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Anthony Weir
MAXIMS
a thought-diary
(Latin:
Maxima Sententia
- "greatest pronouncements")
"EVERY MAN TALKS - IF TALK HE MUST - THE SAME TRIPE."
Samuel Beckett
1
." Perfection of the life or of the art"
precludes - as does our civilisation - perfection of the art of life.
2. In the cold countries where hugging gives warmth
people don't hug.
3. Mankind's destiny and motto:
to change the world and not ourselves.
4. Just how 'superior' is our abuse
of our 'superiority' ?
5. Machines grind on while we do all the work
of failing to live well.
6. A Nation State is a machine made of people.
7. The worst of us are good citizens.
8. Wisdom is the retention of innocence through experience.
9. Science: the torturing of nature to extract Truth in the sanitised section of the global abattoir.
10. The myth of the autonomous self + the concept of 'normality' = totalitarian consumer-conformity.
11. Desire is both a form and a creator of suffering.
12. We who have not killed ourselves know nothing of self-respect.
13. We take toys and games terribly seriously
and turn them into Means to Power.
14. Madness lies imprisoned at the core of every culture.
15. The American Dream: globalised hallucination.
16. Physics and Philosophy are offshoots from Religion,
and religion is the supernatural justification of power
and power-structures.
17. Love is like faith: not so much a leap in the dark as a windowless room with daubed walls.
18. Walt Whitman read poetry to the dying, but never his own.
Such benevolence! Such cowardice!
19.
Man is God's Original Sin, and farmers are his Cherubim.
20.
In a world devoured by his demons, the best of Man is his ruins.
21. After conquering America the goddess Avaritia stepped out of the closet and became Queen of Heaven.
22. His idea of love is her idea of sewage.
23. A barbed and golden cage of leaden dreams interns the shrinking planet.
24. Only self is shallower than mind.
25. When the only spiritual value is Liberty, all falls apart
just as all falls apart when the only spiritual value is Normality.
26. The Outsider defines himself not by inclusion in any group but by exclusion from all.
27. Nothing of mine will be translated into twenty languages - nor even three. Not one of my poems will be requested or recommended on the BBC.
28. In every one of us is Albie Sachs - and Doctor Mengele.
29. Depression, apathy, rage cruelty: what we are
controlled
into.
30. Family: the yellow-bellied sap-sucker.
31. All institutions are evil because they quickly come to exist only for their own perpetuation. Even if, like the French National Assembly, they vote themselves out of existence, because something worse will take their place.
32. Nelson Mandela spent a fifth of his life in solitary confinement. A thousand million creatures spend their whole lives solitary confinement and torture, as 'pets' and 'food' and laboratory animals.
33. Progress is a kind of retrovirus.
34.
There is no narrative but that which we impose:
the destruction of Nature through Reason.
35. Those who do not worship trees and mountains
are already dead.
The universe is living - but for us whose consciousness
is a greed-hole in the head.
36. An "Otherworld" is not another place or time or state of consciousness, but another attitude.
37. History
is product: a false category of 'past'
created by cultures which can't stand under mystery.
38. The Nation State shrinks people into mere function
(within 'Normality'). Thus Gypsies and 'vagrants' cannot be tolerated.
39. We cannot afford to understand that other mammals might communicate rather better (and more economically) than we do.
40. Humans do not so much communicate as create communication-problems.
41. British "National Poetry Day":
regrettably un-unspeakable poetry on the radio.
42. Men without beards have an extra job to 'prove their masculinity'!
43. Information is a dangerous myth, and the desire for it is just another aspect of our galloping greed.
44. Like any abstract idea, love is a theme-park.
45. Only the dead are wise.
46. You rarely see a man in public joy except at some kind of victory.
47. Religion:
File under
-
1.
Disease
2.
Black Humour
3.
Propaganda
48. Men are good a making structures.
Women are good at getting out of the way when they collapse.
49. There are a few sages - but not one stupid tree.
50. The oldest trap of consciousness is Novelty.
51. Self-contradiction is the hallmark of wisdom.
52. Western civilisation has always been mechanistic:
e.g .
the mechanical procession of the Saved to Heaven
and of the Damned to Hell.
53. Every time I turn on a tap - or my computer - a piece of world dies.
54. Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is our stupidity and Nature's mistake and misery.
55. To a dog all the world is dog, but to us it is fragments of a dream that we cannot reassemble.
56. Our culture's obsession with success ensures our failure- and the Sixth Extinction.
57.
It is perversely unfair to reward success -
which is surely its own reward.
58. If you want to be happy - stop wanting.
59. All of us behind windows, shut in by doors, ignore the crucifixion of a tree.
60. Religion: institutional conspiracies to cut us off from Nature and ourselves.
61. The only limit to human horror is human imagination.
62
. The great human sharing: unacknowledged shame.
