a thread for mundane ironists

[b]tiny nietzsche

my aesthetic is denying you exist[/b]

Or [if I’m lucky]: your aesthetic is denying I exist.

it’s taking forever to die

Me, I can’t remember that far back.

I hope I’m not like this already.

You tell me.

I hate months that end in january.

Or: I hate years that end in december.

age 8: there is no santa claus age
9: there is no easter bunny age
10: life is meaningless

Now that’s precocious.

what if mercury was in retrograde the whole time?

What if the Big Bang was?

[b]Anatole France

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another.[/b]

Or certainly something like this.

I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt.

Clearly, one man’s opinion.

Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.

In other words, some things never change.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

Unless of course it did.

Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

By definition as it were.

There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science.
What are they? asked Cotta.
Ignorance and folly, replied Aristaeus.

Cue among others Robert Mueller.

[b]Neil Gaiman

What’s the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you’ve actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?
There isn’t one.
Oh. I thought maybe there was.[/b]

Let’s think one up.

This is crazy, said Shadow.
Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.

Indeed, we have a few Shadows here.

Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit. ‘Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.’

On the other hand, for all practical purposes, it’s gone.

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes ‘plum-blossom’ at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark.

Still, that’s one more than some have.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, “He’s an old soppy really, just poke him if he’s a nuisance,” and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.

A few people like this too.

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead.

You either get this or you don’t.

[b]Leonardo da Vinci

Our life is made by the death of others.[/b]

Let’s try to pin down what this may or may not mean.

He who thinks little errs much…

Let’s try to pin down what this ought or ought not to mean.

My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.

On the other hand, fuck the plants.

He who does not oppose evil…commands it to be done.

The way that we perceive their evil, in other words, not the way that they perceive ours.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

And he who loves theory over practice…?

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Among other things, so?

[b]Terry Pratchett

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.[/b]

Don’t you just hate that?

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

Expect a discount.

It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country, he read. This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.

And not just on the battlefield.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Going postal we call it.

History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.

Imagine then the history of Trumpworld. And not just in the shitholes.

The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.

Unless it dawns on you.

[b]so sad today

i miss people i never even liked in the first place[/b]

Nope, not yet.

there are two kinds of people in this world and they’re both wrong

Need I remind you: About what?

we only have one president in this country and it’s money

Remember when it was not that way? Me neither.

is being alive a meme?

Naturally.

annoyed that i had to be born and annoyed that i have to die

Of course she’s just paraphrasing, among others, Woody Allen.

je suis a shithole

Perhaps, but she’s not living in one.

[b]Joseph Heller

You’ve got to have a God. Without God, you might turn to something really crazy, like witchcraft, or religion.[/b]

Or, sure, philosophy.

Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor.

As well he should.

Help him!
Help who?
Help the bombardier!
I’m a bombardier.
Help him, help him!
Help who?

On the other hand, are we obligated morally to help him?

You’ve got flies in your eyes. That’s why you can’t see them.

Still, better flies than bees. Or mosquitos.

And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his ‘Every Change Is for the Worse’ should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.

We’re way past there of course. Here order masquerades as chaos. Only theirs and not ours.

It’s the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed. But here, finally, he can become free.

Let’s nail down how this works in Trumpworld.

[b]C.G. Jung

Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.[/b]

Among other things, count on it.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

I know, let’s call this the “soul”.

Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.

A hell of a lot easier.

Every man carries within himself the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious, a hereditary factor of primordial origin.

He wondered: Why doesn’t it work that way for every woman?

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

The secular rendition being an ideology of course.

I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.

Imagine him now in Trumpworld.

[b]Allen Ginsberg

Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness of the soul.[/b]

That’s only natural. If that is only natural.

The universe is mad, slightly mad.

That’s only natural. If that is only natural.

he threw up his hands
and wrote the Universe dont exist
and died to prove it

What to make of all this then?

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

Must be a poet thing.

Many seek and never see,
anyone can tell them why.
O they weep and O they cry
and never take until they try
unless they try it in their sleep
and never some until they die.
I ask many, they ask me.
This is a great mystery.

