a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jane Smiley

Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.[/b]

Is that even possible? Ever happened to you?

I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

The human condition as it were.

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

The human condition as it were.

The body, the mind, and the spirit don’t form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn’t below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it’s between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair.

Sounds more like a spiral to to me.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

Cue the bonfires.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

What the hell does that even mean, he thought. Then it dawned on him.

[b]so sad today

sleeping all day speaks louder than words[/b]

What’s that make death then?

me and my mental illness are going to bed

If it let’s you sleep at all.

watching myself fuck up in slow motion

And don’t forget to rewind.

i liked you better when you were imaginary

Doesn’t everyone?

just forgot that life is pain and then remembered again

No getting around that I’m afraid.

i don’t know what i hate about you but it’s something

Or [more likely]: you don’t know what you hate about me but it’s something

[b]Samuel Butler

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. [/b]

Do you believe this? Or, perhaps, more to the point, does he?

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

I know: If only this were not true.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Please feel free to attribute this to me if you will.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

I have almost never been bored. Whatever that means.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

If only that actually mattered.

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

Of course it goes without saying: For better or for worse.

[b]Lee Smolin

Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound.[/b]

And let’s not forget RM/AO.

What we have, in fact, is not a theory at all but a large collection of approximate calculations, together with a web of conjectures that, if true, point to the existence of a theory.

A theory in theory as it were.

Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we’ll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science.

We’ve got a few of them here, don’t we?

Most kinds of matter are under pressure, but the dark energy is under tension—that is, it pulls things together rather than pushes them apart. For this reason, tension is sometimes called negative pressure. In spite of the fact that the dark energy is under tension, it causes the universe to expand faster. If you are confused by this, I sympathize. One would think that a gas with negative pressure would act like a rubber band connecting the galaxies and slow the expansion down. But it turns out that when the negative pressure is negative enough, in general relativity it has the opposite effect. It causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.

Space and time emerge from the laws rather than providing an arena in which things happen.

One suspects however that they happen anyway.

I understood Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which meant that I knew how to demonstrate every essential property of it in a page or less of concise and transparent work. It seemed to me that if you understood a theory, it shouldn’t take weeks of calculations on an art pad to check its basic properties.

Let’s put your own theory to the test then.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Any view of things that is not strange, is false.[/b]

He means almost any view of most things, of course.

Rubbish! screamed a fat, elderly woman, in Richard’s ear, as he passed her malodorous stall. Junk! She continued. Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Come and get it! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe, and useless piles of shit. You know you want it.

A flea market probably.

I think I’ve got Fear down, but how do I take it all the way up to Terror?

More often than not though it will just…happen.

Nobody’s American, said Wednesday. Not originally. That’s my point.

On the other hand, now you just have to be American enough.

Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside.

Don Trump sort of does. And let’s not forget Dick Nixon.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine.

And now, among other things, it’s…shameless?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Heraclitus[/b]

Of course this varies considerably.

“The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.” Heraclitus

I hear that.

“Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.” Plato

Formally as it were.

“Adversity is the midwife of genius.” Napoleon Bonaparte

One word: Waterloo.

“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Otto von Bismarck

No collusion!

“History is written by the victors.” Walter Benjamin

Sure, that’s possible.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content, but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.[/b]

For better or for worse? Definitely.

Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health.

Among others, he’s talking about me.

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

Care to broach a few of your own?

Villains! I shrieked. Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

Me, I’m taking the deed to the grave.

When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect — they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul — not of intellect, or of heart.

Though still no less in the soul of the beholder.

The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.

You’d think any child would know that.

[b]so sad today

look, i hate myself as much as the next guy[/b]

And it’s still not enough!

in theory i’m totally over you

If not objectiviely.

sorry to hear about your positive attitude

Not to worry: It’s long gone.

what the fuck is everything

And why is it not the same as everything else?

that which does not kill you but makes you sleep all day

I should be so lucky.

1 fuck is too many and 1000 are never enough

Let’s prove this.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.[/b]

I know that I didn’t. On the other hand, what does that even mean?

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people’s attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

True, but, come on, really, what the fuck are perfect stories?

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

All the way back to, say, before the Big Bang.

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

More to the point, we all just are people, and none of us know what that really means.

Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.

Light being a metaphor for, well, you tell me.

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

Promises made? Promises received? Too close to call?

[b]John Dewey

There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.[/b]

Or there sure as hell can be.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

Indeed, that was once even applicable to me.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

On the other hand, imagine Aristotle with a smart phone.

For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an “ism” becomes so involved in reaction against other “isms” that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.

Think about that, Mr. Objectivist.

To me faith means not worrying.

That and tithing.

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

Actually, the most important attitude lies in recognizing the limits of what can be learned. For example, in the is/ought world.

[b]C.G. Jung

Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.[/b]

Whatever that means anyway.

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

How disconcerting is that then?

