Frippisms 2

Heaven and earth share the same space. 

Come with Me . . .

Michael Leunig 86

Frippisms 1

Over the years, I have developed a deep admiration for Robert Fripp. Casual listeners may know him as the force behind King Crimson, and dedicated musicians may know him for the founding of Guitar Craft. 

I admit that his recordings sounded like noise to me at first, and his words once seemed a bit too pretentious for my taste. My estimation slowly changed as I slowly changed. 

I have only seen King Crimson in concert twice, but each time I was amazed by the mastermind sitting on a stool behind the rest of the band, in almost complete darkness. He didn't like a rowdy audience, and he wouldn't tolerate flash photography. He was centered on the music, with absolutely no interest in putting on an act. 

I found myself collecting the short sayings, or "Frippisms",  he would share from his journals, which stuck with me almost as much as passages from Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. He was talking about the art of music, and yet the insights also applied to all aspects of life. 

I don't know if this is a complete list, or even if there is such a thing, but here are the ones I managed to assemble. As always, your mileage may vary. 

• • • • •  

The quality of a person is primarily revealed by their conduct in front of: 
sex; 
money; 
the expression of negativity; 
the use of time; 
the exercise of authority over others. 

Epictetus, Discourses 2.15.1

Chapter 15: On those who cling stubbornly to their judgments.

There are some who when they hear these precepts—that a man must be steadfast, and that the will is by nature a free thing and not subject to compulsion, whereas all else is subject to hindrance and compulsion, being in bondage and dependence—imagine that they must abide without swerving by every judgement that they have formed. 

 
No—first of all the judgement arrived at must be sound. 
 
For I would have the body firmly braced, but it must be the firmness of health and good condition; if you show me that you have the firmness of a madman and boast of that, I shall say to you, “Look, man, for someone to cure you.” 
 
This is not firmness, but the opposite. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.15 
 
I find this chapter to be both comic and tragic. I laugh at how stubborn we can be, and I cry at how stubborn we can be. If I could only recognize the inflexibility in myself as quickly as I draw attention to it in others. 
 
Just as I may struggle to distinguish love from lust, or courage from recklessness, it seems so easy to cross that line from constancy into obstinacy. My confusion, however, comes from assuming that an increase of sheer willpower will somehow make things better, when all along the quantity of my resolve can only be as good as the quality of my understanding. I learn too late how a greater determination in doing what is wrong can never help me with making anything right. 
 
As I was growing up in the 1980’s there was surge of self-help movements, most of which promised to make us boatloads of cash, and all of which treated self-confidence and perseverance as if they were ends in themselves: “If you can dream it, you can achieve it!” Few seemed to ask whether it was worth desiring to being with. 
 
Now I was still bright enough to know that money wouldn’t bring me happiness, but I did let that yuppie ideal of boundless ambition creep into my thinking; this merely served to encourage the worst aspects of my Irish temperament.
 
So if something didn’t go my way, I was tempted to dig in my heels, to present my spunky demands, even if it involved little more than yelling and screaming. If you pushed, I wanted to push back harder, and when I failed, as I inevitably did, I would go off to sulk in the corner, convinced all the more of the righteousness of my cause. Yes, this is a particular weakness of adolescence, but the bigger problems arise when we remain perpetual teenagers. 
 
How much grief I could have saved myself by grounding my perseverance in prudence! It is only good to be strong if you can first be wise, and no amount of force will help if I lack a sense of direction. Stoicism teaches us to remember why nothing in life becomes beneficial or harmful, except through the presence or absence of understanding. The heavy hand and the steadfast heart require the vision of an informed conscience. 
 
It is one thing to insist that I want it, and quite another to know why I should want it. The value of the choice is dependent on the merit of the judgment, and no amount of stubbornness can change that. As the diseased body calls for a dose of medicine, so the pigheaded soul calls for the remedy of philosophy. Only the fool will never change his mind. 

—Reflection written in 9/2001 

Sayings of Ramakrishna 289, 290

A learned Brahman once went over to a wise king and said, "Hear, O king, I am well versed in the holy scriptures. I intend to teach you the holy book of the Bhâgavata." 

The king, who was the wiser of the two, well knew that a man who has read the Bhâgavata would seek more to know his own Self than honor and wealth in a king's court. 

