a thread for mundane ironists

FYI…

My daughter was over for lunch today and she taught me how to link stuff from web sites that are not youtube.

So, for anyone interested to exploring the mind behind Bianco Luno [in the here and now] you can encounter it at:

meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic-Philosophy-CLUB/

Bianco Luno here is Victor Munoz there. He just created a thread that revolves around free will. But he has also created threads relating to identity and morality. Click on “discussions” at the top and then scroll down to “message board”.

There he is considerably less elliptical. But not being a real philosopher myself I still find him hard to follow. You know, “up there”.

[b]Bianco Luno:

Being a housewife and mother also appealed to me.
My mother, compulsively too industrious, was not the inspiration here.
Nevertheless, for me, being around the house all day could be quite fun.
I wanted to be left alone.
I wanted to pretend to have the least impact on the world.
And more, as a mother I could have taken a righteous pleasure in something.[/b]

One can imagine any number of feminists lining up to put this in perspective. But is it really about politics at all? In any event, as I philosopher, his impact on the world can hardly be less substantial. In this day and age especially.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You lie, or you reveal some truth.
Tell me, which is worse?

Well, it all depends on how much is really at stake when you need an answer.

The whole planet has been populated by rapists.

But enough about Wall Street and Washington…

[b]Bianco Luno

To William James:
I am not allowed to work out my bleak logic without suggesting some way to avert what it describes.
I don’t profess to be an example for you, but I offer this counsel: without turning your face away stop seeing it as bleak.[/b]

Most folks deal with bleak logic by insisting it is not really logical at all. And the way they generally avert it is make the messenger go away. One way or the other as it were.

I have Flaubert’s fascination with and shyness toward religion.
For the sake of what little purity there is in it, I might have slaughtered half of Christendom, beginning with myself.
Actually, myself would suffice.

And surely any number of folks reading bleak logic of this sort will enthusiatically concur with the last part.

He could mean a few things here, but I’ll react as if I am guessing right. The first sentence seems to mean that one is not allowed to notice and point out problems unless one has a solution. I have always hated that. Oh, yeah, well if you think that system is bad, what would be better? If you can’t improve it, don’t critique it. As if everyone should have all the skills or be silent, when in fact they might have crucial but incomplete skills for getting away from something bad. But then the second sentence almost seems to contradict this. Here it seems to be that one must simply no longer see things as bleak in whatever the area is. But that’s like telling a crying kid to be happy.

I think they also label the person negative, having no distinction, when it is convenient, between reacting negatively to negative things and adding negativeness to the universe where there was none.

With Luno that’s your only option. You can circle around a particular meaning but you can never really land. Not with respect to relationships like these.

My emphasis: Now you’re getting closer.

Or they call him a “troll” who contributes here “in bad faith”.

[b]Bianco Luno

Last night, again, a dream:
Atop a mountain peak, the abyss all around growing because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper.
So needle-sharp, I will be impaled through the one foot on which I’m balanced.
Lightning flashes in the background.
(A cartoon, which I don’t even remember liking: Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
My ‘philosophy’ self-caricatures.
An averted pregnancy, a menses, a masturbation.
What does it have to do with health or even resignation?
A pussy exudation: soak it up.
I am hardly an existentialist.
I am a bandage, a sanitary napkin …because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper, sharper.[/b]

Who is to say what being an existentialist is before the abyss? Though some might conclude that Rocky and Bullwinkle came close. As for sanitary napkins there are retail establishments now that never run out of them.

[b]Bianco Luno:

Epistemic states oscillate between prejudice and confusion.
All else is spite.[/b]

Yeah, I guess that’s logical. Not counting my own such states of course.

Pain and beauty.
The beginning and end of the Goldberg Variations and Gould’s humming, barely audible on these so soft endpieces.
Struck dumb from pain, a whole philosophy is developed, from the first stirrings of doubt through despair to resignation.
Truth having never made an appearance.
The history of philosophy in 33 chapters.

Indeed, and the film biography of Glenn Gould’s life was completed in 32 chapters.

For the record.

Glenn Gould:

[b]“At live concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian.”

“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer.”

“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

“If there’s any excuse at all for making a record, it’s to do it differently, to approach the work from a totally recreative point of view … to perform this particular work as it has never been heard before. And if one can’t do that, I would say, abandon it, forget about it, move on to something else.”

“In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. … The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.”

“Mozart died too late rather than too soon.”

“We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind.”

“‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.”[/b]

Are any of these things true?

[b]Bianco Luno

To speak the truth is to hum.
(How we do it in the West; maybe, sometimes, we also whistle.)[/b]

Yes, but you can be certain that someone will insist you are humming it the wrong way. Or that whistling is always preferable to humming.

I have to speak this way, do you understand?
Not sure why I embroil my personal defense with ours before an empty bench, as though it were some final ‘hope for humanity’.

