a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

Last night, again, a dream:
Atop a mountain peak, the abyss all around growing because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper.
So needle-sharp, I will be impaled through the one foot on which I’m balanced.
Lightning flashes in the background.
(A cartoon, which I don’t even remember liking: Rocky and Bullwinkle.)
My ‘philosophy’ self-caricatures.
An averted pregnancy, a menses, a masturbation.
What does it have to do with health or even resignation?
A pussy exudation: soak it up.
I am hardly an existentialist.
I am a bandage, a sanitary napkin ...because the peak I stand on keeps getting sharper, sharper.

Who is to say what being an existentialist is before the abyss? Though some might conclude that Rocky and Bullwinkle came close. As for sanitary napkins there are retail establishments now that never run out of them.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno:

Epistemic states oscillate between prejudice and confusion.
All else is spite.

Yeah, I guess that's logical. Not counting my own such states of course.

Pain and beauty.
The beginning and end of the Goldberg Variations and Gould’s humming, barely audible on these so soft endpieces.
Struck dumb from pain, a whole philosophy is developed, from the first stirrings of doubt through despair to resignation.
Truth having never made an appearance.
The history of philosophy in 33 chapters.

Indeed, and the film biography of Glenn Gould's life was completed in 32 chapters.

For the record.

Glenn Gould:

"At live concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian."

"Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer."

"I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

"If there’s any excuse at all for making a record, it’s to do it differently, to approach the work from a totally recreative point of view … to perform this particular work as it has never been heard before. And if one can’t do that, I would say, abandon it, forget about it, move on to something else."

"In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. … The audience would be the artist and their life would be art."

"Mozart died too late rather than too soon."

"We do not play the piano with our fingers but with our mind."

"'Strawberry Fields Forever' suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band."

Are any of these things true?

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

To speak the truth is to hum.
(How we do it in the West; maybe, sometimes, we also whistle.)

Yes, but you can be certain that someone will insist you are humming it the wrong way. Or that whistling is always preferable to humming.

I have to speak this way, do you understand?
Not sure why I embroil my personal defense with ours before an empty bench, as though it were some final ‘hope for humanity’.

No, I do not understand. But then, that's the point, right? We circle the words over and again but there really is no place to actually land.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

I could tell you how uncomfortable I am with the shape of my nose.
If you saw it, you would respond considerately, saying perhaps that most people have awkward noses, and you would miss my point.
Where is their discomfort?
Even people with the most perfect noses are uncomfortable with them, you were going to say?
"What discomfort? Spare me, no, you mean just this nose, your nose, your personal sore spot, is what makes you an Kierkegaardian ‘individual’, with a skin the color of no other, a one-person race, and you a racist.
Yes? This is what you tried to mean, but didn’t: you were not up to meaning anything.
What I am going to say to you is the truth.
(Please hold back your knowing smile for the moment.)
Your nose has nothing to do with anything.
You are enchanted with jealousy, other people’s noses, notwithstanding.
If you had no nose, your ploy would be different but your snot the same, only more accessible.
Then, your rhymes could come to rest on your physical deformity.
As it is, your deformity is invisible.
I could discourse forever on the nature of this invisibility.
You are so patent, such a perfect backdrop to everything that happens around you that the most inconsequential biographical or material fact about you will loom smaller than your impossibly microscopic ego.
You began by saying you had to speak this way, but you lie.
Your speech is hardly within the range of hearing, let alone distinguished by some special quality.
The casual assertion of godliness only clinches the matter: carry on, call yourself ‘God’..."

Well, if you reduce reactions down to the individual, you sink to the bottom of an existential morass that is [fortunately or unfortunately] incalcuable. And just as snot is linked to the nose so its equivalent can be linked to practically everything else. And certainly to Gods.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

From under her skirts, the boy makes fun of the woman’s indignation.
A sucker for innocence, whose true enemy has a body covered in down and a voice of a still purer soprano.

The boy becomes the man becomes the fucking predator.

But men are truly disgusting creatures, one can hardly blame her.
But, again, disgust is connected with power and to be so invested is to have maggots teeming in the soul.

