a thread for mundane ironists

[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?

[b]Neil Gaiman

Death: Mostly they aren’t too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear.
Morpheus: And I am far more terrible than you, sister.[/b]

Note to Morpheus: Define “terrible”.

You got to understand the God thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize. He paused. And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.

He means their God of course.

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

Has anyone actually documented this? Or filmed and put it on youtube?

Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

If only [in the end] to be replaced by others. For example, theirs and not yours.

Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?

And that’s before we get to eternal return. Or just plain old oblivion.

Young man, he said, understand this: there are two Londons. There’s London Above―that’s where you lived―and then there’s London Below―the Underside―inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world.

Okay, but what fucking city isn’t that applicable to?

[b]The Dead Author

Philosophy is thinking you’ve left the cave when you’re still inside and everyone else is outside having fun.[/b]

In other words, what they call fun.

The paradox of death is that it stresses you out while making whatever you do seem meaningless.

And, for some of us, the paradox of life too.

Salvador Dalí was born 114 years ago today, if you still believe in linear time.

Or in linear oblivion.

History teaches that you can’t change the world, psychology that you can’t change your life, and philosophy that you should try anway.

And, even more incredibly, succeed.
For example, in your head.

Shamelessness is the postmodern form of courage.

And there’s no stopping them now.

Neoliberalism is when you’re asked to be flexible in everything you do, except when it comes to imagining the world.

That’s the old neoliberalism of course.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.[/b]

Nope, never had a luminous point in my life, he thought.

There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.

I think I know what he means. I just can’t explain it.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

We’ll need a context of course.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

We’ll need a context of course.

For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

I know bullshit when I hear it.

Thank Heaven! The crisis
The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last
and the fever called ‘‘Living’’ is conquered at last.

Come on, he thought, you don’t conquer it, it conquers you.

[b]Jeff VanderMeer

I’m not an answer, she said. I’m a question. She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.[/b]

And here we are with so much at stake in finding that out.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

But not your walls, right Mr. Objectivist?

It’s not superstition, she said. They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools. It is superstition, she admitted. But it might be true.

Cue, among other things, the proverbial kernal of truth.

If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.

Or, so much more to the point, tired of you.

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

More or less than you are willing.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.

From a distance preferably.

[b]tiny nietzsche

painfully unaware[/b]

You wouldn’t think so, would you?

reach out, fuckface

So, if you were a fuckface, would you?

I trust my lying eyes.

Connected no doubt to his lying brain.

I hope I get killed by a tree.

A huge motherfucking redwood.

the ocean doesn’t know your name

Anywhere here expect it to?

probably fuck up again later

Probably let you.

[b]Robert Crumb

The comics are where all the crazy subconscious stuff comes out.[/b]

Not that you’ll ever know it.

The work itself is what motivates me. I like my own stuff, you know? I like the way it looks. I do it to please myself first.

Now that’s one lucky son of a bitch.

I still can’t spend a lot of money on records at collector prices. There’s something in me that just won’t allow me to do that. But I will trade my artwork, which I know is worth thousands of dollars.

Go figure?

Throwaway pens are no good - I never liked them. I’ve tried them all.

Must be a cartoonist thing.

They can buy talent. You can’t buy it for yourself, but you can buy other people’s talent to serve your purposes. And once an artist does that, he becomes like a plaything of the rich.

And worst of all [for me] are the fucking celebrities who shill for corporate bucks.

Killing yourself is a major commitment, it takes a kind of courage. Most people just lead lives of cowardly desperation. It’s kinda half suicide where you just dull yourself with substances.

If only I could, he thought.

[b]so sad today

the dopamine giveth and the dopamine taketh away[/b]

I wonder if mine does that.

it doesn’t matter that yesterday i felt like i was dying and didn’t die, today i’m definitely dying

You can go on like this for years.

i’m annoyed, therefore i am

Not to be confused with I’m pissed off.

[b]my daily affirmations:

  1. uh oh
  2. oh shit
  3. oh fuck
  4. hell no[/b]

Aren’t they everyone’s?

me: can i live?
anxiety: i don’t know, can you?

Let’s file this one under, “touché”.

i’m a self-made mess

And loving it, he thought.

[b]Carl Jung

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.[/b]

Let’s swap stories.

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.

Sure, if this makes sense to you, explain why.

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.

A far cry from, among other things, Plato’s Republic. Not to mention The Communist Manifesto.

Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment, but will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on. Since then it will have been clearly proved that this man is incapable of enduring beyond things, men, and thoughts, and they will hence become his master and he will become their fool, since he cannot be without them, not until even his soul has become a fruitful field. Also he whose soul is a garden, needs things, men, and thoughts, but he is their friend and not their slave and fool.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how close is this to the real world? Your own, for example.

