a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Marjane Satrapi

Life hangs from so slender a thread. Life is but a sigh…[/b]

Not counting those times it seems to weigh a ton.

It’s not disgusting, that little skin that hangs?
The foreskin? No, it’s okay. I think that generally speaking, a dick isn’t really photogenic.
I quite agree.

Tell that to, among others, Robert Mapplethorpe.

To each his own way of calming down.

You know, if he can.

People don’t know anymore why we’ve had eight years of war. Why their children have died…This entire war was just a big setup to destroy both the Iranian and the Iraqi armies. The former was the most powerful in the Middle East in 1980, and the latter represented a real danger to Israel. The West sold weapons to both camps and we, we were stupid enough to enter into this cynical game…eight years of war for nothing! So now the state names streets after martyrs to flatter the families of the victims. In this way, perhaps, they’ll find some meaning in all this absurdity.

Allahu Akbar!!!

Men’s pride is situated in their scrotums.

That and everything else.

They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that’s banned.

Chess? Banned?
Yep: dailymail.co.uk/news/article … bling.html

[b]Jeanette Winterson

She said she’d often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there. She’d spent a long time puzzling it out, then she thought that what you’d done in a past life you didn’t need to do again, and what you had to do in the future, you wouldn’t be ready to do now.[/b]

And it doesn’t get much clearer than that.

What is it that you contain?
The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

Technically, that’s what they tell us.

My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she’d either not see it at all, or call it Mrs. Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she’s do what most people do when confronted with something they don’t understand. Panic.

So, is there a pill for that yet?

The only selfish life is a timid one.

Right, as though it were that simple.

Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass…

On the other hand, wouldn’t that make it even worse?

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Obviously: Some writers more than others.

[b]Nein

It’s not you. It’s your ruthless critique of all that exists.[/b]

Then it is me.

Eat. Pray. Ruthlessly critique all that exists.

Not necessarily in that order. Unless, of course, it is.

A gentle reminder that, yes, you can have your revolution. And eat it, too.

Anyone here ever done that?

Worry not. Your prayers will be answered. In the order received. Expected wait time: 500 million years.

Give or take a year.

Moochiavelli. Your time has come.

And gone.

Students across the nation preparing for that quiz on Monday: How a Tweet becomes a law.

How’d you do?

Reading Infinite Jest. The new not reading Infinite Jest.

I started to. Quite a few times in fact.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire[/b]

Indeed, imagine if he were around today.
And, no, not just here.

"Why should things be easy to understand?” Thomas Pynchon

On the other hand [obviously] why should [other] things be unnecessarily difficult to understand?
And, no, not just here.

“Art is purposiveness without purpose.” Immanuel Kant

This is trickier than it sounds.

“Life is the sum of all your choices” Albert Camus

A life in particular.

“The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism.” Jurgen Habermas

In other words, anytime, anywhere, and for any reason, it could happen to you.

“All human things hang on a slender thread, the strongest fall with a sudden crash.” Ovid

Either that or are impeached.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

It’s a bore, he said out loud.
What is, my dear?
Anything you do too bloody long.[/b]

Living, for example.

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slip-over jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

Let’s decide if this is politically correct.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Sometimes men, sometimes beasts.

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.

Not only that but the part about Hell. This works better for some.

I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

Some you can ask, some you can’t.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

So, by all means, be careful not to step in mine.

[b]Leo Strauss

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.[/b]

In other words, as thoroughly as he does.
For example:

Nihilism is the rejection of the principles of civilisation as such—I said civilisation, and not: culture. For I have noticed that many nihilists are great lovers of culture, as distinguished from, and opposed to, civilisation. Besides, the term culture leaves it undetermined what the thing is which is to be cultivated (blood and soil or the mind), whereas the term civilisation designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian.

And who has ever undertstood nihilsim as thoroughly as he did?
On the other hand, he has been dead now for nearly 45 years.

But what is the core of the political? Men killing men on the largest scale in broad daylight and with the greatest serenity.

Or with the greatest of rationalizations.

The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

Comments anyone?

All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.

Not counting your thoughts, Mr. Objectivist.

But dogmatism—or the inclination “to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking”—is so natural to man that it is not likely to be a preserve of the past.

Though some become tired of thinking sooner than others.

[b]Neil Gaiman

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it’s true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.[/b]

There must be hundreds of theories like this one. But point taken.

Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking towards Tadfield. And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty To Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People travelled with them.

