a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Two hundred miles from the surface of the earth there is no gravity. The laws of motion are suspended. You could turn somersaults slowly slowly, weight into weightlessness, nowhere to fall. As you lay on your back paddling in space you might notice your feet had fled your head. You are stretching slowly slowly, getting longer, your joints are slipping away from their usual places. There is no connection between your shoulder and your arm. You will break up bone by bone, fractured from who you are, drifting away now, the centre cannot hold.[/b]

Let’s move the Oval Office up there.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

He thought: And certainly not here.

In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit. They don’t obey the rules. They are swarming into the bloodstream, overturning the quiet order of spleen and intestine. In the lymph nodes they are swelling with pride. It used to be their job to keep her body safe from enemies on the outside. They were her immunity, her certainty against infection. Now they are the enemies on the inside. The security forces have rebelled. Louise is the victim of a coup.

Ah, that precarious point where “I” ends and the body begins. If [autonomously] it even exists.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the library desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it’s best to be ahead of the queue.

Let’s start one here.

There’s no story that’s the start of itself.

I’ll wrap my head around that if you will.

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Nope, not this one.

[b]so sad today

should i masturbate or sleep: a memoir[/b]

Volume 1

“fuck the capitalist system” i say, filling my basket with shit i don’t need at whole foods

Stiil, better that than Walmart.

what’s wrong with me: the musical

Soundtrack by Morrissey.

ted talk on eating ass

Worse: Ted Talk on dasein.

i like to blame myself for everything just in case

Just in case Don Trump doesn’t drain the swamp.

spoiler: your parents fucked you up

True, but only because your grandparents fucked them up.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?
Of course. Who said it?
I don’t know.
He was probably a coward, she said. He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.[/b]

Of course no one really knows what shit like this means.

Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.

Cue the military industrial complex.

I don’t know. There isn’t always an explanation for everything.

Let alone the right one.

He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.

That’s what I’m doing here myself: giving you versions.

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

Sooner or later though one tends to prevail.

Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

While sneaking a peek [now and then] at the future.

[b]Michael Lewis

After the markets closed Vinny would get into his Cadillac and drive out to his big house in Long Island. Now there is the guy called Vladimir who gets into his jet and flies to his estate in Aspen for the weekend. I used to worry a little about Vinny. Now I worry a lot about Vladimir.[/b]

Those poor souls.

There is nothing more satisfying to me, he said, than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it.

Or [here] a self-contained world of words.

In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California.

He means southern California [and San Francisco] of course.

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

But only all the way to the grave.

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes, he said. When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work.

And look where they are now. Well, with a little help from Trumpworld.

A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method. As I say, I fell in love with a story. The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it. At its center is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way.

Next up, the science of philosophy.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.[/b]

More often than not though it’s a hopelessly entangled agglomeration of them all.

That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed.

Let’s file this one under, “for all that’s worth”.

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend…I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…

I challenge you to wax more philosophically than this.

Even nothing cannot last forever.

On the other hand for all of eternity seems long enough.

There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

Not counting the part where it’s all about the Benjamins.

[b]I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you’re looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and… for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”[/b]

Bravo!

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I made up my mind that nothing, nothing was going to stop me. Not even me.[/b]

Let’s just say that, for some, this is easier said than done.

“I love you” also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

Not unlike “I hate you”.

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can’t hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don’t they get to curl up by the fire? Why can’t they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

So, Jonathan, how many pigs curl up by the fire with you?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Oh, I think we get the gist of it.

The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

In other words, what some folks call progress. And other folks don’t.

You’re incredibly beautiful, I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.

Ah, the games we play.

[b]Haruki Murakami

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?[/b]

In other words, where does one stop and the other begin? For example, if we actually do have free will.

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.

Either that or a giant squid.

I’m an average person. It’s just that I like reading.

Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.

It is cognition that is the fantasy… Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will… My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.

Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.

I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

Oh shit, he thought, which one am I?

We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

And look where that’s got us.

[b]Sophocles

We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.[/b]

Clearly: with lots and lots and lots of exceptions.

What do I care for life when you are dead?

Like that makes all our obligations go away.

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.

Like, for example, becoming president of the United States.

Sentry: King, may I speak?
Creon: Your very voice distresses me.
Sentry: Are you sure that it is my voice, and not your conscience?
Creon: By God, he wants to analyze me now!
Sentry: It is not what I say, but what has been done, that hurts you.
Creon: You talk too much.

Hell, this could be a transcript from the Oval Office.

And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let’s just say I’ve been accused of folly by a fool.

Gee, maybe it works like that here too.

You, you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!

That and [for some] deaf and dumb.

[b]George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.[/b]

Maybe even the president of the United States.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Of course we know where that leads. Well, when that’s where it does lead.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a dismal failure.

I’ll bet we can find a way to make that applicable here too.

After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

And then as often as not [for some of us] it’s around and around in circles.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

Not that it doesn’t actually work sometimes.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

But only the right God of course.

[b]Gloria Steinem

I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? [/b]

Or, instead, do they become a little more like you?

It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sounds more like psycho-babble to me. But point taken.

Even the dictionary defines adventurer as “a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures,” but adventuress is “a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.”

Of course that might be the difference between denotation and connotation. But, sure, maybe not.

