Aphoristic Mixed Dips 2 (2001)

For everyone who's been encouraging me for years to go public with the aphoristic bits and pieces I used to write lots of - today a little more of a selection. I'm putting them up with hesitation, after fiddling round with them for too long - I think maybe because, looking back with the benefit of many years' hindsight, they seem imitative and a touch antiquated - harking back, as they do, to the days when I wrote on the assumption that it was possible to make WEIGHTY PRONOUNCEMENTS about LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING without charging your pen with any of the masterful concept-laden opinions that ten years' labour have made known to me under the names of Adorno, Weber, Redner, Boehme.

The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:

"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."

- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .

In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS

Philosophy by Half-Measures

The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.

The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.

The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.

The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.

Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.

If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.

Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.

At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.

Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.

Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.

Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.

Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.

The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.

If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.

If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.

The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.

Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.

Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.

La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.

The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.

The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.

No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.

Historical

The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.

Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.

The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.

Shakespeare, as a philosopher once said, was maybe as much a creator of language as a poet and though he didn't make up English from scratch he certainly defined some of the possibilities of English in an amazing way, making of English something potentially so multifarious. It might be interesting to consider Luther as playing an analogous role for German, though the comparison mightn't at first sight be flatterering for Luther, or at least not for the Germans. Where Shakespeare looks from this perspective like the creator of whole star-systems for English speakers to stray around in, Luther looks like the manufacturer of a lumbering but precise heavy canon out of which German writers shoot or get shot.

James Cook is Licthenberg translated into the practical. Lichtenberg said "The first Indian who discovered Columbus made a nasty discovery" and Cook did this.

Comparative National Psychology

If you wanted to preserve the Australian Character in a specimen-jar, the fluid you would use would be liquid boredom.

The best indication that the prize question as to "our national identity" is a non-question is that nobody gets closer to answering the question than raising the question and everybody thinks that the question is the answer.

Australian tall-poppy syndrome can be compared quite neatly to German Schadenfreude. The one is the inverted image of the other - the first a form of displeasure at the crowning achievements of others, the second pleasure at others' least-crowning achievements - but they play the same role, namely the main role, in national life.

The first time I heard an American use the word "irreverent" as if it meant anything was describing an Australian comedian describing an Olympic mascot as a dickhead.

The French are right to operate on the assumption that human beings show themselves in the most favourable light - inventive, daring, high-spirited but not drunk, not too sincere - when a mild state of amorousness pervades society, when amour belongs among the main social duties. . . You've thought this at least once in life, haven't you?

Sydney is full of people who dream throughout the night of going to the gym in the morning. Melbourne is full of people whose profoundest instinct is to reach for the self-help shelves in the afternoon gloom.

The only half-tolerable patriotism is the sort that loves its country and thinks that the best thing it can do for its country is send it up.

Melbourne. Do Melbournians have any talent for fun? The city is full of shy or inhibited young men who console themselves by hitting the piss with their shy inhibited mates, full of young women who don't meet your eye, who don't succeed in dressing to kill because they're bored to death, formal blondes for whom sex is obviously just another sort of piss-up - about squealing and passing out ASAP.
Melbourne-style human beings don't go to parties to meet other human beings but to talk to their friends in different settings. The others at the party play the part of furniture - Melbournians want it to look good, but to start talking to it would be crazy. . . Almost all the ice that ever gets broken in Melbourne is broken via friends, the only new people anyone ever meets are their friends' friends. For example, I've never seen anyone approach someone they've never seen before at a party in Melbourne, introduce themselves and start a conversation. I've never done it myself and it has never happened to me. None of my friends have done it and I've never seen it done by anyone to any of my friends. And my friends are not necessarily that backward about coming forward. . . Not that Melbournians wouldn't like a chance meeting with a stranger without two heads or undies on his/her one and only, but then - what an offense against the Melbournian way. If you told them it would inevitably come to pass that in ten minutes flat they'd approach a complete stranger of the appropriate sex, say hi, swap names and start talking a bit about themselves, that for a Melbournian would be the equivalent of demonic possession.

Cameos

Realising the conversation was diverging towards a topic I wasn't capable of being honest about, I realised it was a topic the guy I was talking to wouldn't be honest about either. So we transferred conversational operations to a third party and told so many nasty howlers about him that by the end we'd had enough of ourselves.

There was someone on every corner of the intersection saying into his mobile phone: Where are you? I'm here.

If you were to consider her Marxist strictures a golden diadem, her Baudrilliardian intimations of media-doom a diamond necklet, her Foucauldian perorations a flowing brocade dress and her natural beauty a sign of inborn nobility, she would have seemed like a tsarina fit for an execution.

He never smiles. He never laughts. We all sit round and have reasonable. time. When someone says something funny, we all smile, we all laugh. The equivalent he has found for smiling and laughter is intensive smoking. If you watched our scne from a distance and had only a vague idea what smiles, laughter and cigarettes meant, you might think we signalled our approval by broadcasting a certain noise and sending up an enormous plume of smoke.

