1.

Life surpasses all attempts at capture, and so we fool ourselves by reducing it to a few moments of great intensity. Not without consequence: our viewpoint shifts in radical succession, and we redesign everything that preceded it. If the final moment, the final shift, is sour, that will be the taste of our whole existence. Perhaps in detecting the pattern of these shifts early, we can gather their particularities—how was it to think, to love, to hate, to long, to talk, to sleep, to eat, to breathe? Life will remain impossibly plural, of course, but so will our perspective.

2.

Life as boredom and desire is yet another of our great abstractions, sufficient for those who still need to indulge the middle manager within them.

3.

Our involvement with the world has a predictable pattern at the outset—temper gives birth to an affinity; we measure it against custom; passion waxes and wanes, then spills over into action; almost invariably, whim prolongs effort; at this critical point, either imagination provides the living touch or whim playacts energy. Indeed, a life can be built without ever reaching action, built by comparing our proclivities with those of the epoch and feeling favorably or unfavorably disposed in alternation, always on the brink. But it is far more common to have a taste of the whole process, with the suspicion that we go on merely to avoid the arduous uncertainties of beginning anew. If one cannot live up to a certain effort and is thus forced to confront initial conditions again and again, one is bound to find them coercing, in need of radical change. The living touch of the imagination, the true completion of our tasks, endures as an accident.

4.

We have learned from the Greeks the necessity of command over the soul. But from their heirs, the Romantics, we have also learned the necessity of its revolt.

5.

All straining toward the future and all straining toward the past tear the present apart. Our conceptions of heaven thus uphold the insufficiency of the deictic.

6.

It is fine, wonderful even, to bathe in the stream of an old emotion. But one is often too eager in demanding the world of circumstance that brought it about. And so the emotion leaves us with anemic images and latter-day despair.

7.

We incorporate the past at intervals, and it is late in life that we can be said to command it. What is now an inscrutable image—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile—will announce its place through the accrual of suggestions.

8.

We taste the glories of distance as creators; but in those of contact, we allow frenzy to uncouple us from our will. In absence, humans; in presence, beasts.

9.

Within impersonality lies a curious paradox: aspiration toward it deepens the refractory aspects of personality. One believes that all emotions must be cast off until a supreme disinterest flowers forth; another, that only an amplification of emotion can overpower viewpoint and access universality; still another, that emotions have nothing to do with the matter. If any of these aspirants ever exhaust themselves in their slanted struggles, they will rest in the conviction of achievement.

10.

The enlivening effect of ruthlessness confines itself to two short-lived spasms: the shift to begin and the shift to end.

11.

We need the intermittent poisoning of self-delusion—it startles us into beginning.

12.

When the word is placed, it brims. Appreciation comes later, when it settles. Overestimation is a venial fault, born from the measureless charity of a stimulated mind.

13.

In every conquest of expression, we seem to find an affront to our feigned versatility. That is what we are—standing against time, no longer fleeting.

14.

Humble though our talents be, in the act of creation we perfect our capacity for enjoyment. The path is laid for the body to participate in contemplation.

15.

The artist must remember that art traverses the body. Inspiration is the tremor that entangles with a sudden image.

16.

Each work is a temporary home. There we wake, we eat, we drink, we idle about, and we sleep. To the extent that our memories pervade it, we resist moving on. And yet, when we do, the occasional visit will reveal its adequacy for the irruption of nature. Each work is a temporary home for us, a permanent one for others.

17.

There are works that gain by diffusion through great portions of our life. Others gain only by containment within a brief, intense interval. These are natural cadences both to creation and assimilation. A uniform rush—a uniform languor, myopia—hyperopia.

18.

Creation begets creation. Sterility, insofar as it can greatly exercise the imagination, is suited to prevail at the slightest inducement.

19.

There are moments when we feel unaccountably barren. It is only then that we are ready to return to nature as humble observers, only then that we can gather in earnest. As we produce, we exhale. As we rest, we inhale.

20.

Misunderstanding the relationship between time and energy is a source of profound discouragement. We believe inspiration to strike in an eloquent stream of interconnected thoughts, and workmanship to drag out its painstaking conquests. And yet the divine instant more often than not clamors for a barrage of refuse, so as to summon the energy equal to the task, while that other manifestation—the long, uncertain patience— requires the upkeep of energy to better withstand the sojourns of grace.

21.

We tend to believe that outbursts, whether physical or spiritual, reveal a deeper nature, a more authentic personality. What they reveal, however, is the indistinct current of life. Somebody still haunts the attempted articulation, but one is unfailingly in awe before the blasted emotional landscape.

22.

All that remains unexpressed has value only for oneself. It is the land on which we build, the land on which we grow our crops. Silence is always a survey.

23.

The soul that will enlarge upon the intimations of our work lies somewhere—of necessity. Whether it be a great soul or a modest one is irrelevant. In the upheaval of recognition, everything brims with sense. Two forms of exile have ceased.

24.

Once a human being has glimpsed truth in the efforts of his life, it is an irrefusable gain for all. Its form may remain inaccessible to our private constitution, but it still illustrates the possibility of a substantial, persistent communication between soul and world.

25.

Habit undergoes a transformation in each of the fundamental forms of the spirit. Religion and art make of it a preparation—ritual and trance; philosophy and science, a method—dialectic, trial and error. One pair plunges us into the depths of fluctuating consciousness, whereas the other builds upon the obstacles of sense.

26.

There is a point in our learning after which we feel tempted to renounce the tools and wait for a passing caravan. We can resist: it is a matter of staying in place and conversing.

27.

Much of our mob brutality owes its existence to the daily toll of symbolic contact—exacted in the name of work-friendly atmospheres. So long as we refuse, or feel ourselves excluded from, the constitution of meaningful relationships, the gentle estrangement of distance is a courtesy that gathers import with every passing day. Isolation, a symbolic autonomy, is another dead end.

28.

The mechanism of incuriosity works by convincing ourselves that moderate competence is complete mastery. Owing to the pervasiveness of this easy effort, our claims will not be disproved. Perhaps a rather innocuous variation of self-hypnotism, were it not for its tendency to swell into a will to notoriety.

29.

There is always a superabundance of talent and genius. The epoch merely makes of it a deluge or an undercurrent. Growing blind to the merit of others is the surest sign of our soul’s congealment.

30.

Wisdom is not a property of institutions. They can only set limits, however vaguely. Institutions outline the pragmatic boundaries of human activity. And here lies their true value: the instigation to transgress.

31.

No imposition is lifelong. It deteriorates into an inadequate vehicle for expression, much as the monument to an obscure bureaucrat which, meaning little, acquires an eyepatch, whiskers, and a toothless smile. It is asinine, yes, but it is no longer an excrescence of authority.

32.

When reason dons the habitus of the taskmaster, nothing grows. Reason has always been a gardener.

33.

Nature has regaled us with the spectacle of life and death. In its alluring supervenience, death has made its way to the center of our consciousness. The centrifugal movement of life, by contrast, reaches us only in waves.

34.

Longevity is measured through the endurance of spiritual commotion. The soul retrenches, perhaps expands. There comes, at last, the blow that untethers us—luminous, implacable.

35.

The labyrinthine task of valuing ourselves is better left to the day in which nothing else can be done; in other words, it is better left to that instant before death when life thrusts itself complete in a holy second.

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Phoretics is now available from Paradise Editions. You can order a copy here.

Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Exacting Clam, Firmament, Able Muse, new_sinews, and elsewhere. Twitter: @iab9208