Acorns, Aphorisms and Apps

The story of a project that took me far away from the forms and genres where I was comfortable, and which continues to develop in unexpected ways.

Sep 21, 2023

Making something - the whole process of having an idea and seeing it through - isn’t simple. The process can be a labyrinth of frustration, dread and sudden surprise. And it isn’t always solitary, often taking its shape from people you love, and some you don’t. Here’s my story of how something strange, new, and possibly useful came to be.

Acorns

Acorns dropped from high branches of sidewalk trees on 79^th Street in Brooklyn. They smashed on the sidewalk and plunked on parked cars. I was tired, but regular tired. I sat in a folding chair outside of a place that sold coffee through a window, making it pandemic-safe-enough. To guard against acorns, I pulled the vinyl bonnet over the stroller where my infant son Walter slept.

It was the fall of 2020, six months into the lockdowns. Walter was four months old. I was watching him in the days and working nights for freelance clients. My wife was back at work after maternity leave, and it was best to get out of the house in the days.

I chugged a few gulps of coffee. Walter was asleep, and I estimated I had 45 minutes to work before he’d wake up and demand I get the stroller moving again. I removed a stapled batch of pages from the diaper bag.

The blood drains

I was going through the papers, to make the good fragments into poems. I crossed an ankle over a knee and rested the paper on my thigh.

But right then, a sudden extreme exhaustion hit me, draining the blood from my face. It arrived with a dispiriting certainty that poems could no longer do what I needed done. I was used to these kinds of crises. But this one stayed on for the day, and the week ahead. It felt definitive.

Where poetry had once seemed free, it now seemed soft and dishonest. It offered too many ways to hedge my bets, to have it both ways. It was like the famous Auden poem that ends so definitively “We must love one another or die,” which he then revised to “We must love one another and die.” He couldn’t figure it out, and eventually just tried to live it down.

After 28 years of reading and writing poems, there seemed a deliberate fecklessness to the form that stopped me in my tracks.

A bad review

But at the same time, I knew the papers in my lap held some moments I deeply meant and ideas I’d hate to lose forever. But if not poems, then what? The answer began to creep up from a bad review of my own work. The critic referred to me as being from San Diego, which doesn’t argue for his close-reading skills. He also didn’t like the tone or the structure of the book. What I heard in the review’s few grudging instants of praise may not have been what he meant. It was “great lines, but not great poems.”

While the acorns dropped and my tiny boy slept, and the stapled pages hung in my hand, I toyed with other ideas, like forming the material into something like Issa’s Year of My Life, with stretches of prose setting up short poems.

Terse and mighty pronouncements

That’s when the idea struck me – a book of aphorisms. Audacious and a little scary, I laughed out loud at the thought.

A collection of terse and mighty pronouncements! I’d associated aphorisms with thundering megalomania – the domain of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Heraclitus. But more recently, I’d found a softer side to them in David Markson’s Notecard Quartet, and Dave Hickey’s Dust Bunnies.

For the reader, aphorisms can be like eating popcorn. For a writer, aphorisms are scary. They live their short lives deliberately out of context. They’re short, with no room to hedge your bets. You have to say what you mean and own what you say. The set up and the landing have to add up. They can be disproven or repudiated quickly. They can flat-out fail.

Aphorisms prompt and provoke, but don’t ask you to sign the dotted line and join up. They can go for the breakthrough, the spit-take. As a one-time class clown, I always sensed that wisdom doesn’t reside atop some masthead, or at the end of some lengthy penance or dialectic. But rather, it’s just waiting for the right moment to stick out its leg and send me tumbling.

Process and pressure

So I removed all the prose and all the outright poetry. Harder but more important was crossing out the prescriptions. Don’t get me wrong. I live, laugh, love as much as the next guy. But being told to do it really takes me out of the mood.

At the time, the pandemic and the presidential election led me to read more news and to receive more rhetoric than I wanted. Everything was being boiled down to ultimatums about what to believe or what to do. Language was being put to bullying use. I started to feel like, just by using language, I was cooking with poison.

That informed the collection, where I hoped to build a highway of offramps.

But a book of aphorisms?

As a genre, aphorisms come with problems. Having multiple aphorisms per page results in one stealing focus from the other. But having a book with one aphorism per page would require a book with either a ton of blank paper, or one shaped like a matchbook that’s three inches thick.

There’s also the matter of putting the aphorisms in order. I felt tempted to structure the book into themes or chapters or moods or seasons or something. But that felt like qualifying them, even apologizing for them, and ultimately watering down the force of each.

Also, let’s get real – who’s going to publish a book of aphorisms? It’s not an established commercial genre, or one that most literary presses publish. It’s not even experimental, the way that most presses define it. And it lacks the humility with which it seems most small presses prefer to be approached.

Because each aphorism is so short - and potentially dead wrong - it’s an inherently risky genre. And what organization is really looking for more risk?

That winter, around Christmas, I took the collection of aphorisms and printed a half-dozen copies on Lulu, which I mailed to my close friends, mainly to say I was still alive and still at it. I couldn’t think of what else to do with it.

Look out honey, ‘cause I’m using technology

But sending that little collection around made all the difference, because it was no bolt from the blue that got the project moving again. What solved all the project’s biggest problems was a good friend - Matthew Dublin.

By then, we’d been close friends for more than twenty years, and collaborated on music, multiple films and other projects. Matt is a true polymath and artist who’d devoted the last decade to becoming a serious software developer. Over the pandemic, we’d been talking about potential projects. By early spring of 2021, a year living mostly indoors and online had done a number on everyone’s heads, to the point where NFTs seemed like a solid idea.

We were talking about NFTs and digital approaches to art. Matt brought up Brian Eno’s Bloom Worlds, an app where you can create hypnotic ambient music and visual patterns, which got us talking about Eno’s Oblique Strategies. It was originally a deck of cards - each with a short instruction for a music producer who’s hit a creative dead end. You’d shuffle them and try the suggestion on the card, such as “remove ambiguities and convert to specifics.” The idea is that a random suggestion could derail a misguided or exhausted train of thought, and open up new ideas.

Oblique Strategies was also an app, which simulated the experience of drawing cards at random. It showed us a way forward for Forget This Good Thing - an app that would deliver a single aphorism on a screen at a time, and randomize the order.

As we batted the idea back and forth, we realized that structuring and delivering the experience this way could do more than just solve the problems I was having with my aphorism collection. It also could do something uniquely valuable for the reader - see “A Way out of the Weir” coming this October, for more about that.

How and what it did

Then Matt worked his magic. I put the aphorisms into a spreadsheet. We discussed and beta-tested, tweaked and tested again. Forget This Good Thing came out in October 2021 for iPad and iPhone.

Since then, the app has been downloaded by a few hundred people. We didn’t want to be creepy, so the app didn’t collect any more data than that.

When it comes to projects like this, who knows? But it felt right. It felt like the beginning of something, which is a rare sensation these days.

There’s a new version of Forget This Good Thing out soon, maybe very soon, with new fortune-telling features, android and desktop versions, and a few hundred new aphorisms.

And it still feels like the beginning of something, like an act of hope that the phones that have devoured so much of our cultural and social lives can deliver something new and worthwhile. That feeling is my own best guess about how to move forward. In the end, Forget This Good Thing is a piece of art. It’s a prayer. And like any art or any prayer, the only real question is: Does it work? Let’s find out, together.

I look forward to sharing more the latest development of it very soon.

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