The hobgoblin of little minds
by Steve Xoh

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am by nature inconsistent. I am a living and breathing contradiction. I change my mind. My mood alters, ebbing and flowing like a somewhat unpredictable tide. What I believe today may not be what I believe tomorrow. I will often begin a sentence and, by the time I reach the end of it, have changed my mind and need to start again. I have chains of thought that flash across my brain like bolts of lightning and, before long, I find myself somewhere far away from where I thought I was. It has taken me many years to accept this and embrace it as a natural part of being human. But appropriately, my level of acceptance is wildly inconstant.

I’m not entirely sure what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant by this quote but it has stuck with me as a kind of honouring of the natural inconsistency of human experience and the perils of striving for the opposite. A certain type of structure is important to me in my work. A structure that provides just enough of a frame or a constraint to enable a kind of focussed, spontaneous freedom. I find a totally blank page an unhelpful starting point in the same way that I find an overly prescriptive structure very disabling. My imagination needs something in the middle - an enabling constraint.

Hobgoblins lurk in the shadows waiting for these loose structures to emerge before pouncing on them and feasting until all of their rough edges have been rounded off. They feed on spontaneity and contradiction, slowly turning what was once supple and alive into something rigid, rote and deadened. There is no bargaining or reasoning with a hobgoblin. This is what they do and what they love. The only way to scare one away is to expose it to nonsense: something so bafflingly illogical that it cannot tolerate it. Only then will it let out a little shriek of discomfort and retreat back into the shadows, where it patiently resumes its watch.

“One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions. If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.” Friedrich Nietzsche