a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Thomas Nagel

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.[/b]

See, I told you.

The point is to live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

See, I told you.

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Actually, I wouldn’t go that far. Well, on most days.

The denier that intelligent design is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

Sure glad I’m not one of them.

I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.

Imagine: That precise moment when one becomes the other.

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in million years nothing we do now will matter.

He thought: Let’s prove this mathematically.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.” Epicurus[/b]

You know, in theory. Or, instead, let’s file this one under, “ignorance is bliss”.

“The real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent…” Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Let’s stick something more, say, “existential” in here.

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.” Fernando Pessoa

And then death of course.

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Confucius

Or more if others are involved.

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” Confucius

Indeed, and all the way from the cradle to the grave.

"After victory, tighten your helmet strap.” Japanese Proverb

That and reload.

[iambiguous]

[b]André Gide

When I was younger, I used to make resolutions which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now, I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not growing old.[/b]

Becoming, among other things, entirely more realistic.

…Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap…

In other words, look where we are now.

I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest.

Some, however, learn to hate them with considerably less enthusiasm.

When I got back to Marceline, I did not conceal from her how tedious I found all these acquaintances.
They are all alike, I said to her. When I talk to one, I feel as if I were talking to the whole lot.
But, my dear, said Marceline, you can’t expect each of them to be different from the others.
The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me.

He thought: Not unlike my experience here.

Oh, I thought, without a doubt, everything in my life is falling to pieces. Nothing that my hand grasps can my hand hold.

Mine? Might as well just cut them off. If only in particular moods.

I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw.

And it’s not like you can replace it with another. Either the mirror or the face.

[iambiguous]

[b]Zadie Smith

But it’s hard, when you’re at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others.[/b]

Tell them that.

Oh, sister - good news - I’m getting married! I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn’t help it, a piece of my heart closed against her.

Next up: She’s pregnant.

I couldn’t afford to be offended.

Some, of course, can’t afford not to be.

Everybody’s got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?

Let’s just say it has now been whittled down to one.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.

He thought: Reality doesn’t get any trickier than that.

A different kind of history from my mother’s, the kind that is barely written down.

Let alone taken seriously.

[iambiguous]

[b]Haruki Murakami

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.[/b]

On the other hand, we ain’t talking arithmetic here.

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.

A piece of cake, right Mr. Objectivist?

Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.

Like, for example, getting up in the morning. For some as it were.

Genius or fool, you don’t live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody’s going to come along and screw up the works.

Once I’d say, “let them try”. You know, when I could.

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.

Not around here they don’t.

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.

I know, let’s call this the upbeat version of my own frame of mind.

[iambiguous]

[b]Alan Moore

Once a man has seen society’s black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn’t exist.[/b]

On the contrary, some do it all the time.

In our every cell, furled at the nucleus, there is a ribbon two yards long and just ten atoms wide. Over a hundred million miles of DNA in very human individual, enough to wrap five million times around our world and make the Midgard serpent blush for shame, make even the Ourobouros worm swallow hard in disbelief. This snake-god, nucleotide, twice twisted, scaled in adenine and cytosine, in thymine and in guanine, is a one-man show, will be the actors, props and setting, be the apple and the garden both. The player bides his time, awaits his entrance to a drum-roll of igniting binaries. This is the only dance in town, this anaconda tango, this slow spiral up through time from witless dirt to paramecium, from blind mechanic organism to awareness. There, below the birthing stars, Life sways and improvises. Every poignant gesture drips with slapstick; pathos; an unbearably affecting bravery. To dare this stage, this huge and overwhelming venue. Squinting through the stellar footlights, hoping there’s an audience, that there’s someone out there, but dancing anyway. But dancing anyway.

There’s got to be something in there that nails it.

You see, Doctor, God didn’t kill that little girl. Fate didn’t butcher her and destiny didn’t feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn’t seem to mind. From then on I knew… God doesn’t make the world this way. We do.

I have my own rendition of this. Though I suspect a lot of true believers have never really ever come close.

The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.

In our minds. That’s right around the corner from “in our heads”.

Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together…he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.

Some do see the joke but never quite reach the punchline.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg.
Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

We all fit in here somewhere. Only more or less aware of, among the things, the implications. And not just the philosophical.