63. How can 'educated' people have the arrogance and gall to breed deliberately ?
64. Culture: a thousand subtle forms of shallowness.
65. Ritual: pompously-shared routine.
66. Our brains are hooligans' footballs.
67. An interesting accident of language:
fiction
is the major part of
crucifixion
.
68. Who now knows the difference between Thalamos and Thanatos (
Marriage and Death
)
?
69. Death is not dearth but payment to the earth.
70. The answer to Chuang-tzu's question
Where can I find someone who has forgotten language so that I can have a word with him ?
is:
Listen to a dog
.
71. Knowing my dog is like knowing God: a liminal being beyond world.
72. The creator of Anti-memes: doomed to failure!
73. What we are is how we think and thought is only words.
74. Explanations (the obsession of our culture) also are only words. Having moved from cultures of miracles to a monoculture of explanation, we now prefer words to miracles.
75. Smiling is also face-therapy.
76. Farming: the first, greatest - and last - evil.
77. Employment is both the most trivial and the most dangerous form of work.
78.
'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd...'
What rubbish! Poetry is the opposite of the obvious.
79. Shakespeare was the most marvellous wordsmith, a middling poet, and a playwright inferior to Sophocles, Euripides, von Kleist, Racine, Chekhov...maybe even Strindberg. Outside of the almost-Euripidean
King Lear
and the wonderful weepie
Romeo and Juliet
, I cannot believe in any of his artificially-complex characters - certainly none in
Macbeth
or
Hamlet
or
Othello
.
Productive he certainly was, subtle and insightful he certainly was not: thus he is the perfect icon for the anglo-saxon empires - and England's Verdi.
80. Culture is awareness-abuse as "education" (which has long since been only schooling) is childmind-abuse.
81. The chief function of culture is, by restricting our awareness, to prevent us from committing suicide.
82. We are indoctrinated with a belief in our superior power of reason - but we abandon reason at the slightest and most unreasonable excuse - and use reason to justify ourselves. Indeed the main use of reason is self-justification.
83. They think they have it - but there is no key to the Terrible Parade.
84.
The world is nearly 100% non-human. What is human is surely only slightly interesting.
85. Our brains are clever condoms filled with demented sperm.
86. Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is out stupidity.
87. The cruel, complicated shallows of that little reification, the human 'soul'.
88. The comfort of houses is the rape of the world.
89. In the war against happiness that is humanity, Man has won: we are the sunset of the world.
90. The greater the technology, the smaller the consciousness.
91. Holocaust: The worst that we do to each other is nothing compared with that we do to mammals, fish and birds.
92. Outliving evolution, we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny of our concocted words.
93. Civilisation: the Experiment against Nature.
94. Those most afraid of death are those who never even thought of beginning to live.
95. Death is not the grave, but the digging.
96. Senseless to weep for the end when the whole of it calls for tears.
97. The people who are lovelier than their bodies, the people who are uglier than their bodies, and the people who are at least as ugly as their bodies...
98. Sex is the exchange of spiritual disability within a physical connection.
99. Men's seed is tears rolling back into navel-tight eyes, into rotwork.
100. How to cut the crap, knowing that we are crap in the Empire of NothingButConsumption ?
101. No matter whose corpse you lift, you expose those who need the protection of corpses.
102. Our wonderful intelligence ends in suppression of itself in glib deserts of its own banality.
103. Most people like 'poetry' which just presents in elegant form the commonplaces inside their heads. But
true
poetry must be the opposite of the obvious. There is very little of it.
104. Meat bleeds the unsayable unsaid.
105. O the unutterable, unimpeachable pointlessness of writing poetry!
106. Wisdom (or 'enlightenment'): the other side of language.
107. Love: the kind domain of utter solitude.
108. Elation is shallow, but sadness is profound.
109. The Last Emperor is the maddest marketer of Dream.
110. Life is violent conspiracy of matter.
111. There is no time that is not a time of the cruellest miracles.
112. If you want to know about evil, pay particular attention to those who mean well.
113. Upbringing is a slow portcullis in the brain.
114. Most texts are greater than the writer.
115. There are now more people living on the earth than ever died - though Man is the only beast designed for suicide.
116. The only art that's true is how you mould your heart.
117. A hundred thousand stars within a galaxy among a hundred thousand galaxies: between Man's utter insignificance and arrogance lies bewildered consciousness.
118. Every human is born a terrorist against Nature.
119. Reason is the first casualty of human consciousness
because of the freakish last development of consciousness:
self-image.
120.
The more complex the culture, the blander its people.
121. The bigger the lawnmower the smaller the awareness.
122. The expanding hole in the Ozone Layer
is the human 'soul'. The water at the North Pole - the first for fifteen million years - is the abused Earth-God's lake of tears.
