a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jane Smiley

Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you’re the boss.[/b]

Remember when Joker was an anarchist?

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

Can things get any grimmer?

I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.

For better or worse of course.

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is the years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and the rest of the world have broken down, after all - after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.

But not you, right?

I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we’d been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again.

Actually, three minutes is more than enough for some.

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man’s table, or the child from a woman’s breast, or the wife from a man’s bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

That just about sums it all up.

[b]Jan Miesizkowski

English lit: History is a dream
Irish lit: History is a nightmare
French lit: I have insomnia
American lit: I have sleep apnea[/b]

It’s always possible I suppose that this makes sense.

French romance: You stole my soul!
British romance: You stole my inheritance!
German romance: You stole my will to power!
American romance: Can I borrow your car?

It’s always possible I suppose that this doesn’t make sense.

Greek philosophy: My questions are rigorous
French philosophy: My methods are rigorous
German philosophy: My system is rigorous
American philosophy: I’m pretty sure rigor mortis is about to set in

If only analytically.

Logic: It’s wrong or it’s right
Epistemology: You’re wrong, I’m right
Aesthetics: We can be wrong and right
Politics: Everything is wrong—I hope that’s all right!

In other words, it better be.

Philosophy: Who’s your father?
Psychology: Who’s your mother?
Economics: Who’s your bookie?
Politics: Who’s your dealer?

Either that or your investment banker.

Ontology: I don’t understand the meaning of the being of beings
Ethics: I don’t understand the universal singularity of the moral law
Politics: I don’t understand anything but I never let that get in my way

Let’s run this one by Don Trump.

[b]Max Tegmark

The Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) articulates this sentiment: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure”.[/b]

Let’s just hope it is all only as it ever could have been.

If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it’s only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!

If only at times sub-consciously.

Other big questions tackled by ancient cultures are at least as radical. What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shacked in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to comprehending it.

Okay, but let’s bring this cave down to earth.

The various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of how a self-aware substructure will perceive more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics!

Where’s James S. Saint when you need him?!

Generations of physicists and chemists have studied what happens when you group together vast numbers of atoms, finding that their collective behavior depends on the pattern in which they’re arranged: the key difference between a solid, a liquid and a gas lies not in the types of atoms, but in their arrangement. My guess is that we’ll one day understand consciousness as yet another phase of matter. I’d expect there to be many types of consciousness just as there are many types of liquids, but in both cases, they share certain characteristic traits that we can aim to understand.

And this explains what exactly?

Some key physical entities such as empty space, elementary particles and the wave function appear to be purely mathematical in the sense that their only intrinsic properties are mathematical properties.

And this explains what exactly?

[b] Lee Smolin

The mind calls out for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is in an obvious sense “unified.” The universe we find ourselves in is interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else. There is no way we can have two theories of nature covering different phenomena, as if one had nothing to do with the other. Any claim for a final theory must be a complete theory of nature. It must encompass all we know. Physics has survived a long time without that unified theory. The reason is that, as far as experiment is concerned, we have been able to divide the world into two realms. In the atomic realm, where quantum physics reigns, we can usually ignore gravity. We can treat space and time much as Newton did-as an unchanging background. The other realm is that of gravitation and cosmology. In that world, we can often ignore quantum phenomena. But this cannot be anything other than a temporary, provisional solution. To go beyond it is the first great unsolved problem in theoretical physics.[/b]

Let’s pin down dasein here.

Problem 1: Combine general relativity and quantum theory into a single theory that can claim to be the complete theory of nature. This is called the problem of quantum gravity.

Problem 2: understanding what the hell that means.

Newton’s concept of space was the opposite, for he understood space to be absolute. This means atoms are defined by where they are in space but space is in no way affected by the motion of atoms. In a relational world, there are no such asymmetries. Things are defined by their relationships. Individuals exist, and they may be partly autonomous, but their possibilities are determined by the network of relationships. Individuals encounter and perceive one another through the links that connect them within the network, and the networks are dynamic and ever evolving.

Come on, at least try to understand the implications of that.

We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense.

Come on, at least try to understand the implications of that.

On a personal level, to think in time is to accept the uncertainty of life as the necessary price of being alive. To rebel against the precariousness of life, to reject uncertainty, to adopt a zero tolerance to risk, to imagine that life can be organized to completely eliminate danger, is to think outside time. To be human is to live suspended between danger and opportunity.

Between abysses as it were.

General relativity has a problem with infinities because inside a black hole the density of matter and the strength of the gravitational field quickly become infinite. That appears to have also been the case very early in the history of the universe-at least, if we trust general relativity to describe its infancy. At the point at which the density becomes infinite , the equations of general relativity break down. Some people interpret this as time stopping, but a more sober view is that the theory is just inadequate. For a long time, wise people have speculated that it is inadequate because the effects of quantum physics have been neglected.

