a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.[/b]

Or, where you live, around the puddle.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

Of course he’s just paraphrasing me.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

Well, he was a poet after all.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Less so here though.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

You know, other than nothing at all.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Trust me: there’s no end to it once you’re there. Well, not until the next one.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.[/b]

Ontologically as it were.

Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything—from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Politics in other wrods.

One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade.

That’ll do it.

I was an outsider who seemed more interested in attacking what was being taught than learning from it.

That’s me here, right? But never you.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.

Cue Uncle Porky.
Nope, don’t ask.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right or to left. I’ve discovered that. But this courage didn’t arise from any idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit, and there was nothing noble about it.

No, this time, really think about it.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.” Ayn Rand[/b]

Of course, recall the fate of those who dared to choose other than as she did.

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” Ayn Rand

Talk about an intellectual contraption! Though, sure, that’s the reality alright. But: her reality or yours?

“Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.” Victor Hugo

My guess: An enormously complex, problematic coalition and collision of both.

“We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.” Voltaire

Hmm, where do you suppose he is going with this?

"Historians are not by and large inclined to supernatural explanations, but they are addicted to a near equivalent - ‘inevitability’.” Eric Ives

So long as it doesn’t repeat itself.

[b]Kate Millett

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. [/b]

Sniggering for example.

I believe there’s a killer in all of us. I know there’s one inside me. When you know the killer in you and you know also that you do not want to kill, you have to set yourself upon a course of learning. Not to kill that killer then, but to control it.

Or not of course.

The whole bloody system is sick: the very notion of leadership, a balloon with a face painted upon it, elected and inflated by media’s diabolic need to reduce ideas to personalities.

Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

My sister said, You’re making it hard for all us housewives in Nebraska.

I wonder how that turned out.

With the first act of cruelty committed in the name of revolution, with the first murder, with the first purge and execution, we have lost the revolution.

In other words, a revolution in la la land.

No one should be adored, it’s fundamentally immoral.

Tell that to this guy: youtu.be/4D2qcbu26gs

[b]Vladimir Putin

I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work. [/b]

As though autocrats have to be.

I believe that meetings at the top level in a relatively informal atmosphere are always useful, and there is reason to hope that we will make progress in resolving the matters we will be considering.

Hint, hint…

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

In other words, from “election” to “election”.

We didn’t have any relationship at all with Trump.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist’s job is very interesting.

Of course journalists don’t have an army of thugs at their disposal.

The point is that in any country, including the United States, maybe in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.

Let’s call it crony capitalism. Or, in Russia, state capitalism.

[b]Philosopohy Tweets

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein[/b]

Like there’s any other kind.

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems” Epictetus

Well, that’s certainly debatable.

“Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.” Euripides

True, but do you have the strength to then follow through?

“Habit to us is given from above: it is a substitute for happiness.” Alexander Pushkin

I know that mine is.

“Only he who already understands can listen.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.” Martin Heidegger

He’ll need a context of course.

[b]Norman Mailer

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words. [/b]

In that case, any writers here?

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn’t always enough.

In that case, any men here?

Dying can’t be all that difficult—up to now everyone has managed to do it.

Technically as it were.

I think the internet is the greatest waste of time since masturbation was discovered.

Which part is more idiotic? You know, if either of them are.

The greater the power of any subjective state, the more total is a Romantic’s assumption that everyone understands exactly what he is about to do, therefore waste not a moment by stopping to tell them.

And, with the subjunctive state, double it. At least.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way.

On the other hand, we don’t invent distractions for nothing.

[b]Douglas Adams

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind.[/b]

That even happens here, right Kids?

Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.

Or, sure, with no irony at all.

It seemed to me, said Wonko the Sane,'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.

In French and Spanish too.

Oh dear, says God, I hadn’t thought of that, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

He was discussing dasein with me of course.

He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.

What, no philosophy?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Fuckin’ A, he thought.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Nothing in nature is by chance… Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.” Baruch Spinoza[/b]

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is only as it ever could have been.

“Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” Baruch Spinoza

Okay, but how far might this be taken if not to the conclusion that everything is determined.

“I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.” Baruch Spinoza

Not that he could have ever done otherwise.

“Dearer to me than a host of base truths is the illusion that exalts.” Alexander Pushkin

You get this or you don’t.

“… Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” Max Weber

And a man of philosophy?

“Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.” Rene Descartes

A hell of a lot more.

[b]Brent Weeks

To be a man is to bring together that which you should be and that which you are. Deception is darkness.[/b]

[i]

Of course that’s just me.[/i]

I am the stupidest person I have ever met.

In that case, what’s that make you?

