Solipsists’ Union: Fragments and Aphorisms
by William Cordeiro
You invent your books as surely as reading has invented you.
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Reality is redundant enough without committing mimesis.
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Look for the gaiety in language; recognize the suffering in the world.
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The eyes see the world, but the mind examines sight.
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Only through small effects do we get large designs.
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From the singularity of truth, a multiplicity of meanings.
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Poems aren’t little machines to elicit feelings. A taser, a feather-duster can do that. Poems, instead, reorganize the entire structure of our lives—of our relationship to feelings.
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We only exist as occasions to be other than we are.
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An editor is required to examine a manuscript with gynecological indifference.
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Plagiarize all you want. It will still be your plagiarism.
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A poem must be too much or it is nothing at all.
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A little superficiality is necessary to keep up appearances.
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If you’d like a moral, then make one yourself.
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To call something a superstition is to make an implicit claim that, as far as truth is concerned, one has the keys to the castle. But, in point of fact, one might have the keys, but be locked inside the dungeon, chained in murk and darkness, where the door can only be opened from the outside.
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All learning is autodidactic; this places not less but rather more necessity on the role of good teachers.
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The eyes themselves are the veils without which there would be nothing to see.
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Communication is impossible, though we must pretend as if it were commonplace; all figuration contains the seeds of misunderstandings—but only if we assume there’s some point to interpret.
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Eroticism differs from love as a lacerating egoistical despair from a blissfully indifferent self-abandon.
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Words are the loose sparks left over from when the gods hammered forth the world.
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Logic aligns with other logics much more than it matches any innate structures beyond it.
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The past is useless, if only there were a past. For whatever we know of it, we know by virtue of some presently existing artifact. In this way, the moment that has just expired is probably more unreal than some moments that happened millennia ago.
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In our quest for wisdom let reason be one’s last resort.
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What more will we make of our heroes but monuments to the noble ash?
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Writing is the technology of thought. All language that’s alive is only half finished, suggesting more than it provides.
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Sometimes I feel as if I’m slowly dying. Then I realize I am.
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We can no more control our own thoughts than we can argue another into our point of view.
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Go ahead, dance all you want; a skeleton’s already inside you.
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A good author often invites her readers to outwit her; and yet a reader who assumes he’s cleverer than a book can rarely learn anything from it.
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Eliminate the waiting, and how short our lives would be! Thankfully bureaucracy increases faster than the mortality rate.
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My dog has taught me things I doubt my dog even knows.
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Beauty undermines our preconceptions; that’s why most artists never know what they want.
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We can be given solutions; however, they are usually worth very little since we’re left to seek out our own problems.
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Trying to maintain the same attitude, the same emotion about something—say, one’s appetite for a certain wicked girl; lust for potato chips—is as fruitless as trying to trap a snowflake in a bell jar.
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You notice the flaw in every face, but you’ve never seen one true form.
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Like pearl divers holding their breath, artists descend into primeval chaos and flirt with destruction in hopes of hauling up some slight and iridescent jewel which, had it perhaps not been for our knowledge of the suffering spent in obtaining it, would look little different than any childish bauble.
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What use is there to call something subjective? Whatever does not arise from within a subject is unknowable: a blank hypothesis. Yet, how much we depend on this hypothesis of a thing-in-itself to hold together the thin tissue of all our conjectures!
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Errors are revelations by other means.
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Even during the act of reminiscing, we are driven remorselessly into the future.
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We can do no better than prove opinions in the crucible of personal experience; and yet, how few of us are truly misanthropes, since each of us frequently gives at least herself the benefit of the doubt.
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Most men of the world are merely sheep in wolves’ clothing.
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The philosopher of tears held that everything was fire.
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The kingdom of god is right here, and your day of resurrection is instant with every look you bestow on the continuous rapture of creation.
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There would be little to ponder if we were not exiled from our own thoughts.
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Objectivity, too, is only another myth. Whereas the lyric ecstasies of the soothsayer, the lover, and the poet are myths which know themselves as myths.
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How many people feel bats swoop through the graveyard within them, shadows print ruin on ruin, the thunder contained down the atoms of things caterwaul as it’s unfolding the earth? How many people feel all this and just shrug?
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Be polite; otherwise, you may endanger someone’s vanity, and thereby the very substance and foundation of the world.
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Pretending has more being than being does.
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We rot inside a little. We’re befuddled with contentment.
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The universe contains fewer metaphysical fractures after the solemnities of a good meal.
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The body grows older; the soul waits to be born.
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The sky which ends at every window…
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What’s genuine mean? Everything’s modeled and mottled. Imitation is the surest path to originality.
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A perfectly logical mind is what the wind is when it doesn’t move.
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A craving for safety is more likely to make one avoid life than to protect one.
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Facts are like a jigsaw puzzle, which, even as we struggle to arrange its picture, we recognize we ourselves are the missing piece.
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A little decay can make a house inhabitable. It invites the ghosts in us.
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Who knows what counts as a digression until a story is finished?
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Without the stars, we might think our planet floated alone in a void, with all the grandiosity and absurd gloom that that entails; so, likewise, our interior has been strewn with its stars, too.
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Poets, orphaned from their mother tongues, are free to claim every crooked idiom as their abode.
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Parents should not try to inculcate their own values in their children; rather, they should hope to engender an autonomy in each child that enables the child to fashion her own values.
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I woke, and yet my eyes continued dreaming.
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To move a mountain, simply wait for fog.
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The pretense of objectivity is a residue from centuries of positing a god’s-eye point of view, first because of actual belief in gods and later because of the conventions of novelistic discourse.
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Why do we assume that all awakenings will reveal to us a “higher” state of consciousness? What if our last revelation came as a dung beetle? Or those teeth of grass, which will surely eat us up?
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Not thoughts, but the edge one gives to them…
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Colors form no real part of things; but by them—and them alone—can we perceive the mystery of any distant horizon.
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Those who masquerade as clowns often disguise themselves from being seen as fools.
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A pebble laments it was once a great landmass, forgetting it was then buried under a mountain.
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Talk of god is merely metaphor; metaphor, however, is divine.
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Indeed, I have a great deal of faith—that I will change my mind.
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Oblivion is quick. It lasts forever.
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I’m never myself when I write, and I’m never more myself. 9
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By day, clouds blot out the sun; by night, fires rage on the plains. I’m harvesting my next mistake.
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We may have obligations, but we are not obliged to have them. “Ought” can’t be derived from “is.” Duty is a discourse, an outlook. So if one acquiesces in some duty, then the duty itself has been freely chosen.
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Those patient, insomniac hours when you own your alonenesses…
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Even the most quotidian work of fiction suspends us outside the everyday illusions we labor under.
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Metaphysician, heal thyself.
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The end is only our idea of an end. As long as we’re still shuffling, nothing has ended.