Aphorisms

I first blogged about Aleksandar Krzavac’s aphorisms back in November of 2007; a fresh selection is offered below. Krzavac is a member of the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle and some of his sayings are featured in the film Goodbye, How Are You?, which I blogged about yesterday. In these aphorisms, Krzavac turns his clinical, jaundiced eye on the current political/moral/economic state of Serbia… As always with Balkan aphorisms, prepare to wince even as you smile…

We live virtually but die for real.

Morals make saints; breaking morals makes human beings.

Morality is a barrier between men and women.

They lift their foreheads so high in order not to see what’s happening on the ground.

Eternal vigilance leads to permanent insomnia.

As oil prices get closer to the maximum, the value of human lives gets closer to the minimum.

Imagine my chagrin when, three-quarters of the way through Goodbye, How Are You? (a.k.a. Aphocalypse Now), Boris Mitic’s superb “satirical documentary fairy tale” featuring the aphorisms of the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle, the following message appeared on my screen: “SKIPPING DAMAGED AREA”. At first, I thought this must be a reference to some dark episodes from Boris’s past, or perhaps to the Balkans itself, which Boris traversed during a three-year, 50,000 km-trip to compile the images for his film and which is still hurting from the 1990s wars. But no, it simply meant that there was something wrong with my DVD, so I have still not seen the end of the film, which somehow seems fitting for a documentary about forsaken hopes and damaged dreams…

Boris himself is most eloquent in explaining the background to his film: “An aphorism, as defined and practiced in Serbia, is a short, sharp, linguistically effective sentence or two which imperatively contains an unexpectedly subversive twist that describes in a most striking, clairvoyant way the hidden truth of some common social matters or states of mind. What makes Serbian aphorisms different from classic proverbs is their killer dose of black humor, satire and merciless sarcasm that still conveys a strong humanistic message.” Some examples from the film’s aphoristic narration, which braids together aphorisms from members of the Belgrade Aphoristic Circle with the tale of “a hero of our time who would die for what he believes in but doesn’t believe in anything anymore”:

When a boomerang leaves this place, it never returns.

The minister is taking the weekend off; that’s his contribution to fighting corruption.

They are taking a stick-and-carrot approach: First they beat us with sticks, and then with carrots.

We wanted to fight til the last man, but there were not enough of us.

At any given moment we know what we want, we just don’t know when that moment is.

The longer the war, the closer the peace.

Not only are the aphorisms great, but the collage of images that make up Goodbye, How Are You? are visual aphorisms in themselves, following all of the Five Laws of the Aphorism: They are short (each image lasts no more than a few seconds but achieves a startling effect by being juxtaposed with other, absurdly apt images); they are definitive (the vignettes are blunt and graphic—a tractor dragging a corpse down a street, a boy resting in an armchair as a village burns around him); they are personal (Boris’s unfailing eye for the surreal aspects of the real is evident throughout); they are philosophical (each image elaborates on the narrated text but also takes it off into different philosophical directions, such as the shot of statues of Snow White and one dwarf decorating a home that slowly pulls back to reveal a statue of the Buddha sitting beside them); and they have a twist (each and every image conceals an “unexpectedly subversive twist”, like the shot of a black cat who had its reputation for bad luck reversed when it got squashed on a busy street).

Aphorisms lodge themselves in our minds through their brilliant, startling imagery and subtle meanings; Boris Mitic’s film will lodge there for exactly the same reasons.

Michael Castro calls Sephardic proverbs “the unwritten laws of how to be and how to see”, and a better definition of aphoristic expressions I have not seen. Castro has been collecting these proverbs for years, from books, from friends, from relatives. They are featured in Sephardic Proverbs in Big Bridge (Vol 3, No 3), where Castro writes: “For Sephardic Jews, scattered in insular communities throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Europe, after the century of persecution and Inquisition that culminated in their expulsion from Spain or Sepharad in 1492, proverbs were an important means of passing on and reinforcing values and identity.” This is, in fact, the function of aphoristic expressions in all places, at all times, and Sephardic proverbs make particularly rich reading… My thanks to the ever aphoristically alert Jim Finnegan (check out his blog, ursprache) for bringing my attention to this unique strand of proverbial literature.

Just let me in and I’ll make my own space.

Do something when you are able, not when you want to.

He who has no home is neighbor to the entire world.

It’s better to be the tail of a lion than the head of a rat.
(Compare Lucifer’s retort in Paradise Lost: I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.)

He who bows down too low exposes his ass.

A closed mouth, flies cannot enter.

Whoever falls, feels.

Aphorisms are everywhere, not just in books but carved into buildings and monuments, scrawled on bathroom walls, slapped onto car bumpers and emblazoned across t-shirts and baseball caps—and they are branded onto the skin. In The Word Made Flesh, a piece on literary tattoos that’s part of the Forbes.com special report on Aphorisms, Proverbs, Thoughts and Sayings, Mark Lewis writes: “You need not be a celebrity [like Angelina Jolie] to have your exposed skin admired on the Internet. The hoi polloi can share images of their literary tattoos with Toronto photographer Jen Grantham, who displays them on her blog, Contrariwise.org.”

Contrariwise is worth a look/read for some of the words of wisdom made flesh there, including the mordantly defiant and utterly inspirational:

Defy gravity

which is Kat’s tattoo, from the play Wicked, which she says she wanted “from the moment the show let out, as a reminder to just go for it in life and not let anyone or anything hold me down.”

Then there is Stellar’s tattoo, an even darker take on the defying gravity theme, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

Be ahead of all departure.

