a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Edna O’Brien

On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation.[/b]

He wondered: Have I ever been there?

…a stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.

We know where she is going with this, don’t we?

…never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature’s assiduousness and human cruelty.

One in particular, right?

I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

Besides, she wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.

Some winters more than others as it were.

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

Yes, they’re out there right now thumping on my door.

[iambiguous]

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.[/b]

Patent pending.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

Spaces, true. And [of course] holes.

I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.

In fact, I don’t want you to cross at all.

It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

Let’s come up with a way.

I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

Let’s file this one under, “obviously, it doesn’t work that way”.

She died in my arms, saying, “I don’t want to die.” That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

In other words, as though the military industrial complex [and the war economy] was just a figment of my imagination.

[iambiguous]

[b]Alan Moore

Our consciousness, a startling outgrowth of the universe, is possibly its most important part, the fraction of existence that can think, feel, marvel at itself.[/b]

Some more – considerably more – than others.

… the most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.

Imagine then the least probable.

Most people find the word Apocalypse, to be a terrifying concept. Checked in the dictionary, it means only revelation, although it obviously has also come to mean end of the world. As to what the end of the world means, I would say that probably depends on what we mean by world. I don’t think this means the planet, or even the life forms upon the planet. I think the world is purely a construction of ideas, and not just the physical structures, but the mental structures, the ideologies that we’ve erected, that is what I would call the world. Our political structures, philosophical structures, ideological frameworks, economies. These are actually imaginary things, and yet that is the framework that we have built our entire world upon. It strikes me that a strong enough wave of information could completely overturn and destroy all of that. A sudden realization that would change our entire perspective upon who we are and how we exist.

That’s our only hope then, right?

Affected most, they understand the least…

That’s why we have elections.

You are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.

I know, let’s call it the will of God.

I believe that all other political states are in fact variations or outgrowths of a basic state of anarchy; after all, when you mention the idea of anarchy to most people they will tell you what a bad idea it is because the biggest gang would just take over. Which is pretty much how I see contemporary society. We live in a badly developed anarchist situation in which the biggest gang has taken over and have declared that it is not an anarchist situation – that it is a capitalist or a communist situation. But I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice.

True, but it’s always their gang and not ours.
Or is that the good news?

[iambiguous]

[b]Haruki Murakami

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.[/b]

And not necessarily in that order.

He was silent for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. I uncrossed my legs under the table and wondered if this was the right moment to leave. It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye.

In particular, forever.

Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.

You might even think that this goes without saying.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

For me it’s a fire.

Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

Hell, that may not even be possible.

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people’s lives be so convoluted?

Mine more or less revolves around this one: youtu.be/ZGORPUzLxtU
If only in my head.

[iambiguous]

[b]John Locke

To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.[/b]

People really do believe things like this. Still in other words.

Revolt is the right of the people.

Stirring. Until you get to the part about “the people”.

How long have you been holding those words in your head, hoping to use them?

Since the day I was born.
I just didn’t know it then.

No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

Though not necessarily in reality.

There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.

As God intended no doubt.

So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

As, no doubt, God intended.

[iambiguous]

[b]Robert Penn Warren

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.[/b]

And not just the Kids. Well, probably not.

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You’ve made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

Just ask Michael Flynn. Or, with any luck, Donald Trump.

The best luck always happens to people who don’t need it.

The worst luck too.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

History now is at best the day before yesterday.

The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Let alone the part about “love thy neighbor”.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

Going all the way back [so far] to the big bang.

[iambiguous]

[b]Karl Popper

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.[/b]

Of course some here go far, far beyond that.

Philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives – but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely, that more are false and some are harmful. So the critical examination of our presuppositions – which is a philosophical activity – is morally as well as intellectually important.

See if the can spot the irony here. You know, if you were me.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man’s knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert’s special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.

Maybe, but chances are that, as with him, you’ll take those riddles with you to the grave.