He replied, "I see, O Brahman, that you yourself have not mastered that book thoroughly. I promise to make you my tutor, but go first and learn the scripture well." 

The Brahman went his way, thinking within himself, "How foolish the king is to say I have not mastered the Bhâgavata well, when I have been reading the book over and over again for all these years." 

However, he went over the book carefully once more and appeared before the king. The king told him the same thing again and sent him away. 

The Brahman was sore vexed, but thought there must be some meaning for this behavior of the king. He went home, shut himself up in his closet, and applied himself more than ever to the study of the book. 

By and by the hidden meanings began to flash before his intellect; the vanity of running after the bubbles, riches and honor, kings and courts, wealth and fame, all vanished before his unclouded vision. 

From that day forward he gave himself up entirely to attain perfection by the worship of God, and never returned to the king. 

A few years after the king thought of the Brahman, and went to his house to see what he was about. 

Seeing the Brahman, all radiant with the divine light and love, he fell upon his knees and said, "I see you have now arrived at the true meaning of the scriptures; I am ready to be your disciple, if you will duly condescend to make me one." 

IMAGE: Lady Lawley, A Learned Ascetic (1914) 

Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates 47

Once when someone was in a fury of indignation because he had bidden a passerby good day and the salutation was not returned, Socrates said: "It is enough to make one laugh! If you met a man in a wretched condition of body, you would not fall into a rage; but because you stumble upon a poor soul somewhat boorishly disposed, you feel annoyed." 

To the remark of another who complained that he did not take his food with pleasure, he said: "Acumenus has a good prescription for that." 

And when the other asked: "And what may that be?" 

"To stop eating," he said. "On the score of pleasure, economy, and health, total abstinence has much in its favor." 

And when someone else lamented that "the drinking water in his house was hot," he replied: "Then when you want a warm bath you will not have to wait." 

The Other: "But for bathing purposes it is cold." 

Socrates: "Do you find that your domestics seem to mind drinking it or washing in it?" 

The Other: "Quite the reverse; it is a constant marvel to me how contentedly they use it for either purpose." 

Socrates: "Which is hotter to the taste—the water in your house or the hot spring in the temple of Asclepius?" 

The Other: "The water in the temple of Asclepius." 

Socrates: "And which is colder for bathing—yours or the cold spring in the cave of Amphiaraus?" 

The Other: "The water in the cave of Amphiaraus." 

Socrates: "Then please to observe: if you do not take care, they will set you down as harder to please than a domestic servant or an invalid." 

A man had administered a severe whipping to the slave in attendance on him, and when Socrates asked: "Why he was so wroth with his own serving-man?" excused himself on the ground that "the fellow was a lazy, gourmandizing, good-for-nothing dolt—fonder of money than of work." 

To which Socrates: "Did it ever strike you to consider which of the two in that case the more deserves a whipping—the master or the man?" 

When someone was apprehending the journey to Olympia, "Why are you afraid of the long distance?" he asked. "Here at home you spend nearly all your day in taking walks. Well, on your road to Olympia you will take a walk and breakfast, and then you will take another walk and dine, and go to bed. 

"Do you not see, if you take and tack together five or six days' length of walks, and stretch them out in one long line, it will soon reach from Athens to Olympia? 

"I would recommend you, however, to set off a day too soon rather than a day too late. To be forced to lengthen the day's journey beyond a reasonable amount may well be a nuisance; but to take one day's journey beyond what is necessary is pure relaxation. Make haste to start, I say, and not while on the road." 

When someone else remarked "he was utterly prostrated after a long journey," Socrates asked him: "Had he had any baggage to carry?" 

"Not I," replied the complainer; "only my cloak."

Socrates: "Were you traveling alone, or was your manservant with you?" 

He: "Yes, I had my man." 

Socrates: "Empty-handed, or had he something to carry?" 

He: "Of course; carrying my rugs and other baggage." 

Socrates: "And how did he come off on the journey?" 

He: "Better than I did myself, I take it." 

Socrates: "Well, but now suppose you had had to carry his baggage, what would your condition have been like?" 

He: "Sorry enough, I can tell you; or rather, I could not have carried it at all." 