Not only that, but all the shit you’ve got to endure.

What came is gone forever every time

And, eventually, what’s to come.

[b]Ali Smith

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.[/b]

Or just skimming through the Cliffs Notes edition.

When you’ve nothing, at least you’ve all of it.

Perhaps, but why does that matter?

That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature.

If only since the beginning of time.

Who’s that?
(Silence.)
Who’s there?
(Silence.)
God?
Not exactly.
Well, who?
Where do I start? I’m the butterfly antenna. I’m the chemicals that paint’s made of. I’m the person dead at the water’s edge. I’m the water. I’m the edge. I’m the skin cells. I’m the smell of disinfectant. I’m that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I’m soft. I’m hard. I’m glass. I’m sand. I’m a yellow plastic bottle. I’m all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I’m the fishes. I’m the seas. I’m molluscs in the seas. I’m the flattened-out old beer can. I’m the shopping trolley in the canal. I’m the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I’m the stave. I’m the line. I’m spiders. I’m seeds. I’m water. I’m heart. I’m the cotton of the sheet. I’m pollution. I’m a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. I’m the fly . I haven’t even started telling you what I am. I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m the voice that tells no story.

Truth be told, I’m not even half that.

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.

And simply born than way.

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words.

Ain’t it the truth?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” W.B. Yeats[/b]

Let’s file this one [obviously] under, “for better or for worse”.

“There is another world, but it is in this one.” W.B. Yeats

Figures, doesn’t it?

“One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.” Immanuel Kant

Now that’s a tricky one.

“Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything” Immanuel Kant

Has anyone here ever actually come close?

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Albert Camus

Let’s try again to prove this.

“Few look for truth; many prowl about for a reputation of profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.” Rene Descartes

He means me, doesn’t he?

[b]Stephen Greenblatt

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.[/b]

Though not necessarily in that order. And you know what that means.

I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention.

Right, the “verbal surfaces”.

What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.

On the other hand, why even stop there?

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body.

And look at it all now. Among other things, we call it “late capitalism”.

Acediosus, sometimes translated as “apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

Clearly there is a secular rendition too.

The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

Who cares what it means when you know it’s true.

[b]Ben Goldacre

Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market, and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.[/b]

My guess: This works.

In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.

My guess: This works.

My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about. Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way.

And that’s before [way before] we get to the part played by the media industrial complex in sustaining crony capitalism.

Problems in medicine do not mean that homeopathic sugar pills work; just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn’t mean that magic carpets really fly.

Maybe, but millions of dollars are being made.

Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development.

I suspect it is even worse for, say, the car insurance industry. Flo and all the rest of them bombard us daily.

Today, scientists and doctors find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by vast armies of individuals who feel entitled to pass judgment on matters of evidence—an admirable aspiration—without troubling themselves to obtain a basic understanding of the issues.

Let’s file this one under, “show me the money!”

[b]Nein

Worry, if you must, about the future. But you can take comfort in knowing there’s less of it every day.[/b]

For better or worse, that is one way to look at it.

It’s not the size of the button, they say. It’s the length of the half-life.

After, for example, it’s pushed.

Cogito ergo, like, really sum.

Does this clear it up for you?

My God: dead.
My destruction: mutually assured.
My notifications: turned off.

Mine were never turned on.

Your tired. Your poor. Your huddled masses.
Our shithole president.

Clearly, one man’s opinion. However correct it obviously is.

Yes, we’ll explain, then Oprah became president. And Trump started a book club.

Let’s decide which one is least possible.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.[/b]

On the other hand, what’s the point of this?

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.

If it is even evil at all.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

So, by all means, bring it out in her.

What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.

Unless of course that’s not actually true.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

Maybe in la la land he thought.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

I’ve never been lonely he mused so fuck the cosmos.
At least until death do they part.

[b]Paul Valéry

Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the truth, which is her weapon – and falsehood, which is her armor.[/b]

Let’s just say that the truth is in there somewhere.

At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.

Right, like it could possibly be any other way.

But hope is only man’s mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind.

