The Danger of Aphorisms

From Robert Frost to sloganeering to haiku, koans and one-liners - the pitfalls of toiling in the orchard of Live, Laugh, Love

Language works. Say what you will about its side effects. It can do most of the important things that people do, and things they often don’t. Language can find us where we are most concealed and most lost.

When I’m found, I often like it. I’d like to stay found. Staying found - how would that work? Or sound like? That’s harder. My best guess is that it looks and sounds like the words that found me. I’d like to paint them on a plaque and hang it in my living room. I’d like to tattoo it on the inside of my forearm, so I can always see it.

Those words, though, don’t remain true. The skies are always in motion and the stars are always aligning, but not always with what I’d like them to align with.

Then those treasured words start to mock. Think of Just Breathe, or Live, Laugh, Love: Maybe at first, they free me from overthinking and over-seriousness. But soon enough they reveal how rudimentary was the labyrinth I’d been dumb enough to get lost in. Those words reveal what a sucker I am, how predictable my emotional failures, how shallow my pretensions and how deep personal faults. They rub my face in it.

And where can I go when I’m mocked and revealed? Where can I go when my last shelter were the words that have since turned on me?

The labor of language

Writing isn’t only a tool for communication. It’s a crutch. I think better on the page than in silence. The reason is simple: I can see what I just thought and figure out what comes next. And so on. But it’s a crutch I don’t always have it with me. And memory is slippery. If I have to remember a seven-digit phone number, it takes repetition, focus and effort.

That’s some of the appeal of an aphorism. A mnemonic device could help. Ideally, there would be a single answer, easily memorized, that would answer each and every momentary confusion.

Instructions for the zombie

But the problem is bigger than just memory. In its pure state, consciousness is open to seemingly infinite possibilities, and capable of just as many interpretations of the world it encounters. But it’s almost never in that state.

After all, who has time for infinite possibilities? Who has time to figure out everything again? Who has time to sift the deadly misconceptions from the necessary reflexes again?

These are legitimate objections to consciousness in its pure state. By volume, life is largely unconscious. It’s habit, routine, a familiar fumble in the shadows, a hopefully uneventful meander to the bathroom and back in the middle of the night.

Consciousness can be terrifying and unpleasant (see last week’s “Incompleteness”). Better to set it and forget it and sleepwalk along to a fixed and easy-to-remember set of instructions.

One simple phrase

Consciousness can be difficult, but also often wonderful. For obvious reasons, it’s a lot like you. It’s secretly paying attention and recalibrating its opinion. And once in a while, it puts you on the spot. That’s when people turn to aphorisms - as if there’s a simple trick, or a fool’s mate in the chess game against your own consciousness.

Imagine how you’d feel if someone tried to solve you. Imagine if someone found a reliable spell to neutralize you for their own benefit. How would you feel?

You can see why consciousness might rebel. You can see why it might try to take the pithy knife out of your hand and turn it on you.

Take two and call me in the morning

For all its powers, language isn’t a pharmaceutical. It’s not so blunt an instrument as the legislators and lawyers would have you believe. Words of wisdom can’t undo what’s happened. They can’t do much to alleviate grief.

Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese poet from about two hundred years ago, whose Year of My Life is one of those works I’ve always wanted to emulate. During that year, the poet’s infant daughter dies, and the response is:

This world of mist

is a world of mist.

And yet

Translations differ. But it’s a heartbreaking set of words, a single breath that shows the mind trying to escape the boundaries of the heart, and failing. It’s the failure of being a person. If you haven’t failed like that, just sit tight, smarty pants. It’s coming.

These words, however, don’t solve anything. They don’t cure anything. They’re bigger than that.

Live, laugh…

Of course, we could use a cure. Life is baffling and its lessons are inconsistent. The appeal of a consistent, reliable truth is hard to downplay. It’s something that’s often promised, but as a trade. In exchange, you have to promise to zealously and consistently defend what you’ve been given to believe.

But an ardent set-it-and-forget-it approach to consciousness comes with tremendous uneasiness. This is the dark side of any belief or doctrine, bite-sized or not.

A new thought can become cause for panic. The problem isn’t the doctrine. The doctrine is the solution. But the insistence on a doctrinaire response becomes hugely troublesome as time goes on. It’s like insisting that a wide-awake individual behave like a sleepwalker. The doctrine becomes a hand pushing your head into pool of sugar-free pudding. This is the horror of Live, laugh, love.

When in doubt

The way that words of wisdom can corrode our humanity is the subject, approached gently, in Robert Frost’s Mending Wall.

In the poem, two neighbors go out and repair stone walls that separate their portions of the woods. I grew up in Massachusetts and remember those walls. I’d puzzle over why anyone would build walls in the woods. Only later did I learn my seemingly primeval woods were former fields and orchards overgrown in the previous 100 or so years, when people mostly gave up farming the rocky New England soil.

In the poem, the aphorism at work is Good fences make good neighbors. It compels their labor. And the saying itself prevents the poem’s speaker from ever knowing his neighbor any better.

A turn of phrase can find us where we are lost or penetrate an otherwise impenetrable experience. But when clung to, it can close us off from knowing anything more, or from ever being known any better. It can be a kind of small spiritual suicide.

On the mantle

All of this speaks to a fundamental frustration I have with language, especially the short form. It’s as risky as it is powerful.

And as a medium, language is a road more than it is a statue. Its power is its usefulness. But its use is always changing. Language - even at its finest and most incisive - makes a terrible idol. But historically, so do idols.

As a writer, I feel the urge to make a single, central phrase. It’s an inspiration and an impatience. And I also get how wrongheaded that can be.

That tension shows up in the name of the ongoing aphoristic project I’m involved with - Forget This Good Thing. Good things, even the best, need to be discarded. Maybe they’re better for it.

Selected Bibliography

Forget This Good Thing – Try it free, now

Kobayashi Issa’s Year of My Life

Another approach to aphorisms, by the late David Markson

A manageable collection of Robert Frost

Forget This Good Thing – The app for iPhone and iPad

Forget This Good Thing – Paper book 1 - Paper book 2

Forget This Good Thing – All About It

Forget This Good Thing - Its creation - What it can do for you - Why it matters - Thirteen descriptions - How it works for small decisions - How it works with ambiguous situations