a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.[/b]

Assuming of course you are not misundstanding this.

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

As nearly as anyone can tell in all likelihood.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Don’t expect mine to ever reach it.

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.

Not unlike the least important thing for some.

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Right, and who gets to decide what that is?

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Fatherhood? Forget about it.

[b]Lidia Yuknavitch

I never felt crazy, I just felt gone away.[/b]

Me too. But crazy was always in the vicinity.

Sometimes saviors look different than you thought they would.

If you thought they existed at all.

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.

Or not of course.

It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.

And that’s just the opening credits.

We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.

Hurrah for us…

You can be a drunk. You can be a survivor of abuse. You can be an ex-con. You can be a homeless person. You can lose all your money or your job or a husband or a wife, or the worst thing imaginable, a child. You can lose your marbles. You can be standing inside your own failure, a small sad stone in your throat, and still you are beautiful, your story is worth hearing, because you–you rare and phenomenal misfit–are the only one in the world who can tell the story the way that only you can.

Providing there are others willing to listen.

[b]so sad today

wish i could wear a mask every day[/b]

Who’s going to stop you?

regret or it didn’t happen

That works for me.

i’m cynical because, like, look around

Fuckin’ A!

the miracle of life is annoying

When it isn’t downright infuriating.

ever just feel tired for your entire life

Yeah, so far.

i’m starting to think that feelings are just going to keep happening

If only until the day you die. Though maybe not even then.

[b]Lillian Hellman

Fashions in sin change. [/b]

Not unlike fashions in virtue.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night, matter not at all.

Clearly though with any number of exceptions.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

Let’s bring that down to earth.

Haven’t you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody’s fault?

Unless you count liberals.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

Let alone at the time it ought to.

Styles in wit change so.

So, just grin and bear it.

[b]John Fowles from The Collector

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it’s no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.[/b]

Let’s blame the ruling class.

You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don’t have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.

For most folks though, there’s reality.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating.

Mine? Well, it might be.

If there is a God he’s a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

If there is a God, what are the odds of that? But point taken.

But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you.

Not unlike not forgetting.

Some people would say you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.

Not counting all the times they are anything but.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.” Martin Heidegger[/b]

Here’s a wild thought: It’s both!

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camus

Absolutely free?
But, sure, point taken.

“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance” Albert Einstein

Arrogant ignorance and the fucking Kids.
A new thread maybe?

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Albert Einstein

Does He know that?

“Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said.” Voltaire

Fuck it, he thought, I’ll say them anyway.

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” Voltaire

Always important to bump this one.

[b]Colson Whitehead

He was a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the teeth.[/b]

Any motes here?

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It’s smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

And how pathetic is that?

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

Or, for some, at fifty.

In his mind, the business of existence was about minimizing consequences. The plague had raised the stakes, but he had been in training for this his whole life.

Hell, he thought, I’ll train if you will.

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but ‘created equal’ was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if ‘all men’ did not truly mean all men.

And it certainly didn’t include all women.

Well, imagine you are alone in a room. Are you the best, most special person in the room right now? Yes. That’s the gift of being alone.

If not the sheer genius.

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.[/b]

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Nietzsche.

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!

Or, at the very least, it pays the bills.

Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.

On the other hand, is anyone here planning to live forever?

Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism.

Somewhat exagerated perhaps. But, sure, maybe not.

I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.

That’s how it works in a world owned and operated by nihilists whose lives revolve almost entirely around “show me the money”. Civilization some call it.

For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here?”

Let’s just say you can take this too far.

[b]Mario Vargas Llosa

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.[/b]

Next up: Light philosophy.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

Providing of course you are not entangled 24/7 in just subsisting.

Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.

Not sure of the context here but maybe that doesn’t even matter.

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another’s rights.

In that case, what if we really do live in the best of all possible worlds?

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

Let’s pretend we know what that means.

The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.

Let’s pretend we know what that means.

[b]Nein

Ontology: What the fuck?[/b]

Teleology: Why the fuck?

Our fact-check is now complete. None were found.

Just another day in the Oval Office.

Sorry, October. Nothing surprised us.

Anything surprise you?

Everyone in favor of saving democracy, please raise your consciousness.

He’ll tell you when to stop. And where to in all likelihood.

Our discontent. It can’t wait for winter.

Still, this one will be brutal.

Monday afternoon. It cordially invites you to share in its tenuous equilibrium between quiet desperation and impotent rage.

And then well into the night.
Not unlike the next six.

[b]Dave Eggers

Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.[/b]

Me, I was willing to settle for a lot less.

Morning comes like a scream through a pinhole.

Does that make any sense at all?
Still, I like it.

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of dignity. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.

Okay, but, sooner or later, there it is.

I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Actually, everyone disappears period.

Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.