[iambiguous]

[b]Existential Comics

You are late.
A philosopher is never late, he turns in his term paper precisely when he means to!
But seriously, you failed the class.[/b]

Time we closed this loophole, isn’t it?

If we have to stop reading Heidegger because he was a Nazi, we should also have to stop reading Camus because he was a terrible philosopher.

I smell a challenge here.

Me: life is meaningless and then you die
Dog: no, life is good, sometimes you go to the park
Me: oh yeah

See? It’s always just a matter of perspective.

What’s really ironic is how the meaning of words depends on their actual usage, not their original definition.

Obviously: define ironic.

I’m a big fan of Nietzsche, and I’ve overcome my humanity and given meaning to my suffering.
How?
By whining about feminists online.

But not here, right?

Sartre wrote his philosophy in cafés, Wittgenstein in the trenches of WWI, and Žižek, I imagine, in a Denny’s bathroom.

With Turd [or mr reasonable] in the next stall.

[iambiguous]

[b]John Berger

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.[/b]

Of course the story’s voice then becomes only as you inflect it.
Inflect? It’s a fancy word for spin.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

Men in other words.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Baltimore? Well, we’re still “charm city”. Male or female.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

Let’s file this one under, “…and that’s the least of it”.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

True, but measured in light years.

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman’s presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.

I know: It sounds like something you’d believe if you only understood what it meant.

[iambiguous]

[b]Orson Scott Card

I looked for perfection, and I found something better.[/b]

Notice he doesn’t tell us what that was. But point taken.

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.

They keep telling me it’s out there somewhere.

Intellectual understanding does not always bring visceral belief.

Of course that’s entirely point, right, Mr. Objectivist?

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life…But they’ve learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

Insane, maybe, but clearly patriotic.

Love is random; fear is inevitable.

You know, most of the time.

We spend our lives guessing at what’s going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we ‘understand.’ Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word every now and then.

Not counting words like “antidisestablishmentarianism” of course.

[iambiguous]

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Existence is the unbelievable thing. It is incomprehensible.” Bryan Magee[/b]

He thought: this may well be true objectively.

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Socrates

All the more so in a world of words.
He might have said that to Plato.

“The different sorts of madness are innumerable.” Avicenna

Even more if you count mine.

“Width of life is more important than length of life.” Avicenna

Width as in depth one supposes.

“A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.” Napoleon Bonaparte

Cue [among others] Henry Kissinger and the Bilderberg ilk. By the way, Lord, why is this man still alive?

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” Nietzsche

I’ll bet that gets tricky. You know, in “real life”.

[iambiguous]

[b]P.G. Wodehouse

What ho! I said.
What ho! said Motty.
What ho! What ho!
What ho! What ho! What ho!
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.[/b]

Let’s do that here.
I’ll start:
What dasein! I said.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

In other words, the liquor store is closed.

She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say “when”.

On purpose as likely as not. At least around my neck of the woods.

I always advise people never to give advice.

You can’t but wonder how many spotted the irony.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

Or, for some here, a blowtorch.

If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.

What do you think, foe the bastard?
Or ban the sonofabitch?

[iambiguous]

[b]Christopher Bram

Art is long and life is short.[/b]

Or [sort of]: Philosophy is long and life is short.

Most straight people, and many gay people, especially those who came of age more recently, don’t understand how momentous and difficult coming out was to men and women of this generation. It seems so obvious now, so banal.

Now we’ll see how far Trumpworld can tug us back.

In the new style, homosexuals and heterosexuals could be equally unhappy, equally happy, and equally screwed up.

Gosh, who would have thunk it?

Seventies macho was both a look – moustache, jeans, leather jacket – and an attitude – cool, heartless, virile – that were reactions against the old-style homosexuality of too much art and too much emotion.

Gee, even the gay community is subject to the whims of, as Satyr might suggest, memes.

Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.

Let’s exchange anecdotes. Sure, gay or straight.

Free to call a spade a spade and a cock a cock.

Of course that can be misconstrued.

[iambiguous]

[b]Nein

Monday. The cruelest month.[/b]

Right, like the other six are far behind.

If it’s any consolation, there isn’t any.

Hey, let’s think of one!