Socrates: "What a confession! Fancy being capable of so much less toil than a poor slave boy! Does that sound like the perfection of athletic training?" 

—from Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.13 

The Continence of Scipio 16

David Allan, The Continence of Scipio (1774) 

Epictetus, Discourses 2.14.7

Does no one govern it? How can that be? A city or a household cannot endure even for a brief span of time without one to govern and take charge of it, and can this great and noble frame of things be administered in such good order by mere random chance? 
 
There is, then, One who governs it. What is His nature and how does He govern? And we, what are we, His creations, and to what work are we born? Have we any connection and relation with Him or not? 
 
Such are the thoughts which occur to these few, and so they devote their time to this and this alone, to investigate the assembly of life before they leave it. 
 
What follows? They are laughed at by the multitude, just as in the other assembly those who look on are laughed at by those who buy and sell. Nay, the cattle themselves, if they shared our perception, would laugh at those who have made anything else but fodder the object of their wonder and regard! 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.14 
 
The positivists were quite right to begin with the empirical, but they were sadly misguided when they also ended with the empirical. There is a world of difference between saying that I experience it because it is real, and that it is real because I experience it—be wary of the man who rejects a God because he has not been able to contain the Divine inside a test tube. 
 
Take what you can perceive, and then apply the power of reason to its workings. To deny a cause to the effect, or the necessary to what is contingent, or a purpose to an order is a rather illiberal and unscientific way to proceed, a skepticism that has more to do with obstinacy than it does with clarity. I am reminded of getting drunk with an esteemed physics professor, who finally admitted how he hated religion because his mother had dragged him out of bed on Sunday mornings. 
 
Once I declare that the world is chaotic, I am just describing my inner frustrations, not anything regarding the arrangement of nature. I wasted too many years worried about life failing to make any sense, when the problem was always a turmoil in my thinking. I will not succumb to doubt and despair as long as I remain intensely curious. 
 
If the idea of the Absolute continues to feel uncomfortable, I should realize it is because I am making too much of my own being at the expense of an openness to complete Being. The part will only find a function within the harmony of the whole. That I do not know everything about the grand design does not mean that I know nothing about my particular place. 
 
What will become of me if I continue down this path? The buyers and the sellers in the marketplace will have no further use for me, since I am no longer trading in their currency. They will make clever jokes, and they will roll their eyes as I pass by, yet this will not trouble me as much as it once did. I can now appreciate something I used to ridicule, which makes me wonder if that old man, the one who would mumble about repentance at the bus stop, might have been onto something. 
 
There comes a point when the question, “What do I want?” is replaced by the question, “What does He ask of me?” Instead of scheming over how to make a profit, I am questioning the very meaning of benefit and harm. I am more concerned with opening my mind than I am with stuffing my belly. 
 
As a child, the words “laughing cow” brought to mind delicious little cheese wedges. Now they bring to mind this letter by Epictetus. You can’t go home again. There’s no going back after I’ve peeked under the curtain. 

—Reflection written in 9/2001 

Snippets from the Handbook 3

Aiming then at these high matters, you must remember that to attain them requires more than ordinary effort; you will have to give up some things entirely, and put off others for the moment. 

And if you would have these also—office and wealth—it may be that you will fail to get them, just because your desire is set on the former, and you will certainly fail to attain those things which alone bring freedom and happiness. 

—Epictetus, The Handbook 1 

Jottings on Marcus 5

Every moment think steadily, as a Roman and a man, to do what you have in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice, and to give yourself relief from all other thoughts. . . . 

—from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.5 

How odd that I fret over the things I can't control, while I neglect the things I can control. My worth is not in the arrangement of  the circumstances, but from the content of my character. 

I need only examine my own constitution to grasp this. No rocket science is required. 

Let the rest be as it must be. Whatever the conditions, can I say that I have acted with a purity of understanding and love? 

There is the excellence within my power. There is my happiness. The rest is just window dressing. 

Man's Search for Meaning 23

To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. 

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. 

I practically trained a friend of mine, who worked next to me on the building, site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. 

He was a surgeon and had been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. 

On the building site, especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection, the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: "Action! Action!" 

I told my friend, "One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, 'Action! Action!'"

