The Lost Art of Losing

by Gregory Norminton

  In the lost forest of Caledon, I looked up to watch a raven perform its victory spin. Such gratuitous virtuosity! It was raven celebrating raven – as life asserts its meaning in being.

  Some birds beat the air as if it were a foe meaning to drag them down. Others seem only to flap their wings in order to keep us from getting suspicious.

  Il s’est donné la mort: “he gave himself death”. What does it say about a culture that it can come up with such a felicitous locution?

  For years I cancelled myself out, fearing that the slightest manifestation of erotic interest would prove an imposition.

  If consciousness is defined by the senses, painlessness is a kind of sleep. The instant my neuralgia hit, I was most horribly awake in it. I wanted to beat myself insensible to get away from that monstrous lucidity.

  Though I look into your eyes, I cannot see what you see.

  We are in love with our burrow, though it may become our tomb.

  A child’s tantrum is infuriating because we cannot join in.

  We ought to worship, or placate, the gods of contingency. Was it Blucher who saved Wellington or a Corsican’s stomach trouble?

  Too much of our literature is logophagous – consuming itself, then gnawing at new growths – while the feast of the world goes unsampled beyond.

  A magazine asks me to contribute regular updates on the progress of my writing. Though flattered, I take against the idea. It would be like publicising the weekly condition of my sputum.

  Our ingenuity far outstrips the wisdom we need to cope with its consequences.

  A better word for triumph is reprieve.

  Fragile at noon, I tell myself: never again. “Yeah, right,” says my liver – the most sarcastic of vital organs.

  Perhaps thunder is the sound of God slapping His forehead in pure disbelief.

  Men assert, women know.

  A great artist, for a time, will be a conduit for a voice scarcely her own. Something utters through this mortal – who is bereft, used up, when the voice departs. Talent may remain, while gusts of the former gift will rise up from the lungs, but devoted fans are hanging about an empty vessel, wondering when it will astound them again.

  The fox and the hedgehog have their domains, but what beast represents the rest of us, who know nothing save our opinions?

  The poetic response to Schrödinger’s thought experiment is to ask: what colour is the cat?

  For fear of being axiomatic, we prefer our aphorisms to sparkle than to be true.

  When the sun is at its height, our shadows, out of shame, cower between our feet.

  Thwarted pleasures stimulate our imagination in order for us to partake of what we missed. We regret things undone in the past in order to enrich our present.

  Literature will always be a shadow of the world. The best-wrought poem is an object less worthy of our admiration than the hand which wrote it.

  When success eludes us, we learn to take comfort from the consistency of our failures.

  Aliens came to Earth and sought at once a meeting with its most successful species. They are still waiting for the cockroaches to speak.

  A bestselling author complains of pressure to keep churning out variations on the same book. I, on the other hand, can write whatever I please. The fear of being pigeonholed is one of the perquisites of success.

  After a morning at my computer, I end with fewer words than when I started: reassuring proof that I am getting somewhere.

  Even on his off-days he could not disappoint, and people would have commented with satisfaction on the remarkable absence of an aphorism from Dr Johnson.

  No dream of loved and lost relations has haunted me more deeply than the magical second kittenhood of my dead cat last night.

  Bring on the firestorms, the floods and megadroughts – if only to wipe the smirk off their faces.

  Poetry names the darkness, lighting nothing. And yes, I intend that ambiguity.

  M’s high standards, his reticence to publish all save the best, the most durable of his writing, makes me feel like a flasher who braves the streets offering a magnifying glass to his victims.

  Of course newborns look ancient: they’ve just come in from eternity.

  The male academic waggles his few but impressive facts, as a caterpillar, soft and edible, raises its forked appendage to give the impression that a snake is at the other end of it.

  Testosterone can make a competition out of anything. Somewhere, probably, there’s a birdwatching club whose first rule is that it mustn’t be spoken of.

  Unequal to the task of changing our ways, we put our hopes in a techno-fix as we would hide in mummy’s skirts. But we have no mummy. We are orphans.

  Those who defend God are really defending themselves.

