{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

I have a bunch of Cioran's books, and yet when I reread them, I usually just pull one off the shelf and read a few random pages.   I re-read a few paragraphs.  It's kind of like a heavy drug.  I take small doses.

Cioran, like Nietzsche, was anti-systematic.  He chose the essay form.  Thinking becomes confessional.  Philosophy becomes tortured thinking. 

“The only sin I have never committed was being a father”.

Impossible states of being, unthinkable thoughts are Cioran’s material for speculation. (Thinking against oneself, etc.) But he comes after Nietzsche, who set down almost the whole of Cioran’s position a century ago. An interesting question: why does a subtle, powerful mind consent to say what has, for the most part, already been said? In order to make those ideas genuinely his own? Because, while they were true when originally set down, they have since become more true?

Whatever the answer, the “fact” of Nietzsche has undeniable consequences for Cioran. He must tighten the screws, make the argument denser. More excruciating. More rhetorical.

Characteristically, Cioran begins an essay where another writer would end it. Beginning with the conclusion, he goes on from there.

His kind of writing is meant for readers who in a sense already know what he says; they have traversed these vertiginous thoughts for themselves. Cioran doesn’t make any of the usual efforts to “persuade,” with his oddly lyrical chains of ideas, his merciless irony, his gracefully delivered allusions to nothing less than the whole of European thought since the Greeks. An argument is to be “recognized,” and without too much help. Coed taste demands that the thinker furnish only pithy glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment. Hence, Cioran’s tone—one of immense dignity, dogged, sometimes playful, often haughty. But despite all that may appear as arrogance, there is nothing complacent in Cioran, unless it be his very sense of futility and his uncompromisingly elitist attitude toward the life of the mind.

...

Cioran is another recruit to the melancholy parade of European intellectuals in revolt against the intellect ...

And what could be more relevant than the thesis, reworked by Cioran, that the free use of the mind is ultimately anti-social, detrimental to the health of the community?

In terms of action, it means the acceptance of futility. Futility must be seen not as a frustration of one’s hopes and aspirations, but as a prized and defended vantage point for the athletic leap of consciousness into its own complexity. It is of this desirable state that Cioran is speaking when he says: “Futility is the most difficult thing in the world.” It requires that we “must sever our roots, must become metaphysically foreigners.”

I consider Cioran the poetical philosopher.  I appreciate that he does not attempt to build any systems.  I think, while he was profound and serious, that he was also being sardonic in a very subtle way ... you know, where were one to get his humor, the laughter would be tainted with the despair of a madman. 

He seems to enjoy blasphemy ... He wrote that Jesus and the Buddha were Masters of Illusion, and that the time has come for Diogenes the Cynic to challenge the Son of God.  Cioran was a recluse who lived out his days eating food off of the tables of the leftovers at university cafeterias.  He existed in a rotting garret in Paris, stating that the only thing worth believing in is “breathing”.


From my notes:

2004.04.19

The awareness of existential futility represents the sole weapon against theological and ideological deliriums. Cioran said that both Christ and the Buddha are masters of illusion for their doctrines protect the ruling class from the wrath of the underclass.

A social worker inquired about how I was coping with the loneliness and isolation way out here in the Flame Motel, stranded with no funds. I said that I experience the pain but that I break through the pain into a state of mind very liberating: Mental Freedom. I am rereading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in decades. I laughed aloud while reading the first lines:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.





2004.04.27

I witness first hand the process by which one becomes unemployable. By now I have an attitude of defiance and rebelliousness. Were I to secretly look for work, I might be able to escape my current predicament: we call it economic house arrest. At this point I consider just how much of an outsider I have become. How will I make a living in a society I am so at odds with?

Maybe I will become something of a misanthropic founder of a new religion where we beg for change so as to catch a booze buzz. We could call the religion Alcoholism.

A classic statement by The Aborigine of Gort Busters, 2004, twenty years after I sat in [the classroom] Myths, Dreams, and Cultures:

“A few of the princes live well, while most, of course, labor away in the Taker prison, as the Taker prison continues to crumble. Let’s not even talk about the genocide, desertification, starvation, lack of medical aid, pollution, the now-confirmed melting ice caps, or even the oncoming Great Depression of the 21st Century, wherein even the princes are losing their retirement nest eggs. Let’s start with the half-million children in Iraq who died over the last decade so that the princes could get more energy for their blow-dryers and their SUVs.’

“Yea, we’re doing great. I can’t wait to go live in your world. Maybe if I’m lucky, they’ll let me live in New Jersey. If I’m really lucky, I’ll have the opportunity to mandatorily corral large groups of disaffected, disgruntled teenagers into cinder block cubes where they’ll be force-fed pronouns, pre-packaged history lessons and Pythagora’s theory so that they can forget all of it in a year or two as they get flushed into the work-a-day world, where they will submit 30% to 50% of their tax money to finance a WAR ECONOMY DEDICATED TO STUFFING MOST OF THE GORTS INTO SNEAKER FACTORIES AND UNEMPLOYMENT LINES SO THAT THE PRINCES CAN ‘DO PRETTY GOOD’.”