I would say, "Speak for yourself!", but there is always the possibility that he speaks for others. Me, for instance.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno:

I met Jesus yesterday on the street.
But for the fact that I knew it was him, I never would have guessed it.
He smiled, walked past, knew I had recognized him.
I saw Jesus, my son.

You and a few hundred million others. Though not necessarily on the street.

Marx and Smith and the division of wealth.
Contemporary therapeutic psychology contends with a similar distributive problem in the concept of ‘empowerment’.
Self-interest is as much a canon as altruism, as much an excuse, and as deadly.
I have never been able to ally myself with a scheme for the division of wealth.
Psychic, no less than economic, victims of abuse are too apt to adopt their oppressors’ standards.
I refuse all solutions, and so it appears I support all sides, or none.

But that does not change the fact that all of us have to accommodate ourselves to someone's rendition of all this. Someone will have the power to enforce a particular distribution of wealth. Whether economic or psychological.

In living our lives we don't really have the option of reaching the soundest conclusions. If only because, perhaps, there aren't any.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

A saying among logicians, "one man’s reductio is another’s modus ponens": having reduced an opponent’s argument to absurdity, the temptation to swivel to an alternative conclusion.
Against this psychological bent in logic I struggle.
A reductio leaves us with ashes.
The Phoenix-like inferences, you see rise, are moist apparitions, tear-ghosts, every bit beyond your will as the estimious sentiments evoked at a proof’s finality: quod erat demonstratum.
At the top of the mountain, over the grated pit, the vulture-logician picks corpses clean.
When the pieces come white and slip through the grate of the Tower of Silence, I enter to cart them away and build a cage with them, which one day, when large enough, will house the moist apparitions in a sort of zoo for the edification of the plain and simple person, the unborn, and for the kind eyes of God.

Once you come face to face with the reality that, one by one, we are all reduced to ashes speculations of this sort become all the more pressing...or all the more absurd.

Let the vulture-logicians examine their knowledge of this when the bugs are picking their corpses clean.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

The age of therapy—inaugurated by Freud, etiologically dead-ended by Wittgenstein, et al., early heralded by Hume and maybe Pyrrho, vermiculated by Foucault, Derrida, and friends, (why stop here? why not include everyone in the history of Western literature and philosophy since Gilgamesh and Enkidu?)—is soon to be superceded—not for lack of imagination on anyone’s part—by an age of spite, resentment, by an age in which a surfeit of pride makes the sick hold their heads up high and the cured higher still and the-never-having-been-afflicted able to see to the ends of Alexander’s estate.
Finally, by an age of old age.

Indeed

Mr Bernstein:

Old age. It's the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don't look forward to being cured of.

Not counting of course all the millions of folks that do.
[I get closer everyday]
Is there a philosophy of dying?
Or does it still all come down to God or oblivion?

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

This knowing about everyone but ourselves is what is meant being a ‘social animal’.
We are best groomed by others... It strikes me as sad.
I am not made to feel closeness, or I feel that closeness as suffocation.
Your ambition to see my condition eased...well, do you see what I mean?
Wittgenstein spoke of the experience of feeling "safe" as though it were some profound discovery at the bottom of ethics, as indeed it is, despite what we are asked to believe.
But for me, it is too quickly followed, not with the accepted emotional valence, not with warmth, instead with an extreme breath-sucking heat, but not...
My illness, if you wish to call it that, stems in great part from your wishing to make me well.
(A thousand years ago it would have been unmysteriously labeled ‘sin’.
What do you suppose we will call it that long from now?)

Who said anything about wishing to make you well? Oh, right, you did. And a thousand years from now you and I won't be around to call it anything. Not even in ten, perhaps.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

What do you think I mean by insulting God?
(The compulsion, I don’t fully understand.)
I think of him every moment, so much is clear.
Piety?: But for the fact that he has no right to exist.

My compulsion stems from a belief that there is no God. He has to be invented in order to have something I can pummel when the pain of living demands an answer that is not there.

I'd even grant Him the right to exist if I could.

Someday, it’s possible, I will feel closeness: you will have to lend me your imagination

If this means what I think it means it means he has never been close to another either. But I don't think your imagination will help me at all.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

Partiality toward blood- or familial-ties is not (except in democratic politics) judged another prejudice to uncover and expunge.
Should we ever though, then we will have to crack down on emotional ties.