On the other hand, the parts stay broken.

They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.

That almost doesn’t make sense.

[b]so sad today

it’s not that everything is meaningless but…[/b]

…but it might be.

a positive feeling can fuck you up forever

I’ll let you know if I ever have one.

my most endearing quality is not talking to anyone

Next up: not listening to anyone.

sorry but the password must contain the euphoric moment before you cum and the depressing moment after

And [of course] no more than six characters.

things i fear:
the unknown
the known

Me too. But it’s the other way around.

recovering from being alone by being alone

Is there any other way?

[b]Robert Cormier

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.[/b]

On the other hand, with writing what does it really mean to get it right the first time?

It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Not unlike all the other organs, right?

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Beats not fine though.

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

“Impeach” for example.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?

That and fertilizer.

Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.

The deafening silence as some prefer.

[b]David Hockney

Perspective is a law of optics. The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.[/b]

An Eastern thing apparently.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That’s not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn’t it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

Nope, not yet.

People tend to forget that play is serious.

On the other hand, there’s probably a good reason for that.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It’s an interesting one and it’s a permanent one; there’s no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There’s no set rule.

On the other hand, how formal is that?

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.

Not counting mine of course.

There’s a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing, that thing, that thing?

Well, it’s either you or the immutable laws of matter.

[b]Werner Twertzog

Money and power do not bring happiness. Nothing brings happiness.[/b]

Let’s file this one [clearly] under “one man’s opinion”.

Death is the new 60.

Uh-oh.

No, I shall not “call Saul.”

And, with any luck, that will snowball into a revolution.

Your novel is stupid; your painting is banal; your obscurity is well deserved.

Of course that could be anyone of us.

I begin every day as if it is a day on which I shall be shot.

Or a day on which I shall shoot someone else instead.

Ladies, find a man who looks at you the way a deranged penguin looks at the open water and the feeding grounds, then decides to walk a thousand miles towards the mountains, facing certain death.

Why, the ladies might ask.

[b]Russell Banks

The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.[/b]

I know I’ll take my share.

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

How ridiculous is this, he asked.

They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn’t know the language or how anything here worked and hadn’t arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they’d forgotten it so they couldn’t be much company or help to each other either. They couldn’t even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls.

Not to be confused with Kids of course.

Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

I can’t help but wonder if he has ever actually been in a public library. In the ones around here folks seem no less isolated from each other.

When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you’ll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you’ll know.

Tell me about yours, I’ll tell you about mine.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It’s done all right on its own so far.

For some though not unlike the lies.

[b]David Sedaris

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. ‘Fire up the kettle,’ I told him. ‘Ol’-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.'[/b]

Some folks have all the luck.

Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly open that window, believing the creatures that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?

Now that’s a tough one.

I’ve always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

And we appreciate it, don’t we?

She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? "I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.”

A common occurence for some of us.

I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

And then they all end up on Dateline or 48 Hours.

I can’t seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

Me here, right?

[b]Existential Comics

The funny thing about people who smugly tell everyone that “nothing matters” is that they quite obviously value their own smugness.[/b]

I know that I do.

If you can’t trust faceless corporations who exist solely to enrich the shareholders to do what’s best for society, then who can you trust?

How about their enablers in Washington?

Postmodernism is the worst. One time when I was twelve postmodernism stole my bike and then laughed at me for thinking the word “bike” picked out a concrete object in the world.

Probably not a true story.

What philosophers dreamed of accomplishing:
500 BC: understanding everything
300: understanding virtue.
1100: understanding God.
1700: understanding even a single thing.
1950: understanding just how to say something that makes sense.
2018: I don’t know, to get my article published?

Impeach Trump?

Crony capitalism is when politicians work with rich capitalists to suppress dissent among the workers. Regular capitalism is when the police just beat up the dissenters directly.

Then back and forth they go.

What is philosophy? It’s when you think about something so much that you actually end up understanding it less.

Not that you’ll ever admit it.

[b]Dylan Thomas

And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.[/b]

Wit. Sometimes it’s all you need.

Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.

Good god, imagine thinking that way about philosophy.

Some people react physically to the magic of poetry, to the moments, that is, of authentic revelation, of the communication, the sharing, at its highest level…A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

A good poem. That’s always the catch of course.

Our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.

No one really knows if this is true however.

I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me.

Either that or they hold me.

Youth calls to age across the tired years: What have you found, he cries, what have you sought?
What have you found, age answers through his tears, What have you sought.

And then it’s turtles all the way down.

[b]Elena Ferrante

Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.[/b]

Up in the clouds for example.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

Not unlike the circle of a full day.

…she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

He thought: That’s what I miss the most.

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.

Provided of course you have that option.

Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

Provided of course they have that option.

At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

And now this: Plebs For Trump!