Aphorismata
probably not a duplicate repost of these old thoughts, but you never know
1. What if murder wasn’t news but writing a terrific poem was?
2. I used to think getting published in hardback was the logical culmination of writing: but now I know that’s like expecting them to erect a bronze statue of you in the town square.
3. Warfare is a dream, but slaughter is an avocation.
4. If humans were rational creatures we’d all be driving Bicycles and speaking Esperanto.
5. ‘No Mistakes Allowed’ is the sign at the Empty Motel.
6. A poet without folly is like a race car without sponsor stickers.
7. The only one who understands Umbrism is Yasusada: and he doesn’t understand it.
8. The Devouring are now the Prolific.
9. The Dictionary is the Samovar of Poetry.
10. How can you sing the song of creation when you don’t know shit about shit?
11. From above, it looks like creativity; it feels like a desert when you are crossing it.
12. How will we know danger without Danger Music?
13. A map of purposes constructs a Mystery.
14. Pattern is its food.
15. When you listen to a compilation over & over, till after one song you grow to expect the next, that’s a kind of meaning; when you read a specialized vocabulary word & it makes you think of a certain context, that’s a kind of meaning.
16. Not-silence is my utter & sufficient revenge. But silence–silence is my grace.
17. What is being fed by the refusal of reciprocity? Hauteur?
18. My mind is my only refuge; sometimes, not even that.
19. Accessories we are to murder, and worse. In self defence, we point the finger at Nazis. How useful it is to have had Nazis!
20. Bloodstained is the new black.
21. Imagine a people who found all ageing beautiful.
22. Isn’t reviewing just like earnestly reading the face of an inanimate thing, to find out its thoughts? We look at everything as if it had a face–except each other. We look at each other as if we had no faces.
23. The trouble with choosing leaders based on how well they play The Game (or have it played for them), is that once in office the Game is no longer even the largest part of what they do or the consequences of what they do. Yet they continue as if the Game were still everything. Because it’s the only thing they know how to do that’s not pretence. Not only have we made ourselves ignorant, we have handed over our fates to people still more ignorant.
24. Nihilism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
25. God doesn’t hate smokers, I said. He just loves Cancer more.
26. Obligations, like fixed constellations; dreams, like the wandering planets.
27. You listen to them describe impossible ailments.
28. I think we’ve almost got to the point where the Conspiracy isn’t a secret anymore. Moreover, the Conspiracy doesn’t even care.
29. They said in the paper she went in to save a dog or a cat, because they didn’t want to write she died because she ran back into a burning building to get her Louis Vuitton handbag.
30. If you fetishize your every act as choosing, how will you know when a real choice presents itself?
31. Poetry is a Vampire.
32. Do you think having aspirations will keep you from being crushed?
33. Obsessed with mere stigmata, we only know vampires by the cape they’re supposed to sport; & when Nazis forego their swastika armbands, we embrace them like brothers.
34. TV in bed–the only approved intoxication–what the world would aspire to–what we are fighting for. Crashsound reaches to your marrow. Free, indeed. Free of the burden of being a separate person. Is there any burden greater? Is there any solace sweeter than of watching TV, in bed?
35. Corporations are the true shape shifters, they keep changing their alias; & as for their purpose, is it even expressible in the language of humans? Rather, of viruses.
36. In the labyrinth of recombinant pop culture, only the radically paradoxical resists deliquescence.
37. The mistake people make in looking for the Antichrist, is assuming there can only be one.
38. Being intelligent is like being the only person with a sense of smell, in a slaughterhouse.
39. Mysteries of El español. Why is the word mano feminine? Because you can make love to it. Why is the word día masculine? Because the sun never asks for directions. Just so you’d know.
40. The pain of others, like a color they can’t see.
41. Delete each day as it comes.
42. Did you say, ‘I must learn more about these people,’ or did you say, ‘Now I will begin to hate them’–?
43. Stupidity alone would not have destroyed us; nor mere greed. But their combination has quite as irrevocably doomed us, as a people and as a civilization, as if we bit down on the barrel of a shotgun, and pulled both triggers.
44. If the civil rights movement has ceased to seem everyone’s struggle, is it not still more astonishing that rewarding the already rich should have become so?
45. One fills a pastiche with genuine feeling, & for this feat is accounted an artistic success.
46. FOREVER starting again, having to go back to the last place you remember: isn’t this the law of flicker-self? Why do you imagine it is ever any different?
47. Negligence is an army. In this landscape of futile guideposts, language itself is only the pointer, perhaps, to what should have been the in-between places.
48. And philosophy moves like another such caped crusader, multiplying shadows in its war against the tendency to flicker.
(The Nacreous Oughts blog, 2004-6)