiritual enlightenment.”

See: https://www.enotes.com/topics/old-pond

A metaphorical interpretation suits this Bashō poem.

On a dead branch,

a crow settles—

autumn dusk.

“Bashō insinuates that a crow landing on a dead branch brings about the same feeling as dusk settling in the autumn. The dead branch…stands for the dying of sunlight that leads to dusk. The crow is used particularly because it is black just like nightfall. …the verb ‘settling’ has a double meaning: the crow landing on the branch and the ‘settling’ of dusk. …the autumn season is used because in autumn, the sun sets earlier, and it gets darker faster. The speaker of this poem…notices a crow perching on a branch and is reminded of the darkness of nightfall.”

(Quote has been edited.)

See: http://ongakutei.sanam.us/various/basho.html

This Bashō poem uses paradox effectively.

After the temple bell stops,

its sound continues

from the flowers.

See: http://www.raintaxi.com/matsuo-bashos-poetic-spaces/

We are aroused to reflect on what evanescent, memorable aural attribute is shared by the temple bell and the flowers. It’s possible that the flowers are bell-shaped.

Walt Whitman, America’s Poet:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/06/ten-greatest-poets-walt-whitman.html  

Portrait of Bashō (late 18th century) by Hokusai