He was getting ready for the long campaign of getting hold of her - one full of martial courage, sweeping strategies, minute tinges of charm - and in general he went round with the preoccupied but confident air of proud people who have settled on a project and now considering the technicalities.

Interpreting his nerves as a sign of certain pictureque feelings, which his amazing braininess had obscured the meaning of, she started him off on her favourite technical topic and - by the end of the main had drawn out the picturesque feelings, as a beaming adult draws a toy marsupial from behind a child's ear.

A seasoned gnasher of teeth, he wore a mouthguard to bed to protect his . . . against the onset of nocturnal irritation, earplugs to prevent voices of his own hearing penetrating into the confines of his head, a black velvet mask to spare to spare him the sight of any light and oversized padded pj's to guard against his own utter nudity.

All great artists. . .

Chekhov was the first and best dirty realist pin-up boy.

All great artists can be seen at some stage acting on the belief that the previous aesthetic epoch is . . . dangerous, painful, misguided and - ended for good by them.

The happiness of genius born in times shot through with seriousness (Goethe).
The misery of genius born in times shot through with frivolity.
The arbitrariness of genius in times of dissolution.
The synthetic genius who takes passionate part in an upwards movement of history.
The analytic genius who takes suffering part in a downwards movement of history.

The problem with Thomas Bernhard is that his books come across as a non-stop effort to be witheringly snide about everything except the notion of cultural genius, which it is as easy as anything to be witheringly snide about. . .

One reason many artists are depressives, apart from a disposition of forces within contemporary culture that is inimical to art and artists, is because in a depressed state an individual can often sense the validity of anything and everything, other than his or her own validity. The principle of aesthetic objectivity, reduced to its simplest form, would be to put some cards in every character's hand and the best in those you yourself are least like, but best understands how it would be possible to be.

In heaven they play Chuck Berry and Mozart. In hell they just play constant Dvorak. (Maybe in limbo they play Wagner.)

Miscellaneous, First-Personal

Bigotries are often nothing more than counterfeit passions.

Education is not some ideal state of affairs, but snarling about "the over-educated" is nonetheless invariably humbug.

"Chess is the touchstone of the intellect," said Goethe, on one of his proverbial bad days.

Actors make pitiful old men when they realise too late that there are modes of existence other than the performative mode. Young actors - and all "actors of their own lives" - have their formative experiences of happiness in giving everyone a euphoric inkling that the opposite is the case, that the actor's mode is the highest one because it's the lightest. A mild disgust for all theatricality is no doubt an important move in the overall game of experience.

The last to emerge from the nebulous Kafkaesque gloom of the twentieth century was R- and he did so in the year 3616.

Those were the salad days of CS. . . My own education, while showing promise in some areas, was really a badly-baked strudel. I was taught science by a bunch of very trim men you could hardly say had personalities at all; religion by a none-too-bright martinet; history by an amaible ex-army man with a crew-cut after the history PhDs had been expelled for having pony-tails; the French language by a Mauritian gent the grammar of whose idiosyncrasies was more complicated and wondrous than the grammar of the French language. About my native land (Australia) I was taught nothing by anyone. Philosophy I came into contact with for the first time via my father (fear and trembling). While working out a thing or two about books and writing on my own, nobody made me do much about it. "Art" was confused by the art teacher, Mr L, for Design. If Michelangelo himself had turned up at the gate on Springvale Rd, the character known as the School Marshall (who did not ride a horse) would have made straight for him. . . If he'd made it as far as the art department, L would probably have taken him for one of the quizzical Mediterranean yokels who were still tending their market gardens out beyond the bus shelters . . . I used to dream of the proud figure with the pugilist's profile telling L he was a dying slave too ugly to be worth liberating from any block of stone - then being forcibly ejected. I myself never managed to have even the introductory range of punishments inflicted on me. Even my attempts to bad-mouth the one or two teachers I disliked were considered too arty, possibly gay - an incomprehensible but forgiveable effect of the over-educated state I was getting myself into completely contrary to the intentions of the school.

From the time I started studying philosophy I've been going through a restorative loss of belief in many things and these writings are the price you have to pay for it.

The undulating non-romance between Johanna and me has more than enough to it to be a European arthouse film if not a good one.

My pet parrot vowed it would stop looking at itself in the mirror once and for all when it had worked out who it was in the mirror and decided beyond all shadow of a doubt whether whoever it was in the mirror ws good-looking or not.

I toddled off to the movies to see the latest Australian thing - and to sacrifice my aesthetic for my country again.

The ghosts of my former stupidities send regular delegations and sometimes I hardly succeed in turning them back, in which case they gather round and conduct a sort of celebration according to their own custom, exhaling the clichés of my thinking about myself in the form of song.