No, I do not understand. But then, that’s the point, right? We circle the words over and again but there really is no place to actually land.

[b]Bianco Luno

I could tell you how uncomfortable I am with the shape of my nose.
If you saw it, you would respond considerately, saying perhaps that most people have awkward noses, and you would miss my point.
Where is their discomfort?
Even people with the most perfect noses are uncomfortable with them, you were going to say?
“What discomfort? Spare me, no, you mean just this nose, your nose, your personal sore spot, is what makes you an Kierkegaardian ‘individual’, with a skin the color of no other, a one-person race, and you a racist.
Yes? This is what you tried to mean, but didn’t: you were not up to meaning anything.
What I am going to say to you is the truth.
(Please hold back your knowing smile for the moment.)
Your nose has nothing to do with anything.
You are enchanted with jealousy, other people’s noses, notwithstanding.
If you had no nose, your ploy would be different but your snot the same, only more accessible.
Then, your rhymes could come to rest on your physical deformity.
As it is, your deformity is invisible.
I could discourse forever on the nature of this invisibility.
You are so patent, such a perfect backdrop to everything that happens around you that the most inconsequential biographical or material fact about you will loom smaller than your impossibly microscopic ego.
You began by saying you had to speak this way, but you lie.
Your speech is hardly within the range of hearing, let alone distinguished by some special quality.
The casual assertion of godliness only clinches the matter: carry on, call yourself ‘God’…”[/b]

Well, if you reduce reactions down to the individual, you sink to the bottom of an existential morass that is [fortunately or unfortunately] incalcuable. And just as snot is linked to the nose so its equivalent can be linked to practically everything else. And certainly to Gods.

[b]Bianco Luno

From under her skirts, the boy makes fun of the woman’s indignation.
A sucker for innocence, whose true enemy has a body covered in down and a voice of a still purer soprano.[/b]

The boy becomes the man becomes the fucking predator.

But men are truly disgusting creatures, one can hardly blame her.
But, again, disgust is connected with power and to be so invested is to have maggots teeming in the soul.

I would say, “Speak for yourself!”, but there is always the possibility that he speaks for others. Me, for instance.

[b]Bianco Luno:

I met Jesus yesterday on the street.
But for the fact that I knew it was him, I never would have guessed it.
He smiled, walked past, knew I had recognized him.
I saw Jesus, my son.[/b]

You and a few hundred million others. Though not necessarily on the street.

Marx and Smith and the division of wealth.
Contemporary therapeutic psychology contends with a similar distributive problem in the concept of ‘empowerment’.
Self-interest is as much a canon as altruism, as much an excuse, and as deadly.
I have never been able to ally myself with a scheme for the division of wealth.
Psychic, no less than economic, victims of abuse are too apt to adopt their oppressors’ standards.
I refuse all solutions, and so it appears I support all sides, or none.

But that does not change the fact that all of us have to accommodate ourselves to someone’s rendition of all this. Someone will have the power to enforce a particular distribution of wealth. Whether economic or psychological.

In living our lives we don’t really have the option of reaching the soundest conclusions. If only because, perhaps, there aren’t any.

[b]Bianco Luno

A saying among logicians, “one man’s reductio is another’s modus ponens”: having reduced an opponent’s argument to absurdity, the temptation to swivel to an alternative conclusion.
Against this psychological bent in logic I struggle.
A reductio leaves us with ashes.
The Phoenix-like inferences, you see rise, are moist apparitions, tear-ghosts, every bit beyond your will as the estimious sentiments evoked at a proof’s finality: quod erat demonstratum.
At the top of the mountain, over the grated pit, the vulture-logician picks corpses clean.
When the pieces come white and slip through the grate of the Tower of Silence, I enter to cart them away and build a cage with them, which one day, when large enough, will house the moist apparitions in a sort of zoo for the edification of the plain and simple person, the unborn, and for the kind eyes of God.[/b]

Once you come face to face with the reality that, one by one, we are all reduced to ashes speculations of this sort become all the more pressing…or all the more absurd.

Let the vulture-logicians examine their knowledge of this when the bugs are picking their corpses clean.

[b]Bianco Luno

The age of therapy—inaugurated by Freud, etiologically dead-ended by Wittgenstein, et al., early heralded by Hume and maybe Pyrrho, vermiculated by Foucault, Derrida, and friends, (why stop here? why not include everyone in the history of Western literature and philosophy since Gilgamesh and Enkidu?)—is soon to be superceded—not for lack of imagination on anyone’s part—by an age of spite, resentment, by an age in which a surfeit of pride makes the sick hold their heads up high and the cured higher still and the-never-having-been-afflicted able to see to the ends of Alexander’s estate.
Finally, by an age of old age.[/b]

Indeed

[b]Mr Bernstein:

Old age. It’s the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don’t look forward to being cured of.[/b]

Not counting of course all the millions of folks that do.
[I get closer everyday]
Is there a philosophy of dying?
Or does it still all come down to God or oblivion?