We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men; in fact, he was skeptical of all professional learnedness, whether it was that of the philosophers or of the learned men of his own generation, the Sophists. The wisdom he meant was of a different kind. It was simply the realization: how little do I know! Those who did not know this, he taught, knew nothing at all. This is the true scientific spirit.

So, was Plato’s Republic written as an exercise in irony?

I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

He thought: Damn, what if he’s right?!

A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.

Let’s file this one under, “and then some”.

[iambiguous]

[b]Charles Darwin

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.[/b]

It’s nice to know he had a sense of humor.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

And now he never will. On the other hand…

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree…The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.

Still, there is plently of wiggle room here for God.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Including you, Mr. Objectivist.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Until we get to the part about death.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Though it is inadvisable Kids to revel in it.

[iambiguous]

[b]Existential Comics

What did philosophers do on the side?
Epicurus: gardening.
Foucault: drop acid in the desert.
Camus: seduce women.
Kant: more philosophy.[/b]

Or, here, no philosophy.

When someone says they made their millions through hard work, you should always ask: “whose hard work?”

Great, another Communist. But point taken.

Epistemology: something something unknowable.
Ethics: something something trolley.
Existentialism: something something then one day you die.

In other words, it’s always never nothing.

Never turn your back to an ethicist when standing next to the railroad tracks.

Or a trolley.

Remember, always be true to yourself.
Lie to everyone else.

Of course, for me, that’s more complicated.

I bet when they finally figure out the true, ultimate nature of reality, it’ll end up being something totally stupid.

Then we really will have died for nothing.

[iambiguous]

[b]P.G. Wodehouse

Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.[/b]

Hmm, maybe that’s why I’ve never been in love. But I doubt it.

Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship.

I wouldn’t know, he thought, never had one.

A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

I ain’t even on speaking terms with mine.

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

Indeed, and that applies to, among other things, hundreds and hundreds of posts here. And not just the Kidstuff.

Cheer up, Crips, and keep smiling. That’s the thing to do. If you go through life with a smile on your face, you’ll be amazed how many people will come up to you and say ‘What the hell are you grinning about?’

And some no doubt will try to wipe right it off you.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

Or, if he’s kneeling down, in the pecker.

[iambiguous]

[b]Alexandre Dumas

I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.[/b]

This may well be the best [or, for some, the only] antedote.

Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because sometimes they take a rest.

Wow, I hadn’t thought of that.

Be kind, aim for my heart.

And with both barrels.

Besides we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.

You know, for your commander in chief.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

Not counting those that, if you are a man, emanate from the prick.

In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents.

Or, today, wage slaves.

[iambiguous]

[b]Shirley Jackson

Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?[/b]

You know, aside from the obvious.

I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four, he said, patting his hands together. I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie.

Philosophically as it were.

Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heart-breakingly mobile.

And then on top of that, “hell is other people”.

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

As opposed to, say, six feet under.

Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don’t let me, she hoped concretely, don’t let me know too surely what he thinks of me.

Of course there are always other options. Not to mention other combinations.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

Certainly not my books…

[iambiguous]

[b]Karl Marx

Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren’t his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he’s lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.[/b]

On the other hand, what if it really is the best of all possible worlds?

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world… of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it.

On the other hand, what if it really is the best of all possible worlds?

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

And not only if you buy it at Walmart.

Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.

Trust me though: The bastards here are particularly tricky.

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

In other words, Mr. Abstractionist, not just up in the clouds.

Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice.

If only “in your head”.

[iambiguous]

[b]Stephen Fry

The trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result, and cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing, and horrific.[/b]

And now, increasingly, there are cosmetic men too.

Between funny and witty
Falls the shadow

Pitch black for some.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons…

Oh, they’re still around. And not just in the White House.

Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.

I know: Like that’s a bad thing.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. ‘And what did you do?’ asks Saint Peter. ‘Well’, says the dead soul. ‘I criticised things’. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, “thin and unconvincing”, “turgid and uninspired”, “competent and serviceable,”…you know’.

