Notes To Self # 3
More maxims and meditations from a writer trying to stay sane
Over the last twenty years of writing fiction and essays I’ve kept notes - more for my sanity than with any project in mind. I use them as little flags inserted into moments in time, to guide me.
Over this time period I’ve absorbed many aphorisms, epigrams, witticisms and maxims from Cioran, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Parker and Wilde, and I’ve found that re-reading them and mulling over them, helps give clarity and can be useful in any number of contexts - especially when I find myself stuck.
As my ninth novel is about to be published and the pages of “notes to myself” have filled two A4 notebooks, I’ve decided to share a small selection.
This is the third.
I hope these might in turn might be of some use to others.
Enjoy.
*
To put everything you have into a book, write as if everyone you know is already dead, and the book you are writing will be your farewell.
When you have finished your book, have a little weep and say your thanks to the world but rather than killing yourself, play the same trick on yourself again. Begin writing once more, telling yourself that, for sure, the next book will be your last.
If you can deceive yourself, over and over again, in perpetual postponement, this can become the force that keeps you writing and that keeps you alive.
*
We see the risings and fallings of individual births and deaths, we obsess on our own imminent demise, but pull back across time and we see a dozen births and deaths end to end, we see a hundred generations, and in this repeating rising and falling cycle we perceive a long line made of thousands of peaks and troughs. The shape, mapped-out, is a wave form, therefore a wavelength, therefore a frequency, and so it must have a sound. Across the millennia, this is the musical note our species makes and has made since it began.
We cannot hear it, because we are inside it.
*
Every planet, every sun, every moon has magnetic waves that can be converted into sound waves. The sound of the universe is a constant hum of gravitational waves; vibrations in spacetime. Even the void has its song.
*
When you leave your own country, as your wheels lift from the ground, you always feel a great burden has been lifted. When you return, it is always as if a weight has been placed upon your chest again. That heaviness that drew you back, that holds you down, that squashes you beneath its weight. Another failed escape. Yes, that is home.
*
Enemies – why waste so much time and energy on people you don’t even like?
*
Hedonist: You tell yourself that pleasure is life’s only meaning. And so you pursue the repetition of a thousand fleeting little ecstasies, forgetting that the senses dull over time, that repetition causes boredom, that the pursuit of pleasure becomes infinitely more difficult to sustain, that the taste buds wither from over-use. How rewarding can your eight thousandth glass of wine really be?
Aging pleasure seekers have nothing to pass onto the young apart from emptied wine bottles, tales of past sensory adventures and stains upon the sheets of their final bed.
*
The trough feeders will not thank you for pointing out that they are in a long line of swine.
*
Never make actors, pop stars or writers your role models, they have a tendency to commit suicide and to create a melodramatic impression of life’s problems. Better role models would be those who have lived long and learned to endure all things, even themselves.
*
Do not attribute your failure to another person’s success. Do not say people like that, or the culture they represent, is destroying me. There may be many reasons for your failure that are not connected to this person’s success at all. It is not a zero-sum game.
Beware, as this is the work of resentment, and resentment works like acid inside your body. It begins in one organ and burns through to another - it transfers. You can easily shift your resentment onto another target and retrofit your reasoning to make it match.
Is this not, in fact, what you have done for decades with the array of different enemies that you have blamed for your struggles and failings. And no real connection between them at all other than the single mind that generated the need to blame others.
*
We see ourselves as rebels. We hate the status quo, but yet we want to be accepted by it. We want people we do not respect to reward us with respect. We ask people we think beneath us, to praise us and raise us up.
But why ask people you look down upon to judge your worth? Do you think you're so cunning as to trick them into applauding you? No, surely, in turn they should despise you also. And you should learn to live without hoping to be given prizes by people that you despise.
*
If you still hold the same political and philosophical positions after twenty-five years, can you really call yourself a thinker? No, surely you have been doing something entirely different with your head.
*
The desire to “change the world” diminishes with age as the libido declines. Which leads us to suspect that the desire for social transformation was really nothing more than the libidinous ego attempting to elevate itself above all other competitors, not by way of sexual prowess, but sublimated through the forms of ethics and politics that signal higher status. The most radical then becomes the most attractive to the opposite sex. A mating game with virtue as the winning card.
*
They will fight for the cause of the talentless, to replace those with skills and natural abilities. They will fight for quality of work and quality of products to be reduced so that none may feel oppressed by that which is exceptional. They will fight to lower the standards of measurable intelligence so that no-one can be judged as lesser and all will be equal. They will banish beauty because it oppresses those who cannot be beautiful or make things of beauty or inspire them. They will eradicate the truth, so that they can conceal the destruction they are unleashing.
