a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.[/b]

I assign you the task of applying this to yourself.

He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.

And [still] too close to call.

I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

Tell him that. Though it may well be that he feels much the same way about you.

There’s nothing to this world, he said, but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.

Needless to say that, for all practical purposes, this is rather hard to pin down.

Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: "Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?

Of course that’s off in the future. If we’re lucky.

I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

Depending on, for example, the question.

[b]Robert Crumb

I’m just a negative person, a deeply negative person. I see the worst aspects of everything. [/b]

He wondered: Have I finally met my match?

At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.

So, is that good enough?

When I listen to old music, that’s one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.

Or, for some of us, new music too.

I’m an outsider. I will always be an outsider.

I hear that.

I always had a sketchbook with me when I was young. I was hiding behind it, basically, hiding behind drawing because I couldn’t cope with people in real life…

I hear that too.

I draw the line at some things. Some things I won’t do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there’s a couple of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million dollars I wouldn’t do it.

You can’t help but wonder: Pictures of what?

[b]C.G. Jung

The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person’s intellectual life.[/b]

Wasn’t this Einstein’s complaint too?

Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.

Then I’m sure as shit out of luck.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly.

But only if you think along the same lines that Satyr does.

The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.

Of course Marx had an altogether different rendition of this.

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…

Imagine then his reaction to the world today.

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

There are two types of people:

1. Those who believe in astrology.
2. Those who don’t but who are also idiots.[/b]

And now we only need science to prove it.

There’s a special place in Hell for people who ruin your life.

On the other hand, why wait for that.

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ would still be one of the greatest songs ever even if it were shortened to ‘any way the wind blows’ at the end.

Let’s just agree that’s debatable.

The day I realised my English wasn’t so bad was when I watched ‘Trainspotting’, understanding every single word, reading the subtitles.

I dare you to watch it without them.

Say something sexy in Russian?
Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y …

So, what am I missing here?

The real tragedy of life is that sometimes you are shamelessly happy.

So, what am I missing here?

[b]T.S. Eliot

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “Yeah, right”.

For he will do
As he do do
And there’s no doing anything about it!

Let’s file this one under, “We’ll see about that.”

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

They still do.

I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Still, no getting around keys in this world.

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.

In a world of fugitives, maybe. But not in this one.

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

That leaves only the best of all possible worlds.
If there even is one.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

The mind plays tricks on itself in order to stay in one piece.[/b]

Of course don’t expect that to always work.

Twitter, said Manny, waving his hand. You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

Not counting the stuff that I post of course.

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.

He thought: I’ll settle for my initials.

What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?
Be a man, I guess, Ethan said.

A smartass, sure, but, for some, there it is.

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

Cue the way back machine, he thought.

Wasn’t the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn’t have to wear a tie?

Yeah, back when hippies roamed the earth.

[b]Kurt Cobain

To be positive at all times is to ignore all that is important, sacred and valuable. To be negative at all times is to be threatened by ridiculousness and instant discreditably.[/b]

Let’s root out the golden mean here.

I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word ‘fuck’ has many connotations as does the word ‘art’.

The fuck it does.

Nobody dies a virgin…life fucks us.

Even out and out rapes some.

And I do, god, how I do love playing live, it’s the most primal form of energy release you can share with other people besides having sex or taking drugs. So if you see a good live show on drugs and then later that evening have sex, you’re basically covered all the bases of energy release, and we all need to let off steam.

Me? I had to settle for 2 out of 3. Like you probably.

Look on the bright side, suicide
Lost eyesight I’m on your side
Angel left wing, right wing, broken wing
Lack of iron and/or sleeping
Protector of the kennel
Ecto-plasma, Ecto-skeletal
Obituary birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery!

That was number 196.

Kids don’t care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It’s already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life.

Also, it becomes a commodity.

[b]God

I have been canceled by Fox.[/b]

What’s that all about?

I will be eligible to be a god in India as soon as I get my Aadhaar card.

What’s that all about?

Now, more than ever, dogs.

Let us know if that works.

Retweet this in the next half-hour for a free admission to Heaven and 25% discount at Olive Garden.

Nope, nothing happened.

“52 Palestinians” rolls off the journalistic tongue in a way “52 human beings” just doesn’t.

God taking sides?

Do not believe in Me and I will never, ever let you down.

Not counting all the other Gods, of course.

