The Lost Art of Losing

by Gregory Norminton

  The

  LOST ART

  of

  LOSING

  Gregory Norminton

  To Emma

  One writes not because one has something to say

  but

  because one has the longing to say something.

  E.M. Cioran

  Let the grass grow over it.

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Introduction

  If there is a literary endeavour more remote from present tastes than a book of aphorisms, it has to be that book’s introduction. Anything worth forking out for, in time or money, should speak for itself and not require a proleptic defence. Yet it’s my contention that the aphorism – a resilient bug in the jungle of letters – has qualities to recommend it, and that its briskness ought to sit well with a culture in which just about everyone tweets, or will have twat ere long.

  Other forms possess, like Claudette Colbert showing her leg in It Happened One Night, assets worth slowing down for: the absorption of narrative, the imprint of facts. The aphorism, exposing its slender thumb to traffic, has little to recommend it save brevity and concision. But these are qualities with cachet, too often absent from baggy novels or hackneyed journalism. Aphorisms cannot support the structure of an argument: they are fragments, yet like the shards of a mirror they reflect, they sparkle. Nor do they make excessive claims on our time. No one ever needed marooning on a desert island finally to get down to reading La Rochefoucauld. Indeed, it would take a kind of mania to read a collection of aphorisms all the way through. They may have a cumulative effect, but on the whole, they are to be sampled, not devoured in one sitting.

  Your brain, to put it another way, is a cracker. And this is your dip.

  I should like to claim that these aphorisms are the fruit of years of toil in the form. But reading them, who would believe it? The truth is that I am prone to sudden and shifting enthusiasms. Having enjoyed the aphorisms of Don Paterson, I followed the trail of his influences to immerse myself in E.M. Cioran (a miserabilist to give Beckett a run for his money, if only they weren’t both dead), Paul Valéry, Antonio Porchia (“I know what I have given you; I do not know what you have received”) and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whose Waste Books have been reissued by NYRB Classics. These writers are as different in philosophy and manner as they are removed from one another in time and geography. What they share is a gift for concision, paradox and memorable utterance.

  It was perhaps inevitable that exposure should bring me out in a rash. Long possessed of strong opinions and an overdeveloped sense of engagement with issues over which I have no influence, I tried my hand at a few remarks. The few became many, and I was hooked: composing as I walked, mulling over the mot juste, covering scraps of paper in the attempt to chisel a hunch or grievance into a lapidary statement. The compulsion – more costive than is graphomania, but not unrelated to it – gripped me for much of a year. The resulting book has no overarching purpose or polemical intent. It is made up of fragments that cohere only in as much as they come from one mind, one bundle of neuroses and preoccupations.

  Much has changed in my circumstances since I wrote The Lost Art of Losing. I have married, found work as a university lecturer (exchanging writing time for the security of a salary) and moved with my wife from Edinburgh to Manchester. The personal happiness of these developments might seem at odds with the grim waggishness of my aphorisms. Yet the world at large has done nothing to discredit their pessimism. If anything, circumstances seem immeasurably worse than they did a year ago. The ice caps are melting, the fat cats are purring; we look for Churchills and Roosevelts and all we get is Chamberlains and Hoovers. Nor is there consolation for the author in watching his anathemas turn into prophecy. But then it doesn’t take an aphorist to read the writing on the wall.

  Gregory Norminton,

  Manchester, December 2011

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Lost Art of Losing

  Copyright

  The

  LOST ART

  of

  LOSING

  Concerned for the environment, she insists on taking reusable bags whenever she flies to New York to do her shopping.

  The instant S dropped the first lobster in the pot, I knew that – save for those who love me – my own death will be of no more consequence.

  Death is nothing to be afraid of. Which misses the point: it is nothing that we fear.

  The dominant mode of the aphorism tends to be sourness: evidence of its inadequacy as a form – if we seek in literature the sum of human experience.

  Even paradox looks glib when it makes an exhibition of itself.

  Admiring new hedgerows, young woods – the slow restoration of “improved” farmland – I wonder if progress and vandalism are distinguishable only with hindsight.

  Should Paradise exist, our instincts would have to be filtered out of us by death, or else we’d ruin the place.

  Our nostalgia for the country condemns us all to the suburbs.