  Our last illusions about the solidity of the world vanish when we become parents and realise that the ground we stand on is ourselves.

  The more conscious I become of my impotence, the more I behave as if the world would collapse if I didn’t keep an eye on it. And I wonder how crackpots come into being…

  Could the older generation’s aversion to climate science be rooted in fear of its proximal death? If so, it is a declaration of war against the future they don’t have: the monstrous solipsism of ensuring that they take everyone with them.

  What’s blindingly obvious cannot be looked at.

  I will never cease wishing for his death – even if it takes me his lifetime to succeed.

  We declare the person fascinating who listens to us longest.

  The path to success runs through other people’s vanity.

  Sometimes a typo gets to the heart of things. Just found on a green issues blog: “Grab your coast, apocalypse watchers”.

  There are Hamlets who, deprived of a ghost, become Polonius: their art gone to seed for want of matter.

  Fearing I’ll outstay my welcome presupposes that I began with one.

  One cannot admire the nerve of a nerveless person.

  If we could reconcile ourselves, truly, to the fact that no one’s watching, what fun we might get up to.

  How glibly, in our disputes, we equate ourselves with people from the past. Only time will tell who is Galileo and who the Inquisition.

  The sceptic’s burden is always lighter.

  I resent sharing my apple with a maggot, but how must the maggot feel to find my teeth in its dining-room?

  Politics may require a fudge but the biosphere doesn’t do compromises. Even if you leap three-quarters of the way, you still end up in the ditch.

  This bold hypothesis has been doing the rounds in learned journals for years now. The academic is the school swot who does the journalist’s work for him.

  The grand-père terrible of English fiction publishes a new novel. “Hardly anyone reads him,” a journo quips. The word “him” in the phrase is redundant.

  Who can evaluate utility? There are plenty of things one can live without that give one a reason for living.

  Even as we read we forget, and what remains to us is not essence but residuum.

  Sometimes a word does double duty, both conveying and embodying its meaning. How appropriate, for instance, that English has no exact translation for recherché.

  Setting aside the biological impossibility, we could not exist intellectually without the natural world. All our referents are there: take away the sea of troubles, the tangled web, the roots and ramifications, and we could only stammer, idiots in our spaceship.

  Send in the drones, engage the robot soldiers, and our enemies will intensify their attacks on civilians. Flesh will answer for flesh: let the pilots at their computer consoles remember that.

  It would take an eternity to work our way back to the first wrong turning.

  We cherish babies because we see our future in them; we shun the elderly for the same reason.

  Conceived on the go, dragged in haste towards its consignment, the aphorism slipped clear of my mind and attained perfection.

  Read glancingly, th
ese fragments settle on the mind like snowflakes on a warm pavement. Whether they have any cling depends on the mental space afforded them. But writers cannot control the attention of their readers: we should count ourselves lucky to have flagged one down, even if it’s only to gaze forlornly at the receding taillights.

  To fear the ill-opinion of others is grossly to overestimate the space we take up in their imagination.

  We can only hope by way of contrast that once in a while good comes from our acting with the worst intentions.

  A nag is someone who pursues us with the truth.

  One cold winter here (though freakishly warm elsewhere) and the public loses its belief in global warming. We cannot distinguish between weather and climate, just as we cannot distinguish between ourselves and the world.

  Why is there something rather than nothing? Because nothing could not ask itself that question.

  A visited city lacks the ley lines of habit. The tourist and I do not walk down the same street.

  When I talk to myself, do I imagine that someone else is listening?

  After a time that might have been an afternoon and might have been a century, Lucifer ordered his minions to take down the sign. “All hope abandon ye who enter here” was an instruction that deprived Hell of its most effective torture.

  In the psychopathic conduct of the Olympian gods, antiquity prepared the mind for Stalin.

  To the cold, stony edifice I mean to add my little heap of pebbles.

  This happened, then this, and then this. Now spare yourself the trouble of reading that bestseller.

  The trick of obscurity is vital to things that perish in daylight.

  The kites that he feeds each morning would just as happily peck at his corpse. Now here’s the twist: that knowledge consoles him.