[b] Tom Stoppard

The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.[/b]

Yes, another attempt to untangle it.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds.

Or for some the best.

We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.

A hell of a lot better.

Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
No, you fucking idiot, we’re talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.

There probably actually is one though.

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he’s standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can’t deny that they’re there, he can’t for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

Unless of course you’ve never written one.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good’s a brick to a drowning man?

Let’s think of something.

[b]Existential Comics

Life is often disappointing. We must accept that most of us will never come up with a groundbreaking idea, find a great love, create a political reform, or get lost in the wilderness and become ensnared in a witch’s cruel game.[/b]

But we’ve always got ILP, right?

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are craving meaning in a bleak, meaningless world, when you are really just craving, like, a hug or something.

Or even a healthy bowel movement for some.

As Dostoevsky wisely taught us, always be spiteful all the time.

And not just underground.

The funniest thing about libertarians worshipping Elon Musk is that he’s basically the villain from Atlas Shrugged. He makes all his money from government subsidies and contracts, and by wildly exaggerating production to pump up stock prices.

What say you, Mr. Ayn Randroid?

Dudes are always like “love is just a chemical in the brain”. Why is it always “love”? Why not “ambition”? Or “masculinity”? Or “smugness”? Aren’t those just brain chemicals too?

Among other things, he thought, no fucking way

Believing that technology will save us is like thinking that an escalator would have liberated Sisyphus.

On the other hand, let’s ask Sisyphus.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand.[/b]

On the other hand, what’s the point of bringing it up at all anymore?
Anyway, here’s an antidote:

For my part, life is so many things I don’t care what it is. It’s not my affair to sum it up. Just now it’s a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

Come on, it might work.

The least little bit o’ money ‘ll really do… What have yer done ter yerselves, wi’ the blasted work? Spoilt yerselves. No need to work that much. Take yer clothes off an’ look at yourselves. Yer ought ter be alive an’ beautiful, an’ yer ugly an’ half dead.

Some get it, some don’t. And some even claim to know the difference.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of. We’re only half-conscious, and half-alive. We’ve for to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It’s our crying need.

Let’s pin down where to draw the line.

I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone.

The trick though is in being that away around others.

Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held. Break it, and get away.

Or, as Neil once put it: youtu.be/MImNGJNcvIc

[b]Svetlana Alexievich

In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die. And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.[/b]

It’s natural as it were. Not counting all the exceptions of course.

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves.

It’s natural as it were. Not counting all the exceptions of course.

There is no more pressing or torturous task for man, having found himself free, than to seek out someone to bow down to as soon as he can…someone on whom to bestow that gift of freedom with which this unhappy creature was born.

Didn’t Erich Fromm write a book about that?

During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one.

He thought: Just one more or less insignificant piece of history.

I asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience – it’s like they’re from different planets.

Ask me what I think that means.

I met this one man, he was saying that this is because we place a low value on human life. That it’s an Asiatic fatalism. A person who sacrifices himself doesn’t feel himself to be a unique individual. He experiences a longing for his role in life. Earlier he was a person without a text, a statistic. He had no theme, he served as the background. And now suddenly he’s the main protagonist. It’s a longing for meaning.

Let me ask you what you think that means.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The strongest intimidation, by the way, is the invention of a hereafter with a hell everlasting.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Didn’t work on me though. But not from lack of trying.

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Then go figure those who long to know what to believe.

“He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.” Friedrich Nietzsche

He meant their ice not his.

“Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly” Aristotle

On the other hand, what’s unnatural about anything that what we do if we are just another manifestation of nature?

“A true revolutionary should be ready to perish in the process.” Maximilien Robespierre

I skipped that part myself.

“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.” Albert Camus

And, if he’s particularly lucky, the past and the present.

[b]Robert Musil

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.[/b]

Of course you all know my talent, don’t you? You just haven’t a clue about its objective.

[b]To the mind (Geist), good and evil, above and below, are not skeptical, relative concepts, but terms of a function, values that depend on the context they find themselves in…. It regards nothing as fixed, no personality, no order of things: because our knowledge may change from day to day, it regards nothing as binding: everything has the value it has only until the next act of creation, as a face changes with the words we are speaking to it.

