a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Neil Gaiman

Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen. More Nothing. The Return of Nothing. Son of Nothing. Nothing Rides Again. Nothing and Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman…[/b]

Really, there’s nothing quite like it.

We all have stories. Or perhaps it’s because, as humans, we are already an assemblage of stories and the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin color, gender, race, or attitudes. But we don’t see - we can’t see the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories, we realize the things we see as dividing us are all too often illusions; falsehoods. That the walls between us are, in truth, no thicker than scenery.

Of course this is just one more story.

Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.

You never see this though on the National Geographic channel.

And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

Some new technology no doubt.

For the record, I don’t expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I’m a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar.

He’ll need to cite some example of course.

You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work.

So, it better be worth it.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

What could be worse than the memory of last Monday?
Camus: Last Monday.
Bataille: This Monday.
Kierkegaard: The realization that last Monday was a repeat of next Monday.[/b]

The philosophy of Mondays.
How about this one?

Metaphysics: What is it to know?
Epistemology: What can I know?
Phenomenology: What do I know?
Aesthetics: What do I want to know?
Ethics: What should I want to know?
Logic: No.

He means maybe of course.

Philosophy begins
Aristotle: in wonder
Kierkegaard: in a dream
Nietzsche: in a joke
Camus: in the grave

In the grave is certainly where philosophy will end for each one of us.
[if we’re lucky some suggest]

Reasons to Despair
Russell: You can’t reconcile logic and mathematics
Husserl: Your theory of intuition isn’t intuitive
Heidegger: You’ve failed to pose the question of the meaning of the Being of beings
Beckett: You’re alive

Which one is least likely not to be true?

Logic: A = A
Ontology: A exists
Ethics: A is good
Epistemology: I know A
Psychology: I want A
Aesthetics: Isn’t it time to replace A with B or C?

Or…
Logic: Z = Z
Ontology: Z exists
Ethics: Z is good
Epistemology: I know Z
Psychology: I want Z
Aesthetics: Isn’t it time to replace Z with Y or X?

Deleuze: Something in the world forces us to think
Husserl: Something in the world forces us to think about something
Beckett: Something in the world forces us to think that the only something is nothing

Next up: Nothing in the world.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

And then there are times, Mr. Osgood, when one must just let go. His gaze softened. I believe, he said after a moment, that those are the happiest of times.[/b]

Just not always, right?

…there is no beauty without some strangeness.

Not to mention the other way around.

I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is the theme.

Mere self? Isn’t that the center of the universe these days?

The moaning and groaning, The sighing and sobbing, Are quieted now, With that horrible throbbing At heart:—ah, that horrible, Horrible throbbing! The sickness—the nausea— The pitiless pain— Have ceased, with the fever That maddened my brain— With the fever called “Living” That burned in my brain.

That can’t be good.

I’ve been destroying, destroying, destroying myself in longing for poetic truth…

Whatever the fuck that is.

Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile—an idiot.

Almost a “chimp” perhaps.

[b]C.G. Jung

In psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one’s own will and conviction on the patient. You have to give him a certain amount of freedom. You can’t wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development.[/b]

Imagine trying to bring this down to earth.

We must not underestimate the devastating effect of getting lost in the chaos, even if we know that it is the ‘sine qua non’ of any regeneration of the spirit and the personality.

Imagine trying to bring this down to earth.

Man is much more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor.

Uh, no shit?

From the beginning, I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have the certainty, it had me.

Of course we know how far this can be taken.

Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more readily a powerful counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks out it may have disagreeable consequences.

Wow, talk about psychobabble!
Point taken though.

Hidden in our problems is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche. Without this, we face resignation, bitterness and everything else that is hostile to life.

Well hidden in mine.

