a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Edvard Munch

My father was temperamentally nervous and obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born. [/b]

Dasein, in other words.

My will exceeds my talents.

Tell me about it, he sulked.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

Yo, Vincent!

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Or: Words live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the posts.
You know, if that’s actually true.

Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.

Like, for some, that’s a good thing.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

For example, there being absolutely no proof of this.
Besides, up there, what would you talk about?

[iambiguous]

[b]Susan Cheever

You mustn’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.[/b]

Plop.

I think 12-step programs really work, rehab really works, certain types of therapies and talking to other addicts really work. There are a lot of things that work - that isn’t the problem. The problem is getting the addicts to say they’re addicts. The problem is admitting it.

I know that I never would.

Personal experience is the lightning of the soul; it transforms the heart in ways that leave the brain behind.

You know, if you’re an intellectual.

Women’s currency is their looks. Like it or not, the most powerful woman is an 18-year-old woman.

Gee, is that still true?

There is no such thing as expecting too much.

On the other hand, not expecting much at all?
Here, I mean.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst.

True, but your explanation or mine?

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” Pericles[/b]

Great, another reminder of that.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been an agnostic. I’ve always thought there’s a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there’s a world to come.” Bob Dylan

Well, you know me: Believing is one thing…

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” Leo Tolstoy

And, sure, if perchance she just happens to be beautiful too…?

“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” Martin Heidegger

Next up: Why are there Nazis instead of none?

“The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.” John Searle

You can just feel me cringing, can’t you?

“I love the name of honor more than I fear death.” Julius Caesar

Sure, with him, that might actually have been true.

[iambiguous]

[b]William Styron

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.[/b]

And for days, weeks, months on end.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

And I’ve got a scar to prove it.

…we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

You know, if you actually can.

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.

Or, here, reading.

This was not judgment day - only morning.

Maybe tomorrow.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Any chuckleheads here?

[iambiguous]

[b]Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. [/b]

Alas, including you, Mr. Objectivist.

People are much less interested in what you are trying to show them than what you are trying to hide.

Well, the smart ones anyway.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.

So, what then is the implication of that.

Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

Wage slaves let’s call them.

It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

Though not necessarily a sign of strength.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

You know the one.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosopnhy Tweets

“The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.” Jean-Michel Basquiat[/b]

And a hell of a lot more conservative.

“Everything is science and everything is philosophy." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Okay, but how about everything else?

“…The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” Issac Asimov

And then there’s Trumpworld!!
You know, if I do say so myself.

“Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.” Martin Buber

Inscrutable indeed!

"When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life…"John Lennon

Next up: When Mark David Chapman went to school…

“All measurements are made from the ground.” Sun Tzu

Yo, Mr. Serious Philosopher!

[iambiguous]

[b]Jenny Offill

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.[/b]

And if God is a Hermaphrodit?

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

No, really. And it makes perfect sense.

In Paris, even the subways are required to be beautiful.

google.com/search?q=paris+s … 66&bih=657
You tell me.
Though I actually prefer them grubby myself.

Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals,” my mother said. “Clothes and a sense of shame."[/i]

But let’s not forget irony!

She told me that at the end of death there was a long tunnel and in it awaited everyone you ever loved. But if you never loved anyone there was just an empty room.

That works for me.

Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom. But I don’t know. That’s pretty much every day here.

Only now the masks, and six feet between us.

[iambiguous]

[b]Yogi Berra

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.[/b]

Jesus, like here, right?!

Listen up, because I’ve got nothing to say and I’m only gonna to say it once.

Would that this could be me? Here for example?

You can observe a lot by just watching.

As opposed to, say, thinking?

When the waitress asked if I wanted my pizza cut into four or eight slices, I said, ‘Four. I don’t think I can eat eight’.

Or, better still, don’t slice it at all.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Indeed. Some prove that here, some don’t.

Ninety percent of all mental errors are in your head.

You know, when you think about it.

[iambiguous]

[b]Colum McCann

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.[/b]

Boy, he thought, does that take me back.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t.

You know the ones.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

You know, if you’re doing it right.

Well, I’d say fuck too, if I were me.

Want me to explain this to you?

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky–pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

You know, if you can reach them.

There is always room for at least two truths.

That and any number of lies.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The only thing money gives you is the freedom of not worrying about money.” Johnny Carson[/b]

Like that’s a small thing.

“There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.” Albert Camus

I know: a context!

“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” Kurt Vonnegut

Every actor too.
So, let’s explain this.

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” Kurt Vonnegut

Unless of course we count our own.

“Before Elvis there was nothing.” John Lennon

Well, up until Colonel Parker perhaps.

"Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. " John Kenneth Galbraith

The fools!

[iambiguous]

[b]Iain McGilchrist

If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.[/b]

Of course here it’s these things:

If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and not later resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.

Spot the abstractions here yet?

Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable, ungraspable.

Spot the abstractions here yet?

Thinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought … I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context … neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.

Well, what do you know!!!