What do you say we just take his word for it.

[b]Existential Comics

Ah yes, “the wisdom of the crowd”, often known by its more common name, “stupidity”.[/b]

No, not just Trumpworld.

Lucy Lawless should have just been in every movie. Whenever I watch a movie without Lucy Lawless in it, I always think to myself: “man, fuck this movie.”

I had to Google the name. No, really.

I do not, and will not, associate with anyone who believes that the guys who escaped from Alcatraz drowned in the bay. They survived.

God damn right they did!

What people like Sam Harris don’t like about Trump is that he makes xenophobia, racism, and imperialism associated with stupidity and crass populism. This is bad for Harris because he has worked his entire life trying to give those things a respectable veneer.

Is it really okay to go that far?

Republican: “We need to bomb these savages back to the Stone Age!”
Democrat: “Look, we obviously need to bomb a lot of savages, but I don’t particularly care for how you phrased it.”

Let’s file this one under, “close enough”.

[b]There are three kind of skeptics:

1. Scientific skeptics, who are skeptical of bigfoot, ghosts, and psychics.
2. Philosophical skeptics, who are skeptical of the external world, and the senses.
3. Literary skeptics, who are skeptical that there ever even was a “Moby Dick” whale.[/b]

Let alone a Bartleby the scrivener.

[b]Neil Gaiman

You’re alive, that means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change.[/b]

Not many things are more preposterous than this.

There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.

Abracadabra?

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Amen to that. Or something approximating it.

Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys.”

Did they? Well, we’ll know when we get there.

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

Some talk is free. Some men are wise.

It is sometimes a mistake to climb. It is always a mistake to never make the attempt.

Spot the flaw yet?

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.[/b]

But [as likely as not] only if we’re lucky.

…the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.

Let’s just say I’m working on it.

True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

Well, for one thing, wouldn’t you be better off?

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

Or triply dead if she had everything to live for.

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls…

Not only that but even if you don’t have one.

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

Talk about disorienting…

[b]Existential Comics

Welcome to anarchist club. The first rule is that there are no rules. The second rule is that there are no rules. And now to business: half of you have clearly broken the rules, and are not real anarchists, so you have to leave.[/b]

And then all hell broke loose.

It’s Friday, my friends, time to cast off the values of our ancestors and remake the world in our image.

Works for Thursday too.

How to write an existentialist novel:
Beginning: dude is sad that life is meaningless.
Middle: dude is kinda okay that life is meaningless.
End: dude finally has sex with the girl.

Meaningful sex at that.

I can’t necessarily prove it, but I have a strong intuition that intuitions can’t be trusted.

Okay but what’s your gut tell you?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I realized that I’m missing something in my life.

Think about finding it then.

What’s bizarre is that people think that humans pursue their own rational self interest, and the fact that people are going around having babies doesn’t seem to deter this idea at all.

I think he means in this world.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.[/b]

How often though is debatable.

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

If only on this planet.

It is superstition, she admitted. But it might be true.

Go ahead, walk under the ladder and see.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’ve alive.

Go ahead, be the first to really understand this.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

Like me though you might not.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

Let’s exchange examples of this.

[b]Robert Crumb

You don’t have journalists over there anymore, what they have is public relations people. That’s what they have over in America now. Two-hundred and fifty thousand people in public relations. And a dwindling number of actual reporters and journalists.[/b]

And that’s just in the media industrial complex.

When I come up against the real world, I just vacillate.

Seventy four years for him now and counting.

I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist.

Mission accomplished?

Hey kids, while you’re out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Abbie Hoffman.

Your vigor for life appalls me.

I’m sure they were devastated.

As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn’t much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them.

In a word: maybe.

[b]C.G. Jung

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.[/b]

You know where this is going. Or, perhaps, where I will take it.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Trust me: Not the objectivists.

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

Hell, I can do this before breakfast.

One book opens another.

Or closes another.

Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists…But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.

My own fucking being in particular.

Man’s task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.

Yeah, good luck with that.

[b]The Dead Author

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on this day [4/25] in 1889, who claimed that a philosophical work could be written that consisted entirely of jokes. It’s unclear if he meant his own.[/b]

Probably meant Karl Popper’s.

Aristotle read Plato. Aquinas read Aristotle. Brentano read Aquinas. Husserl read Brentano. Heidegger read Husserl. Sartre read Heidegger. Camus had a date to get to.

With a cigarette perhaps.

There should be a rule that for every book you buy, you have to read one you already own.

So, would you?