And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere: on is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit. Ulrich thought of that body of facts and discoveries, growing almost by the hour, out of which the mind must peer today if it wishes to scrutinize any given problem closely. This body grows away from its inner life. Countless views, opinions, systems of ideas from every age and latitude, from all sorts of sick and sound, waking and dreaming brains run through it like thousands of small sensitive nerve strands, but the central nodal point tying them all together is missing. Man feels dangerously close to repeating the fate of those gigantic primeval species that perished because of their size; but he cannot stop himself.[/b]

To your credit though, at least some of you try.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

Just out of curiosty, what do you suppose the rest is?

At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: “Why do you keep on pushing me away?” The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him. How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

You know where I’ll go with this. Just as I know why you won’t.

Slowed down by a sense of hopelessness in all his decisions and movements, he suffered from bitter sadness, and his incapacity solidified into a pain that often sat like a nosebleed behind his forehead the moment he tried to make up his mind to do something.

You know, to be optimistic.

And after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from the outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity.

Let’s decide: How stupid is that?

[b]Jane Smiley

In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.[/b]

In fact, it didn’t worked for me either.

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.

I never made that connection myself.

She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”

Not much you can’t say that about.

We drove in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus loves me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known.

But then one day He doesn’t.

I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It’s always the lunch line in ninth grade.
Nakedness dreams are very common.
I suppose they are.

Just not anymore, he thought.

It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success.

It never seemed more clear to me. If only following it.

[b]Existential Comics

How to be a free thinker 101:

1. Stare of into space a lot.
2. Buy a bunch of books you don’t read.
3. Complain that you can’t make friends because you are too smart.
4. Have the same totally original thoughts as everyone else.
5. Talk over women.[/b]

Which one is actually true?

Philosopher’s biggest regrets:
Descartes: failure to explain how mind and body interact.
Russell: failure to ground math in logic.
Sartre: failure to reconcile existentialism with marxism.
Nietzsche: failure to get laid even a single time.

Which one is the least untrue?

Karl Marx was born on this day, 200 years ago. In those 200 years since, everything has been shit. Sorry Karl.

Really, really sorry.

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man Who Was Extremely Mad Online.

Let’s call him, say, a troll.

You see, a communist is someone who loves humanity but hates humans, whereas a capitalist is someone who brutally exploits his fellow man through violently enforced property relations which make the bulk of humanity labor to enrich the capitalist class or starve.

Let’s run this by Phyllo.

The high point of philosophy was Diogenes telling Alexander the Great to fuck off. It’s been all pretty much downhill since then.

Any truth to this?

[b]Nora Ephron

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.[/b]

Writing too.

When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.

You know, for a Yuppie.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.

They learned that from men.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

Flip a coin?

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Flip a coin?

I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn’t work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being.

Is there any other kind?

[b]Han Kang

Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.[/b]

Imagine actually believing this.

Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.

Grimly enough [for some] that might be an improvement.

I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t realised was there.

And, let’s face facts, it’s not inside everyone.

Conscience.
Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

If you’re follish enough to have one, he thought.

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

Perhaps even to stay this time.

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean…the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

Truth be told [and try as I might] I never really even came close.

[b]Max Tegmark

Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations—this didn’t go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600.[/b]

Let’s try to put this in perspective.

Getting more tech-savvy people into law schools and governments is probably a smart move for society.

Perhaps even into philosophy departments. Or would that be entirely irrelevant?

Again Einstein comes to the rescue with a loophole, this time from his general relativity theory, which says that gravity is caused not only by mass, but also by pressure. Since mass can’t be negative, the gravity from mass is always attractive. But positive pressure also causes attractive gravity, which means that negative pressure causes repulsive gravity!

Dasein once again being largely irrelevant. Mine anyway.

If you increase the number of space dimensions beyond three, there can be neither stable solar systems nor stable atoms. For instance, going to a four-dimensional space changes Newton’s inverse-square law for the gravitational force to an inverse-cube law, for which there are no stable orbits whatsoever.

Three dimensions work fine for me.

…some concepts such as symmetries retain their central status. In contrast, other concepts, such as initial conditions, complexity and randomness, get reinterpreted as mere illusions, existing only in the mind of the beholder and not in the external physical reality.

For example, out in the world that we actually live in.

Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.

Right, it all comes down to us.

[b]Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.[/b]

You might well imagine my own reaction here.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Not counting the times when it’s well worth it.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

What does that even mean though?

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Trust me: Don’t.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Not counting me of course.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Maybe, but what does he see now?