We can only hope that this is not true.

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

The floor? Literally?

Taste is made of a thousand distastes.

And tell me that’s not rooted in dasein?

This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind.

And now of course we have our words.

[b]God

I cannot understate how small Donald Trump’s penis is.[/b]

Next up: Stormy confirms it.

Retweet this so that others can see the full breadth of its pointlessness.

Me, I posted it here.

Fuck these fucking motherfuckers so fucking much.

Five will get you ten it’s Trumpworld. God being a liberal and all.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards impeachment.

No doubt about it: Heaven is a blue state.

I will never be verified because I have never been verified.

Rather enigmatic to say the least.

Would it help if I existed? Because I’m willing to do that if it would help.

Rather enigmatic to say the least.

[b]Naomi Alderman

We’re only pretending everything is normal because we don’t know what else to do.[/b]

How’s that working for you?

[b]The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn’t have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it.

So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary’s time. He’d go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then… well, of course eventually he’d be running the whole office. It’s important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.[/b]

How’s that working for you?

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.

Anyway, don’t forget to vote.

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent…But we don’t have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we’ve based our ideas on.

Cue the fucking idealists. One or another cure being worse than one or another disease.

It’s enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.

Next think you know they’re dumping her in a hospice.

Just like a man, she says. Does not know how to be silent, thinks we always want to hear what he has to say, always talking talking talking, interrupting his betters.

Just like a woman in other words. Only more of them.

[b]Mary Roach

Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the threat. The arms bend and retract to the chest, the shoulders hunch, and the knees bend, all of which combine to make you a smaller, less noticeable target. Snapping the limbs in tight to the torso may also serve to protect your vital innards. You are your own human shield. Siddle says hunching may have evolved to protect the neck: a holdover from caveman days. A big cat stalking prey will jump the last twenty feet and come down on the back and shoulders and bite through the neck.[/b]

Cue Satyr?

Death. It doesn’t have to be boring.

Hell, it can be downright terrifying.

Téléclitoridienne means simply “female of the distant clitoris,” but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it—calling to mind a career woman in heels and sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than “frigid.”

We need more words like that, don’t we?

…there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people’s saliva.

I never doubted it.

And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you’re not forgotten.

Among other things, no one will ever say that about me.

Lacking any scientific means of pinning down the soul, the first anatomists settled on generative primacy. What shows up first in the embryo must be most important and therefore most likely to hold the soul. The trouble with this particular avenue of learning, known as ensoulment, was that early first trimester human embryos were difficult to come by. Classical scholars of ensoulment, Aristotle among them, attempted to get around the problem by examining the larger, more easily obtained poultry embryo. To quote Vivian Nutton, author of The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine and the Human Embryo, analogies drawn from the inspection of hen’s eggs foundered on the subject that man was not a chicken.

So, do chickens have souls?

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Enlightenment: Fact over fiction
Modernism: The facts are the fictions
Postmodernism: There are no facts; there are no fictions
Post-Postmodernism: It’s a fact that your fictions aren’t marketable[/b]

You knew that money would get in there somewhere.

To truly love wisdom you must
Kant: set it free
Hegel: set it free and watch it come back
Nietzsche: set it free, watch it come back, and kill it

And that’s before eternal recurrence.

Monday mornings I wake up, get a cup of coffee, and reflect on
Schelling: the infinite pain of thought
Kierkegaard: the haunting creep of unbounded anxiety
Kristeva: the abject horror of knowing I’m still alive
Žižek: how best to boost my sales on Amazon

Obviously: Kristeva.
If only now and then.

Judge a person by Voltaire: the questions they ask
Nietzsche: the questions they pretend not to answer
Heidegger: the strength of their conviction that a question asked is a question answered

Now all we need is an actual question.

Philosophy teaches you all the shortcuts, if by shortcuts you mean abyssal tumbles into aporetic voids.

Clearly, that’s what I’m here for.

Ontology: It is what it is
Epistemology: I know what I know
History: We know what it was
Politics: Whatever!

Then cue the Dow Jones Industrial Average.