Of course we do not actually build things up in the way that the left hemisphere imagines. That illusion comes from the fact that when we ask ourselves, after the event, how we understood something, our linear-processing left hemisphere comes up with the only way it knows, the way it would have had to do it if asked.

Sounds like determinism to me.

According to Max Planck, ‘Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.’ And he continued: ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve’.

You know, going back to the mystery of existence itself. For starters?

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

A gentle reminder from the philosophers. No, your life has not lost meaning. It has found philosophy.[/b]

We’re not fooled though, are we?

Ask not what your country can do for you. You don’t want to know.

And it’s not like they’ll tell us.

Yes, Twitter made us all dead inside years ago. But now it’s pivoting. To the outside.

Like an infection.

Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx log on to a Zoom meeting with their project manager. The audio isn’t working.
Nietzsche: What are you saying?
Freud: What are you really saying?
Marx: Agreed. The revolution begins tomorrow at 9.

Zoom?

Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche are watching the news, shaking their heads.
Marx: The dialectic was supposed to end in Communism.
Nietzsche: The transvaluation of all values was supposed to end in the Übermensch.
Freud: Our session was supposed to end a half hour ago.

But only Freud gets paid, right?

Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, self-isolating together, call it a night.
Nietzsche: Sleep well.
Marx: Sleep according to your abilities.
Freud: Dream according to your needs.

You know, hypothetically.

[iambiguous]

[b]Freeman Dyson

The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian… It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. [/b]

And that makes sense…how?

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

And that makes sense…how?

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

Like, for instance, why is there no nature at all?

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

In other words, whatever that means.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

Get it on tape then.

I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we’re going to be outstripped by the machines. But, in my view, this whole field is based on a misconception. I think the brain is analog, whereas the machines are digital. They really are different. So I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it’s not the same as what the brain can do.

Do us all a favor and don’t explain this.

[iambiguous]

[b]N.K. Jemisin

There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.[/b]

Unfortunately, here we don’t have access to either. Not that it matters.

The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

No, it’s still the strong devouring the weak. In reality, for example.

There is nothing foolish about hope.

Well, until there is.

Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

Unless of course there is no one around to discover them.

No, I’m telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me and you.

No, she’s telling it right.

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

Better that than the ones we’ve got.

[iambiguous]

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

In 2020, the question ‘Where are you?’ will probably be the least frequently asked.[/b]

Hmm, he thought, I wonder why?

Cassandra said there’d be days like these.

And now weeks and months.

See you at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when this is over.

You know, if it ever is over.

Which circle of Hell is this, again? Asking for Dante.

Unless, of course, it’s all just a hoax.

Being a responsible and caring person these days seems like a new subculture.

In other words, he groused, count me out.

Officially, today is Sunday. Also officially, nobody cares.

Next up: Nobody cares it’s Monday.

[iambiguous]

[b]Edvard Munch

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell? [/b]

Well, are we?

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

My guess: not earlier than I did.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

Or, here, a good post.
Also, a bad one.

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.

Of course here with us it’s words.

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red… I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

We all know that one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

And we know that philosophy can’t.

[iambiguous]

[b]Susan Cheever

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.[/b]

Going all the way back [at least] to Adam and Eve.

Dogs are great teachers. They are at home in the world. They live in the moment, and they force us to stay there with them. Dogs love us unconditionally, not for our bodies or bank accounts.

Right, like this is something they do of their own free will.

The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

More interesting anyway.

Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.

Over 150,000 deaths a day, for example. And that’s just human beings on this planet.

Guilt is petty; I am above guilt.

Well, I always strive to be.

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

Especially when it morphs into seething rage.

[iambiguous]

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Still believe in common sense, and that’s my only superstition.[/b]

Only it’s the worst one you can have.

I wonder how many of us have rewatched Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” during self-isolation.

Nope, believe it or not, I haven’t.
Yet in other words.

This isn’t the Godot we’ve been waiting for.

It’ll have to do though.

2019: I remember the time when people could smoke on an airplane.
2020: I remember the time when people could fly on an airplane.

How about the time they could fly them into buildings.

Putin announced an extension of the ‘non-working week’ (aka ‘self-isolation’) until April 30. He didn’t say what year he had in mind.

Well, that’s democracy for you.

[b]Things we all have in common now:

• Ennui
• Anxiety
• Anger
• Desperate longing for a freshly made pizza[/b]

Clearly not in that order.

[iambiguous]

[b]Anne Tyler

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.[/b]

She’ll bring you to Baltimore.
You know, for better or worse.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

What do you think, me too?

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

Like there’s a right person.

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

I know, I know: quite the contrary.

I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?

And, of late, so empty?

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

Of course that will never stop me.

[iambiguous]

[b]William Styron

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome. [/b]

My own commensed in a latrine at Fort Devens.

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

Fiction. A good place for it.

…my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

No more familiar than mine.
I’m guessing.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.

And how much skin can that be? Still, being who he was, did that make it harder or not?

When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.

Around the time some of us had yet to be born.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

We know the one.