123. There is no calmness in our culture of protagonism:
getting and spending, jailing and freeing, right and wrong, grab and bestow, charge and discharge - like a lavatory-cistern...
124.
Sex
is not serious - it is just a compulsive illusion like video, or Zero Gravity.
125. The game of love is not worth the brief candle of sex.
126. The horrors of child sexual abuse are as nothing compared with the universal, institutionalised, apotheosised child mental abuse.
127. Culture is the enactment of wondering how to seem.
128. Employment: like school, another institution
to murder mind.
129.
"Unemployment" is the only Religious Vocation now possible.
130. Paris: a dreary city made unbearable
by amputated trees.
131. The snow falling tells me that I should stop thinking.
132. Dresden, Nagasaki, Laos, Cambodia, Viet-Nam:
the totalitarianism of hypocrisy.
133. Red camellias in the gutter
like pools of browning blood.
134. In between the isobars of weather-maps
invisible corpses.
135. Bottles of champagne await the lover
who somehow can't afford to visit. (Kissing him:
an invisible ballet of tongues.)
136. The roots of oleanders wriggle down to the long dream
of a snake.
137. The first thing to say about Wisdom is that it is an non-communicable disease.
138. For the Chukchi of Siberia there are seven genders.
Where does this leave the "gays" ? Hoist by their own miserable petard!
139.
Mankind: the rotten idol.
140.
The Teaching Wolf says that all teachers are false.
141. The humility of wisdom: hopelessly hiding from the hopelessness.
142. Man's future has long since expired.
143. The one good thing about being ashamed of being human is that I care nothing for what humans think of me.
144. Sex has become not just a Golden Calf, a part of Luxury, but a Chimæra and a Red Herring in a cul-de-sac.
145. Consciousness - thy name is treachery.
'Humanity' -
thy name is Hypocrite
!
146. Reason cannot make us feel good.
The only thing which does that is the Fantasy of Well-being usually induced by alcohol or drugs - or by other people seeming to share the fantasy communally or intimately, as in a mirror.
But for me, the only good feeling is No-feeling. Reason is despair. Happiness...will be Death.
147. We are obsessed by Number (which is only a metaphor) because we are obsessed by what we make, destroy and - especially - own.
148. "The Disordered Species" has great difficulty in understanding the order of Nature and the Cosmos. It's not that the Cosmos is inscrutable, but that we are mangled trumpets, warped and blocked and out of tune.
149. Elvis Presley borrowed just one book from New York Public Libraries:
English Fairy Tales.
..
150. My dog: being with a perfectly-adequate being makes me constantly aware of my inadequacies.
151. Although good art has to be true, art is the opposite of truth - which we find unfaceable.
152. The dreary triumph of law is to put the best beyond it.
153. If punishment prevented crime, there would be very little crime.
154. Lives without risk create their own risk: crime (as I know from my former habit of shoplifting).
155. School is where eternal truths are ignored or denied, and fashionable lies are promoted without examination.
156. Nothing is more fantastic than
"the real world"
.
"The real world"
is just collective fantasy.
157.
The Evil Empire
is not just the USA with its satellites, clients, dupes and victims - but the Empire of Unjust Gain.
158. All Ministries and Departments of "Defence" are mere and monstrous Ministries of Death.
159. "Manliness" - like a great many terms of approbation - is just a fancy way of saying "cruelty".
160. Between tragedy and triviality, beauty and monstrosity, runs the whole pathetic gamut called "humanity".
161. The closed mind is one which turns descriptions into classifications.
162. One of the myriad things that humans do not understand is that the need to control is beyond Nature's ken and contempt.
163. The only honourable employment is beggary;
the only honest philosophy is misanthropy.
164. But not untouchable - O touch me not
for I'm a fragile, untouched man.
165. But secrets aremore interesting than confessions.
166. Human consciousness is a terrible affliction,
dire inoculation, dreadful plague
upon is as upon the planet we disrupt:
to be human is to be dangerously unpredictable -
untrustworthy, corruptible when not corrupt.
167. '
Reality
' is only a screen.
168. Neither drugs nor sex do much for me -
and music flows into my sense of tragedy...
169. The more shrunken the awareness (hence the personality), the more famous, powerful and successful it appears in the World of Mere Appearance.
170. Every government is more than evil - it's ridiculous, because all institutions are self-perpetuatingly ridiculous.
171. Progress: the whole world becomes the instrument of gain.
172. Sometimes the right side loses - but always the wrong side wins.
173. The pursuit of humility - not happiness;
the rights of trees - not Man;
the absence of desire - not democracy.
174. In the end, democracy is rule by whomever can best manipulate the electorate: the military-industrial complex and the tabloid press.
175. The goal of consumer-capitalism: to make us all no-men in one big no-man's-land.
176. The problem with many art-forms (for example, the novel and the theatre) is that they are entertaining - so that only the unentertainable can be reached by them. This is why I write poetry that hurts and depressing maxims - which are, of course, definitely
not
for masochists.
