Great piece in the NY Times by Brian Morton, Falser Words Were Never Spoken, about why the true function of aphorisms is to make you feel NOT good about yourself, not to reassure you that everything will be alright. Aphorisms are irritants, not salves; in (metaphorical) media terms, they are ‘lean forward’ rather than ‘lean back’ experiences. “When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them,” Morton writes. “Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.” Inspect your coffee mugs today! Dispose of those that don’t unsettle you, as you would expired medicines discovered in a bathroom cabinet.
Aphorisms by Manfred Weidhorn
“After a half century of teaching and writing and after publishing ten books …,” Manfred Weidhorn writes, ” I entered the stage of life in which such matters dwindle in significance and one looks back rather on the road taken. Drawing on all my experiences and gathering the courage or, if you will, lapsing into the folly of hazarding conclusions about the larger picture, I have therefore in the past two years published three books on the meaning of it all.” One of those books is Landmines of the Mind: 1,500 Original and Impolite Assertions, Surmises, and Questions about Almost Everything, Mr. Weidhorn’s collection of astute and occasionally acerbic aphorisms. In the preface to Landmines, Mr. Weidhorn compares writing (and reading) to connecting the dots or, in the case of aphorisms, to not connecting the dots; instead just skipping “from one impression to another.” ‘Impression’ is definitely the right word here, since aphorisms are like pointillist paintings. Close up they may seem like a random collection of unformed, ill-placed splodges. But step back a bit and consider the whole and a definite pattern emerges. I guess we don’t so much connect the dots as linger long enough and pay enough attention to observe the dots connect themselves. Herewith, a few of Mr. Weidhorn’s points to ponder…
If young people should be seen and not heard, old people should be heard and not seen.
Blessed are the fortunate, for they have inherited the earth.
For people in developed countries, life consists mainly of moving from one room to another.
Some people would not be so wicked if the rest of us were not so stupid.
God spoke to you? He spoke to me too and told me to ignore you.
Actually, what does not kill me, often injures me grievously.
Aphorisms by Martin Langford
Martin Langford, a poet and teacher, is also a keen practitioner and promoter of the aphoristic form in Australia. His book Microtexts is a collection of his aphorisms, many of which are pensees that focus on the art of writing itself, an art that Langford demonstrates in these sayings depends very much on the art of living. A brief selection from Microtexts:
Long before Warhol, books had been mass-produced objects that spoke to people individually.
Sometimes, good craftsmanship can reveal that there was nothing there in the first place.
Meaning is a walk in the snow.
Minimalism is just another excess of style.
Few people complete their experience of an event until they have talked about it.
More Aphorisms by Sabahudin Hadzialic
I first blogged about Sabahudin Hadzialic’s aphorisms back in 2009. Here is a fresh selection of his mordant black humor, translated into English by Anya Reich with a little idiomatic editing by me…
Socialist thought created a religion of ideology; capitalist thought created an ideology of religion.
In the Balkans, apathy is not the exception that proves the rule, it is the rule that excludes the exception!
Why do we hate each other? After all, we’re just three different tribes of the same people. But which tribe!?
Politicians decided to put an end to organized crime—by committing mass suicide!
Campaigning is when you want to influence the masses; manipulation is when you succeed.
Even More Aphorisms (Epigrams) by Thomas Farber
Thomas Farber, senior lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley, has a new collection of epigrammatic epistles coming out in August: Foregone Conclusions. In the afterword to the book, Farber writes: “Humor. Writing and rewriting these spars and catarrhs, I often laughed. Because of wordplay, of course. But also because I was turning moral blindness, often my own, into recognition of the distance between error and self-knowledge, self-image and fact. If the epigrammist appears to presume himself superior to others, of course he’s implicated in all he perceives. As, when children, insulted, we’d retort, ‘Takes one to know one.’” For some of Farber’s conclusions that have gone before on this blog, click here and here.
Monogamy, so you can each focus on food.
The last two centuries. From village community (gemeinschaft) to atomistic capitalism (gesellschaft). From see to c.c.
Sleepless: nocternity.
When not repeating itself, history stutters.
He found it harder to distinguish between things intended and things done.
If the old ask, “Which way?” graciously explain, “Dead ahead.”
Metaphors in Worn-Out Words
The Ledbury Poetry Festival starts today. Last year, The Guardian asked poets to name their most hated words. For this year’s festival, running until 10 July, the paper asked for ‘worn-out words‘, expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning. Here are their responses, including my own. You might not be surprised to learn that the expressions are all, er, metaphors…
Aphorisms by Renzo Llorente
A native of Brunswick, Maine, Renzo Llorente lives in Spain, where he teaches philosophy on Saint Louis University’s Madrid campus. In addition to his
academic publications, Llorente is the author of Beyond the Pale: Exercises in Provocation, a collection of aphorisms and fragments published by
Vagabond Voices. Part I of Beyond the Pale contains musings on a wide variety of topics, while Part II consists of brief meditations on political themes. Here are some selections from Part I:
Whence the condemnation of loitering? Why this aversion to what is, after all, the definitive metaphor for “the human condition”? To loiter: to remain in an area for no obvious reason (Merriam-Webster).