And then there is the simple word “Unless”, tattooed on the forearm as a reminder of the Dr. Seuss line from The Lorax:

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Bertie Charles Forbes, the man who founded the magazine that bears his name, was also a life-long collector of aphorisms. He gave “Thoughts on the Business of Life”—a smattering of thoughtful quotations—a full page in every issue of the magazine, he said, “to inspire a philosophic mode of life, broad sympathies, charity towards all.” In the introduction to Thoughts on the Business of Life, which now totals some 10,000 sayings, Forbes wrote that he wanted to “have done something towards bequeathing a better world for my four sons and an increasing number of grandchildren.” That motivation puts him in a long line of moralist-aphorists that started with the local Egyptian potentate Ptah-Hotep back in the third millennium BCE…

Forbes.com has just put Thoughts on the Business of Life online, accompanied by a clutch of essays on Aphorisms, Proverbs, Thoughts and Sayings. This special report includes reflections by Karl Shmavonian, the editor of Forbes‘ quotes page; a piece on how sayings evolve by Brian Burrell; a friendly warning to misquoters from Nigel Rees; an anatomy of proverbs by Wolfgang Mieder; a primer on online quotation sleuthing by Fred R. Shapiro; a piece on literary tattoos by Mark Lewis; and a consideration of aphorisms and the Forbes family by me.

Bertie Charles and Malcolm Forbes are part of a small group of aphorists for whom a talent for the form has run in the family. There are only a few other examples of aphoristic family trees. “Fireside Poet” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. passed on some aphoristic genes to his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was a U.S. Supreme Court justice. And, of course, the Roosevelts—President Theodore, First Lady Eleanor (Theodore’s niece) and U.S. President Franklin Delano (Eleanor’s distant cousin and husband)—were consistently aphoristic. The aphorisms of Bertie Charles Forbes tend to be moralistic and civic-minded:

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Those of his son, Malcolm, are more philosophical, even Zen-like:

When you catch what you’re after, it’s gone.

The aphorisms of both men, though, remind us why this intimate, idiosyncratic form is so special. If you’re in search of more reminders, check out Thoughts on the Business of Life.

Every polished surface conceals a mirror. Whatever shines—the blade of a knife, the curve of another person’s eye—is intent on reflection. Desperate for attention, these things seem to think the best way to get it is to display us to ourselves. Why else would images gather wherever water stops to collect itself? Why else would windows, meant to be transparent, show us pictures of ourselves looking through them? Mirrors are untrustworthy because each one presents a slightly different perspective. They may feign objectivity, but they really can’t resist giving an opinion, playing up imperfections and blemishes, grotesquely magnifying things or cruelly diminishing them. And we can’t resist looking, even though you can never argue with a mirror. It just throws your own words back at you.

A loose thread protruding from my favorite sweater. So this is what everything hangs by, this is what holds it all together. A thread can never relax; it shrivels if you cut it too much slack. Tension is the only thing that gives it shape, purpose. It gladly bears the stress even as it starts to fray around the edges. Once shorn from its pattern, though, a thread becomes lost, distraught, useless as a snapped violin string, a coil of old rope. This no doubt explains a thread’s tenacity, knowing how quickly things unravel, that clinging is its only strength.

A version of this abbreviated essay appears in the June-July issue of Ode.

Oleg Vishnepolsky was one of the early technologists and researchers at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in the 1980s, and was thus present at the creation of some of the critical advances that made the Internet possible. Some of his sayings come out of his corporate experience: “Good project management is building a novel out of a bunch of short stories.” Vishnepolsky’s father was an editor at Pravda; his mother a professor of the arts. Despite his choice of a technical career, Vishnepolsky retained a love for art, journalism, poetry, and aphorisms. A selection of his own:

A choice is the only thing you kill by making it.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you create an environmental problem.

Small actions beat big intentions.

A relationship that lasts is built not on a win-win but on a sacrifice-sacrifice.

A relationship is an hourglass; sometimes, you have to turn it upside down to get it going again.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, the firewood is yours for the taking.

A joke is a soap bar; it gets thinner with use.

If you bump into a devil you do not know, quickly introduce yourself.

The last person into an elevator is the first person out.

Rap star Kanye West doesn’t read books. But he knows what he likes, and what he likes are aphorisms, or at least something that almost sort of kind of approximates aphorisms. Despite his aversion to the printed word, West has co-authored a book of “thoughts and theories,” according to Canada’s National Post. The book, Thank You and You’re Welcome, is just 52 pages long, and apparently some of those pages are blank. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” West told the National Post. “I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.” A selection of “Kanye-isms” follows. For more, you’ll have to read all 52 pages of the book.

Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!

I hate the word hate!

Get used to being used.

A truncated and dialectical form of the aphorism proper, kind of like the crushed cube a car becomes after it has been compressed in a junkyard, the oxymoron retains the paradox and provocation of the longer saying. Steven Carter (see his parables here; a posting about his aphorisms was lost in a catastrophic failure of the site a while back…) offers plenty of oxymorons to ogle in Little House of Oxymorons, which he describes as “a supplement to The New Devil’s Dictionary, a two-volume ‘sequel’ to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary of a century ago”:

Scheduled departure: Get to the airport early. Right, so that your wait won’t exceed more than three-and-a-half hours.

Online learning: Online learning is to learning what phone sex is to sex.

Scheduled arrival: See “Scheduled Departure.”

Figuratively speaking: Literally speaking! “It’s literally raining cats and dogs,” exclaims a local weatherman.

Free will: Ambrose Bierce—Free will, O mortals, is a dream / Ye all are chips upon a stream.

Conventional wisdom: True wisdom is unconventional, to say the least, ever and always.

Considered opinion: Opinion.

Reality programming: Contemporary TV offerings, as tedious and stupid as they are highly orchestrated and edited.

Parkway: George Carlin—“Why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?”