Bill Chapko is an aphorist, and an aphorist computer technician. He’s developed what he calls the Lifetime Uncategorized Computer-Aided Collection of Aphorisms (LUCCA). He says it’s a “place for people who want to write aphorisms” and it can be found here. Mr. Chapko designed LUCCA “to make writing and reading aphorisms as easy and as widespread as possible. It also supports the view that aphorisms are inspirations, caught on the fly, and in general shouldn’t be ‘worked on’ afterwards.” He describes LUCCA, somewhat spookily, as “as an expanded gravestone, where you put your most important words.”
Mr. Chapko is still very much alive and well, though. He’s an American chiropractor living in Italy—and even says my back pain will eventually disappear! He also runs a website called Nietzsche for Creative Spirits, dedicated to that great German bombastic aphorist. Mr. Chapko himself has been writing aphorisms in little notebooks off and on since 1966. His sons have developed the habit, too. Jason, at age 14, came up with:
Death — nobody knows what it is and everyone is going to find out.
Daniel, at age 12, penned:
The sun can never see any shadows.
Here is a selection of Chapko Sr.’s aphorisms; more are available on his website:
Truth is what you see when you wake up.
Don’t confuse sane with same.
Truth is retrograde. The newborn sees best.
One sees. Until one is taught to see.
Children experience things; grownups want to.
For some apparently, an “aphorism” can pop off the tongue like a duck falling off a water-slide arse-backwards. As in this one, “Some people never even think of writing poetry on their gravestones…” Which is one of the short comments I heard a friend of mine make up occasionally in my local cemetery of St. Mary’s, and immediately noted down for posterity…as we used to read the gravestones occasionally after a few cans of beer, for inspiration, before I even knew what an “aphorism” was exactly. Of course that was a few years before you could get arrested for it, as they do now in London if you’re not careful about it: “Controlled No-drinking Zones”, I believe the establishment calls them (although the winos call them something else). However, some complex aphorisms seem to evolve, be corrected, and change around the more they’re fiddled with; and at the end of the process it may even be questioned if it was ever one of yours in the first place. Like this one, “The truth is a variable quality bartered between fools.” Now I’m sure I came up with that somewhere in the dim, distant past, only I’m no longer sure where it came from, or even if it’s valid; however, I’ve been pulling it about for so long now I’m not even certain it’s one of mine, as really it sounds like Voltaire to me. Now if I didn’t work that one out like liquorish pulled about on a marble slab, it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me in a quick flash of inspiration…unless I’m wrong an its someone else’s flash in the pan and my “prized example” of an evolved aphorism just doesn’t hold water.