a thread for mundane ironists

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4101

[b]Anthony Burgess

Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off forever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.[/b]

Imagining [in horror] if that was not an option…

I can’t accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Indeed, a work of philosophy too.

Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded, prodded.

You prod them, okay? I really don’t give a fuck anymore.

The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.

You know, among other things.

Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver.

The musings of a thug as it were.

Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.

Another brick. Another wall.

4102

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.[/b]

Either that or they reach for their wallet.

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, ‘That was so Bankheadian.’ Or, ‘A little too Bankheadian for my taste.’

That’s so iambiguian, isn’t it?

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Sure, but why the pigtails?

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

Known scholastically as “the rationalization of labor”. Or politically as the “alienation of labor”. Only now applicable to everything.

Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence”. The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the initial drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. It lasts, Luce explained, up to two years—tops.

Imagine two fucking years of that!

Eating is natural. Gaining weight is your choice.

Would that losing it were.

4103

[b]The Dead Author

Criticism: Fuck you.
Cynicism: Fuck them.
Stoicism: Fuck it.[/b]

The fuck you say!

Existential nihilism: Shit happens.
Ethical nihilism: I don’t give a shit.
Epistemological nihilism: You don’t know shit.

Naturally, I agree.

Everything used to be better, but nobody knows when.

Or: Everything will be better, but nobody knows when.

Everybody dies. The rest is up to you.

Trust me: I’m working on it.

The difference between happiness, sadness and depression? Happy people look sad, sad people look depressed, and depressed people look happy.

Or, sure, close enough.

Optimism: The glass is half full.
Pessimism: The glass is half empty.
Relativism: Who knows?
Nihilism: Who cares?
Existentialism: Drink!

But only authentically.

4104

[b]Lionel Shriver

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.[/b]

Actually, it’s never even crossed my mind.

Why would affluence make him mad?
Maybe he’s mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it’s very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country’s very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn’t it? At least if you’re white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they’re not needed. In a sense, it’s as if there’s nothing more to do.

Right, that’s it.

I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

And no help from men of course.

…a carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

That just about nails it, right?

I think that’s the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don’t you? Permission to be dull.

Instead, most just take it for granted.

And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.

Yet another rendition of “up in the clouds”.

4105

[b]Jim Harrison

Everyday I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about.[/b]

Must be in the thousands, Mr. Objectivist.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

Or [of course] hate something.

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

Of course it goes without saying: you never actually do.

I was on the verge of jumping into one of those holes in life out of which we emerge a bit tattered and bloody, though we remain sure nonetheless that we had to make the jump.

And then, finally, the Big Hole. Though, more often than not, you get pushed into it.

When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought.

Right, likes it’s all that different when we’re still around.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

Never once wore a suit. True story. I think.

4106

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded—the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty.[/b]

In fact they demand it.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

And then one day the ancient people are us.

Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.

And there will never be a shortage of wrong answers, right?

The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.
Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
If a tress falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot?
And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven This wasn’t a question of whether I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone’s full attention.

Let’s find the kernal of truth in there.

Listen up. Rant would tell people: ‘You’re a different human being to everybody you meet.’
Sometimes Rant said, ‘You only ever is in the eyes of other folks.’
If you were going to carve a quote on his grave, his favorite saying was: ‘The future you have tomorrow won’t be the same future you had yesterday.’

Rant. Someone should write a book about him.

…this is the upside of already being eternally damned…

I know: What if you can be?

4107

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit.[/b]

Can we expect the same upon his return?

In terms of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.

Maybe, but the part about power still holds true.

Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn’t forbidden.

Either/or. Neither/nor.

Talking with a Martian is something like talking with an echo. You don’t get any argument but you don’t get results either.

We have a few Martians here then, right?

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.

Let’s file this one under, “my way or the highway”.

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.

And make a buck at it too.

4108

[b]Salman Rushdie

Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.[/b]

Love being the least of it in some respects.

Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust.

Well put. But no less ghastly.

…this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

Next thing you know they’re fatwaing your ass.

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.

Reclyed wisdom. Until one day it has turned into its opposite.

I sigh therefore I am . . .

Rhymes with cry. And die.

4109

[b]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.[/b]

Is there anyone who doesn’t know this?

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

Up in the clouds more often than not.

Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite.

Especially me, right?

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

Let’s file this under, “blah, blah, blah”.

When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back.

In other words, steer clear of, among other things, mirrors.

Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.

Jesus, talk about an intellectual contraption!

4110

[b]Sigmund Freud

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.[/b]

You know, objectively.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Whatever that means of course.

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

That can’t be good.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

And not just the Gods.

The ego is not master in its own house.

Let alone the houses of others.

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet – or bitter-sweet – poison from childhood onwards. But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it. They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this ‘education to reality’. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

Here however some just trade one infantilism for another.

4111

[b]Ian McEwan

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality.[/b]

Of course it sinks in deeper for some than for others.

But how to do feelings? All very well to write “She felt sad”, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

The accursed subjunctive. And all the more so for philosophers.

If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That’s what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.

Suppose that it’s not a dream though.

Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

Indeed, isn’t that more or less why I’m here? :wink:

Nothing was to be lost by beginning at the beginning…

The equivalent, say, of being born.

And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time. His deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their marriage.

True, but what would Kant say?

