a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Paul Gauguin

I shut my eyes in order to see.[/b]

Let’s try that here.

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!

Or, if you dare, three or four.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

A weeping willow for example.

I have come to an unalterable decision - to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.

Or, as we call them here, Kids.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism,

Actually it’s the other way around.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

Actually it’s the other way around.

[b]so sad today

high on regret[/b]

Soaring!

i would like to be more attractive

Don’t get me started, okay?

forgot that life is pain and then remembered again

I know. Don’t you just hate that?

oh look it’s a hell of my own making

You know, after years of practice.

no i don’t know what the fuck is going on, what do i look like, someone who knows what the fuck is going on?

Anyone here look like that?

maybe i’m not supposed to be ok

You know, the Gods. Or the stars.

[b]Robert Mapplethorpe

I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before.[/b]

No, really, Kids, some people actually do.

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

My guess: not your God.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

On the other hand, the more posts you read here…?

I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.

Lots of good places to leave, right?

When I’m behind a camera I forget I exist.

And I forget what this means.

I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good. I just don’t get it.

Blessed by God, perhaps.

[b]so sad today

i liked it when i didn’t know you existed[/b]

Me here right?

by relaxed i mean anxious

Next up: By anxious I mean…

let’s roleplay you not being an asshole

You know, if that’s even possible.

if you need me i’ll be worrying about shit beyond my control

And certainly beyond your control.

i like to greet the new day by going back to bed

Repeat as necessary.

proud supporter of the i didn’t ask to be born defense

Like anyone out there is listening.

[b]Margaret Mead

To demand that another love what one loves is tyranny enough, but to demand that another hate what one hates, is even worse.[/b]

A hell of a lot worse, for example.

Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.

And how scary is that, Mr. Populist?

The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

Of course here we call them pinheads. Well, some of us anyway.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.

Let’s call this capitalism.

Laughter is man’s most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man.

Unless you count hyennas.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

Resolved: This goes too far.

[b]sad socrates

Earth is not the place to be your best self.[/b]

On the other hand, it is still the only place.

The problem with today is tomorrow.

What’s that make yesterday then?

Life sucks. Don’t fact check me.

Unless, of course, life doesn’t suck.

The best way to be happy is to imagine things worse.

Of course!

I warned me about myself

And now I’m warning you.

Hell is just today, but tomorrow it could be worse.

Next up: a week from now.

[b]Napoleon Bonaparte

You think you are too intelligent to believe in God. I am not like you.[/b]

More to the point, who is he not like now?

War is ninety percent information.

Not unlike peace.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Not unlike women.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

Like that’s a good thing?

An army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions.

He wondered if there had ever been one.

A true man hates no one.

Any true men here?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Oscar Wilde[/b]

By the way, that’s now a scientific fact.

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” Oscar Wilde

Or, here, they would if they could.

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” Oscar Wilde

Either that or the actual bucks.

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

Trust me: old men too.

“Passage of time arises because we think of occupying different realities. In fact, we occupy only different givens.” Kurt Godel

You know, logically.

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” Bertolt Brecht

Maybe, but what loving parent would name their kid Bertolt?

[b]Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: "A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit.[/b]

On the other hand, he’s still dead.

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

See, didn’t I tell you?

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Not clever enough? Or too clever?

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

Not much that doesn’t explain, he figured.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

Come on, no one is not dying. That comes with being born.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, Einstein said.

Yo, Kids!

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

You know, whatever that might possibly mean. Though point taken of course.

“Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.” Philip Roth

Either that or not at peace.

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
Gilles Deleuze

Yo, Mr. Fulminating Fanatic. Explain this to Mr. Objectivist.

"The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?” Gilles Deleuze

Or, if you dare not to write, to read.

If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.” Gilles Deleuze

Fucked it is then, he chortled.

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!” Gilles Deleuze

Yo, Meno! :sunglasses:

[b]Holly Black

I love my parents’ murderer; I suppose I could love anyone.[/b]

Doesn’t get more grimmer than that, he winced.

I hate you, I breathed into his mouth. I hate you so much that sometimes I can’t think of anything else.

Doesn’t get more ominous than that, he winced.

I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.

No, really, it can actually come to that.

Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.

And, sure, to burn others.

