a thread for mundane ironists

[b]John Cage

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. [/b]

Or three if you count the intellectual contraptions you find here.

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

In other words, whatever that means.

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

You know, among other things.

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

Oh, sure, that’ll make them go away.

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.

Our Indians or theirs, he wondered.

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

So, what are the odds it’s a true story?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]

My guess: Man is still a mystery. Woman too.

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Either that or, here, have a “condition”.

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Hannah Arendt

Unless of course it’s a little [or a lot] of both.

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Unless of course it isn’t.

"Don’t you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?“ Søren Kierkegaard

Yo, dasein!

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nope, never have. You know, yet.

[b]Terry Eagleton

Americans use the word “dream” as often as psychoanalysts do.[/b]

Should that concern us?

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

As well it should must be.

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

So, what’s that make the Old Testament?

The most compelling confirmation of Marx’s theory of history is late capitalist society.

Or, far more likely, the least compelling.

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.

Cheek by jowl, he utterly disagreed.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

What’s that make us then?

[b]Delia Owens

Kya wondered who started using the word cell instead of cage.[/b]

Anyone here know?

If only she could join in, belong to them. Kya knew it wasn’t so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd.

I skipped that part myself.

The Barkley Cove graveyard trailed off under tunnels of dark oaks. Spanish moss hung in long curtains, creating cavelike sanctuaries for old tombstones - the remains of a family here, a loner there, in no order at all. Fingers of gnarled roots had torn and twisted gravestones into hunched and nameless forms. Markers of death all weathered into nubbins by elements of life.

My kind of oblivion, he thought.

I guess some things can’t be explained, only forgiven or not. I don’t know the answer. Maybe there isn’t one.

Let’s find it. You know, finally.

Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was…

And what will never be.

She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.

Worse [sometimes]: the ones that do.

[b]Karl Kraus

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider’s web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.[/b]

No, really, I get this.

If children had been told that they could not blow their noses, this alone would make adults blush.

No, really, I get this.

Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.

The rest as they say is history.

I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment to acquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.

This reminds me of the things some here take pride in.

I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.

That’s something to aim for here.

Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

Or, as the salesmen insist, tits.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.” Jorge Luis Borges[/b]

Is this defensible?

“My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.” Vladimir Nabokov

He means death metal of course.
Or rap?

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.” Vladimir Nabokov

See, I told you.

“My criticism of Hegel’s procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.” Alfred North Whitehead

You know, as Marx did.
Well, as a materialist.

“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Let’s explain that to the Kids here.

“Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.” Rudolf Carnap

Yes, but only if you’re lucky.

[b]Wim Wenders

My advice is, don’t spend money on therapy. Spend it in a record store.[/b]

Remember them?

The more opinions you have, the less you see.

Here? The blind leading the blind. Right, Kids?

I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things.

Until it becomes indistinguishable from lies.

Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed.

Or reinforce the conception that things are shit and can never be changed.

Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn’t understand the first thing about either one.

Let’s explain what that means.

The beautiful image today means nothing. It’s worth shit. In fact, it’s almost as if it has the opposite effect, because you’re just like everything else out there.

So, does that bother you?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” Fyodor Dostoevsky[/b]

Believe it or not however there are exceptions.

"Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.” Rudolf Carnap

Name that tune.

“Despite their pretensions, all of them, the “Fourth International,” “anarchists”, and “ultra-leftists,” are but historical memories, minute scabs on the wounds of the working class, destined to be shed as the new skin readies itself in the depths of its tissues.” Cornelius Castoriadis

Tell that to Donald Trump.

"Revolution does not mean torrents of blood, the taking of the Winter Palace, and so on. Revolution means a radical transformation of society’s institutions. In this sense, I certainly am a revolutionary.” Cornelius Castoriadis

Me too. Once. And look at the world today.

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ll bet that’s still true.

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.” Philip Roth

On the other hand, does that?

[b]Martha Graham

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.[/b]

Why do people say things like this, he wondered.

Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.

Next up: Some women.

What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.

Unless, of course, they either do or do not act on it.

People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.

Mystical enough for you?

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

Biological imperatives as it were.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

And philosophers?

[b]Stefan Zweig

Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?[/b]

Ignorance is bliss?

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd … It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

So, is this true? And how about checkers?

…for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

If he does say so himself.

Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.

So, how fateful was yours?

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.

He doesn’t take the words right out of my mouth.

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

You come to understand this a decade at a time.

[b]Werner Twertzog

If only the coronavirus could be killed by automatic weapons in elementary schools.[/b]

Only one way to find out.

The judgment of history does not bring back the dead.

You know, literally.

History does not repeat itself, but cliches do, by definition.

Gotta love those definitions!

Never admonish a despot about lies and cruelty, for they are the rewards of power.

If only [so far] historically.

I perform my own stunts. And I am my own ancestor.

Can you say that?

No, Chief Brody,
We do not need “A bigger boat.”
We need, instead,
A more comprehensive
Eschatology.

A bigger soul in other words.

[b]Eva Green

Most of the women in film are there to be beautiful to the man.[/b]

Well, none of that here thank god.

I’ve always felt a bit weird, very shy.

No, we don’t expect you to understand.

I think British men build up the idea of us French girls having some magic extra sex appeal so much, they lose their heads. I can’t really understand the whole thing - but it makes me laugh. It’s such a cliche to think all French girls are well dressed, elegant, sophisticated and sexy. Some are utter slobs, I promise you that.