[b]Existential Comics

First base: talking about Sartre.
Second base: talking about Heidegger.
Third base: talking about Hegel.
Home run: admitting you’ve only read the Wikipedia pages.[/b]

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

[b]There are actually only four genres of music:

1. Songs about love.
2. Songs about depression.
3. Songs about shipwrecks.
4. “Immigrant Song”, by Led Zeppelin, which is its own genre.[/b]

I can think of a few more.

[b]There are three main categories of existence:

1. Things that exist, like dogs.
2. Things that only exist in the mind, like Clifford the Big Red Dog.
3. Things that don’t exist at all, like good billionaires.[/b]

I can think of a few more.

When you are 15 you think no one gets you.
When you are 20 you realize you don’t even get yourself.
When you are 30 you realize there just isn’t that much to get.

When you are 60? Let’s not go there…

How to overcome your existential despair:
Kierkegaard: embrace faith in God.
Nietzsche: embrace your own will.
Camus: embrace sleeping with as many actresses as possible.

Camus, clearly.

You can’t really trust someone who isn’t serious about anything, but someone who is serious about everything is far worse.

Not to mention the other way around.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.[/b]

An achieved stillnes. What could possibly be more obvious. Or obscure.

It is very much easier to shatter prison-bars than to open undiscovered doors to life.

What we really need here though are some examples.

Why don’t we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness?

Anyone here not turned into one yet?

They were mere permutations of known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without life or being.

You either live with it or, well, you know.

How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted.

Maybe next year…

What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

Of course for most of us we’ll have money in order for this to even be an option.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.[/b]

Words? They’re a good start. Or, sure, a bad start.

Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.

Another example that, truly, there was not much that could not be rationalized.

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

May yours be reflected in the mighty oak.

If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, "Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!”

Let’s just say that mine is in the general vicinity.

If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?

Uh, next to none?

Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole. Heaven was the other direction and so the woman was lying, unless it was like sending a parcel.

In space though there really is no up and down. So, no, she wasn’t lying. At least not necessarily.

[b]Tom Stoppard

Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.[/b]

That and who has the power to pull it all off.

It’s all right—just exhibitionism: what we psychiatrists call ‘a cry for help’.
But it was a cry for help.
Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. All exhibitionism is a cry for help, but a cry for help as such is only exhibitionism.

Sure, make this work for you.

Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell’s bells and all’s well—half the world is at peace with itself, and so is the other half; vast areas are unpolluted; millions of children grow up without suffering deprivation, and millions, while deprived, grow up without suffering cruelties, and millions, while deprived and cruelly treated, none the less grow up. No laughter is sad and many tears are joyful. At the graveside the undertaker doffs his top hat and impregnates the prettiest mourner. Wham, bam, thank you Sam.

Sure, make this work for you.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

Words. There’s always the next one to find.

Consistency is all I ask!

That and what to be consistent about.

If you act only on what you should do without heed for what you want to do, you’re nothing more than a machine, a phenomenon.

Next up: Your actual options.

[b]Ferdinand de Saussure

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.[/b]

But then there’s the part about which comes first. About which counts more.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Let’s explain the reason.

Psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words—is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Let’s explain the reason.

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

More or less clever.

In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

Excluding the masses of course.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

You know the ones.

[b]tiny nietzsche

killing time until I’m dead[/b]

Beats waiting for godot, he thought.

last exit to postmodernism

Until tomorrow of course.

use your suicide voice

Or, sure, your murder voice.

we’re all dying so put a little more effort into it

Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

me: I’m afraid of postmodernism
doktor: are you sure?

After all, can anyone be?

humans killing humans since always

If not before then.

[b]Hannah Arendt

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.[/b]

They just sort of stumble into it. Or it just sort of stumbles into them. Not unlike most good.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

And not necessarily with a happy ending.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Not counting Che of course.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Had she run this by Martin?

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Let’s just assume this no doubt explains Trumpworld too.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Let’s just assume this no doubt explains Trumpworld too.

[b]José Saramago

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.[/b]

Not unlike dreaming?
Or very much unlike it?

