Accidental Ironists
General Category => Why Bother? => Topic started by: Holden on January 04, 2016, 05:22:28 pm
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I have not read all the books by Cioran(just one),though I intend to read them all. I feel that while he is a good thinker,unlike Schopenhauer,his philosophy lacks metaphysical foundation.
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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.
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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.
lord of this world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0uNC_QQ9zw)
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’.”
:P :-\
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I found some of Akizur's spoken rhetoric in English ... just a curiosity.
In Buddhism it is completly clear: the three caracteristics of existence: anicca = nothing is permanent, anatta = no permanent entity, and dukkha= because of these two there is no permanent satisfaction. I never found any soul in me.
Too much distraction ... I only listen for a little while. Don't let Youtube distract you too much. It is interesting though ... sometimes.
I agree with much of what he says, but I have other things I want to do. There is too much talk in this world. There are so many distractions. It's a shame to say, but one really has to limit what one takes in just in order to focus.
no soul (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZapOD-htpA)
Akizur (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgz-hHpFekw)
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Exercise of Insubmission
by E.M. Cioran
“How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your Kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets. You are the damper of our flames and our rebellions, the fire hose of our fevers, the superintendent of our senilities. Even before relegating You to a formula, I trampled Your arcana, scorned Your tricks and all those artifices which produce Your toilette of the Inexplicable. You have generously endowed me with the gall Your pity spared Your slaves. Since there is no rest but in the shadow of Your nullity, the brute finds salvation by just handing himself over to You or Your counterfeits. I don’t know which is more pitiable. Your acolytes or myself: we all derive straight from Your incompetence: pitch, patch, hodgepodge—syllables of the Creation, of Your blundering…”
“Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? Wherever something breathes there is one more infirmity: no palpitation which fails to confirm the disadvantage of being; the flesh horrifies me: these men, these women, offal that moans by the grace of certain spasms; no more relationship with the planet: each moment is merely a vote in the urn of my despair.
What does it matter, whether Your works leave off or continue! Your subalterns cannot complete what You ventured without genius. From the blindness into which You plunged them, they will emerge nonetheless, but will they have the strength to take revenge, and will You to defend yourself? This race is rusty, and You even rustier. Turning toward Your Enemy, I await the day when he will pilfer Your sun to hang it in another universe.”
-E.M. Cioran. From A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard.
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I have been doing some research to try to place Cioran's attack against "Instant India" into context. I am fairly certain he was referring to the commercialization of "pop-philosophy" marketing ...
Here (https://emcioranbr.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/the-sceptic-on-duty-3/) I found something of interest:
Cioran was an unconventional thinker, averse to academic philosophy like the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he venerated as his master. Cioran was of the view that “the university has extirpated philosophy. In my opinion philosophy is not a subject matter of study. It should be lived and experienced. One should be able to philosophise on the streets. …An official philosophy? A career as philosopher? No, please.”
After studying philosophy at the University of Bucharest Cioran went to Berlin as a Humboldt Scholar and studied Husserl and Heidegger. During his stay he became an admirer of Hitler. Like Heidegger, he later distanced himself from Hitler’s movement and attributed the initial fascination to the hastiness of youth.
Indian Philosophy
“Fortunately, I am engrossed in Hindu and Chinese philosophy”, he writes. “What peace! The truth lies there, if it is allowed, to use such a term”. Cioran’s engagement with Buddhism, which as a religion came closer to his world view, is well known. Very few know, however, that Hinduism also played a crucial role in his thinking and that he often turned to Hindu spiritual texts. In his rare interviews, he repeatedly expressed his thoughts on Hinduism and its seminal meaning for his world of ideas: “I consider Hinduism to be the profoundest of all the religions … The great systems are Hindu philosophy, then the Greek philosophy and the German philosophy. The basic advantage of the Hindu philosophy is: In India the philosopher is compelled to practise his philosophy.” It is not just an intellectual exercise. The philosophers of the East are certainly not intellectual charlatans and professors: “Philosophy is not a profession. It is inextricably intertwined with their life.”
Through his intense engagement with the Vedas, Upanishads and Mahayana sutras Cioran’s idea of the delusion of existence stood vindicated. In the true Far-eastern tradition, Cioran does not attach any significance to history: “The negation of history is in conclusion the Hindu philosophy: The action is considered meaningless and futile. Only the cessation of time counts. When one really ponders upon this, one should cease to act and function. One should throw oneself on the floor and weep.”
Cioran, unlike many other European thinkers of the 20th century, tries to explore Western and Eastern philosophies in a unified fashion. He searches and discovers links and parallels between Hinduism and the Catholic mystics like Saint Teresa of Avila or the German, Meister Eckhart, who according to Cioran was the profoundest thinker of the Occident, as his search for truth went beyond the conception of God and culminated in a total void: “Meister Eckhart is actually a thinker who could very well have been born in India, too”.