  My contract with the landscapes I value must be never to live in them.

  The sense of my own mediocrity descending on me like sleep.

  Our gaze is the tribute that beauty demands of us. The bloody tyrant.

  There are few things less desirable than misdirected desire.

  Prone to sudden enthusiasms, I leave the main work undone. The pursuit of novelty is the evasion of effort.

  The truth may set you free, but it’s cold outside.

  For Proust, it was a madeleine. Yesterday, the smell of a particular blend of mud restored me to my childhood.

  Some neuroses are companions for life. I still look under my pillow for the spider that hid there in 1983.

  Truth is complex, lies are simple. Fiction confronts this challenge by wearing its untruth on its sleeve – thereby asserting kinship with its supposed opposite.

  Nothing kills reading more effectively than its elevation to a virtue.

  Books in a ruined world would be unreadable lies.

  Eight times in a million years, human beings colonised Britain. Seven times these attempts failed; why should it be any different for us?

  The Earth abides, and bides its time. I like to imagine yet that our voices will be missed.

  Perhaps science fiction remains niche because of its emphasis on deep time, deep space – the dizzying perspectives of the Universe. Fiction that puts us into context is safest confined to the nerd ghetto.

  And yet we are tellurian. Every trip into the stars turns our faces towards home.

  Why isn’t bullshit listed on the Stock Exchange?

  Truth runs uphill but lies need only a flick of the heel to set them rolling. No wonder the blowhards on Fox News rarely break a sweat.

  If we listed Churchill’s failings in the absence of his achievements, we would remember a monster.

  He who desires, but acts not, has a shot at a halfway decent marriage.

  We are all bigots when our sense of self depends upon it.

  It is no more abject to read a book because everyone else has done so than to avoid it for the same reason.

  A maths dunce, I get an inkling of the satisfaction of a well-done sum when a sentence arranges itself unimprovably. That this happens so infrequently is one of the motivations for continuing to write.

  The recurrent nightmare of a Papuan warrior finds him deep in enemy territory when his comrades suddenly vanish. The techno-grunt jangling with gadgets and acronyms suffers exactly the same terror. We are no different from our ancestors – only more encumbered.

  Doubtless the play in which I must perform tonight, without having learn
ed a single line, would in the dream of an earlier incarnation have been the rowan twig with which I confronted a sabre-toothed tiger.

  Finally confessed to E that I’m writing aphorisms. We agreed that our love is strong enough to survive it.

  We must practise hope, if only to defy those who would throttle it.

  One may dress an animal but only humans can be naked.

  The body has wits that the conscious mind lacks. Pure intellect can’t dance.

  The tragedy of sleep is that we cannot be awake to appreciate it.

  Oh, to launch oneself at parties with the relish of a child kicking through leaves!

  Thought and reason are not always aligned. One must think oneself stupid in order to avoid thinking oneself stupid.

  There can be no tolerating lies that kill.

  Life is made of unfinishings. Temperament concludes from this either hope or despair.

  What barrier will serve against the idiot tide?

  Working at home – one of those days when I look at my bed surprised not to find myself in it.

  I thought I was being flippant but I found it online. The only thing missing from God the Action Figure is the prefix “In–”.

  Innately subversive, laughter can be turned, like a spy, against the common good. We hear this in the self-congratulation of the snigger.

  Some journalists fabricate, but most insist on paraphrasing the press release that does it for them.

  A terrible stink in our terrible stair. We find, smeared across the front door of our tenement and on the frozen ground before it, a load of shit: the offering, perhaps, of a suppository-fired junkie. By the end of the day no one else has cleared it away; so I set to the task, fulminating against the obscenity. But then I too am an excremental being, having evacuated, just three days ago, while in the grip of a gastric bug, great quantities of unspeakable matter – into the appropriate receptacle. Our sins are all a matter of context.

  Happy endings don’t exist in fiction any more than in real life. They’re just mutual agreements to draw a veil over the morning after.

  I like imaginary books best: the novels of Kenneth Toomey and Nathan Zuckerman, the poetry of Mary Swann and Randolph Henry Ash. Only imaginary works can be perfect. They are platonic archetypes, unstinted by the finitude of existence.

  The really terrible thing is dying. Most people feel sorry for those who have died but I rather admire them – as though they had just graduated in the most taxing of subjects.