Who thinks like this? You know, besides him.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

Or [out in the real world] what we call lives.

I don’t think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you’re doing it, you ought to mean it.

That and get away with it.

I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating.

Maybe, but how far behind can all women be?

What do stars do? They shine.

But even then only the ones not already dead.

[b]Jonathan Safran Foer

I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep.[/b]

And a lot of good it does them.

I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Don’t expect this to ever be pinned down. For example, one way or the other.

Jacob wrestled with God for the blessing. He wrestled with Esau for the blessing. He wrestled with Isaac for the blessing, with Laban for the blessing, and in each case he eventually prevailed. He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

Jacob who? Fixed Jacob?

Cruelty prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.

Tell that to, among others, the hunters and gatherers. While they’re still around.

Life is scarier than death.

Well, not counting the times it’s the other way around.

Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive – to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling – to be not being, not to be.

Me too. And not just from watching Woody Allen movies.

[b]Terry Pratchett

It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.[/b]

No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.

Let’s debate that, Mr. Objectivist.

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink’.

Sure, I can live with that.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Or groots as some call them.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn’t as cynical as real life.

Mine has never even come close. You know, believe it or not.

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?

Does he know that?

[b]George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.[/b]

Uh-oh.

If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

Instead, it turned out to be capitalism.

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

On the other hand, they could be playing checkers.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

Fiction for example. And autobiographies.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Indeed, and how hard could it be to tell them apart? Right, Mr. Objectivist?

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Right, Kids?

[b]Joseph Heller

He was never without misery, and never without hope.[/b]

In other words, it was a normal day.

What would they do to me, he asked in confidential tones, if I refused to fly them?
We’d probably shoot you, ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
We? Yossarian cried in surprise. What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?
If you’re going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on? ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted.

Only nowadays it’s not just a military thing.

Who’s they? He wanted to know. Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?
Every one of them, Yossarian told him.
Every one of whom?
Every one of whom do you think?
I haven’t any idea.
Then how do you know they aren’t?

Only nowadays it’s not just a military thing.

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

Cue, among others, Robert Mueller.

Surely there can’t be so many countries worth dying for.
Anything worth living for, said Nately, 'is worth dying for.
And anything worth dying for, answered the sacrilegious old man, is certainly worth living for.

Let’s call it “catch-23”.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

Much like, for example, common sense.

[b]Zoë Heller

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.[/b]

Mine don’t. Not even close.

It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it…

Of course we all know that feeling. Yes, even me.

It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside.

Not only that but [for most of us] it never stops getting worse.

It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.

If [from time to time] not actually impossible.

The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.

Any secrets you’d like to share with me?

I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

A daily reminder you might call it.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

You can’t know the…
Kant: thing-in-itself
Hegel: self in and for itself
Schelling: other as self
Nietzsche: pain I feel reading your stuff[/b]

Imagine him reading our stuff. Though, sure, mostly yours.

Philosophy is a war with…
Hume: good sense
Kant: common sense
Wittgenstein: nonsense
Husserl: the sixth sense
Bataille: dollars and cents

Which one is the pragmatist?

A philosopher must be tireless in the fight against…
Plato: sophistry
Kant: dogmatism
Nietzsche: philosophy
Camus: a tobacco tax

Which one is the pragmatist?

I can’t be the first person to have thought of this, but has anyone told Trump that Pyongyang is desperately in need of a new luxury hotel?

Not to mention luxury bomb shelters.

Philosophies:
Ancient: Why do we exist?
Medieval: Why do we exist?
Enlightenment: Why do we exist?
Modern: Our existence is an embarrassment.

And, no, not just in Trumpworld.

[b]Thinkers covered in seminar:

1. Marx
2. Benjamin
3. Adorno
4. Kristeva
   What you’ll actually discuss:
5. Trump
6. Trump
7. Trump
8. Trump[/b]

And, no, not just Ivanka.

[b]Jasmine Warga

I’m not asking you to live for me. Even though that would be nice because I’m in love with you. And yeah, yeah, you can tell me I’m misusing that word, but I don’t care. That’s how I feel. But this isn’t even about me, or how I feel about you. I want you to live for you because I know there’s so much more waiting for you. There’s so much more for you to discover and experience. And you deserve it, you might not think you do, but you do. I’m here to tell you that you deserve it. And I know I sound cheesy as hell. Believe me, six weeks ago, I would’ve slapped myself for saying shit like this, but knowing you… Knowing you has helped me see things differently. See myself differently. And all I want is for you to see yourself the way that I do.[/b]

Two things I’m sure about:
1] I’ve never said this to anyone
2] No one has ever said this to me

I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.