Delayed obedience is really disobedience.

We’ll need any number of contexts here.

It wasn’t a great question, but the real questions were so big that Kylar didn’t even know how ask them.

Enough said?

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you’re going to believe, but how you’re going to believe.

You do get the difference, right?

An oath you only keep when it’s convenient isn’t an oath at all.

Isn’t that all of them though?

[b]Jenny Offill

She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts.[/b]

Anyone here do that?

Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.

That makes [at least] two of us.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Fortunately [or unfortunately] I’m not.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

Next up: philosophy monsters.
A double entendre of course.

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

Another fucking pragmatist?

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain?

Sure, maybe.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

"What is this much repeated phrase ‘active citizen’ supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille.” Camille Desmoulins[/b]

Now they vote for Bernie.

“I was not born to amuse the Tsars.” Alexander Pushkin

So, what’s the equivalent of that today?

“The believer is happy. The doubter is wise.” Edgar Allan Poe

It would have to be one or the other, wouldn’t it?

"Moral maxims are surprisingly useful on occasions when we can invent little else to justify our actions.” Alexander Pushkin

What say you to that, Mr. Objectivist?

“Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more.” Maximilien Robespierre

Like that has anything at all to do with our interactions in the real world.

"In science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere.” Rudolf Carnap

There is, however, “deeper”.

[b]Enrico Fermi

Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown” followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.[/b]

Let’s not go to what I’m feeling.

Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Yeah, I used to believe that once myself.

…on what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence.

Politics? You know, like everything else.

Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.

Just out of curiosity, how many particles are there now?

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

I’d go lower myself.

Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.

Good to know, right?

[b]Eugenio Montale

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready. [/b]

And, nowadays, fuck meter and rhyme.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

What others [hint, hint] judge to be an optimist.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

In fact by now there is almost nothing that art isn’t.

The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men; and it is the only one that rules the world.

Well, not counting us of course.

Holidays have no pity.

And some can be downright brutal.

Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

For example, in our own pop culture, they are merely consumed.

[b]Nein

Me? I blame Twitter. And late capitalism. But mainly the poets.[/b]

And, sure, the occasional philosopher.

I’m just here for the pre-traumatic stress.

And, these days, it’s everywhere.

A gentle reminder to get a selfie of your next shark attack.

Or a selfie of you getting a selfie of a shark attack.

Yes, the week is ending. But we regret to inform you that everything else is likely to continue.

There is an expiration date however.

Friday. Everybody’s favorite end of history.

Well, maybe next Friday.

A gentle reminder. From page 1,064 of War and Peace.
“Once admit that human life can be guided by reason, and all possibility of life is annihilated.”

Let’s explain that to the Kids.

[b]Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.[/b]

With his cock?

One must read poetry with one’s nerves.

How’s that working out for you?

…in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

I know that mine does did.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception… If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough… But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

The poetosopher!

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

If they would come down out of the clouds.

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

This sounds like something we should actually understand.

[b]Robert M. Pirsig

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.[/b]

But not here, right?

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments.

You know, in the either/or world.

Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.

You know, in the is/ought world.

The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that.

Anyone here always flunking?

But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know a little and say a lot.

Let alone ever and always repeating yourself, right?

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

So, does this settle it?

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

Dostoyevsky:

1. Everything is very bad.
2. Only 1000 pages to find out why.
3. Only 1200 more pages to find out why it’ll be worse.[/b]

Unless, of course, you die first.

“You have the right to remain silent” - me, to my conscience.

You know, if you’ve got one.

Are you there, René? It’s me, not a pipe.

The other Rene.

There’s hardly anything more present than the ghosts from your past.

And don’t exclude your future.

The years 2016-2020 will be remembered as the American dream brought to you by Russian reality.

Next up: the plague.

February is as useless and annoying as that Uber driver circling around your location and suddenly cancelling the ride.

A little help with this one, please.

[b]Robin Morgan

My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.[/b]

Never went that far myself.

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.

Anyone here ever attempt either one?

I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

I was once married to a reasonable facsimile.

We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.

Is that still around?

Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.

And look at us now.

The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women’s oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.

Next up: race and class and then all the rest.

[b]Martin Rees

In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. [/b]

Is this brilliant more or less than it’s idotic?

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we’re the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

Either way, sooner or later, we’re on our way back to it.

It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Let’s file this one under, “an educated guess”.

The physicist is like someone who’s watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that’s an inexhaustible one I’m sure.

You know, going all the way back to…

I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, “I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder.”

So, really true?

An insect is more complex than a star and is a far greater challenge to understand.

So, really true?