*
We are a generation of realists sandwiched in between two generations who call themselves idealists. We are younger than the older generation who deny the historical consequences of their ideals, and we are older than their children who have yet to learn that attempting to live by ideals has consequences, many of which are unintended, unpleasant, sometimes lethal.
We are like the unwanted conscience of the older generation. We tell them you cannot hide the evidence of your failure; you cannot fill the young's minds with pointless goals, you must deal with the mess you have made, and that we have to live with. It is cruel of you to deny the real outcomes of what you have done, to hide the evidence, and to fill the children’s minds with the same falsehoods you lived by. Can you not admit your failure and admit that your ideals had destructive outcomes? It is cruel to pump the young up with the ideals that you failed at, as if their lives are somehow your second chance to prove your ideals were right all along.
At the same time, we say to the young, look at the mess the older ones have left you in! Can you please listen and learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. For it is a tragedy for history to repeat itself blindly, for nothing to be learned, and you will surely repeat all their mistakes if you do not learn from them.
Neither generation wants to listen to us. We make the older generation feel guilty and they despise us for that. We cramp the style of the younger generation who want to discover everything for themselves, even if it means repeating the mistakes of the older generation. Both generations hate us and silence us, and so, powerless to prevent it, like a generation of Cassandras, we witness history unfold into a predictable and preventable pattern yet again.
*
You say you want to “change the word” but do you even know what the world is?
Have you visited the hundred and ninety six nations on this planet. How many of its three millions species have you lived among? Have you survived in minus ninety four degrees centigrade in Antarctica, or gone two kilometres below the surface of the Pacific and felt gravity’s indifference to your little bubble of life. Have you felt a knife in your hand as it penetrates living flesh. Have you given birth. Have you betrayed someone? Have you begged for forgiveness on your knees?
When you say you want to “change the world” your feet are floating above the earth and your are living within an abstraction.
*
Our species has always been and always will be torn in half, between selfishness and the innate need for self-preservation within the collective. A single human cannot build a city, an aqueduct or sewage system alone, many hands are needed, many minds, a plan agreed upon and acted upon, together.
On the other hand, a collective cannot compose a poem, or symphony, or create an artwork or be in love with one unique person.
A culture based on the collective can become authoritarian or totalitarian, crushing the self and levelling everyone; whereas a culture based on the self can greatly increase inequalities and conflicts over status. It can regress to mere tribalism and murder.
So, we are caught always in the struggle between the self and the collective. One generation will go too far in one direction and then the next will swing back to the opposite pole.
Periods of balance between the two tensions are rare and it is what we claim we aim for, but in truth we sense stagnation whenever we settle into stasis. Admit it, we prefer the violence of the swing.
*
It is remarkable how often people wave the flag of equality for their own personal gain.
*
Depression is not sadness. The reason for depression, in my much-humbled opinion, is the inability to make sense of life as isolated individuals who have been given nothing else to believe in but ourselves.
*
People will flood round your corpse at your funeral, but not round your sick bed. The same can be said of people who have failed publicly. They will find themselves very alone, as if failure was a contagious disease others were afraid to catch.
*
In a culture in which liberation from demons is the goal, what happens when the glorious day arrives and all demons are banished, vanquished, pulverised into nothing?
How can we live now that our liberation is complete? What will provide our sense of righteous purpose now? What will motivate us?
Oh, how we miss our demon enemy! We secretly cry. So, of course, the old demons, must be dragged from their graves, resurrected, revivified, their empty skins padded out, so that they can be paraded in the streets and cause terror once again.
Look our demons have returned and they are more terrible than ever! We yell so that the illusion of our struggle for liberation can go on, and we can feel the real power that comes from forcing that illusion on others.
*
For those who say they are “making their own meaning” or as Nietzscheans would have put it “creating their own values” let us be absolutely honest. You are not creating meaning or values out of thin air, no, you are creating distractions from the horrific awareness of a lack of universal meaning. You are shimmying round the edges of the abyss, turning a little balancing act into a diverting dance. This is survival as a little hobby. A set of pleasurable experiences intended to divert you from the gaping chasm of universal meaninglessness that you have already acknowledged lurks beneath every single action and event, and mere inches from your toes. Look how dark and bottomless that chasm is.