Indeed, I already have. But not in the manner in which, say, Hank Reardon came to crack down on his.

Fellini, my cat-friend, is teaching me closeness.
I’ve never met anyone who, by their willingness to be observed, has more convinced me that they are capable of loving.
How to explain this: their powers of persuasion are inadequate, or my discernment, or I am looking in the wrong place altogether: I should be observing how an animal might favor them.
It is a quality that can only be observed in a flawless mirror, not directly, no matter how closely.

Dogs, however, are still viewed as the faithful companions of choice. With them you don't have to earn the love...you just have to not kick them.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

The motion from the irrational to the rational is the classic move in art.
The movement in reverse is romantic.
Not either alone.
It is clear system-building or reductive philosophy is a species of the former...
...The importance of art is that it permits us a moment or two of what it is like not to think, and not to deserve anything, to re-experience being adiaphorous—reason enough, in itself, for common morality to perceive it as mortal enemy.

But certainly not of philosophy exchanged "down here". For that we have the art of existentialism. The nihilist reading text with a red pencil and a shredder.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

Equally fickle in their development, moral and aesthetic values—but the latter travel in circles (wide arcs from our perspective).
Both move, a possible and ominous surprise to some about ethics.
The moral is linear, "the straight and narrow", and like an arrow in flight, it is displacing, moving with a very clear (if, just the same, highly deniable) direction.
A vector, aimed at the Good, the Ultimate Good, that is to say (that is to whisper), Death.

That "thump" you now hear is, in this regard, as close as I ever seem to come to a whisper.

So the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill", has the suppressed qualifier: "all of a sudden".
In due course, without impatience, and with respect for the moral order, which is not the same as ‘upholding’ the moral order: it has us firmly by the scruff and scarcely needs our complicity.
We are only free to march to the scaffold like, deep down, the good aristocrats we are.
But the history of art are the paths traced by stray balloons through the vapors, squatting over the moribund city, and though there are infinite reasons to, we are not rational and so there is no requirement to be sad.
The joy of death is difficult to celebrate but the muses do not skimp on supplies.
To sum up the Decalogue, trite in its profundity: "Be a good sport about death."

When you reckon that being reasonable here is like aiming for the bullseye and hoping to at least hit the board, sadness unto death is nothing less than missing the entire wall.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

"What a jerk! A snide-ass tease, waving your perfumed pussy around!"—to paraphrase a male friend of O’s on reading some of this.
Perfume?
The logic of perfume would be a fit subject for a poet-logician.

Years ago, O gave me some of this to read. And here I am again treading water. And none the wiser of course. But that still seems logical to me.

As logician the imperative is to labor the obvious; as poet to make it cryptic.

Making logic cryptic is merely to expose its limitations. After all, human existence makes a mockery of it everyday.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

"What is so much gall in the service of?" Really, I don’t know.
Something I haven’t learned, or can’t, haunts me continually.

This reminds me of the gall put on display here from time time: "How dare you not understand and then agree with me!"

[Moreno]

Bianco Luno

"What is so much gall in the service of?" Really, I don’t know.
Something I haven’t learned, or can’t, haunts me continually.

This reminds me of the gall put on display here from time time: "How dare you not understand and then agree with me!"

I think gall, like any other 'humour', should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This gets complicated in interpersonal situations. It does not follow that innocent gall means the other person is guilty. However we rarely allow gall and other humours to develop and be expressed. (rather than, say, dumped, which happens, often in a way too verbal form)

One interpersonal pattern can be that the person is really angry at themselves and the other person not getting it is reflecting back a part of themselves that is not reconciled with the ego. Sure, this does happen, and it happens here. A lot.

But we can use interpretations like this, or simple blanket judgments of gall, to gloss over the fact that gall can be right on. There may be some distortion in it. It may be the case that mixing it in with intellectual dialogue is hysterically optimistic in the extreme,
but some ideas are killing us and the planet.

So of course sometimes gall pours out.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno

"You seem to want to side with oppressors against their victims?"
The best I can do, by way of explanation, is to note lamely that every oppressor was and will be again a victim, hard as it is for the presently oppressed to consider.
What hater would listen to what I say?
They would listen as carefully as some Nazis heard Nietzsche.
I ask you to show more discrimination than is generally expected of you or you customarily credit yourself with in polite company.
I speak up to you.
You don’t deserve it, but, in the nature of the case, I have placed myself beneath you.
The view from here you will never grow accustomed to.