The good news: the year is almost over. The bad news: they say there’ll be another.

I think we can already confirm that, right?

Coming soon in Washington: your worst fears. Confirmed.

Unless of course you’re a turd.

Somewhere the professors are sitting quietly at their computers. Ordering their thoughts. And hoping they arrive before the semester begins.

Posters too. Here for example.

Yes, we’ll say, we knew things were bad. And about to get much worse. But we never stopped hoping that we wouldn’t be around to see it.

You now have about ten days to not be.

[iambiguous]

[b]Helen Oyeyemi

And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.[/b]

On the other hand, not everything bears repeating. In fact, hardly anything does.

It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling way possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love.

With a laugh track of course.

… it’s not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too… we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.

Without actually being, say, a racist.

That’s the ideal meeting…once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.

I may have invented that.
You know, if you absolutely have to meet someone.

With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.

But not here, right, Mr. Misogynist?

I’ve read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.

Well, I’m not quite there then.

[iambiguous]

[b]Michel de Montaigne

If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.[/b]

At least try to grasp the implications of this.

The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live to the point.

To the point. Yeah, right.

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

Of course Donald Trump changes all that, doesn’t he?

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

He thought: Like so many specks of dasein…

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of dischords as well as different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.

Crap like this [if it is crap] always sounds so much better when expressed “philosophically”.

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

You know, much like the fool.

[iambiguous]

[b]Olivia Dresher

What percentage of what there is to know do we know?[/b]

Or: What percentage of what we can never know do we think we know?

My dear sweet childhood…so here, so gone.

And then one day…for good.

If I don’t speak, I am misinterpreted. If I do speak, I am misunderstood.

Two for two at least.

All this pressure to be something we’re not, or even to be something that we are.

Of course we bring the same pressure to them. Or most of us do anyway.

The way people replace their ignorance with beliefs…

In other words, “which is worse?”

I want to write one line that I can carry with me to soften things. One line that won’t stop softening.

Hey, what a coincidence: I want to read one.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stephen Fry

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.[/b]

So, would you like me to tell you?

In a dung heap, even a plastic bead can gleam like a sapphire.

Maybe, but that doesn’t make it one.

It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

Great, just what we need, another rendition of this: youtu.be/dwqwAy85CgY
You know, if that’s what it is.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies.
Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies.

A bit cynical perhaps. Unless of course it’s not cynical enough.

If you have been, I’m glad you’ve stopped.

Which will only prompt some to start.

One of the most unattractive human traits, and so easy to fall into, is resentment at the sudden shared popularity of a previously private pleasure. Which of us hasn’t been annoyed when a band, writer, artist or television series that had been a minority interest of ours has suddenly achieved mainstream popularity? When it was at a cult level we moaned at the philistinism of a world that didn’t appreciate it, and now that they do appreciate it we’re all resentful and dog-in-the-manger about it.

Yet more proof there either is or is not a God.

[iambiguous]

[b]Carson McCullers

It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.[/b]

One possible solution: Invent a God. Blame Him.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

Of course you and I both know it is actually the other way around, isn’t it?

They are the we of me.

Nope, sure haven’t met them yet.

Listen, F. Jasmine said. What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?

Notice not a single mention of dasein.

The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.

Why? She’s just lucky, I guess.

The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.

True, but let’s not get carried away.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.[/b]

Sure, but don’t lose sight of the destination.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

Besides, some are still boycotting both.

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

You know, if they actually exist. One thing for sure though, darkness [whatever it is] does exist. And I’m loving it.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Let’s figure out the difference.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art… is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar… We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Excuse me while I grit my teeth.

Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

He thought: Fuck all that.
Or, rather, he would if anyone ever came over.

[iambiguous]

[b]Ernest Hemingway

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.[/b]

For one thing, someone might speak back. And a lot better than you did.

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.

So, has anyone actually accomlished that?

Death is like an old whore in a bar—I’ll buy her a drink but I won’t go upstairs with her.

Sooner or later though, she will have the final word.

There isnt always an explanation for everything.

Bullshit, right, Mr. Objectivist?

Remember to get the weather in your damn book–weather is very important.

Yep, that’s probably why they didn’t publish mine.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.

Intelligence of course being folks who think exactly like you.