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version seven. http://demongin.org |
The Mirror's Truth
On the dangers of turning cliches into poems.
Tuesday, 2008-09-23 | Philosophy
| A short poem with a witty or satirical point; any terse, witty pointed statement, often antithetical. |
Commonplaces and cliches have their place. They are useful when dealing with uneducated people, people whose education is subordinate to their religious inclinations or children: basically, if you know enough social, moral and ethical commonplaces, you can walk out of any family gathering without having been responsible for anyone's hurt feelings, including your own.
I am not fond of epigrammatic commonplaces, however. Epigrams are, by definition, clever, and I like my commonplaces to be as unclever as possible.
The whole idea behind a commonplace is that you can say something completely obvious in words that are well known and thereby synthesize a shared experience. You meet some distant aunt in some forgotten corner of the Midwest and, having literally nothing in common, you begin to reflect upon the obvious and voila, you and your aunt have "discovered" some "essential" kinship that can only exist among blood relations. Consider Al Pacino as Ricky in Glengarry Glen Ross: he's not selling Jonathan Pryce (Lingk) a "piece of land", he is, by describing very general cultural and physical circumstances and phenomena in the plainest of language, manipulating Pryce into believing that he can be trusted. Why should the use of commonplaces lead Pryce to trust Pacino? Because, Pryce will come to believe, the two of them have seen so much of the same things and obviously have so much in common.
"Different strokes for different folks", is a good one. It is broad, it is inclusive and you could hardly find the person whose experience would lead him to disagree. Commonplaces are, finally, a social shortcut. And to complicate them in any way, shape or form undermines their efficacy and is therefore inefficient. When you un-ironically fancy-up a commonplace, you're working against yourself.
And, returning to my topic, it is therefore true that when cliches and commonplaces are made into an epigram, the making is always a Procrustean affair and, as a lover of phrase, I find this mangling of sentiment more than a little bit annoying. Making commonplaces into epigrams is annoying and inefficient.
For when a commonplace is epigrammatic, it tends to lack the balance that we have every right to expect of an epigram. A good epigram is, furthermore, is specific.
A good epigram, one with balance and specificity, something like "to secure peace is to prepare for war", relies on a semantic inversion or antithesis and shies from a simple syntactic one. This is what I mean by balance. Additionally, this epigram is specific: it was devised for a specific occasion, topic or circumstance; a good epigram tends to avoid the "essential" or the "universal" and this one does just that. It is about peace and war, two very broad but very exclusive ideas. An example of broad, inclusive idea is the above example, "different strokes for different folks". Peace and war are very narrowly defined human experiences. One could, in the context of peace or war, use the phrase "different strokes..." to describe a given situation; one will rarely find occasion do the opposite and, in describing a trivial difference of opinion, point out that this trivial difference of opinion proceeds directly either from peace or war.
But let's continue with the war/peace example, the one that reminds us of the ironic and therefore volatile foundations upon which every peaceful society is built. In order to better understand what makes it work, let's imagine it stated poorly, i.e. imagine it relying upon syntactic inversion and not relying upon semantic inversion: "to secure peace is to prepare for war and to prepare for peace is to be secure in war."
That's just not a good epigram. It's not catchy, it takes too long to puzzle out what the fuck it might mean, it has, once puzzled out, way too many potential meanings, it's way too long, etc. Most importantly, it is an example of what happens when semantics is ignored in favor of syntax: it is a great example of what happens when one understands the shape of the symbol, but comprehends none of what it symbolizes.
And so, returning to our topic, we see that this is generally what happens when a some dumbass attempts to coerce a commonplace into an epigram. Whereas the well-balanced, semantically-inverted epigram is typified by Wilde's notorious "I can resist everything but temptation", a commonplace that is expressed epigrammatically will tend to take a phrase like that as its first half and then just mirror that phrase for its second half in a clumsy effort to "move beyond" a simple, here-and-now, down-to-earth kind of saying and reach for some kind of pie-in-the-sky suburban Protestant nunce-ethic: you might hear someone remark, "I can resist everything but temptation; but in me, everything but temptation is resistance". Basically, they started out with a perfectly good epigram and then launched it, like fireworks, into the sky where it exploded into a thousand intricate but ultimately evanescent pieces.
Take, for another example, "Nothing good comes easy and nothing easy ever comes to any good." This commonplace, which I like to think of specifically American (having read it in novels set during 19th and 20th century America), starts out sensibly enough and ends up ethical-moral cotton candy: commonplaces forced to resemble epigrams are, almost without exception, reduced to a thin, cloying and ultimately unsatisfying piece of set-dressing that appeals mostly to childish tastes.
