Aphorism is exaggeration, or grotesque...in poetry, "cet extremisme est le phenomene meme de l'elan poetique." Aphorism is exaggeration, extravagant language; the road of excess which leads to the palace of wisdom.
Exaggeration or extravagance, not to count the cost. Go for broke. Aphorism is recklessness; it goes too far. Intellect is courage; the courage to risk its own life; to play with madness. "Poetes, voice la loi mysterieuse: Aller au dela. Aller au dela, extravaguez, soit, comme Homere, commme Ezechiel, comme Pindare, comme Salomon, comme Archilogue, comme Horace, comme Saint-Paul, comme Saint-Jean, comme Saint-Jerome, comme Tertullien, comme Petrarque, comme Alighieri, comme Ossian, Comme Cervantes, comme Rabelais, comme Shakespeare, comme Milton, comme Mathurin Regnier, comme Agrippa d'Aubigne, comme Moliere, comme Voltaire. Extravaguez avec ces doctes, extravaguez avec ces justes, extravaguez avec ces sages. Quos vult AUGERE Jupiter dementat." Aphorism, the form of the mad truth, the Dionysian form.
Only the exaggerations are true. Credo quia absurdum, as in parables or poetry. Aphoristic form is suicide or self-sacrifice; for truth must die. Intellect is sacrifice of intellect, or fire; which burns up as it gives light.
Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech. Truth, a broken body: fragments, or aphorisms; as opposed to systematic form or methods: "Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest."
Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings on it, and so it remains dead. Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wodden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: "the form of eternity."
Aphorism, or symbolism, as in Finnegans Wake: "A mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total or diversified field. Such, indeed, is symbolism by definition - a collocation, a parataxis...Symbolism, or groteque: "A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself: the gaps, left or overleapt by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character."
Systematic form; generalities. All knowledge is particular, goes into the natural man in bits, a scrap here, a scrap there. Food is taken in bites. Bread broken to feed five thousand.
Broken form. Against beauty as such. No form nor comeliness. Abrupt: uneven; inconsistent. By Ciceronian standards, mutila quedam et hiantia.
"A new heroic era has opened," mandelstam werote in 1921, "in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering."
Beyond atomism. Fragmentation unto dust, and the word becomes seminal again. The sower soweth the word. Dionysus broken and scattered is seed scattered. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit. The body is made whole by being broken.
Sanskrit bindu: "This word, which has many meanings, Like 'point, dot, zero, drop, germ, seed, semen,'...It is the point from which inner and outer space have their origin and in which they become one again." The thought, poem, is a cell or seed; a germ of living thought: growing from nothing to ripeness. Instead of the dead wood of systems, the tree of life; ramifications; brached throughts new-grown with pleasant pain.
Broken speech; speech broken by silence. To let the silence in is symbolism. "In symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance."
The revolution, the revelation, the apocalypse, is vision; which pronounces a last judgment; and brings about the end. Aphorism is the form of last judgments; sentences.