Either that or my brain.

I spend a lot of time wondering what dying feels like. What dying sounds like. If I’ll burst like those notes, let out my last cries of pain, and then go silent forever. Or maybe I’ll turn into a shadowy static that’s barely there, if you just listen hard enough.

Anyone here know for sure?

I think he’s looking for comfort, but I don’t have any to give.

Or: He thinks I’m looking for comfort, but he doesn’t have any to give. Or, sure, she.

Everything used to seem so final, inevitable, predestined. But now I’m starting to believe that life may have more surprises in store than I ever realized. Maybe it’s all relative, not just light and time like Einstein theorized, but everything. Like life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.

Tell me this isn’t profoundly embedded in genes and memes.

What people never understand is that depression isn’t about the outside; it’s about the inside.

Not counting all the times when it’s the other way around. Or all the times when it’s an inextricable tangle of both.

[b]Malcolm Gladwell

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.[/b]

And in the either/or world no less.

Research suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Okay, is it more or less largely an illusion?

There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

Though, no, not here.

It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.

True, but I may well have come closest.

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice–perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again–and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court…spontaneity isn’t random.

What’s that make baseball then?

For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger role preparation seems to play.

In other words, we still don’t really know for sure. Well, not counting what you claim to believe is true “in your head”.

[b]Existential Comics

To be honest, the older I get the more I’m warming up to the idea of a God who planted dinosaur bones to trick people into believing in dinosaurs.[/b]

Oblivion [the abyss] will do that to some.

I hate that phrase “time will tell”, because you can just as easily say, “in the fullness of time all shall be revealed.”

So, does he have a point?

Existential definitions:
Dread: grasping of death.
Anxiety: dizziness of freedom.
Despair: hopelessness of life.
Crisis: you’re out of beer.

Let’s go to the dictionary.

The opposite of a philosopher is a sophophobic: when you fear or hate learning new things. Like, for example, pretty much everyone on Earth.

[i]And everyone else. For example, in the universe.

[b]Things that are certain:

1. Death.
2. Taxes.
3. The conclusion of the dialectical materialist process bringing a worldwide communist Utopia.[/b]

No, really, it used to be like that.

[b]How to become an interesting author:

1. Become an interesting person.
2. Learn how to fucking write.
3. The end.[/b]

Or sure [here] an interesting poster.

[b]Arthur Koestler

…and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception.[/b]

About, among other things, the nature of the self itself.

But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.

That’s how it works alright. And going back centuries now.

We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip.

That’s how it works alright. And going back centuries now.

Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.

And [nowadays] almost any part will do.

Cigarettes to be fetched for me from the canteen, said Rubashov.
Have you got prison vouchers?
My money was taken from me on my arrival, said Rubashov.
Then you must wait until it has been changed for vouchers.
How long will that take in this model establishment of yours? asked Rubashov.
You can write a letter of complaint,’ said the old man.
You know quite well that I have neither paper nor pencil, said Rubashov.
To buy writing materials you have to have vouchers, said the warder.

Just one more catch-22 in a world where hundreds of them must exist by now.

Perhaps he did not know himself – like all these intellectual cynics.

He means, among others, me.

[b]Roland Barthes

It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but. instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance’ is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.[/b]

Postmodern love in other words. On the other hand, love may well just mean “never having to say you’re sorry”.

Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the noeme of Photography.

This: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noema
I know: Let’s ask Satyr.

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

It is all rather ineffable.

Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone.

Of course more often than not they are paid to be.

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.

That or rage. And not just here. Though mostly here.

Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.

Let’s cite actual examples of this.

[b]Evelyn Waugh

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming![/b]

Though, no doubt, like me, you’re heard worse.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are.

I think we’ve got a pretty good idea…

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

That probably explains the cacaphony here then.

I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none - except possibly folk dancing.

Not counting soccer of course.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

Most men however would still fuck her.

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.

Not so much today though.

[b]Mary Roach

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.[/b]

Never been on one but that doesn’t make this any less true.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, our loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life.

Let’s file this one [maybe] under “human nature”.

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

But, as I often remind you, only from the cradle to the grave.

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

I know that I do. Or, rather, I used to.

Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.

Most will settle for less terrifying.

Here is the secret to surviving one of these airplane crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.

And that’s not a good thing, right?