177. The cheapest, most easily-available, most reliable
and most terrible of drugs is Reason. So few people dare to take it seriously.
178. The big religions exist to justify the meanness of the inventors of mean gods.
179. At the greatest gathering in the history of Mankind - The Great Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, January 2001 - Twenty-five Million people gathered in peace and joy to purify themselves collectively in the Ganges. It was hardly reported in the West, and I know very little about it.
Good news is no news.
But a few days later an earthquake hit Gujerat, and the competing journalists flew in like vultures with the competing aid organisations, interviewing the bereaved and bereft - and our ears were stuffed with their excited reports. After which they left for the next tragedy on which to feed and feed us.
180. A society without holy men (as opposed to clerics) quickly gets out of control.
Europe has had no holy men since the 14th century when Francis of Assisi was neutralised not by burning as a heretic, but by canonisation.
181. Government is Man's crime against Humanity.
Humanity is Nature's crime against Nature.
182. To dogs we are neither gods nor devils,
but chattering power-monkeys.
183. In the sacred world almost every human act is blasphemy, defilement.
184. A definition of Truth is that it is necessarily contradictible, and hence betrayed, as poetry is, by the tired old tricks of metaphor, parable and allegory.
185. Truth is 'ultimate beauty' - but beauty is far more likely to be deceit than truth
186. The sayings of philosophers who cannot cook are as empty as the posturings of carnivores who cannot hunt and kill with their bare hands.
187. Everything American is very new
- and very soiled.
188. Democracy is just an extension of the fashion industry.
189. Truth is so new that it has never been revealed - and so old that it has evaporated with the mists of time. It cannot be revealed - only lived, as animals live truth.
190. Truth is a matter of choice - but there is neither truth nor freedom in choice, only in directionlessness and choicelessness.
191. Sex is not intimacy, only a treacherous path to intimacy through the illusion of intimacy.
192. The Republic of Nice is of course really
the Empire of Sanitised Nasty.
193. Each dawn the human mind is dark
with something more than night.
194. To be a child-molester is only a little worse
than being respectable.
195. The least-recognised and most basic virtue
(upon which all other virtues depend):
wholesomeness.
196. Civilisation is essentially against knowledge.
For hunter-gatherers
know
their environment, while farmers merely alter it and clear it and adapt it to their will - and then force their will on non-farmers. "Desolitudinem faciunt, pacem - atque humanitatem - appelant!"
'Education', too, is essentially anti-knowledge.
197. Sex is very liked smoked eel - wonderful once or twice a year with a fine
gris fumé
. (And a very hairy, cuddly-kissy man.)
198. 'Art' (a concept invented like so many in the 19th century - though the word '
GENOCIDE
' did not appear until 1945) is merely highbrow infotainment. Nothing wrong with that, of course - except the snobbery which devours it.
199. The vicious species doesn't even recognise its vicious mistakes, much less learn from them.
200. Between the Professors of Poetry and the Popular Poetry Performers stretch the desert of referential craftsmanship and the wasteland of entertainment.
Today a radio talk-show advertised a Professor of Princeton and Oxford's lecture on Emily Dickinson - whom the sickeningly-worldly likes of him unyieldingly despised.
201. Now, narrative is everything, because narrative is explanation. Explanations cannot be non-narrative. Thus truth and vision have to be traduced into fictions that they cannot be. And our whole world-view is story-lies, entertainment.
201. Truth is undestructive chaos. We think truth is in novels or in scientific explanations, so we turn the chaotic world into a terrible, destructive semblance of order by our lying narratives.
202. Literature is only lies from which truth occasionally drips like blood from meat.
Science is stories of our desire to explain and control.
203. Truth - and the tender indifference of non-human nature - are what less than one percent of one percent of 1% of human beings have the shame to face.
All our secrets are the same.
204. The wisest man in all the world is far, far less noticeable than I.
205. True 'respect for life', human or non-human, is refusal to be involved in bringing it into the world. Breeders have, by definition, no respect for life.
206. To be born is to lose immortality forever and not for good.
207.
"The living wash in vain."
- Samuel Beckett
208. There can be neither 'enlightenment' nor 'happiness' until all human beings abandon hope and action. Happiness starts from the embracing of pessimism - which is why dogs, too, though divine heroes and saints, flagrantly ruled by desire, cannot be happy.
209. In the world-holocaust every drop of milk and every mouthful of meat is a war-crime. But animals do not accuse.
210. The definition of 'humanity':
inhuman.
211. Slaughter for its own sake:
All the animals gratuitously slaughtered - and all the humans who are slaughtered and uneaten.
212. Not justbecause all property is theft from Nature
all governments are criminal.
to be continued...
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