epigram Archives | Numéro Cinq

Two principles rule in human affairs: identity and difference. We yearn for home, comfort and familiarity (self, family, tribe, city, country, language, culture), and yet we are always engaging with difference (through simple curiosity – one of the most endearing human traits – or need, or love, which is the aesthetic attraction). This sets up a paradoxical oscillation between paranoia (excessive fear of pollution coming from outside) and schizophrenia (an inability to distinguish self from other; all messages are the same).

Moats and bridges are perhaps unhappy metaphors for thinking about inter-state relations –except that, of course, that is the way in which we tend to think of them. We are always digging moats, and simultaneously building bridges to get over them. This begs the question: why dig the moat in the first place?

— read the rest @ On Humanity’s Moats and Bridges : Global Brief.

Here is a taste of the latest of my epigrams at Global Brief just published.

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A third, dark possibility for the future state emerges with the invention of computers and digital storage. We see evidence in advanced states of legislative paralysis, the frenzied churning of virtual money to create wealth for fewer and fewer people, a steady accumulation of computer surveillance coupled with a decrease in privacy and social mobility, and an increase in state-sponsored corruption (as tax, subsidy and campaign finance laws become increasingly complex and phantasmal), coupled with a dwindling tax base.

The middle class – the traditional core of the modern state – is under assault, not from economic austerity or investment bubbles, but as a legitimate mode of existence, a way of being, because it (like that other Enlightenment concept, the self) may not be useful to the coming state (think: pilotless drones). The result is cynicism and despair, recession suicides in Europe, desperate acts of internal terrorism, and plummeting birthrates in mature world economies – a trend toward, not stateless people, but people-less states – a ghostly, penumbral future that we might all wish to avoid.

— Douglas Glover @ Global Brief

Here is a taste of the latest of my epigrams at Global Brief just published.

Cooperation is local, competition is pandemic. It has always been this way. We live in a churning cauldron of competitive vectors, of drags and accelerants. We compete for money, jobs, love, space and power. We compete, and we are competed for (for our votes, for our consumer dollars, for our admiration – desire desires desire). What goes for thinking these days is mostly competition; what goes for information is mostly shill and exhortation. The media world is a vast infomercial – competing for the mind of the reader, the e-reader or the (TV) e-watcher.

Conversation is a competition to have one’s voice heard; to have one’s ideas prevail. Languages compete and extend their reach or disappear. The world is a chessboard of international gamesmanship. In space, we are all competing for the higher ground. And, willy-nilly, the whirling, pulsing interactions of competition seem only to grow faster and denser as the world goes digital, and as connectivity multiplies arenas of contention. The individual human being wins and loses a thousand times a day – mostly without even knowing it, as the virtual and invisible electronic tickers mark the rise and fall of prices, currency and interest rates. Being alive, we compete.

via The Future is Red in Tooth and Claw : Global Brief.

The author skating two miles from the Lake Ontario shore.

This is a chapter from Steven Heighton‘s Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing (just published by ECW Press)—amazingly enough, a book of aphorisms (epigrams, whatever–short, pungent thingies). Many of you will recall that ages ago, when dg had the energy for such, NC used to have aphorism contests. It was mentioned then that, in fact, people, real writers, often wrote aphorisms and published them in books. It is an astonishing form, little taught in the creative writing schools, and here is living proof of its exuberant viability.

DG had the devil (yes) of a time picking from the book. Every section is deft, dry and delightful. There is a section in which Steven writes to himself as a younger writer.

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what it is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition.

There is a gorgeous section on inspiration (& boredom).

(It’s the Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Naht Hahn who says instead, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” A small act of subversion in a society that has no use for stillness, silence, inward vision—that extols speed, productivity, the manic pursuit of things that by their nature can never be caught and retained.)

This book is an embarrassment of riches. In the end, dg chose the chapter of definitions (the definition is one of the ancient forms of the aphorism).

Steven Heighton’s most recent books are Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing and the novel Every Lost Country. His 2005 novel, Afterlands, appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice; was a best of year choice in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. His poems and stories have appeared in many publications—including London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, and Best English Stories—and have received four gold National Magazine Awards. He has also been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. In 2012 Knopf Canada will publish The Dead Are More Visible, a collection of short stories including “A Right Like Yours,” which appeared in Numéro Cinq.

See also this little interview with the author. And Steven’s earlier appearances on these pages: A Right Like Yours, Four Approximations of Horace, from Every Lost Country, and Herself, Revised.

If God is in the details, the Devil is in the definitions

AMBITIOUS: writer more successful than oneself.

BUZZ: ignorant consensus of readers who have not yet read the book in question and for the most part never will.

COMPLAINT: not actually a form of criticism, though often mistaken as such by reviewers.

DEADLINE: date by which writer must perfect excuses for not delivering in time.

FAILURE: phenomenon that allows writers to retain their friends.

FRIENDSHIPS, OF YOUNG WRITERS: akin to the urgent, insecure alliances of small countries in times of war.

GOOD FICTION: a collaborative confidence trick.

GOSSIP: weapon in the ancient, unconscious war waged by the group against the individual.

HIGH INFANT MORTALITY: problem endemic to literary novels, a low percentage of which survive their first two years.

HUMOUR, WIT: for some reason a proof to many readers, and critics, that a writer lacks aesthetic seriousness (hence, a failure to recognize the seriousness of play).

LITERATURE: an education in complexity.

MEMO: the musing of a harmless drudge.

