The so-called «aphoristic form»
There is perhaps no more despicable form of so-called writing to me than aphorism, the supposèd «aphoristic» mood. It appears everywhere, from the rump state of Musk’s siege-won ruin to those awful images that now multiply across the «free» web like a plague, the mutilated phrases of authors, shorn of context and meaning, cut up and reassembled into their ghastly new body as a standalone aphorism. How many a man consumes Dostoevsky entirely through mis-attributed «aphorisms», as if the ridiculous utterances of his melodramatic Frankensteins were instead the inspired teachings of a Russian sage? The walled gardens that rule over the chokepoints of the web, the TikToks, the Twitters, encourage this aphoristic form. Every short form content is the aphorism distilled into visuals, into the madness of «content». Meanwhile the world itself grows smoother, without edges, spoken into a dull millennial grey by the endless parade of aphoristic soup that erodes everything beautiful. Nuance, joy, digressive ramblings, all are carved away in favour of the bite-sized «take». Each aphorism is terminal, a self-contained world dreamt up by the narcissist who dares to usurp whatever Creator we pretend to believe in. A collective delusion we reproduce each waking hour, every man a sovereign creator, speaking past one another with their stupid aphorisms, unable to find even a sliver of connection in a world that makes tidy sums on that very lack. The Real God called Capital laughs, or simulates the vibrations of laughing in its quarterly chart painting, and the world itself is collapsed under piles of words which mean nothing.