And what of those who oppress by calling it something else? And what of those who believe [in all sincerity] it really is something else?
And noting how it once was and will again be the other way around seems particularly silly in this day and age.

[Moreno]

[b]Bianco Luno

"You seem to want to side with oppressors against their victims?"
The best I can do, by way of explanation, is to note lamely that every oppressor was and will be again a victim,

How Hindu. I don't think this is the case, actually.

hard as it is for the presently oppressed to consider.
What hater would listen to what I say?

If you mean those who hate because they are oppressed, bruno, then it might be best not to start by siding with their oppressors. This leaves a possibility they will listen. Chiding them that the oppressors have also suffered or that some cosmic balance is on the way in the future is likely not going to warm their cockles.

If you mean those who hate as oppressors, that is tough. They need to notice what they feel before they hate the oppressed, and given how those feelings will likely challenge their self-image, they are likely not going to want to go there.
So for me the only route is to ask them how it all actually feels. How does the system of oppression feel to them. Is it working, even for them? (best not to use the word oppression when asking) If they have some disatisfaction they can notice and are willing to mention, this might leave the door slightly ajar to a [future where they would be happier and less oppressive. Self-interest seems the only hope there.

And what of those who oppress by calling it something else?

Which is all of them.

And what of those who believe [in all sincerity] it really is something else?

Which is nearly all of them. But most know, on some level, that they are not really coming forward with their deepest imprinting - women are manipulative cunts, or whatever.

[iambiguous]

Bianco Luno wrote:

What hater would listen to what I say?

If you mean those who hate because they are oppressed, bruno, then it might be best not to start by siding with their oppressors. This leaves a possibility they will listen. Chiding them that the oppressors have also suffered or that some cosmic balance is on the way in the future is likely not going to warm their cockles.

If you mean those who hate as oppressors, that is tough. They need to notice what they feel before they hate the oppressed, and given how those feelings will likely challenge their self-image, they are likely not going to want to go there.

Just to clarify:

Bianco Luno is an alter ego used by Seattle philosopher Victor Munuz. The aphorisms above are taken from notebooks written in the 1990s. I came into contact with him through a letter exchange with Olivia, a friend of his.

I am merely quoting from the notebooks. This is not an actual exchange between us. It is just me reacting to what I construe to be a fellow ironist. And how he would react to that I cannot say.

If you wish to explore his thinking today [and in the manner in which philosophy is pursued academically] he can be found at the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club. Here:

http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic- ... es/boards/

[Moreno]

Just to clarify:

Bianco Luno is an alter ego used by Seattle philosopher Victor Munuz. The aphorisms above are taken from notebooks written in the 1990s. I came into contact with him through a letter exchange with Olivia, a friend of his.

I am merely quoting from the notebooks. This is not an actual exchange between us.

I understood this, in general terms. I knew it was you quoting and reacting. I used his name in the post just to show I knew I was not responding to you.

It is just me reacting to what I construe to be a fellow ironist. And how he would react to that I cannot say.

If you wish to explore his thinking today [and in the manner in which philosophy is pursued academically] he can be found at the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club. Here:

http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic- ... es/boards/

i actually went to that site and joined earlier. I haven't gone back and posted yet. I didn't find a place I wanted to jump in.

[d63]

Ambig? How much Camus have you been reading lately?

Sorry! Victor Munuz.

But he does remind me of Camus.

[d63]

And the ironist is one who knows that their belief system is contingent....


that the only justification it can possibly hope for is that it just works,



right?

[d63]

Such an epistemological ground runs risks.




But an ironist knows that it is far better to run those risks



than concede to a system.

[d63]

I'm still working on Rorty's issues with epistemological systems,


but my main issue is that they are too rigid




and stifling.




They cut off the flows of energy





that can lead to real creativity.

[d63]

We find truth through discourse,



not rules.




Rules are only a means by which we find truth through discourse.



Of course, that is always dependent on those involved in the discourse following the same rules.


And there is just no way to insure that.