  The sometime pleasure of a second glance. What I took, with an inner grumble, for litter becomes a hillside of snowdrops.

  Oh yes, I’m an eco-hypocrite. I deplore consumerist greed and the lack of it among book buyers.

  With the fall of the press and the rise of the blog, the age of the hack is passing into history. Now, pace Johnson: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for pleasure.

  The devil may have all the best tunes but God has some memorable chords.

  The tragedy for conservatives is that everything changes; for progressives, that it does so in the wrong direction.

  What they failed to strangle in the crib they smother in its dotage.

  I need a thesaurus of ideas.

  Poetry has its limitations. I may call that clot of phlegm a liquid lichen but you will still step around it.

  We stoop to pick up our dogs’ turds – and we think we own them.

  The seas are acidifying faster than at any time in 55 million years. We read this and move on. For all our computers, we cannot compute.

  Animals have no name for our species yet they know to avoid it.

  We call vermin anything that exploits us.

  If a truth falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound?

  Of all my poses, the prophet of doom is the one she least wants to marry.

  Love has one language but many dialects.

  Haggard, I shut my door on the lot of them, only to find them lolling on my sofa.

  A question mark is an exclamation mark that stoops to inspect itself.

  A baby is introduced not to daisies but to the daisy. Our first of everything is everything.

  The tawdry relief when a beautiful woman opens her mouth and speaks horribly.

  The soil of thought is temperament.

  Parents take their kids to marvel at the reassembled T-Rex, the bones of a giant sloth. But I have seen tigers, leatherback turtles, Irrawaddy dolphins: beasts that will soon be no less extinct. Perhaps this makes my brain a museum piece.

  If the internet had existed in Weimar Germany, the Nazis might never have taken power, as their thugs would have been too busy beating up their opponents online.

  With the e-book, reading is reduced to a single artefact through which the text passes like a spirit through a medium. Thus the book loses its corporeal existence and literature enters the age of ghosts.

  A deity worthy of worship is the product of civilisation. If things turn sour for the whole clanjamfrie, expect a return to propitiation.

  Credit… Climate… Oil… It’s the Imagination Crunch that frightens me.

  An anthology of true (that is, unpremeditated or unembellished) last words would be a jumble of groans, platitudes and obscenities. It would chart the point at which we can no longer redeem ourselves, death being the last step on the escalier de l’esprit.

  To the mind, our organs are resident aliens: autonomous to our will, their workings mysterious, their presence confirmed only when they crash.

  If God is Truth, Satan was the first storyteller.

  A novelist must look closely for her characters merely to look.

  If the conceit is true, that the most vocal homophobes are shouting down their hidden natures, what does it say about me that I so readily declare other people morons?

  Because we want our joys to be particular, we generalise from our disappointments.

  Suffering gives an outline to the ease we failed to notice.

  With its anchorites and flagellants, the Middle Ages found a use for anorexics and self-harmers, and perhaps we would have fewer of either, had not the old Church mistaken sickness for saintliness… On the other hand, pain will always be with us, and perhaps we have merely swapped meaning for morphine.

  “Sustaining illusion” in Nostromo: the revelatory word in Conrad’s formulation is not the second but the first. Let Tolkien freaks raise their kids in Elvish if it makes them happy and kind.

  The randomness of suffering being intolerable, humanity invented malediction.

  When we object to science’s attempt to dethrone us – to place human beings in the commonwealth of species – we would do well to recall the fate of most tyrants.

  You know you have to write when you seriously imagine that having a bibliography will lessen the anguish of your deathbed.

  Our aim must be for life to flourish in our wake.

  The gap between revelation and platitude is time.

  Another day, another prospect to squander.

  I read that Michel Leiris, in a book called Manhood, compared writing to bullfighting, for the courage required of the participants. This is priceless. The only thing in common between the torero and the writer is the word “bull”.

  Don’t be too hard on yourself. There’s a whole universe for that.

  I have a head for books and factoids, with too little space left over for life. E, on the other hand, remembers everything. She contemplates in retrospect a furrowed field, while I look back upon trees in fog.