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

Either that or perhaps not.

Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.

Wow, he may well have hit the nail on the fucking head here.

You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it’s time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.

Great, another reflection in time.
You know, however brilliant it might be.

Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.

He means vagina of course.

Your questions are false if you already know the answer.

Here’s a question: Is that true?

Well the original word is probably vientre, but womb is just not as banal as vientre is, at the same time not nearly as sacred.

Less babying of a word. So technically belly might be a better translation. But a euphemism it is not.

Maybe, but “belly” is defined as, “the front part of the human trunk below the ribs, containing the stomach and bowels.”

On the other hand, at least he didn’t say “pussy”.

[b]so sad today

always feel like i’m bleeding psychologically[/b]

Welcome to the real world.

trust your heart…just kidding

I tried it once…just kidding

gave up on everything but then forgot to stay given up

Pay me to remind you.

i’m hungry but not sure if i deserve to exist: the musical

In production now way, way, way, way off Broadway

eating and masturbating

Let’s form a club.

i either think about you or think about death

Let’s form a club.

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

My dear fellow, who will let you?
That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?[/b]

Of course that’s all scripted.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

Of course who among us doesn’t bitch about that?

Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count?

Oh, indeed.
On the other hand, he thought, what best friends?

Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.

And, no, not just Mother Teresa.

But you see, said Roark quietly, I have, let’s say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.

The irony of course being that for most in the workforce, capitalism is all but synonymous with alienated labor.

There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything.

Really, how idiotic is that!

[b]Dorothy Parker

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)[/b]

Define never, he insisted.

I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives’ tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen.

But then there are also the brilliant, beautiful women like Natalie Portman. And [if I do say so myself] Supannika Rongsopa.

“So, you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck.’"
Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, ‘fug,’ in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

Remember Lyssa? She spelled it f­­__k, as I recall.

You think You’re frightening me with Your hell, don’t You? You think Your hell is worse than mine.

Let’s compare our own, okay?

Q: What’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?
A: You can’t hear an enzyme.

True, I’ve never heard one.

When I was young and bold and strong,
The right was right, the wrong was wrong.
With plume on high and flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
But now I’m old - and good and bad,
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say the world is so,
And wise is s/he who lets it go.

Of course you don’t need rhymes to figure that out.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.” Plato[/b]

Not that anyone like this has ever actually existed.

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” Plato

I’ll cue [among other things] dasein.

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Aristotle

The fucking liberals, right?

“It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.” Soren Kierkegaard

Of course we’ll need an actual path here.

"People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness. " Soren Kierkegaard

And then take their leap to God.

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” Soren Kierkegaard

What’s that say about me then?

[b]Angela Davis

I feel that if we don’t take seriously the ways in which racism is embedded in structures of institutions, if we assume that there must be an identifiable racist who is the perpetrator, then we won’t ever succeed in eradicating racism.[/b]

And, sure enough, we haven’t.

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.

Of course on the other side there is also a “what we must be”.

Of course, there’s a grave collective psychic damage that is a consequence of not being acknowledged within the context of one’s ancestry. Those of us of African descent in the US of my age are familiar with that sense of not being able to trace our ancestry beyond, as in my case, one grandmother.

Still, as some insist, we all go back to Adam and Eve.
If you’re white in other words.

Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.

Not much that isn’t applicable to.

Communities are always political projects, political projects that can never solely rely on identity.

The we in me as it were.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.” Isaac Newton[/b]

Especially our truth.

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”
Isaac Newton

Hmm, didn’t we get them from monkeys and apes?

“What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” Isaac Newton

And probably the Pacific Ocean.

“To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.”
Dogen Zenji

If only in the privacy of your own home.

"I know that I exist; the question is, What is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ know. “ Rene Descartes

Of course back then dasein didn’t even exist. Not mine anyway.

“An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?” Rene Descartes

How can you blow out what doesn’t even exist? Or is that the whole point?