Lift the barriers of Style!

[Costi]

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
(Jalal ad-Din Rumi)

Just replace "love" with "Style" and this 800-year old piece of Sufi wisdom gives you the road, the key and the proof of authenticity of your personal experience.

[Gruto]

"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful."

[Nietzsche]

Love your barriers to create style.

[Costi]

Matthew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

[Rowly]

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

I suggest if your fig leafs are of thistles...you might want to have your trousers lined...perhaps a new fig leaf project for the cloth club?

[Costi]

A Gardening Club, perhaps? - the Eden in Paris must have been a premonition

[Gruto]

Matthew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Truth always comes from false prophets, whether they are drunk men, children or "crazy" philosophers.

[Costi]

And?

[Gruto]

And?

I am just trying to articulate a necessary opposition to The Gospel of Style ... Maybe I got something wrong here?

[Costi]

No-no-no-no-no, there is no Gospel. But there is no treatise, either! Style is not a Universal Revelation, or an Objective Truth - it is a personal revelation and a subjective truth. It is an experience, something to be lived. We can talk about it in the manner of Henri Bergson's "Theory of Laughter". The sense of humour is inborn: you can't teach or learn it and everyone is endowed with it. You talk about laughter, while I talk about the sense of humour, about tapping into this inborn resource. Humour is not to be found outside of us, it is the way we perceive, decode, translate a situation that makes (some of) us laugh (or not) about it. WHAT makes us laugh, HOW we laugh can all be culturally influenced, but the sense of humour itself is not.
A joke explained no longer works its magic, no longer triggers this eminently human reaction. Love explained is not love: if you can say you love someone BECAUSE they are such and such, you don't love them; true love can't explain itself, but that doesn't make it any less real. That's why I used "fall in Style".
What is there to oppose? Let's laugh together and "fall in Style" instead...