Sometimes the other men invented amusing dreams about the future, such as forecasting that during a future dinner engagement they might forget themselves when the soup was served and beg the hostess to ladle it "from the bottom." 

—from Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning 

Epictetus, Discourses 2.14.6

Our condition may be compared to the gathering at a public festival. 
 
Cattle and oxen are brought thither for sale, and the mass of men come to buy or to sell; only some few come to look at the assembled people and see how and why the assembly gathers and who instituted it and with what object. 
 
It is just the same here, in this assembly of the world: some are like cattle and trouble themselves about nothing but their fodder, for you who busy yourselves with property and lands and servants and public offices are busy with fodder and nothing else. 
 
There are but few who come to this assembly with a desire to see what really is the meaning of the Universe and Who governs it. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.14 
 
This passage speaks to me immediately, because I have never much enjoyed following the herd, and I am always at my best after I first stand back to observe. What is that fellow up to? What makes her tick? Who is being sincere, and who is putting on an act? How can I understand the deeper motives, through the relationship of their words and deeds? All that glitters is not gold. 
 
There is, however, the danger of an eccentricity out of pride, a weirdness for the sake of show, as distinct from simply going against the grain as a consequence of an informed conscience. I don’t have to be different to be special, but I should be prepared for some odd glances once I start thinking for myself. By their fruits shall you know them. 
 
I sometimes wonder how the little green men from outer space might see us: are they confused by the way we frantically rush about, forever enthralled by images of money, power, and sex, unwilling to imagine a life beyond the rat race? How odd when creatures gifted with the freedom of understanding behave like livestock, fattened up to be sold at the market! 
 
I could easily stop right there, bemoaning the fate of society and falling in line with the snarky cynics, but then wouldn’t I just be hiding away in yet another clique? I could instead choose to embrace the very qualities that I claim are lacking; I can be in the world, but not of the world. I could choose to pursue wisdom in the presence of ignorance, love in the face of lust, and liberty while surrounded by conformity. Though I won’t make the front page, I will also have learned why that never mattered much to begin with. 
 
Whether I find myself in the office, or on the subway, or at the shopping mall, I remain free to ask “Why?” If you tell me I will be alone, I assure you that there are others, who will stand with me, in the spirit if not in the flesh. You do not take notice of them, for they do right without asking to be reimbursed, and they watch carefully without demanding attention. Take a snapshot of any crowd, and you are guaranteed to discover at least one thinking man. 
 
What sort of questions does he ask, as everyone else is occupied with petty business? He looks for the truth behind the appearance, for the good within the annoyance, for the beauty underneath the drabness. He gazes at anyone, and he seeks out the face of God. Having a sense of the beginning and the end, he knows that nothing is in vain. 
 
As helpful as it is to go to work, to pay your taxes, and to save up for the house with the white picket fence, those are not the things for which you were made. 

—Reflection written in 9/2001 

IMAGE: Francesco Bassano the Younger, Market Scene (c. 1585) 

Dhammapada 423

Him I call indeed a Brahmana who knows his former abodes, who sees heaven and hell, has reached the end of births, is perfect in knowledge, a sage, and whose perfections are all perfect. 

Stobaeus on Stoic Ethics 23

Again, of good things, some are things which exist in themselves and some are relative dispositions. 

Knowledge, just action, and similar things are things which exist in themselves. 

Honor, goodwill, friendship, and agreement are relative. 

And knowledge is a grasp which is secure and unchangeable by argument. 

Another definition: knowledge is a complex system of grasps of this sort, such as knowledge of the particulars, which is, in the virtuous man, rational. 

Another definition: a complex system of craftsmanlike knowledge, which provides its own stability, which is what the virtues are like. 

Another definition: a condition receptive of presentations which is unchangeable by argument, which they say consists in a tension and power of the soul. 

Friendship is a community of life. Agreement is a sharing of opinions about things relevant to life. 

Within friendship, familiarity is friendship with people who are well known to you; habituation is friendship with people you have become accustomed to; companionship is friendship by choice, such as that with one’s contemporaries; guest-friendship is friendship with foreigners; there is also a kind of family friendship between relatives; and an erotic friendship based on sexual love. 

And painlessness and organization are the same as temperance, just as insight and wits are the same as prudence, and sharing and generosity are the same as good-heartedness; for they have been given names by reference to their relative dispositions. And one must note this too in each of the other virtues. 