Let’s decide: In or out?

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.

Let’s decide: True or false?

[iambiguous]

[b]Carson McCullers

I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.[/b]

I would if I could, he thought.

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.

Let’s hear it for Frankie!

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all.

And that’s certainly what it ends up being. If only for all of eternity.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

He thought: I must have skipped right past that stage.

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows.

Let’s just say that I don’t know if you know and you don’t know if I know.

The things they have done to us! The truths they have turned into lies! The ideals they have fouled and made vile. Take Jesus. He was one of us. He knew. When He said that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God—He damn well meant just what He said. But look at what the church has done to Jesus in the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if He was living today. Jesus would be one who really knows. Me and Jesus would sit across the table and I would look at Him and He would look at me and we would both know that the other knew.

That’s not Donald Trump’s rendition of it though. And he’s the president.

[iambiguous]

[b]Sad Socrates

I don’t believe in anything because that’s how you make friends.[/b]

On the other hand, I don’t have lots of them.

Absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun absurdity is fun.

And then you die.

What dies inside me, stays inside me.

You know to the best of his knowledge.

What would I do without me?

Metaphysically as it were.

Sometimes you just have to gaze at the fake reality, breathe in the fake air and think the fake thoughts to make it through the fake day.

At least for the next four years.

I think you can make a lot of great metaphors about how shitty life is.

Similes too.

[iambiguous]

[b]Hans-Georg Gadamer

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said…Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.[/b]

I know, let’s decide if this is worth understanding.

In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.

Either way most of us are fucked.

What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.

Pick one:
Yes ___
No ___
Maybe ___

It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

Or, nowadays, not so hidden.

In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted.

For example, in a No God world.

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.

Here we go again: 'The concept of…"

Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena and processes. In the field of natural phenomena this goal cannot always be reached everywhere to the same extent, but the reason for this variation is only that sufficient data on which the similarities are to be established cannot always be obtained. Thus the method of meteorology is just the same as that of physics, but its data is incomplete and therefore its predictions are more uncertain.

Noted. Now, let’s move on to the social sciences.

[iambiguous]

[b]Liane Moriarty

They say it’s good to let your grudges go, but I don’t know, I’m quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.[/b]

And then one day it grows to become a monster.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.

Trust me: You don’t want to see mine.

Every day I think, ‘Gosh, you look a bit tired today,’ and it’s just recently occurred to me that it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that this is the way I look now.

Looking tired being the least of it.

I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful, continued Jane. But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.
But you weren’t, you’re not— began Madeline.
Yes, OK, but so what if I was! interrupted Jane. What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?

It’s all in the genes, right, Satyr?

It’s because a woman’s entire self-worth rests on her looks, said Jane. That’s why. It’s because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

Let’s ask Reece and Nicole.

It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.

I’m trying to imagine now if I had only revealed my own…

[iambiguous]

[b]tiny nietzsche

trump did 9/11[/b]

And, with any luck, that will come out at the impeachment hearings.

what do we want? existentialism
when do we want it? now

Nope, it’ll never catch on. Not that it should mind you.

Why Do Anything, Charlie Brown?

Of course that may well have been the whole point of the strip, right, Charlie Brown?
Or is that Calvin and Hobbes?

twitter is condemned to be free

Broadly speaking as it were.

watches the earth become a tiny dot as I drift through space and the void consumes me…
this is what I’ve always wanted

Don’t we all?

nietzsche don’t surf

He didn’t, did he?

[iambiguous]

[b]Nikos Kazantzakis

I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roasted chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.[/b]

Well, that and everything else.

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.

Better perhaps to teach them that they never can.

God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises.

And wretched is the man who can’t. You know, if there is a God.

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

Either that or just throw them in the dungeon.

You can knock on a deaf man’s door forever.

Much like, for example, praying to God.

I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.

I suppose that could happen, sure. On the other hand, come on, I am running out of time.