How strange to be afraid of the dark. Even with the lights on we have to go to sleep in our heads.
The gall, the presumption of that builder’s shout: “Cheer up mate, it might never happen.” For all he knows, it already has.
The atheist replacing God with human reason is invoking something scarcely less elusive.
The pity of the world lies not in its horror but in the evolution of a mind capable of imagining that things might be otherwise.
Words sleep, dreamless as hills – until the eye reads either, line or land.
Love is the opposite of hate but friendship is its antidote.
The deepest pessimism is silent. Many a jeremiad against humanity is a vote of confidence in its prospects, as it presupposes a future reader to concur with its sentiments.
There may be mercy killings but there can be no mercy births.
Returning to the heath where I played as a boy, I found instead a desert of ash. In the hard world coming we will have to relearn many lost arts, including the art of losing.
“You make your own fate,” say people born with the good fortune of never having had to prove it.
Love letter, love poem, love song… That a love aphorism is inconceivable ought to release us from the form for ever.
The aphorist: a fiction
Though we may become our obsessions, our obsessions rarely become us.
The aphorism is best suited to men who pronounce ex cathedra – it is the consolation of powerless erudition. Thus, to the world at large, he exists as a chartered surveyor; only in private does he attain on occasion the potency of memorable utterance.
Long ago, he used to wait for an aphorism to come to him. It would make its presence felt in a corner of his mind, like a mouse stirring behind the wainscot. To confront it too hastily was to risk its annihilation; so he learned to watch, as it were on the edge of his vision, the gradual resolution of the numinous entity until it was possible to determine not only its shape but also its content – as the wind reveals itself by the matter it plays with. Then, and only then, would he take up his pen and attempt to lure the words on to paper.
Latterly he has lost patience. Revealing a particular affinity for the abstruse, he forces himself to achieve the concision and pithiness which can only come of negligence.
A professional aphorist is a contradiction in terms. To sit down for six or eight hours each day, wilfully urging a precept into being, is to incur the wrath of the gods of definition.
Like most of his kind, he has a mania for concision. He dreams of nanotechnology capable of storing his observations at a molecular level.
The less sure he becomes of them, the more he relies on italics to give his writings a semblance of authority.
Perhaps she hopes that, by hiding his dictionaries, she might soften his resolve to aphorise. But there remain encyclopaedias, too substantial to impute their loss to accident, as well as radio, television, and the ever- expanding universe of the internet.
Each time she goes off on one of her rants, he sits there nodding while his mind retreats like a toad into its hollow.
His earlier manner used to be cool, insouciant. Now, seeing things clearly as never before, it is not unknown for him to declaim his aphorisms in the street. Curiously, the words seem to affect people less than the volume at which they are spoken.
Night, he replies when she wakes to find him writing, is far too precious to waste on sleep.
The aphorist is an autocrat on paper. He is deceived if he believes he can extend this authority into the domestic sphere.
Having watched her pack the last of her things, he returns to the frightening order of his study. Human love wanes, he writes; let love of maxims wax eternal.
Taken to task for non-attendance at work, he replies: “I can’t be sacked for something I haven’t done.”
Food, he scrawls on supermarket produce, is only shit which is not yet up to scratch.
Drink, he murmurs, is the work of the cursing classes.
Paranoia, he might once have written, is masochistic megalomania.
At last, sensing that it is time for his oeuvre to be disseminated, he tears the manuscript into pieces and scatters them from the deck of the ferry.
Cremation is his last wish. He looks forward to the concision of ashes in an urn.
Though your feet be flat, you must stand on them.
Copyright
© Gregory Norminton 2011
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.
Glasgow
Scotland
ISBN 978–1–908251–21–3
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards this publication from Creative Scotland
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website,
www.vagabondvoices.co.uk
The Lost Art of Losing Page 5