"If you understood everything I said, you'd be me."
- Miles Davis
(via Andrew Parker)
the structure / pay off reminds me a bit of this
Interviewer: "What is the future of jazz?"
Jazz Legend (tetchily) : "If I knew what the future of jazz was, I'd be playing it already"
I wish I could remember who Jazz Legend was.... I want to say Max Roach but I can find no proof out there this is his quote.
Also reminds me of the back cover of the first Stealer's Wheel album: "We know that you believe you understand what you think we said, but we are not sure you realise that what you heard is not what we meant"
ReplyDeleteIt's a quote often mistakenly attributed to Alan Greenspan.
DeleteHis actual version is pretty good, though: "If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said."
That's a good one. The Greenspan is better than the Stealer's Wheel which is a bit clunky and contorted - five verbs in just the first half of the sentence alone! Another four in the second!
DeleteIronically the Greenspan clear as bell and easy to understand.
That Greenspan reminds me of this warning - "please do not understand me too quickly". I can't remember who said it, though. Nietzsche? Deleuze? Derrida?
And then there is this banger from Wittgenstein, near the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
ReplyDelete"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"
"Please do not understand me too quickly" is Andre Gide.
ReplyDeleteI have come across the "throw away the ladder" part of that quote before - I thought it was a verdict on all of philosophy? like you go through it all and the revelation is that so little is known and almost all is unknowable
bit like the wise old saw about maturity involving the realisation that the older you get the greater your sense of how little you really know
(after looking it up) it may be a maxim whose precise rendering I forgot, but it's also something Socrates apparently said in a couple of ways: “I know one thing, that I know nothing”; “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Isn't Yogi Berra the person who is most associated with this kind of phrase?
ReplyDeletee.g. "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future", "I never said most of the things I said", "If you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else", etc., etc.