a thread for mundane ironists

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8041

[b]Enrico Fermi

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown” followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.[/b]

Let’s not go to what I’m feeling.

Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Yeah, I used to believe that once myself.

…on what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence.

Politics? You know, like everything else.

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Just out of curiosity, how many particles are there now?

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

I’d go lower myself.

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.

Good to know, right?

8042

[b]Eugenio Montale

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready. [/b]

And, nowadays, fuck meter and rhyme.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

What others [hint, hint] judge to be an optimist.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

In fact by now there is almost nothing that art isn’t.

The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world.

Well, not counting us of course.

Holidays have no pity.

And some can be downright brutal.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

For example, in our own pop culture, they are merely consumed.

8043

[b]Nein

Me? I blame Twitter. And late capitalism. But mainly the poets.[/b]

And, sure, the occasional philosopher.

I’m just here for the pre-traumatic stress.

And, these days, it’s everywhere.

A gentle reminder to get a selfie of your next shark attack.

Or a selfie of you getting a selfie of a shark attack.

Yes, the week is ending. But we regret to inform you that everything else is likely to continue.

There is an expiration date however.

Friday. Everybody’s favorite end of history.

Well, maybe next Friday.

A gentle reminder. From page 1,064 of War and Peace.
“Once admit that human life can be guided by reason, and all possibility of life is annihilated.”

Let’s explain that to the Kids.

8044

[b]Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.[/b]

With his cock?

One must read poetry with one’s nerves.

How’s that working out for you?

…in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

I know that mine does did.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception… If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough… But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

The poetosopher!

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

If they would come down out of the clouds.

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

This sounds like something we should actually understand.

8045

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.[/b]

But not here, right? :laughing:

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.

You know, in the either/or world.

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

You know, in the is/ought world.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

Anyone here always flunking?

But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Let alone ever and always repeating yourself, right? :wink:

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

So, does this settle it?

8046

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Dostoyevsky:

  1. Everything is very bad.
  2. Only 1000 pages to find out why.
  3. Only 1200 more pages to find out why it’ll be worse.[/b]

Unless, of course, you die first.

“You have the right to remain silent” - me, to my conscience.

You know, if you’ve got one.

Are you there, René? It’s me, not a pipe.

The other Rene.

There’s hardly anything more present than the ghosts from your past.

And don’t exclude your future.

The years 2016-2020 will be remembered as the American dream brought to you by Russian reality.

Next up: the plague.

February is as useless and annoying as that Uber driver circling around your location and suddenly cancelling the ride.

A little help with this one, please.

8047

[b]Robin Morgan

My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.[/b]

Never went that far myself.

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.

Anyone here ever attempt either one?

I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

I was once married to a reasonable facsimile.

We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.

Is that still around?

Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.

And look at us now.

The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women’s oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.

Next up: race and class and then all the rest.

8048

[b]Martin Rees

In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. [/b]

Is this brilliant more or less than it’s idotic?

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we’re the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

Either way, sooner or later, we’re on our way back to it.

It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Let’s file this one under, “an educated guess”.

The physicist is like someone who’s watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that’s an inexhaustible one I’m sure.

You know, going all the way back to…

I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, “I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder.”

So, really true?

An insect is more complex than a star and is a far greater challenge to understand.

So, really true?

8049

[b]Werner Twertzog

I like to party, if by party you mean sitting alone in a darkened room contemplating the futility of human existence.[/b]

He got that from me.

[b]The four stages in a man’s life:

  1. Dare great things.
  2. Achieve mightily.
  3. Face criticism on social media.
  4. Die of remorse.[/b]

Well, die anyway.

The future of Twitter is a boot stamping on a human face forever, and that’s on a good day.

Next up: on a bad day.

Dick Sargent did not replace Dick York on the American television program called “Bewitched.” Let me just say it involved the CIA, as we all know.

Someone get back to us on this.

And then I pranked Kinski by traveling back in time to prevent the meeting of his parents.

Unless, of course, Kinski got there first.

Giraffes have long necks not merely to eat leaves, but because they yearn to escape the earth and voyage to the stars.

If only we could ask them.

8050

[b]Norman Mailer

Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.[/b]

Let’s actually rank them.

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.

Uh, literally?

There is probably no heterosexual alive who is not preoccupied with his latent homosexuality.

Unless of course it’s Satyr.

Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.

And then one day [for some of us] it all becomes chronic.

I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

That ever happen to you?

Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought.

Much less screwball comedies.

8051

[b]Douglas Adams

Who is this God person anyway?[/b]

It’s about time someone asked that.

I’ve had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.

What some would call a good day.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much, the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons…

So, too close to call?

The President of the Universe holds no real power. His sole purpose is to take attention away from where the power truly exists…

Who might that be? You know, if there is no God.

In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were dead.

Or, far, far, far, far, far more likely, not know.

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
But yes, of course it is, he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
But it’s burnt down?
Yes.
Twice.
Many times.
And rebuilt.
Of course. It is an important and historic building.
With completely new materials.
But of course. It was burnt down.
So how can it be the same building?
It is always the same building.
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

See? It’s all about conflicting assumptions. I was right all along!!

