A small reflection on the narrow mind of Emile Cioran.

"I eliminated word after word from my vocabulary.
When the onslaught was over, just one word had escaped:
Solitude*. I woke up in a state of euphoria."

* translated from the French, in which language Solitude can mean loneliness, isolation or solitude.
In English loneliness and solitude are very different things.

We think only because we have language. 
Language - not place, territory, tribe or kin -
is (as Cioran pointed out) each human being's only home -
and a very fragile, rickety home it is!
Some fortunate people have several such homes, but they are rarely rich.

(Languages are becoming fewer year by year, 
and now the only truly 'international' language is English Bureaucratic - 
a language ideal for making statements and 'marketing'
rather than suggesting the subtleties of process, mood or sensation.)

Without thought, hence without language,
we would not be leading the planet into its Sixth Extinction.

Cioran reduced the significance of language to the single solitary word.
I, more generously (or more fatuously ?),
allow two in order to make the only song, the only poem, the only novel, the only dirge:

             Humanity:

             Catastrophe.

But beyond our mere consciousness-through-language
(and our mere solar system)
what is 'catastrophe' ?

Only the business of being born and 'socialised'...
which (ironically and uniquely) we
can lighten with a sense of humour,
an amused acceptance of the ridiculous vanity of being
- à la Beckett.
  
Emile Cioran took himself, his birth and his death so seriously as to be ridiculous.
Hence his cogito, ergo glum appeal to other solipsists.

*  *  *

This is the last post of my blog, begun in February 2008.

'Inspired' by Wallace Stevens and Jalal-ud-Din Rumi.

Although I know hardly anything
about What Is Going On.
ever aware of much, too much,
and much too much,
I no longer dare to care
about such and such and such...

Homo arboricidens,

pompously self-entitled
Homo sapiens,
is (alas! alack!
for woe is us)
quite obviously
(but to whom ?)
an evolutionary dead-end,
impasse and cul-de-sac.

The Zen of Pooh.

The microcosm is the macrocosm.

The council workmen
"clean" the little stream
of watercress.

from the ill-dressed man with a beard.

After the last simpering,
whimpering Yes, maybe,
almost certainly, comes
the magnificent No,
the glorious non-human
beyond glory;
and inside Never
lurks, sometimes, always -

existence is only a story.

(after Wallace Stevens)

"One of the reasons for the bankruptcy of the European Left

was their failure to realise how deep were the mental roots of class distinctions.
They thought they could treat as mere prejudice
what in reality had come to be a conditioned reflex of mankind."

Arthur Koestler: Scum of the Earth, 1941.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As the Three Magi might have said,

travel should not merely broaden the mind,
but utterly change it, so that further travel
is pointless..

If dogs could speak to us

they too would be mendacious
and say we hadn't fed them...

Prosperity

depends on
ferocity.

I am learning to fall,

trusting and delighting in my heaviness.
Falling is the essence of  human being
as darkness is the essence of all this light.

The self

is largely composed of the lies we tell ourselves.
One of the biggest is that we are not, every one of us alone.
The family
is a conspiracy to create and reinforce this lie.
DNA testing is now showing that the family
is also a lie.

On our accidental, sole appearance

we, smudgingly and often grudgingly,
disappear amongst the disappearing
into the blank transparence of the disappeared,

so we should never be despairing
of the transient disconnection
which is our being,

but try to revel in the pure vibration
of proper desire properly to be joined
to all that went before,

though shallow hope
just deepens hopelessness,
and we are guilty
precisely because of all innocence.

(a post-Rilkean sonnet)

Being or living

in the moment
has much less to do
with time or place
and much more to do
with attitude.

It is not the direst poverty

for a family of eight
to share one pair of shoes,
or for refugees to find water
only in the footprints of cows.

Just as knowledge is
the processing of information,
wisdom is just
the bleak processing of knowledge

from the distance of the poor.

Art

is usually much more numinous
than the sect
of the religion
that it serves.

The rôle of The Media

Bad News
keeps the population
rewardingly depressed.

Through the blindness

of our good intentions,
through the deafness
of our greedy delusions,
ghosts multiply inside our heads.
Quickly, all monuments look sad.
World's End is not a place.

Like most people,

I have got to be where I am
   (and, in my case, want to be :
   close, but not too close
   to the bottom of the heap)
through moral cowardice.

Everything we do

(including the writing of aphorisms and apophthegms,
and little or majestic poems)
diverts our attention
from what we are
(as well as what we will become).

Everything has been said
in many different ways.  Words fail.

All religion, all civilisation,
all human progress,
the human condition,
is sounding brass,
bombs and tombs
and jangling cymbals.

Religion attacks thought;

thought attacks Nature.

DBC Pierre

famously wrote:
"Wealth makes you less nosy."
Mainly because you are less connected.

And, curiously, the richer you become
the drabber you get.

History

is a huge factory
of irony.

Revenge

may be and sound
sweet,
but it tends to
rebound.

Raptor!

(Bemused.)

It is when we have an explanation

for everything
that we begin to feel reduced,
plundered
and insatiable.

Justice

is possibly
a sillier thing to believe in
than God.

There's nothing fixed

that can't be broken
(again).

From sharp stones to smart phones.

We (and almost every organism on the planet)
are inevitable and ineluctable victims of our crass technology.

Adam's Sin

was Belief,
with its shadow (handmaiden),
Hope.

The problem with 'wisdom'

(which is only a concept)
is that the human mind
seems to have been designed
to block it.

An Astrophysiotheological Question

[after Hafiz]

What would happen if God leaned down
and gave you a big wet
Kiss ?

Assuming that there was ever
or would be a God-the-Creator
with body and lips,
who would want to,

you would surely start blabbering
all day, unceasingly
mind-blasted,
devilish poems
even more shocking than this.

When you are open

a lot of doors shut in your face.

Loving

is a release
into another enclosure.
Not-loving
is another kind
of letting go.

This side

of suicide,
the best that one can hope to be
is in the world, but impossibly
not of it.

'Theory of Mind'

It is very much easier
to "read" a dog
than a human -
but very few humans
bother to "read" dogs.

What I learned at University:

was that I absolutely didn't want
to be an achiever,
or even employed.

I like being "a loser",
and now, in happy senile solitude,
I make witty remarks to my dog
which my mother would have enjoyed.

The problem with Hamlet

is that, like most of Shakespeare's characters,
he's shallow, self-regarding, and not very bright.

Our little planet as seen from (even smaller) Mars.

No big deal.
I guess the other two are Venus and Jupiter...?