That’s good to know, right?

I didn’t know about the Bond girl thing. I was approached very quickly, boom, boom, boom, it happened.

Reality. Not much you can do about that.

I’m worried because of my mother, she’s going to see my performance and she’s quite hard. She’s going to see me naked. And my Dad, woah. Yeah, they’re going to see me like a woman, you know?

Reality. Not much you can do about that.

At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that’s very complex, or human.

I’d hoped she’d say that.

[b]Mikhail Baryshnikov

The problem is not making up the steps but deciding which ones to keep.[/b]

Hey, like we do with words!
Well, some of us.

Your body actually reminds you about your age and your injuries – the body has a stronger memory than your mind.

Among other things [here and now]: “no shit”.

I am not the first straight dancer or the last.

Probably true, isn’t it?

I cannot stand authority.

And he is still around not to.

A country like Belgium, or socialist countries in central Europe spend more money on art education than the United States, which is a really puzzling thought.

Let’s deconstruct this. You know, if it’s still true.

I don’t drink milk, and I don’t eat bread, pasta or rice. But I eat a lot of meat, chicken, fish and salads.

So, what does this explain?

[b]Existential Comics

Conservative politicians are already talking about banning TikTok of all things, because it is “controlled” by China. Imagine when a billion Chinese nationals are on every website defending their government. Free speech in America means only our propaganda is allowed to exist.[/b]

So, is this worth resolving?

“A lot of bad things happened in the early years of the Soviet Union, so we should never try communism again.” — people from a capitalist country that was founded on genocide and slavery.

So, is worth resolving?

Watch out, the far left is indoctrinating our youth with radical ideas such as “actually, it’s bad for people to die because they can’t afford health insurance” and “what if a handful of billionaires didn’t control everything?”

On the other hand, the class struggle…it’s back: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=195848&start=25

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the fact that people were mean to you on the internet does not constitute a crisis in the principle of free speech.

Except here of course.

Most people’s lives would change a lot more dramatically if they could vote for who their boss is, rather than vote for who goes to Washington.

Hey, how about here?!

Ever wanted to give up all your possessions and live the life of simplicity, like Thoreau?
Well, my brother did just that. Ten years ago. And he still is, living off as little as $3000 a year.

Uh, good for him?

[b]Robert Musil

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.[/b]

You wouldn’t think so, would you?
Must be an intellectual thing.

… the novel is called upon like no other art form to incorporate the intellectual content of an age.

On the other hand, seen the best seller lists of late?

For only fools, fanatics, and mental cases can stand living at the highest pitch of soul; a sane person must be content with declaring that life would not be worth living without a spark of that mysterious fire.

How about this: I’ll help you find your soul if you’ll help me find mine.

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.

Going back, say, thousands of years.

… there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.

Not to mention the other way around.

His answers were quite often like that. When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis. When she mentioned love, he responded with the statistical curve that indicates the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate. When she spoke of the great figures in art, he traced the chain of borrowings that links these figures to one another.

That Mars/Venus thing again.

[b]John Sayles

I’ve always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.[/b]

What’s it mean today? Also, what should it mean?

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

You know, if only down through the ages.

I don’t have a social agenda. I just don’t choose to ignore what’s in front of me.

In other words, a political agenda.

The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you’re playing a character who changes within the movie, you’ve got to do that, but you’ve got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that’s really, really tough.

Wow, he thought, I guess that’s true.

We just said, ‘Okay, you’re in the movie. Bring what you would bring for a three-day weekend and I hope you like the way you look in it because once you’re on camera, that’s your wardrobe.’ But it worked; it worked and we were very surprised.

Return of the Secaucus 7, I’m guessing. As opposed to, say Eight Men Out.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don’t have an acting agent. I’m in the book.

Let’s work for scale here.

[b]Doth

What you do at night is between you & your anxiety[/b]

Yeah, it would have to be that way.

I respect the moon because it controls two of our most precious elements, oceans and wolves.

Well, the moon and…the stars?

Be the reason why she speaks a dead language in bed.

You know, other than Latin.

My sexual orientation is an overgrown greenhouse on a haunted estate during a thunderstorm.

Yo, LGBT!

Sex is cool but have you ever laid down in a graveyard just for practice.

Actually, no, not yet.

Be the reason why the lights flicker when you enter a room.

Do the lights flicker here when I post?

[b]John Cage

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.[/b]

Not unlike ours here.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?

Let’s move on…

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

Next up: his suspenders.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.

What some call, “the brute facticity of life”.

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.

Well, maybe later.

When we separate music from life we get is art.

Ever try that with philosophy?

[b]Terry Eagleton

It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?[/b]

The rest is, among other things, history.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

Tough one, eh?

It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word ‘evil’ as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.

He wondered: What if it goes even deeper than that?

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

My guess: there’s a reason for that.

There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

There also seems to be something that does.

Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.

Really, don’t get me started.

[b]God

Which is more oppressive to the human breath and spirit: a mask on the mouth or a knee on the neck? There’s a right answer here.[/b]

You know, if God’s a liberal.

…then Adam and Eve had kids. And their kids fucked each other and had kids. And those fucked each other and had kids. And you are the result.

Comments, anyone?

None of this makes any sense, it really doesn’t.

That can’t be good.

I’m no Hindu, but they have a concept called karma that I’ve really started getting into.

He’s no Buddhist either.

Once you die that’s it.

Now do you believe it?

The President of the United States is a fucking piece of shit.

Now do you believe it?