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

Does the stone know that?

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

Not many like that still around. Here for example.

Our suffering comes from our unlived life–the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche.

Anyone here actually believe that?

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual.

Or [as often as not]: The psychopathology of the individual is rooted in the psychology of the masses.

[b]T.S. Eliot

It’s not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.[/b]

Their rules in other words.

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

Let’s confirm what that means.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Let’s confirm what that means.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

He wondered, any particular dead? Or does this go deeper than that?

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.

There are worse things to use.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Mine never meant to be. And it shows to say the least.

[b]Nein

Correction: Putin invited Trump to White House.[/b]

Ordered him actually.

Don’t forget the good news. One of these Mondays will be your last.

Maybe the next one then.

Correction: there is a hell. But in heaven there is no beer.

No, seriously, is there?

A gentle reminder from your data: it’s nothing personal.

This time.

To be on Facebook. Or not to be.

You mean, like, period?!

Remember, friends. You are what you delete.

Let’s start with everything.

[b]Judith Butler

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.[/b]

Social, true. But certainly no less political and economic.

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am.

’ ’ here makes all the difference in the world.

The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.

Go ahead, use my terms if you’d like.

Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.

Lots of things weren’t anticipated, were they?

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of ‘evil’.

And then all the fools who insist that they can tell them apart. Objectively, no less.

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?

And I’m all for repetition, right?

[b]Kurt Cobain

Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self esteem.[/b]

Not the ones I take. Well, so far.

Friends are nothing but a known enemy.

Best to keep that to yourself though.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

Give us a sign then if that’s still true.

I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.

Probably just something attributed to him.

I started to be really proud of the fact I was gay even though I wasn’t.

Had he ever explained that?

The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came.

And then one day it really didn’t.

[b]God

The Easter Bunny is a ridiculous myth that completely detracts from the factual reality of the Son of God rising from the dead.[/b]

Of course He’s biased.

No, it’s about co-opting Passover (along with ancient pagan celebrations of the vernal equinox) to help nascent Christianity syncretize with pre-existing faiths and Easter eggs and bunny rabbits.

Think, for example, Santa Claus.

A better world is possible but extremely unlikely.

Let’s change His mind.

You can be much less of an asshole than Donald Trump and still be an enormous asshole.

Let’s note some.

I made you in My image and I’m an asshole.

He means Asshole of course.

My son is crazy. He thinks he’s Jesus.

Celestial humor.

[b]Tom Stoppard

It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.[/b]

What you might ask.

What are a friend’s books for if not to be borrowed?

And sure, for some, even returned.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

Has anyone actually done that here?

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

We know what that assumes though, don’t we?

I’m going to be dead before I read the books I’m going to read.

Works pretty much the same for music and films. And most everything else for that matter.

It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

Including the future for some of us.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.[/b]

Not counting the truly insufferable…zealots?

…ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

Nope, not anymore.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

Characters in other words. If not already caricatures of them.

Have I interrupted a conversation? she asked.
No, only a complete silence, said Birkin.
Oh, said Ursula, vaguely, absent.

On the other hand, I can still tell them apart.

The artist usually sets out – or used to – to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Cue the dangling conversations.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog…Only in the novel are all things given full play.

One man’s opinion. Though clearly true.

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

Man lives with death, but he doesn’t understand what it is.[/b]

I know that I don’t. Though I do have my suspicions.

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.

In other words, for those who were actually there.

Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

Some more or less closer to ground zero.

Truth is communal.

Well, with all those individual renditions of it anyway.

I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.

Obviously not for everyone.

It’s certainly true that Chernobyl, while an accident in the sense that no one intentionally set it off, was also the deliberate product of a culture of cronyism, laziness, and a deep-seated indifference toward the general population.

Lots of things like that over here too.

[b]Existential Comics

Is philosophy of math cool? Are you kidding? What could be cooler than spending your life trying to figure out the relationship between math and logic? Name one thing, I dare you.[/b]

You know, now that James is no longer around.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past, longing for a time when you had not yet realized that everything is shit.

Tomorrow for some of you.

It’s a little known fact, but philosophy actually started when Thales attempted to understand the world as a prank, but the joke went too far when they started doing experiments and created science.

I actually don’t know if this is true.

What distinguishes humans from animals?
Aristotle: reason.
Descartes: a soul.
Nietzsche: keeping promises.
Marx: making industry.
Kierkegaard: being in constant despair every single moment of their lives.

Which one [obviously] took a leap of faith to God?

Sports are the ultimate expression of existential creation of meaning, because there is absolutely no god damn reason anyone should care which five dudes are best at putting a ball through a basket, and yet we do care. It does matter.

Okay, but does it also matter if you don’t care?

I consider myself a true centrist. Both the Anarchists and the State Communists make excellent points. We have to learn from both sides.

Think of them as conflicting goods.