On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.

Also in the Oval Office.

Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

Of course we’ll need to know what that something is.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

That’ll do it.

Always glad to see you still doing it, Ambig.

[b]Jean Baudrillard

Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.[/b]

Or, sure, maybe not.

Even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished animals in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are “human” with them.

Or, sure, maybe not.

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.

Let’s decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. After we all agree on what it means.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

And not just on the golf course, he quipped.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

Actually, I’m not at all sure about dasein here.

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there at the beginning. How could one not wish for that with all one’s heart? How could one not lend one’s feeble resources to bringing it about?

Hell, he thought, all it would take is “the big one” to come hurtling down from the heavens.

And right back at you regarding your own quality contributions here.

[b]Will Rogers

Never miss a good chance to shut up.[/b]

He means you, Kids.
Or I certainly do.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like.

Not to worry, it’s perfectly normal.

Common sense ain’t common.

And, believe it or not, not even here.

Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.

Not counting those who are ignorant on all of them.
Or so it seems, right?

Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.

Or, for that matter, tomorrow.

When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.

Unless of course you can make it all the way to China.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

On the other hand, we’ll never forget yours.

"God created sex. Priests created marriage.” Voltaire

And we know for sure that preists exist.

"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” Friedrich Nietzsche

I know what you’re thinking: not including me.
Or maybe not of course.

“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.” Thomas Henry Huxley

Not counting everything else though.

“In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.” René Descartes

Let’s figure out where that leaves us.

"A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.” David Hume

Not counting God, obviously.

[b]Mitchell Heisman

There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate mythologies of the human species.[/b]

Let’s just say that he walked the talk.

What does despair mean to someone who interprets that emotion as a chemical reaction in the brain?

So, is that a good point?

Uncertain of uncertainty, skeptical of skepticism, it seems that the most important question is whether there is an important question.

In, among other things, an absurd and meaningless world.

If there is no extant God and no extant gods, no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, no meaning and no purpose: if there are no values that are inherently valuable; no justice that is ultimately justifiable; no reasoning that is fundamentally rational, then there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism, art, conservatism, nihilism, liberalism, surrealism, fascism, asceticism, egalitarianism, subjectivism, elitism, ismism. If reason is incapable of deducing ultimate, non-arbitrary human ends, and nothing can be judged as ultimately more important than anything else, then freedom is equal to slavery; cruelty is equal to kindness; love is equal to hate; war is equal to peace; dignity is equal to contempt; destruction is equal to creation; life is equal to death and death is equal to life. Nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals–because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.

I can live with that. He couldn’t.

I might be a nihilist except that I don’t believe in anything.

Cue [among others] Wittgenstein.

What really happens in the Western countries that adopt feminism and individualism is not the complete end of the human race, but rather, the relative demographic decline of the native populations of liberal democracies. The individual irrationality of the self-sacrificial parent to child relationship helps produce genetically suicidal birthrates.

So he killed himself.

[b]John Searle

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.[/b]

This speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

In general, I feel if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself.

With the possible exception of everyone here.

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God’s existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

Or objectivists.

Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you’re more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you’re in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special – I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other.

Yeah, sure, maybe.

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky’s syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

Let’s decide if this is important.

Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what’s going to happen.

Let’s decide if this is important.

[b]Roland Barthes

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.[/b]

Also, because it wounds or seduces others.

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Either when enduring or inflicting it.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

He wondered if [when] his own language ever would.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

Me too no doubt if I ever thought about it.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Or none as the case may be.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?

Pick one:
Yes.
No.
Maybe.

[b]Philippa Gregory

Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have.[/b]

Said Don Trump to Vladimir Putin. Or, yeah, the other way around.

The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.

Unless, like us, they become…civilized.

En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement - In my end is my beginning.

For some, like clockwork.

Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.

Here of course you only get banned. Or, there, sent to the dungeon.

Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don’t see that there is in life only ever one goal.
And what is that?
More, George said simply. Just more of anything. More of everything.

And, if need be, take it from others. That’s still the same.

The law is what powerful men say it shall be.

So, do you think that might still be true today?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French drama: We are so witty!
English drama: We are so refined!
German drama: We are so cynical!
American drama: Yeah, it’s theatre. So?[/b]

Off with his head!

Mondays are
Hegel: bleakly cunning
Schopenhauer: cunningly bleak
Nietzsche: meaningfully painful
Beckett: painfully short on meaning

Iambiguous: the same as all the rest of them.

French novel: you hope it’ll never end
British novel: you’re not sure it can end
Russian novel: the end is great, but you never get there

Not counting translations of course.

A philosopher’s greatest humiliation is to be a slave to
Hume: reason
Kant: passion
Hegel: mastery
Nietzsche: slavery
Camus: nicotine

Which one is it really though?

Kantian Trump: I am a categorical imperative
Hegelian Trump: I negate bigly, I sublate hugely
Sartrean Trump: You’re scared of freedom? Sad.

In other words, three Trumps too many. Or four if you count Don.

Epistemology: I know what it is.
Ontology: I know what is is.
Ethics: I know what is should be.
Aesthetics: I know what it should be.

Nihilism: I know what it will end up being.
And not just nothing at all.