“My life has always occurred at the nexus of psychology, spirituality, and art,” writes Peter Yovu, and that’s exactly the spot his lines hit with unerring aphoristic accuracy. There are several other aphorists who have occupied a similar space. Antonio Porchia, a long-time Yovu favorite, is a master of Zen-like pronouncements such as
The loss of a thing affects us until we have lost it altogether.
Yovu strikes similar wistful, though haiku-inflected rather than koan-ish, note:
If you wish to give me something I’ll keep, you’ll have to steal it from me first.
Yovu also has a sharp, serenely surreal eye (and a sense of humor!):
A jellyfish is one of the sun’s muscles.
that partakes of Malcom de Chazal’s painterly observations:
Space is the widest open of all mouths.
But Yovu’s voice and perspective are uniquely his own. He has published a couple of books of haiku-influenced poems, “but the aphorisms go in a different, though sometimes not too different direction,” he says. “I love paradox and a poetic/spiritual quirkiness.” The quirk is, in fact, the elementary particle from which all true aphorisms are made. Like neutrinos, quirks stream through and around us, though we can’t see them and rarely even detect them. Only sayings of the finest mesh capture their fleeting spark. Peter Yovu has spread his net of quirkiness wide and come up with some remarkable catches.
Always leave your glasses where you can see them.
The more I try to escape, the more the arrow of Everything considers me its bull’s eye.
When a tiger attacks you, become a jungle.
It is often not what you take off that leaves you naked, but what you take on.
A celebrity is everyone but himself.
An introvert is happy to be no one. To be someone requires the consent of too many people.
I’m well over sixty. That’s not always true. Sometimes I’m fairly ill over it.
The sky never quite recovers from a fallen tree.
I only write the lines I would highlight in a novel or essay. Why bother with the rest?
There are no right angles in the brain, though there may be wry tangles.
A book, lying unopened on the bed: a stack of horizons.
It will soon be over is the longest thought.
What is foreign to you can only increase your vocabulary.
The only true loss is trying to remember what it was.
The darkness lies under me. My face is the hull of a great ship.
Like a razor a mirror is dulled by too much use.
I wish to develop all my senses, and there are, of course, many more than five. A sense of the absurd, for example, the organ for which is found in many a church.
There are senses I do not wish to lose—sight, certainly, or hearing. But equally I would not wish to lose my sense of the absurd. What would be the name for someone who lost his sense of the absurd? I can think of two: blind, deaf.