To have unclear thoughts is to mumble in silence.
We often praise optimism as though it were a virtue, when it is in fact something of a pathology. To be an optimist is to be metaphysically in denial.
Theology is the pious form of sophistry.
Our regrets never disappoint us: no matter how regularly we frequent them, they always afford us an inexhaustible source of distress.
Aphorisms by Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler (Geary’s Guide pp. 21-24) is the author of one of my all-time favorite aphorisms, an aphorism I first encountered as a teenager when I happened to be learning the very instrument referred to in the saying:
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
This aphorism has been a fixture of my thinking ever since. I’ve not come across a more apt metaphor for life. I never knew the original source of the aphorism, however, until I recently read a selection of Butler’s essays. It comes from the essay ‘How To Make the Best of Life’, a typically apposite and delightful piece in which Butler argues that we make the most of life only after we’re dead—through the effect of our example and influence on those still living or, if we’re creative, through our art:
He or she who has made the best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it.
Butler is such a perceptive, funny writer that it’s a shame he is not more widely read, especially his Note-Books and essays, in which some of his best aphoristic thinking can be found…
We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.
When a thing is old, broken, and useless we throw it on the dust-heap, but when it is sufficiently old, sufficiently broken, and sufficiently useless we give money for it, put it into a museum, and read papers over it which people come long distances to hear.
We care most about what concerns us either very closely, or so little that practically we have nothing whatever to do with it.
Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor.
Truth is like a photographic sensitized plate, which is equally ruined by over and by under exposure, and the just exposure for which can never be absolutely determined.
Still More Aphorisms by Aleksandar Krzavac
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the formal break up of Yugoslavia; Slovenia declared its independence on June 25, 1991. To commemorate that event, Aleksandar Krzavac sends a selection of “vintage aphorisms” dedicated to that disappeared era of communism-socialism. (For more of Krzavac’s aphorisms, click here, here, and here.) “Comparing that system to today’s globalization is more like comparing different civilizations than systems,” Krzavac writes. “People who once lived in Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia know it well—basic social values, economic relations, interpersonal communication, lifestyles, individual freedoms of thinking and moving were completely different. Therefore, almost all aphorisms written in former communist (socialist) countries are more or less political. People in general—and writers, journalists and university professors in particular—felt the enormous burden of censorship. They feared to openly criticize the government and ruling party. Books were banned as were some metaphors or allegories due to misinterpretation by the ruling party. Now fear of censorship has been replaced by widespread fear of job loss. It sounds bizarre but a recent survey conducted in Serbia showed that people in Serbia are more afraid of job loss than of death. So, even in today’s democracy, writers still have lots of work; only the topics of criticism are different.”
Don’t build prisons; close the borders.
All human organs are biological except the brain, which is ideological.
After arrest, the writer figured out the point of proverb ‘Silence is golden’.
The writer is still at large; the police cannot make out what his metaphors mean.
I think, therefore I am an anachronism.
Ouch, I really hope I won’t be run over by the wheel of progress.
It’s not called a crisis here; it’s called the economic cycle.
Our politicians are very hygienic; they substituted brainwashing for money laundering.
Upon the advice of my lawyer I stopped writing aphorisms.
Aphorisms by John Bradley
John Bradley’s aphorisms are mundanely magnificent and nonchalantly sublime, like cracking open a fortune cookie to find not a saying but a symphony orchestra. Bradley‘s collection of aphorisms, Trancelumination, is out from Lowbrow Press in the autumn. He discovered the aphorism via Antonio Porchia, but says he finds himself “coming to the aphorism at a slant, as I’m a poet greatly influenced by surrealism. Maybe I should call them anti-aphorisms.” There is a definite sense of surrealism here, reminiscent of the fun surrealistic sayings of Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret (Geary’s Guide, p. 369), which they gave the jocular title 152 Proverbs Adapted to the Taste of the Day. Bradley also invented the Journal of the International Collective of Cosmic Aphorists, a title his publisher likes so much that he now wants to create this very journal. “I feel like I stepped into a Borges short story,” Bradley quips. Step into Bradley’s surreal world of sentences here:
Smoke needs no passport.
Without love or malice, kiss your collarbone at least once a day.
Carry the fruit or the worm, your choice, but carry something.
Rain speaks many dialects, yet no one ever requires a translator.
The sparrow that built its nest inside the fire alarm has no need of a fire extinguisher.
A photograph of an open mouth reminds me of the space between the rungs of a ladder.
I made a list of everything I love. Then a list of everything I find annoying. They were exactly the same.