This evening I was putting together a long post on Zamyatin, and I never got the Wyndham Lewis book out to get the quote right. It’s the first ‘item’ on the Code of the Herdsman: “Never maltreat your own intelligence with parables. It is a method of herd-hypnotism.” Close enough.The second item in the Code is about cleverness. Even though I had no idea where the idea for that ‘whose clever’ post came from at the time, I’m sure now it did come from faint memories of the passage “Do not admit cleverness, in any form, into your life.” You can write a three volume book going through all these statements and analyzing them.
I don’t agree with much of the Code, and the idea of a Code does sound scary coming from him, but it is full of his ability to cut through the BS and make you really think.
1 comment:
actually the clever post came from another post criticizing cleverness, now that I think of it. It's not imporant - it's a dumb post, I just have an aversion to creative theft
Post a Comment