How Literature Can Change Us...

A funny thing happened. Just as my aphorisms - and short form writing, in general - was beginning to gain traction in the world, I stopped writing them. I felt like an imposter having my brief arts anthologized and pronouncing on the short form, when the humbling and humiliating truth was, that I no longer knew where they came from or where they’d gone. Out of inner compulsion, I’d begun writing them as a late teen and defined them to myself as ‘what is worth quoting from the soul’s dialogue with itself.’ But, somewhere along the way, I’d lost my profound silences and, with them, my capacity to overhear myself and aphorize. Mercifully, other forms took their place: poems, essays, conversations, etc…

Still, something was shifting within me and I’d learned, even when not writing at all that, those periods we refer to as dry spells are often secretly fertile —where our very souls are being rewritten and readied for fresh utterance. When the aphorisms returned, they had changed as had I, the times as well as the prevailing tastes. We cannot step into the same river twice; so I allowed my returning friends more liberties, this time around. They needn’t be declarative or neat or strictly philosophical, because neither was I. They might be fragmentary, poetic and occupied with the mysterious life of the spirit. After decades of exploration, I am beginning to discover I stand at the shore of intellectual knowledge before an infinite sea of the esoteric.

Which is to say, these new aphorisms are a document of my Kneeling in Stages. Two and a half decades ago, a mighty spirit whispered to me and rearranged my days. Drink, it said, of solitude; taste of silence. I did as I was told and it left me a writer of aphorisms. Now, it’s back again with grander designs to transform my being. Renounce, it insists, word and world games and I have no choice but to submit, bow and write what I am told.

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