NEGATIVE CRITICISM: art of creating, out of an instinctive hostility towards work that tests or spurns one’s vision, a calm, orderly argument.

Thus, NEGATIVE CRITIC: writer in the business of disguising a club-wielding caveman in civilized tweed.

PROMISING YOUNG WRITER: middle-aged writer whose work is finally gaining notice.

PROMISING YOUNGER WRITER: late middle-aged writer whose work is finally etc.

ROYALTY: foreign celebrities who earn more in daily investment income than most writers earn in a lifetime.

WRITER: someone trying to extend childhood—its exuberant creativity, its capacity for timeless absorption—all the way to death, thus bypassing adulthood altogether.

WRITER’S WRITER: one who lives at or below the poverty line.

—Steven Heighton

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Here is another dg epigram at the international affairs magazine Global Brief. Global Brief is an amazing and ambitious magazine, the inspiration of the editor Irvin Studin, who finds his writers all over the world (the online part of the magazine features blogs in several languages). The current issue features an interview with Steven Pinker, an essay on three tragedies of humanitarian intervention, a piece on international criminal justice and a prophetic text on the complex future of Israel—to name a few.

Magnanimity heals the rift; ruthlessness seeks to erase the opponent. Both are tools of what we nowadays call conflict resolution. Yet history abounds with cautionary tales. In 1836, Santa Anna was ruthless at the Alamo and Goliad, raising the red flag signifying No Quarter, only to inspire the rag-tag Texians at San Jacinto. After the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus was surprisingly magnanimous toward the defeated Carthaginians, which only led to the Third Punic War (after which the Romans ruthlessly sowed the ruins of Carthage with salt, and resolved that conflict for good).

Ruthlessness means without pity – without those second thoughts about the feelings of others that plague the well-brought-up human. Mexican drug lords popping victims into oil drums filled with acid are ruthless. Pol Pot was ruthless, as were Hitler and Vlad the Impaler. Andrew Jackson sending the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears was ruthless. Harry Truman bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ruthless. But Gandhi was ruthless, too, in his own way, and maybe even Martin Luther King Jr. (a case could be made).

Read the rest at On Magnanimity and Ruthlessness : Global Brief.

Just published: Another of dg’s worldly epigrams at the international affairs magazine Global Brief. Here are the opening paragraphs. Click on the link or buy the magazine to read the rest.

The great 18th century French diplomat Talleyrand once said that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts – a counterintuitive claim that explodes many sentimental myths about both communication and diplomacy. People never say what they mean: communication is not exchange, but aggression – and secrecy is at the heart of diplomacy. That is why we have reached the end of the age of diplomacy.

With unseemly haste, the new digital era has ushered in the end of individual privacy, just as it has ushered in the end of official secrets. Any whistle-blowing idealist or malcontent can download a thousand state secrets in seconds, just as credit card companies, phone companies, Internet sites and security cameras daily harvest data about our lives – some, if not all, of that information sold or shared for commercial purposes. Every day, diplomats blush to have their unedited, private remarks and reports published to the world.

Diplomats are the mouthpieces of governments, which also like to keep secrets – doubly secretive as such, for diplomats renounce the expression of personal views, just as they tend to keep their country’s true intentions tight in their hearts. Thus, diplomats always bear the mark of Cain – the sign of untruthfulness; an unsavouriness, as it were, for their professional hypocrisy.

via On Language, Logic and Lies : Global Brief.

This was just published at Global Brief. Click the link to read the rest.

But the triumph of spirit today seems paradoxically spiritless. The Christian God has been dead, or at least moribund, since the mid-19th century, when Nietzsche pronounced the obsequies. Liberal political philosophy has progressively eliminated spirit from state and statecraft. Science has eliminated spirit from matter. And economics has eliminated spirit from the market.

Spirit seems to linger in the vociferous, but often derided religious rearguard actions of so-called fundamentalist movements (they seem to exist in every religion). But even the phrase ‘human spirit’ used in conversation is a marker for the naïve and passé. And humanism, without spirit, is derided as just another system of oppression. No longer can we wax romantically elegiac about the residuum of immaterial essence that we feel to be part of our existence.

The old arguments from spirit that every human life is infinitely valuable has led to planetary crowding, the exhaustion of resources, the advent of government-sanctioned abortion, assisted suicide, and various forms of medical rationing (when poor people cannot pay for health care, that is a form of rationing). Spirit has turned on spirit, per force, because species survival depends on it. In the end, our human desire to separate ourselves from nature has had the paradoxical effect of proving that we are nothing but nature.

via Nature and the Spirit of the Age : Global Brief.

The idea of winning smacks of the absolute and archaic. The pulse of history, liberal guilt and the end-of-history, millenarian dream of global homogeneity are against it. We all go to the worms. Civilizations rise and fall. What remains of countless ‘wins’ are a few stone remnants and a museum display of corroded armour.

Language, as always, is dire with prognostication. One can win the battle but not the war. And even if one wins, it might be a Pyrrhic victory. In the modern parlance, quagmire is a metaphor turned into a technical term for a victory that won’t stick

Read the rest at On Winning and Responsibility : Global Brief.

Copernicus

THE THROW OF FICTION these days is decidedly dystopian. Novels and movies are chock-a-block with images of the Ends of Times, wherein humans scurry about in shadows, while machines run amok, or the Earth heats up or cools down with catastrophic suddenness, or the undead rage in the streets for healthy blood. The future is a Mad Max movie on hyper-drive, and the stupid and brutal shall rule…