IMAGE: Carl Spitzweg, Childhood Friends (1855) 

Bach 9, Es ist dir gesagt, Mensch, was gut ist

Johann Sebastian Bach, Es ist dir gesagt, Mensch, was gut ist, BWV 45, Netherlands Bach Society 

Sayings of Publilius Syrus 199

It is a fraud to receive the trust which you cannot return. 

IMAGE: John Everett Millais, Trust Me (1862) 

Proverbs 5:1-6

[1] My son, be attentive to my wisdom,
incline your ear to my understanding;
[2] that you may keep discretion,
and your lips may guard knowledge.
[3] For the lips of a loose woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
[4] but in the end she is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.
[5] Her feet go down to death;
her steps follow the path to Sheol;
[6] she does not take heed to the path of life;
her ways wander, and she does not know it. 

IMAGE: Gustave Moreau, Delilah (c. 1896) 

Sayings of Heraclitus 95

Man's character is his fate. 

IMAGE: Henry Fuseli, The Death of Oedipus (c. 1784) 

Epictetus, Discourses 2.14.5

What do you lack? 
 
If I show you that you lack what is most necessary and important for happiness, and that hitherto you have paid attention to everything rather than to acting appropriately, and if I conclude my criticism by saying that you do not know what God or man is, or what good or evil is, though perhaps you may bear being told of your ignorance in other ways, you cannot bear with me when I say that you do not know your own self; how can you submit to examination and abide my question? 
 
You cannot bear it at all: you go away at once in disgust. 
 
And yet what evil have I done you? Unless indeed the mirror does harm to the ugly man, by showing him what sort of man he is: unless the physician too insults the sick man, when he says to him, “Sir, you think there is nothing wrong with you, but you are in a fever; take no food today and drink water”; and no one says, “What shocking insolence!” 
 
But if you say to a man, “There is fever in your will to get, your will to avoid is degraded, your designs are inconsistent, your impulses out of harmony with nature, your conceptions random and false,” he goes away at once and says, “He insulted me!" 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 2.14 
 
We quickly comply with medical advice, while becoming quite indignant about moral advice. Why might this be? 
 
An old friend once proposed it was because science is like our new religion, and doctors now behave as if they were priests, but I then asked him how this could explain Epictetus describing the very same problem back in ancient Rome. 
 
He shrugged and said, “I dunno, maybe folks are just boneheads?” We had a good laugh, and I will always remember him for that stock phrase. 
 
Nevertheless, what makes anyone choose to be so stubborn? Don’t we know what’s good for us? Ah, there’s the rub! For all the materialism of the modern age, a confusion about our nature is a universal shortcoming. Give a man the freedom of judgment, and he is so tempted to follow the easiest route. 
 
My priorities inform my choices, so I will gladly obey if I perceive a certain benefit. When a professional tells me that a new drug will grant me a longer and more comfortable life, I am eager to hand him my money, because the pleasures of my body matter the most. Yet when a philosopher tells me that a timeless attitude will greatly increase my virtues, I am hesitant to change my habits, because the character of my soul is not so high on my list. 
 
Though this helps to explain an indifference about a healthy conscience, it can’t account for the downright hostility we have toward any moral correction. For myself, I can only observe how I would still like to appear like a good man to others, even as I don’t necessarily care about acting like a good man to others. As a result, I take offense at being called out, at having my cover blown; I retain an instinctive knowledge about my purpose, even when I fail to make it authentic. 
 
I can do so much better. I can do far more than pretend. 
 
For all the make-believe, do I truly understand the rudimentary principles of my nature? What is good and what is evil? What brings happiness and what brings misery? What is God and what is man? I cannot proceed with any other aspects of my life when these questions remain unanswered, or when my awareness is superficial. I lash out at the wise counsel, in the hope of dodging my own responsibility. 
 
It is humbling to be exposed for not knowing myself, and it is more convenient to be angry with another than to improve myself. It would be best for me to heed the guidance of the sage, since he recognizes exactly what I need, far more than any physician. 

—Reflection written in 9/2001 

IMAGE: Jacob Toorenvliet, The Doctor's Visit (c. 1667)