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…

Ultimately these observations go nowhere fast.

What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.

And, for some, that’s practically everything.

[b]Edward St. Aubyn

People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.[/b]

I know that I don’t.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it’s cherished.

Applicable to everyone of course.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

Let’s count ours up.

Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up… They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.

Yes, it does get grueling.

The best way to contradict him is to let him talk.

Repetitiously as it were.

The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience.

Convinced?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“The enjoyment itself is not in the thing we enjoy, but the idea of it.” Soren Kierkegaard[/b]

Among other things, I beg to differ.

“The more one thinks about it objectively, there is less.” Soren Kierkegaard

We’ll have to know what it is first of course.

“Every revolution has its corollary the massacre of the innocents.” Charles Baudelaire

Well, surely all the ones so far.

“To know oneself, one should assert oneself.” Albert Camus

If only to discover how others know you.

“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it." Albert Camus

Wow, there must be hundreds of them that stray from mine. And that’s just here.

“You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Albert Camus

Come on, one way or another, you are either living or you’re not.

[b]Meg Wolitzer

You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.[/b]

Even if you never really were.

It’s funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.

Hasn’t happened yet but point taken.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

Hasn’t happened yet but point taken.

You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Is that even possible?

…fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it’s caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts.

I’ll just assume that this is made up.

You’re telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone’s an artist? But here’s the thing: if everyone’s an artist, then no one is.

Or: You’re telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone’s a philosopher? But here’s the thing: if everyone’s a philosopher, then no one is.

[b]Jim Carroll

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.[/b]

You know, if we’re listening.

I’ll Die For Your Sins If You Live For mine.

Sounds like a dopey song lyric, doesn’t it?

That, I realized, is the great beauty of dreams: the devil may inevitably find a way to jerk you off, but you can always wake up before he makes you cum.

Never even came close in fact. But that’s just me.

You see, you just don’t know
I’m here to give you my heart
And you want some fashion show

What did he expect in the world today?

Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer’s lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.

As God meant it to be.

On a whim, he stopped and bought a watch from a sidewalk vendor. Normally, Billy could not abide keeping time, especially when it was attached to one’s body. Time was like a relentlessly needy lapdog one had to haul around. It barked too much and had no sense of loyalty.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing Stephen Hawkings

[b]tiny nietzsche

we should get together sometime and murder me[/b]

Or, sure, you.

me: existential dread
the future: hey

And getting heyer all the time.

me: I feel empty inside
doktor: have you tried tacos?

Better still: Tacos with heroin.

damn girl are you postmodernism because I doubt it

Sorry, she doubts it too.

thinking is what got me in to this mess

Don’t you just hate that?

just say no to guns

Or, in North Korea, nukes.

[b]Harvey Pekar

Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.[/b]

So, let’s make it pretty simple.

It makes you feel good to know that there’s other people afflicted like you.

Of course they feel the same way about us.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

In other words, anything here being some things.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

In other words, aside from those godawful fucking super heroes.

There was a survey done a few years ago that affected me greatly. it was discovered that intelligent people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins.

Let’s poll all the stupid people here.

What kind of a day was it? A day like all others, that alters and illuminates our times. And you were there.

Right, rub it in.

[b]Tom Stoppard

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it’s the cage that makes the animal bad.[/b]

Come on, isn’t it really too close to call?

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Sometimes though you have to shift theirs.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

0f course that narrows it down to anything.

Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

I do question this though.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

If need be, borrow some of mine.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over…Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…

We just can’t actually know this for sure.

[b]D.H. Lawrence

For even satire is a form of sympathy.[/b]

My guess: With clear exceptions.

She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.

For some [back then] pornography.

If you admit a unison, you forfeit all the possibilities of chaos…Love is a direction which excludes all other directions. It is a freedom together, if you like.

Or, at any rate, the illusion of love.

You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition…You’ve got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being.

So, can anyone here illustrate this particular text?

Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.

And right around the corner from that is “the people”. Or “society”.

He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

You know, for a few hours.

You-'ve got to learn not to be before coming to be , and who are the exceptions ?

Those who mever been.

[b]so sad today

me: why do you want me dead?
my mind: it just seems so peaceful[/b]

True. But there’s all that other stuff.

can you feel my desperation through the internet

Or, to put it another way: How can you not?

when people say “love yourself” what the fuck, specifically, does that mean?

Or, come on, even generally.

it’s weird that some people aren’t constantly trying to escape themselves

And some aren’t even assholes.

my feelings are never not hurt

See if you can spot the double negative.

people’s natural beauty really hurts my feelings

Not only that but bellowing “fuck them!” doesn’t really help.

Thanks for the contribution. Sort of.