Pain makes you strong, Madoc once told me, making me lift a sword again and again. Get used to the weight.

Or just switch over to a Saturday night special?

Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go.

For some, even farther than they need to go.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Gilles Deleuze[/b]

For Reich it all revolved around sexual repression; not sure about Spinoza though.

“I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it can take.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Not much, right Mr. Objectivist?

“The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.”
Jackson Pollock

Nope, not yet. You know, if you’re me.

“Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” Vladimir Nabokov

He’s kidding, right?

“The repetition of words and phrases, the intonation of obsession, the hundred percent banality of every word, the vulgar soapbox eloquence mark these elements of Dostoevski’s style.” Vladimir Nabokov

He’s kidding, right?

"Words without experience are meaningless.” Vladimir Nabokov

See, I told you, Mr. Intellectual Contraption.

[b]Emily Dickinson

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.[/b]

Things that poets say. And some actually believe.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Things that poets say. And some actually believe.

An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.

You do grasp this, don’t you?

I must go in, the fog is rising.

But: into the fog itself?

Parting is all we know of Heaven,
and all we need of Hell.

Or something like that.

A wounded dear leaps the highest

I know, I know: and then what?

[b]Matthew McConaughey

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.[/b]

Sounds like something he would say.
Depending on the movie.

I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.

Great! Another goddamn fool, he grumbled.

I don’t mind assholes. It’s the dork I don’t trust. The dork is the one who’s trying to be whatever he thinks you want him to be. I trust the asshole cause you know where he’s gonna stand.

Where the assholes do.

First off I want to thank God, because he’s the one I look up to, he’s graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human kind. He has shown me that it’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late British actor Charlie Laughton, who said, ‘When you got God, you got a friend and that friend is you.’

Let’s just say that Texans well deserve him? Unless of course I’m missing his point.

Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.

Acting?
Asked the philosopher.

I think ‘unbelievable’ is an unbelievably stupid word.

I won’t ask him why if you don’t.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” Lord Byron[/b]

Ah, the Big Three: fulminating fanatics, Kids, objectivists. Though not necessarily in that order.

“Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.” Gilbert Ryle

You know whatever that means. Like, say, for all practical purposes.

“I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die.” Bertrand Russell

Finally, another hopelessly subjective opinion.

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, ‘I am suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly’”. Simone Weil

In other words, you tell me.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Simone Weil

Nope, still haven’t found where mine is rooted. But you’ll know when I know.

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.” Simone Weil

Yo, Mr. Reasonable. Explain this please.

[b]Theodore Roethke

I learn by going where I have to go.[/b]

Or where others send you.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

Right up until August 1, 1963.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

Occasionally moving on to the major organs.

Should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?

But I repeat myself: you can say anything. And, sure, even believe it.

Art is our defense against hysteria and death.

And perhaps even more.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I once understood this so much better than I do now.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Art is an attempt to integrate evil.” Simone de Beauvoir[/b]

That tells us almost nothing, he snorted.

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.” Simone de Beauvoir

None of us do. And then what?

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Alfred North Whitehead

Objectively, right?

“It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.” Alfred North Whitehead

We’ll need a context of course.

“Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.” Alfred North Whitehead

The rest, shudder to think, being history.

“What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?” William Lindsay Gresham

Yours perhaps?

[b]Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.[/b]

And then it’s now all the way down. Or all the way to the grave.

Each moment is a place you’ve never been.

Although some do come awful close to feeling the same.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

Weird isn’t it?

These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing
This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing
I am the same boy my mother used to kiss

Or smack around. But point taken.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

Well, it is after all a world of words.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I’m guessing not always.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Stupidity is much the same all the world over.” John Stuart Mill[/b]

Only so much more here.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone." John Cage

Though, come on, how we know better!

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.” John Cage

Either that or the wrong reason.

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage

Here, I refuse to discriminate. Both can floor you.

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” Lewis Carroll

That and the physics.

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” Lewis Carroll

That and plain old stupidity.

[b]Ernest Cline

No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway.[/b]

And definitely not here, right?

I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

Wouldn’t bother me in the least.

Going outside is highly overrated.

You know, for some of us.

People who were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, that’s who. Cats with a serious marble deficiency.

I mean, obviously.

Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

Right around the corner in other words.

I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer’s tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer.

Again, in other words.