8052

[b]Existential Comics

I can’t follow cultural relativism all the way, because that would mean that we have no objective way to claim that everyone’s hair was ugly in the 80s.[/b]

Of course you might have a different reason.

We need philosophy because no one was ever radicalized into revolutionary politics from learning mechanical engineering. Technical skills will only make the system more efficient, but we always need at least the possibility of reimagining the system entirely.

For example, “in your head”.

Communists: “what if the workers decided what do to themselves instead of obeying capitalists.”
Capitalists: “wow you guys are so authoritarian.”

Well, why not at least try it?

Yes, I consider myself a cultural critic. For example: culture, it sucks.

And getting suckier all the time.

One thing they about Jeff Bezos giving $10 billion to “fight climate change” they don’t discuss is that he alone will decide who gets funding. For example, if they want to study if it’s good for the climate to ship every retail item individually to houses, they won’t get funded.

Probably not, anyway.

Centrist: “I am practical, unlike the radial left, I can actually get things done!”
Leftist: “So what, exactly, are you going to get done?”
Centrist: “Actually, it turns out everything is good the way it is.”

Close enough?

8053

[b]Brent Weeks

Pacifism is a virtue indisguishable from cowardice.[/b]

Cue, among others, the chickenhawks. Probasbly a few of them here.

Hope is the great deceiver. Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.

You know, sometimes.

Hope is the lies we tell ourselves about the future.

You know, sometimes.

A lie told in the service of truth is virtue.

Trump’s lies, for example. Go ahead, ask him.

You’re a great man, but only when seen from afar.

Here, of course, we only see them virtually.

…a man who denies what is essential to his being is a man who drills holes in the cup of his own happiness.

Like folks like me have another option.

8054

[b]Jenny Offill

And that phrase - ‘sleeping like a baby.’ Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.[/b]

Of course being a blonde has nothing to do with it.

Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.

Sure enough there it is on mine.

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering.

#-o

But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.

Unless, of course, like mine, it was a shotgun wedding. True story.

How had she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

Let’s call this the human condition.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring.

Apartments too.

8055

[b]Doth

My sexual orientation is emerging from fog-covered woods to vote & then exploding into thousands of crows.[/b]

Though, so far, only in his head.

Never trust the living

Much less the dead.

Remember, you can become possessed by a demon whenever you want. You’re an adult

Alas, not counting the real world. Or not yet.

We created Monday, we did this to ourselves.

Probably all the rest of them too.

Of course I have body issues, I can’t look at the moon & turn into a fucking wolf.

Let alone a T-Rex.

The earth wants us dead & I respect the hell out of that.

That makes one of us.

8056

[b]Edward Teller

When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.[/b]

If it doesn’t kill you of course.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

:-" :laughing: :-" .

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

Either that or to an ever deeper sense of futility and despair.

The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function.

Or, sure, something else.

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Well, in that case, I believe in it too.

On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.

Of course we’ll need to hear from the folks around Chernobyl.

8057

[b]Eugenio Montale

Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word. [/b]

And not just the Summer blockbusters.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

I believe. I believe. I believe. I believe. Like that settles it.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Let’s look for that on the campaign trail in America.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

For my part, who cares.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Like great jazz, maybe.

Strangely, Dante’s Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Just out of curiosity, why strangely?

8058

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

I can be googled, therefore I am
The philosophers have only googled the world. The point, however, is to change it.[/b]

Let’s google that.

I wanted to be a philosophy major, but I didn’t want to learn about
a) the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system
b) the meaninglessness of my existence
c) the infinite pain of thought
d) Sartre’s love life

I’m sticking with “b” for now.

Philosophy happens
Plato: in public
Descartes: in private
Smith: in the boardroom
Heidegger: in the Black Forest
Sartre: in a cafe
Žižek: on whatever reality TV show will have me

Of course only Žižek is still around.

Philosophy is
Plato: lovesick
Heidegger: homesick
Schopenhauer: worried sick
Beckett: sick of life
Kierkegaard: sick to death
Nietzsche: sick to death of sickness

Of course none of them are still around.

Ontology: Let it be
Ethics: Let it be good
Aesthetics: Let it be beautiful
Politics: Let them eat cake

And that’s still true.

Heidegger: Do plants sleep?
Blanchot: Do plants dream?
Derrida: Was Heidegger a dream?
Foucault: Was Derrida a plant?

Clearly, the guy needs to get out more.

8059

[b]Guy de Maupassant

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist. [/b]

Well, sort of.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

You know, before the internet.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms.

You know, before the internet.

…breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.

If you know what he means. Not that this matters.

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

Believe it or not, some actually obsess on this.

One sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

I know that I once did. But now it’s death all the way down.

8060

[b]Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.[/b]

Has anyone here ever actually come close? Not counting the Kids of course.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

If only all the way to the grave.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Yours of course, not theirs.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

Your version of course, not theirs.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

I think this is probably [or nearly] true.

One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Right, try not being modern in this world.