If you are ‘creating your own values’ by making art, the day will come when it’s very hard to finish a painting because you know that in the great span of time art is utterly pointless and without justification or relevance. Why paint when the canvas is being sucked into the void? Why start anything when the world itself is scheduled to be destroyed.
Why speak? Why write? Why write this?
No, you are not creating your own values and even Nietzsche was just killing time till his eventual insanity.
If you believe that life is essentially meaningless then you have brought the void to your door.
*
You wake up one day and realise
No one would notice if I didn’t do creative work today
If I didn’t write or paint or sculpt or compose
I could take a week off and my lack of productivity would have no impact on anyone
No one’s livelihood depends on me making this culture
And I cannot make a living from it
No one will notice if I took another year to finish this painting
Or five years
No one will lose anything or even notice if I never finish writing this book at all
It will join the millions of other books that no one will read
It is not adding or subtracting anything to anyone’s lives
This activity or it’s lack is not visible in economic terms
Or cultural. People have more than enough culture already
And all culture now is the mere recycling of past culture
What I create won’t become part of any debate
It won’t be remembered
It won’t become part of any history or legacy
It is being forgotten in advance of being completed
There is no point even starting it
It no longer even gives me pleasure to do this for myself
Because when I make this art just for myself, then who is to say why one choice has more validity than another?
Why choose this colour of paint?
Why place this word next to that word and not another word?
Who is going to read or see it anyway?
What would it matter if I wrote it badly, when I am its only audience?
Consider the madness of that. A culture filled with writers all selfishly and selflessly pursuing their own projects, and no-one reading anything by anyone else. All sat in our little bubbles, slaving away, on works that will be seen only by our own indifferent selves
When such realisations arise, this is the day you wake up and decide to stop making culture
I will do nothing you say
I won’t live like this anymore, tormenting myself
I must stop
Stop then
Then there is the silence
Empty hours
Then a hundred noises of things that pass your window
All alive, all in motion
And you are still
Horrified by the sounds of time
Of purposes that pass you by
You wait for silence
It waits for you
*
Consider light through a lens. How much of the energy in the first half of my life was simply excited agitation caused by moving between too many projects. A lack of focus, a frantic loss of control and an ecstasy of friction, of burning energy.
Now that I am middle aged and have managed to emerge from a debilitating period of fatigue, I understand that I must conserve all vitality. Time and energy are scarce. I understand that life must be focused like the rays of the sun, through a magnifying glass to a single burning point. Energy will no longer be dissipated in trying to do too many things. Just as light is dissipated through concave glass, travelling in every direction, illuminating ultimately nothing.
*
I am too old for the new kinds of energy. The enthusiasms of others exhaust me. People tried to fix me up, get me on my way, but their new fuel is incompatible with my engine. I say still where I stop. Raindrops rust me. Sun dulls me. My windows and my mirrors are silted up. I can see neither forward or back. I no longer have the need of my eyes. I breathe little gasps in the dark as my lungs fill with dust.
*
The vanity and coquettish-ness of the young floors me. I find myself standing on the sidelines staring aghast at their passionate intensities, of how blind they are to consequences, how entirely lacking in caution.
They believe they are right. Always. The surge of energy they feel in defying everyone older makes it right. They believe that they are more important than any humans who ever lived have ever been. They believe they are pioneers and that none of what they are attempting has ever been attempted before. They know nothing of history, and of how the great weight of the dead eventually crushes the will.
I stand here to the side, behind the safety barriers, unable to even take a step as the carnival protest march of youth surges past me with their flags unfurled, their songs and yells saying nothing but ‘we are the young, we are life, death to those who oppose life.’
How I was like them once. How they scare me.
*
Simple maths should tell humanity that in a race in which everyone believes they can win, the vast majority will lose. Why even be angry about that? Accept it in advance.
But then why race at all?
The DNA, yes, of course.
Does it not feel like we are the horses and our DNA is the rider in the race, sitting on our backs, with his whip and spurs.
*
What is more beautiful than a soloist singing unaccompanied?
Put together we are a chord, a discord; beyond a certain number of us, all we can create is a bloody cacophony.
And then sometimes a choir sings in polyphony, and multiple melodic lines clash and overlap, and from the impossible fusion beauty appears again.
*
The fact that a song comes to an end, doesn’t make the song meaningless and therefor pointless. The value of the song was felt during its weaving and unwinding - it was not like some answer, delivered at its end.
Ewan Morrison’s 9th book, the dystopian novel – For Emma – is published by Leamington Books, on 25th March 2025. It is available for Pre-order from all retailers.
It will be published in the USA by Arcade Publishing on June 17th 2025.