4112

[b]The Lit Crit Guy

Nietzsche challenges humanity to joyfully step into this vacuum created by the death of truth, by the death of God & metaphysical guarantees.[/b]

Or maybe that’s what drove him insane.

Alone in a strange, alien world we could just endure, maintaining a 'dignified equilibrium" in the face of the world…

Perhaps in that world but not in ours.

Ah, the Freudian slip. The original auto-correct.

Now it’s all technology.

And yet, this is still how English literature is conceived, as this narrow, dull and restrictive process of “decoding what it means”.

…from text to text to text.

…perhaps another example of the divide would be the conversation between AJ Ayer and Georges Bataille on whether the sun existed before humans…

Okay, does it?

…how much blood and cruelty lies at the bottom of all “good things!”

Our good things not theirs.

4113

[b]Patricia Highsmith

My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.[/b]

It functions better for them too.

Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.

Of course that’s not how it’s supposed to be.

My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.

Not to worry: they won’t.

Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?
Always, Carol said, smiling, too.

On the other hand, if you can’t have them they can’t let you down.

What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?

Or, if you’re lucky, you’ll never ask them at all.

I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly.

And we’ve all been there, right? Either filling or being filled.

4114

[b]Robert Graves

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Claudius”, or “Claudius the Stammerer”, or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.[/b]

Of course things were different back then. If not by much.

Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.

At least until the 20th Century.

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

That’s exactly what we mean.

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Let’s imagine what they are.

…there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth.

Not counting all the other ways of course.

To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

Well, it’s better than the alternative. If not the best of all possible worlds.

4115

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?[/b]

Let’s start here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=190312

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.

So, what do you think, Mr. Objectivist?

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Of course that takes some getting used to.

Without war there are no heroes.
What harm would that be?
Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.

She’s probably a bitch too, right?

There’s nothing wrong with me…except acute chronic fear.

I hear that. But [at least] I’ve got it whittled down now to just two things: life and death.

Having one king, one god, one belief, they can act single-mindedly.

Or else as it were.

4116

[b]Michael Cunningham

She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while.[/b]

I know a few ingredients that might help…

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.

In theory of course.

Man, he said, I’m not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.
What do we want? I asked blurrily.
Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want, well, the same things these people wanted.
What was that?
He shrugged. To live, I guess, he said.

The remake of Waiting For Godot. You know, for Kids.

Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness. You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don’t care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they’re good. We care about them because they’re not admirable, because they’re us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it.

Trust me: I will never forgive you.

He’s one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won’t, possibly can’t, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

Well, until the bills pile up.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance.

Ah, so that’s what the soul is.

4117

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Beauty will save the world. Mercilessly.[/b]

She should talk. No, really.

Every language is foreign when you say “I love you.”

When you hear it too.

We stopped calling each other because we’re just too busy being lonely.

True story: I’ve never ever been lonely.

That which does not kill you is just rehearsing.

Uh-oh, Mr. Uberman.

Et tu, Beauté?

Indeed. And not just in France.

Optimist: The glass is half full.
Pessimist: Unfortunately.

On the other hand, half full of what?

4118

[b]Arundhati Roy

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jewelled bride. Her silk sunset-coloured sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eye-brows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory - not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile. Like polishing firewood.[/b]

See if you can spot the part about dasein.

I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there’s nothing that’s lovely, and if there’s nothing that’s just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what’s the point?

One more rendition of this: youtu.be/HKEr5U8ERgc

Madness slunk in through a chink in History.

Or, sure, maybe it was sanity.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

But who ever really does? Aside perhaps from those who bring them about.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

Obviously: It’s as complicated as you make it.

He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have swum on land?

All the believers: What say you?

4119

[b]Anthony Burgess

But if you eat this chap who’s God, said Llewelyn stoutly, how can it be horrible? If it’s alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?
Because, said Dymphna reasonably, if you eat God there’s always plenty left. You can’t eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can’t ever be finished…[/b]

On being reasonable about God.

There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogren, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat - all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. ‘Help,’ he tried to call. ‘Help help help.’ He fell, crawled, crying, ‘Help, help.’ The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.

Let’s file this one under, “better him than me”.

Translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

And that’s before we get to the part about “a whole historical context”.

As for the new world war that’s waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We’ve already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there’s a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. It’s sheer wish fulfillment. War is a culture pattern. It’s a legitimate mode of cultural transmission…

And that’s before we get to the part about the military industrial complex.

One can die but once. Dim died before he was born.

Does anyone doubt that?

It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?

Well, being omniscient, let’s ask Him.

4120

[b]Ethicist For Hire

Imagine a situation in which Philosophy makes an impact on society.
Ok, well Socrates…
No, I mean today.[/b]

Cue the laugh track.

Kant and Lenin walk into a bar. Kant says, “Lemme guess, you only drink vodka?”
Lenin says, “Lemme guess, you only drink noumenally?”

And it’s not like Kant can lie about it.

“I feel ashamed, therefore I am.” - Vladimir Solovyof

Well, he might have said it.

I got 99 billion problems, but hyperbole ain’t one…

Obviously.

Of course a Philosophy degree is useful. Especially for deconstructing the concept “useful”…

You can write a book about it.

That Marx and Kierkegaard were in the same room at the same time will never not blow my mind…

No, really, they were.