[b]Bianco Luno

This knowing about everyone but ourselves is what is meant being a ‘social animal’.
We are best groomed by others… It strikes me as sad.
I am not made to feel closeness, or I feel that closeness as suffocation.
Your ambition to see my condition eased…well, do you see what I mean?
Wittgenstein spoke of the experience of feeling “safe” as though it were some profound discovery at the bottom of ethics, as indeed it is, despite what we are asked to believe.
But for me, it is too quickly followed, not with the accepted emotional valence, not with warmth, instead with an extreme breath-sucking heat, but not…
My illness, if you wish to call it that, stems in great part from your wishing to make me well.
(A thousand years ago it would have been unmysteriously labeled ‘sin’.
What do you suppose we will call it that long from now?)[/b]

Who said anything about wishing to make you well? Oh, right, you did. And a thousand years from now you and I won’t be around to call it anything. Not even in ten, perhaps.

[b]Bianco Luno

What do you think I mean by insulting God?
(The compulsion, I don’t fully understand.)
I think of him every moment, so much is clear.
Piety?: But for the fact that he has no right to exist.[/b]

My compulsion stems from a belief that there is no God. He has to be invented in order to have something I can pummel when the pain of living demands an answer that is not there.

I’d even grant Him the right to exist if I could.

Someday, it’s possible, I will feel closeness: you will have to lend me your imagination

If this means what I think it means it means he has never been close to another either. But I don’t think your imagination will help me at all.

[b]Bianco Luno

Partiality toward blood- or familial-ties is not (except in democratic politics) judged another prejudice to uncover and expunge.
Should we ever though, then we will have to crack down on emotional ties.[/b]

Indeed, I already have. But not in the manner in which, say, Hank Reardon came to crack down on his.

Fellini, my cat-friend, is teaching me closeness.
I’ve never met anyone who, by their willingness to be observed, has more convinced me that they are capable of loving.
How to explain this: their powers of persuasion are inadequate, or my discernment, or I am looking in the wrong place altogether: I should be observing how an animal might favor them.
It is a quality that can only be observed in a flawless mirror, not directly, no matter how closely.

Dogs, however, are still viewed as the faithful companions of choice. With them you don’t have to earn the love…you just have to not kick them.

[b]Bianco Luno

The motion from the irrational to the rational is the classic move in art.
The movement in reverse is romantic.
Not either alone.
It is clear system-building or reductive philosophy is a species of the former…
…The importance of art is that it permits us a moment or two of what it is like not to think, and not to deserve anything, to re-experience being adiaphorous—reason enough, in itself, for common morality to perceive it as mortal enemy.[/b]

But certainly not of philosophy exchanged “down here”. For that we have the art of existentialism. The nihilist reading text with a red pencil and a shredder.

[b]Bianco Luno

Equally fickle in their development, moral and aesthetic values—but the latter travel in circles (wide arcs from our perspective).
Both move, a possible and ominous surprise to some about ethics.
The moral is linear, “the straight and narrow”, and like an arrow in flight, it is displacing, moving with a very clear (if, just the same, highly deniable) direction.
A vector, aimed at the Good, the Ultimate Good, that is to say (that is to whisper), Death.[/b]

That “thump” you now hear is, in this regard, as close as I ever seem to come to a whisper.

So the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, has the suppressed qualifier: “all of a sudden”.
In due course, without impatience, and with respect for the moral order, which is not the same as ‘upholding’ the moral order: it has us firmly by the scruff and scarcely needs our complicity.
We are only free to march to the scaffold like, deep down, the good aristocrats we are.
But the history of art are the paths traced by stray balloons through the vapors, squatting over the moribund city, and though there are infinite reasons to, we are not rational and so there is no requirement to be sad.
The joy of death is difficult to celebrate but the muses do not skimp on supplies.
To sum up the Decalogue, trite in its profundity: “Be a good sport about death.”

When you reckon that being reasonable here is like aiming for the bullseye and hoping to at least hit the board, sadness unto death is nothing less than missing the entire wall.

[b]Bianco Luno

“What a jerk! A snide-ass tease, waving your perfumed pussy around!”—to paraphrase a male friend of O’s on reading some of this.
Perfume?
The logic of perfume would be a fit subject for a poet-logician.[/b]

Years ago, O gave me some of this to read. And here I am again treading water. And none the wiser of course. But that still seems logical to me.

As logician the imperative is to labor the obvious; as poet to make it cryptic.

Making logic cryptic is merely to expose its limitations. After all, human existence makes a mockery of it everyday.

[b]Bianco Luno

“What is so much gall in the service of?” Really, I don’t know.
Something I haven’t learned, or can’t, haunts me continually.[/b]

This reminds me of the gall put on display here from time time: “How dare you not understand and then agree with me!”