Immanuel Kant was born on this day [4/22] in 1724. Every year, Kant would bake a raw bean into his birthday cake. Whoever of his guests got the piece with the bean would have to give a talk in his honor.

Hell, he’d be morally obligated to.

Every 50 years, someone declares that philosophy is over. Now you know the history of philosophy.

Come on, there’s no getting around those “big questions”. Probably never will be.

Nearly all hatred of smartphones and social media comes from the realization that other people have friends to talk to.

Not counting mine of course.

[b]T.S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.[/b]

Or as some smartass might put it: blah blah blah.

There was a door
And I could not open it. I could not touch the handle.
Why could I not walk out of my prison?
What is hell? Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to Escape to. One is always alone.

And not a single rhyme.

To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.

Well, you can’t say I didn’t try to. But point taken. Or not of course.

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference…

It all just sort of happened to me.

The journey not the arrival matters.

Says who?

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

And [perhaps] what makes it all the more insufferable are all the times it is possible.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

…he’s infuriated that his e-reader allows him to only know the percentage of a book he’s read, not the number of pages. This, he thinks, is 92 percent stupid.[/b]

Any e-readers here? Is this actually true?

And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?

First of all, let’s decide if this is a rhetorical question.

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

She means yours, asshole.

Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers.

So, did Donald and Ivanka leap to mind?

And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you really can’t believe that there’s something else at the end of it. Something that isn’t just more pain. But there’s always something else at the end; something at least a little different. You never know what that thing will be, but it’s there.

Unless of course [for you] the end is still nowhere in sight.

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.

Another brute facticity of life as it were. If only for almost all of us.

[b]Sad Socrates

Focusing on the good is as much a skill as focusing on the bad.[/b]

You know, if you can find any.

It’s a blessing to know Jesus was never my god.

How you might ask.

It may not be useful to think the universe is absurd, but it’s fun.

How you might ask.

The world is only dark when I open my eyes.

And that’s before I get to my ears.

Monday is just another horrible fucking day.

If only along with all the horrible fucking others.

One day you wake up and things are bad forever.

You tell me about yours, I’ll tell you about mine.

[b]Kurt Cobain

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.[/b]

Not much this isn’t applicable to. Or, sure, that’s just him and me.

No one is afraid of heights, they’re afraid of falling down.

In other words, they’re afraid of heights.

If you read, you’ll judge.

And if you write expect to be judged all the more.

I’m not like them
But I can pretend

On the other hand, so can they.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

Not unlike, for example, grunge.

Here we are now, entertain us.

That reminds me: How am I doing?

[b]tiny nietzsche

If you’re feeling lonely and small on a monday, remember the universe is vast and beyond comprehension.[/b]

And, for most of us, that’s tomorrow.

…when you know god is dead

For example, for sure.

hate it when I’m aware of everything I do

While some actually don’t hate it at all, do they?

i need another brain just for secrets

Nope, mine works just fine.

If i could afford to be a loner, i wouldn’t talk to anybody.

Must be millions like that.

I’m so old that dressing entirely in black wasn’t goth, it was Tuesday.

Just out of curiosity, how old is that?

[b]Tom Stoppard

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.[/b]

You know, sort of.

Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It’s the currency дf living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

You know, before we get to all the things you should assume instead.

A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

How dumb is that, he thought.

James Joyce…an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

Kind of ironic don’t you think?

It’s silly to be depressed by it. I mean one thinks of it like being alive in a box, one keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn’t it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box would you?.. Even taking into account the fact that you’re dead, it isn’t a pleasant thought. Especially if you’re dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off-- I’m going to stuff you in this box now would you rather be alive or dead? Naturally you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all.

That or life in an urn.

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

This guy apparently: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus

[b]D.H. Lawrence

There was only this one lamp-post. Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.[/b]

Sounds like a rehearsal for something.

Somewhere, deep down him, he was scared, he was born scared. And those who are born with fear are natural slaves, whose profund instint leads to dread, with poisonous fear, all of those who suddenly can possibly cut loose the slave colar around their necks.

I can’t even reach mne.

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

On the other hand, who cares?

You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.

More fucking gibberish about love, he thought.

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else… The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

This might not be true, of course. But not by much.

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.

Not counting commercial art of course.

[b]so sad today

depression is like “i’m always here for you baby”[/b]

For some, not unlike dread.

unfortunately i’m very self-aware

For me that gets a bit tricky.

there’s nothing to fear but fear itself and also the dying process, the uncontrollable, the strange fact that we exist, other humans

Of course she’s just getting started.

can you fill the existential hole with dick? a memoir

Probably not. But there are other holes.

i came, i saw, i hid in the bathroom

With all the medications.

i’m aware of what i’m doing but not enough to stop

Even if I wanted to.