Notes to Self - no.2

Continuing aphorisms on life and purpose and their lack

No.2

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 with nothing to say.

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. I hope these might in turn might be of some use to others.

Enjoy.

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Life is long enough for us to learn the true consequences of our beliefs and actions, but also long enough for us to deny them, hide them, bury the evidence and the bodies and die telling ourselves that our good intentions prevailed.

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You can’t make violence vanish by banning the word violence. You can’t make hatred vanish by banning the word hate. You can’t summon love by telling people to love each other.

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One day you will meet a person who teaches you that naïveté is one of the most lethal forces in the world.

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Those who have nothing to say do not fear censorship.

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Treat your depression as your constant companion; get to know him. Treat him with the utmost seriousness and respect. He will be with you till you die. Year after year, if you treat him well and care for him, he will shrink until he becomes again the child of that first trauma.

*

They amassed and chanted and screamed for the destruction of the library. They threw stick and bricks and flames through the library windows. And so the activists instituted a new regime: The empire of amnesia; the dictatorship of the eternal present. Beneath the dark cloud of paper ash hanging over the city, that would slowly dissipate over days, the young would live freed from all History, under the new regime of a euphoric and forced forgetting. We have banished blame, they chanted, we have burned all bigotry, all language that hurts, all memories that haunt, all that previous generations said mattered; we have burned the law and the memory of it.

But once you have burned the library, there is no archive of past human errors and tragedies to learn from, no words of caution, no knowledge from which to steer a better course so as to avoid repeating past mistakes. Once you burn and ban the word vengeance or the word lust or the word pain, in the name of your purifying fires of liberation, you then have no words to call upon to soothe and cease these powerful sensations when they re-surface deep within yourself. What is this destructive emotion, I feel, you ask yourself? What is it called? What am I to do about it? What did the people who before me do about this terrible impulse I feel? But all the words of the past are gone, and so you are alone, on the blank page of the infinitely empty now. Wordless, breathless.

*

A culture falls apart when tearing others down rather than lifting oneself up becomes the dominant activity.

*

The sages say that great peace comes to person who is beyond desire; the one who can live with small wants and does not become agitated if they are not fulfilled. But what if agitation and desire are the essence of life, and great peace is really no more than slowly acquiescing to death?

*

Cure for a panic attack. Repeat the words:

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

Nothing is happening
Nothing needs to happen

*

You can't just be a bit of a heretic, you can’t dabble in it or do it secretly. Once you start the process, it become fuelled by a lust for knowledge, and it gathers speed and force. It affects the way you think and act and everyone around you starts to see it. From a turn of phrase they will sense your questioning all that they hold to be solid and true. Doubts you had before, arguments you repressed, all come bursting forth from you in a euphoria of questions, and the others have no choice but to attempt to silence you. Once you begin to doubt the foundations of the belief that is held by your fellows, or your nation, or your faith, then you become a threat. Before long the insiders will cast you out and punish you as a scapegoat. ‘But I was only asking questions!’ you plead at the gates but they will not let you back in. So, accept that once you begin on the path of the heretic, the wilderness beyond the walls of safety will be your new home.

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You can achieve nothing of value without making enemies.

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The final acceptance of man's stupidity is in ceasing to write about man’s stupidity.

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He that tells a tale to a fool, is a fool for telling it.

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We have used mathematical models to explain the universe, and they seemed so effective that we have confused the mathematical models with the reality and ended up believing that the universe is a mathematical machine. Then we did the same for the human body and the mind. We are all just algorithms now, we are told. And yet every algorithm is written by someone or something that is not an algorithm.

*

How many writers and artists terrified of their own failures have gone through a sudden conversion to egalitarianism? So they proclaim, good and bad writing, talent and no talent – these are all hierarchical social constructs that must be destroyed. All writing is equal and all writers must be equal! Critics and those who could judge us must be torn from their pedestals, along with all statues to ‘the greats’ and ‘the classics’. This is how, artists fearful of the failure they sense lurking inside themselves reduce a culture to rubble. In ecstasies of resentment, in a collective lust for levelling, they discover a passion and conviction that was lacking in their own writing, and they replace the vulnerable uncertainties of ‘finding a voice’ with the silencing of all others.

*

Amateurs in the arts are easy to spot,
Amateurs in politics, much less so.

*

You are like a leaf that falls from the tree in autumn, despairing as it falls, oh life is short and pointless, I may as well never have existed. But the leaf does not see that from its decay, fresh growth will come in the spring, that’s its death nourishes the tree that will grow new leaves.

*

I shall give up all writing, the writer thinks, because humanity is itself doomed.

Such an anxious, obsessive thought is an immense weight to carry around, and it burdens the entire body with fatigue. A fatigue so strong that you cannot get out of your bed to seek the nourishment required to make it through another day, let alone lift a hand to write. And this makes your fatigue very happy.

*

Self proclaimed ‘hedonists’ are mere paddlers at the edges of the ocean of experience, they settle for a glass of wine, some titillation and a comfortable chair but are are too cowardly to try opium.

*

Technologies that promise to ‘democratise’ communication; to give everyone the ‘freedom’ to express themselves, have the unintended consequence of creating the illusion that everyone has selves that are worth expressing.

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The world would be a better place if everyone stopped going round telling everyone else that they are making the world a better place.

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Stop telling yourself that things are fated to be this way from today onwards. Stop projecting and predicting. So many times the narrative is - it is like this now and when this trend continues it will grow and everything will get worse. Stop. Ask yourself how many times you have catastrophised in this way, only to see unexpected movements in history, trends come to an end. They last no more than ten years. Things swing one way then they swing back, or they go off in new directions entirely. And what did your subconscious want with all this catastrophising. Was it not up to its old game, searching out that same old narrative again, that alibi for submission and inactivity; was it not yet again pursuing that narrative that says “that’s it, I give up, all is fated and doomed.”

*

“Truth is power” they say. No. Knowing the truth about things rarely endows you with more strength, agency or influence. Communicating the truth is even more dangerous. In fact, survival, generally depends upon living with a large number of small lies every day. To speak the truth would in fact make one entirely powerless. One may as well walk into one's place of work absolutely naked and scream that your colleagues are lazy, liars and hypocrites. This may indeed be true, but communicating this knowledge will not deliver power into your hands. You are more likely to be escorted from the building by Security. No, the closer you get to communicating the truth, the nearer you get to being locked behind the bars of the jail or the madhouse, and rendered powerless.

*

You might think that the way to lead a quiet life is to retreat from the noise of the crowd. Unfortunately, in silent seclusion you then have to deal with the crowd within your own head.

*

Look at us mortals with our many tongues, all searching for the same song.

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My 8th novel and 9th work of fiction - For Emma - is published on 25th March 2025, by Leamington Books and is available for pre-order, as hardback and ebook.

The US imprint is published by Arcade Publishing and is also available for pre-order, as hardback, and is available for pre-order.