  The most shameful iconoclasm is the kind that’s well remunerated.

  Cynicism, now the glibbest of poses, once meant a moral philosophy. We didn’t need the Soviet Union to trash the dialectic of progress.

  Perhaps I’ve another reason for confusing “entomology” with “etymology”. Next to beetles, God has an inordinate fondness for words.

  “Fearless” is an epithet which bigots apply to themselves. An open mind grapples constantly with dread.

  In certain instances academic jargon might be termed a crypto-language. Its purpose is to keep hidden the absence of content.

  Online we find too easily reflections of our prejudices. “Information technology” is really just a hall of mirrors.

  Curious how many now living were Cleopatra in a former life and how few the slave who emptied her chamber-pot.

  The voyage of self-discovery is not without risk. What if you reach your destination and find it’s a complete dump?

  When we read a novel, we contract to make ourselves dupes, hence our sense of betrayal when an author defaults on the bargain.

  I ended it, and felt the unassuageable contrition of the gardener who finds two writhing halves of the one worm.

  Just as we’ve trashed the real world, we invent a virtual one to retreat into. And the cynics doubt the ingenuity of our species!

  What we understand of science is only metaphors.

  Oh the irony! We achieve mass literacy and Rupert Murdoch buys all the newspapers.

  That ancient English sport: liberal baiting.

  The innocence that we see in children is really the absence of wounds.

  Sweet analgesics! Heritage peddlers always forget about toothache.

  The spirit moves with action yet action moves from the spirit. Our task is to start.

  We love our partners best when we don’t put ourselves overmuch in their power.

  A book so bad, one was grateful for the white spaces.

  Unencased by dangerous metal, the pedestrian must submit to his lowly caste. I too scowl at traffic lights and fume to overtake that lumbering obstacle. Yet where are the newspaper articles lamenting pavement rage?

  One day, the messengers of the world will rise up and shoot first.

  Whence this suspicion that a return to mental calm is a slumbering resubmission to the usual bromides?

  With luck, we may be inoculated by experience. The only immunity against stupidity is to have contracted it at least once.

  Reform demands feeling but sentimentality is reactionary. Dickens’s first readers could congratulate themselves on their tender feelings for Smike even as they stepped over the child prostitute in their doorway.

  Toleration should not be confused with respect. Of course you are entitled to your opinion – as am I to treat it with contempt.

  And vice versa. Always, vice versa.

  Even at a time of health, I dread the return of my depression as though it were a kind of lucidity. Proof that the neural groove is well and truly inscribed.

  Yet sometimes the joy is almost transcendent. I look at these fragments and see a blinkered soul choosing, in the words of Jeremy Taylor, “to sit upon his little handful of thorns”.

  In his brilliant and terrible Disasters of War, Goya writes “Yo lo vi” – “I saw this”. And who can doubt his sincerity? We see what our imaginations will encompass. So conditioned was Goya for the worst that he could make another’s eyewitness account his own.

  To deny oneself love because love cools is like refusing to heat one’s home in winter because the universe is heading towards entropy.

  Murder is abhorrent – of innocents especially. Yet the clumsy time-traveller would not be wholly damnable who landed his vessel on Jean Calvin’s crib.

  Whereof we cannot speak, thereof someone will make a wisecrack.

  They were two islands – between them a minch of unbridgeable yearning.

  If only we could appeal to enlightened self-interest. The worse things get, the more the armourers will thrive.

  It is comforting sometimes to love the dead but disconcerting to fancy them.

  An early death is a truncated story. Thirteen years after she took her own life, I find myself wanting to catch up with S on Facebook.

  If, in sleep, the subconscious reveals our repressed longings, how come I never dream of pizza?

  The sacred, because inerrant, texts are few and far between. Most of us dabble in profanity.

  If fatalism could mean the calm of disinvestment – a state of utter resignation – we might be released from the daily pain of hoping.

  The purest aphorisms are found, not made.

  When, in the insufficiently distant future, our snouts are plunged into SimWorld and iLove and VR sex parlours, some intrepid beard will stumble with eyes aflame upon this astounding technology: the paper codex.

  Information technology has reached the apex of its usefulness: from here on it’s enslavement all the way. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.