A Sardine on Vacation, Episode 2
The Isthmus

The last time we met, a segment of the Logged-In Public visited this columnist's house to get acquainted with my style, interests, and background. At one point, several of this group found a book on the coffee table and asked what it was.

A book.

They knew that. They hadn't been net surfing so long to have forgotten what books were. What kind of book?

Nothing you'd be interested in, I told them, and requested it be put away.

Then they became more curious because I didn't want them to look at it. Was it a dirty book?

The book cost seventy dollars.

Seventy dollars? What kind of book could be worth that much, they wondered, and not have pictures?

I explained that I had purchased it from an out-of-print book service. My sardine bank account had bravely swallowed the whale of an expense.

My guests thumbed a few pages, became discouraged at the enigmatic content and laid the volume aside. What was this guy writing about? It wasn't a story or anything they had seen.

The volume they were now sorry they had opened was a collection of aphorisms called Reasons of the Heart by Edward Dahlberg.

They had heard of aphorisms but couldn't quite define what they were.

I elaborated. An aphorism was a pithy statement that contained a truth. A sort of self-produced, self-introduced--as opposed to a popularly or collectively molded--truth about the condition of human society. Not the most satisfactory definition, but no one pressed for a clarification.

Since that evening, I have had time to think about a better way to describe how aphorisms worked.

Take an hourglass with its upper half filled with sand-this half corresponds to the writer's experience. The half that receives the sand, now empty, we'll call the potential recipient of the writer's life work. The aphorism itself is the isthmus of the hourglass; the isthmus narrows the writer's observational wealth to a single flow, nearly down to a sentence, for the sake of an all-pleasing effect.

The danger is that a reader may too readily agree or disagree with the aphorism and nullify its full effect. You will recognize a successful one when the tinge of colors with hourglass's bottom.

Now a sample from the aforesaid book, whose author has been called "the Ishmael of American letters":

Most women like a man's smell more than his character.

I dated a woman in college who would bury her face into my pillow and imbibe the leftover fragrances from my hair, skin, and breath. Years later, another woman was disposed to snuggle her face into the pits of my sweater.

What had they found so appealing? They just liked the smell. Personally, I preferred to have been cared about on other terms than my smell, say, my personality or intellectual efforts. Alas, how can we really control the manner by which people care for us?

Dahlberg implied that women have a very trustworthy device for finding out who means business in a relationship.

The nose.

Man's proboscis has been very unstable in the past. The very story, "The Nose" by Gogol, testifies to a certain malfunction of the man's sensual being.

Hence, women's tendency to take men less seriously than men take themselves. The lesson (for those who seek a lesson): trust a man's odor, not his declarations of love nor his plans for the future.

This interpretation of the Dahlberg aphorism, if not the aphorism itself, may seem primitive to those with up-to-date sensibilities. You are guaranteed to get more attention from Nietzsche's "Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman's game is mediocre." You may feel that I, the Sardine, have been too long away from the modern tin and have not known the right sort of women.

So, I'll offer another perspective from Vespucci, an expatriate friend living in Florence, Italy. I sent him fifty aphorisms from the book; he commented on many. About the one under discussion he wrote:

"What D. seems to be saying is that MEN'S BODIES SMELL BETTER THAN THEIR CHARACTERS.

"Historically, nothing has been more putrid than the characters of men. Can women rely on anything else but the senses? Even a group of men who have appeared interesting, artists and literary types, can't be acquitted.

"Initially, we romanticize a Chopin, George Sand, Flaubert, Goya, Picasso. All the bohemian mythology we've sentimentalized. Yet, many from this creative lot have been cheaters, backstabbers, adulterers, paranoids, suicides, drug addicts and drunkards.

"Dostoevski was a rabid xenophobe, though he probably lied about being epileptic. Gogol became a religious fanatic. Thank God we know nothing about Shakespeare. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife with a damn pencil, for Christ sake.

"Then we come to Michelangelo. He didn't women near him. But he knew that his rotten, money-grubbing, near psychotic personality was not enough to repulse admirers of the fair sex. Thus he made himself stink so badly physically that nobody, especially women, would care for him. He had the latitude to be physically repugnant because he knew only one 'smell' of his was what counted."

Vespucci and I agree to put up with the other's opinion, so I won't offer a gloss on his words. He had appended this question to his commentary:

"It would take long and agonizing study to figure out what men really care for in women. Certainly nothing as simple and truthful as women's natural smells. Nor have I ever met a man who enjoyed what a woman alone possessed. Why does it seem that man's love for a woman revolves around his desires? Can men imagine relationships any other way?"

Such considerations we might take up in a future column.

The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. If you want to reach him, his address is popesixtus@aol.com.