Cioran is right from the beginning quite unequivocal that thinking in its real sense cannot be and should not be abstract, as thinking, philosophy and religion cannot be separated from real life. Moments of despair and ecstasy teach us the fundamental meaning of life and they are to be aspired to. Cioran termed this the philosophy of unique moments. In the depths of disillusionment lie sublime realisation, and the meaning of life is attained in the ecstasy of imperfection, he once observed. These kinds of observations characterise Cioran’s writing.
The most common accusation against Cioran is of contempt for human beings. He was also termed a misanthrope of the worst sort by some as he maintained that the best thing that could happen to humanity would be its downfall and disappearance. He was relentless in his search for indicators and evidence to corroborate his view that the apocalypse is imminent: the disquietude all round is an augury of doom. In ostensible progress, he saw nothing but a quest for collapse.
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999 posts! I am very grateful for every one of them.When I think of my own personal history, I think of the earliest twitchings of human life.A world of rudimentary law but one intriguingly advanced in visceral practices.Of lands whose chief feature was a kind of brutality and an air of exile-coarse & tortuous terrains,deliriums of earth and sky.These include desolate fog-bound islands in polar seas,countries of barren peaks lacerated by unceasing winds,wastelands that consumed all sense of reality in their vast spaces,shadowed realms littered with dead cities,and sweltering hells of jungle, where light itself was tinged with a blue slime.
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miserabilism := the quality of seeming to enjoy being depressed
This may be a key paradox in our existential situation. This word you (or Ligotti) have introduced me to. I have known this condition my entire life. In fact, in one of my favorite novels, one I had to read when I was 13 or 14 years old, was Ira Levin's THIS PERFECT DAY, and I remember the part about where Chip wants to stop taking his medication because he enjoyed a "happy kind of sadness," a "sad kind of happiness."
I seem to enjoy stretching my mind to understand concepts slightly beyond the limits of my comprehension, and yet there is also a difficult to describe "depressing" feeling that comes with facing how much I will never understand.
In a letter to a friend, Carl Friedrich Gauss once wrote, "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment."
And yet, here we have a world, 'miserabilism,' in which delight and misery are contained in one concept.
Maybe there is some kind of morbid pleasure one derives from facing the boundaries ...
Wasn't Kant's accomplishment negative in nature? The limits of reason ...
But I am not talking about something so general and universal or hard-wired into our human apparatus (being three-dimensional organisms). I am saying that learning is not an altogether enjoyable process, and that just maybe a miserabilistic tendency might actually be what makes the learning process more enjoyable. I know this is a paradox, which is why it sounds like utter nonsense.
Was it Confucius who counselled us to "rest in confusion" ?
This approach does not have to be limited to studying mathematics, but might be applied to "religious questions" as well.
In honor of Cioran, I will be as blunt and honest as possible even if this exposes my lack of spiritual sophistication as a creature: smoking tobacco is my "meditation" ...
There are two things Cioran was proud of, one being not having fathered any children, and the other being having quit smoking tobacco. I have no desire to quit smoking tobacco. This is as close to meditation as I get.
I want to be spontaneous, but I am afraid that, without a concentrated effort to "control the mind" (you mention this as the great psychological value of ancient Indian religious/philosophical traditions), I would be flooded with the chaos of the mind and never be able to focus on the task at hand.
Oh ... I spontaneously attempted to squeeze out miserabilistic tendencies in to this message board's main title.
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In the middle of the night last night, the following two readings from The Trouble With Being Born struck me. I felt compelled to boot up the computer and connect before they slip my mind.
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La verdad reside en el drama individual. Si realmen te sufro, sufro más que un individuo, sobrepaso la esfera de mi yo y me acerco a la esencia de los otros. La única manera de encaminarn os hacia lo universal es ocuparnos únicamente de lo que nos atañe.
Truth abides in the individual drama. If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns ourselves.
This reminds me of what Schopenhauer wrote ... something about the way to know others better is to look deep into ourselves. Deep down within ourselves, the drama of life unfolds ... in there we are the same being living out the individual drama. The way to know others better is to know ourselves better.
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"Aquel que tiene inclinaciones hacia la lujuria es compasivo y misericordioso; los que tienen inclinación hacia la pureza no lo son." (San Juan Clímaco.)
Para denunciar con tal claridad y vigor, no las mentiras, sino la esencia misma de la moral cristiana, y de cualquier moral, era menester un santo, ni más ni menos.
"He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so." ( Saint John Climacus)
It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.
That one really made me think!
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I feel that while he is a good thinker,unlike Schopenhauer,his philosophy lacks metaphysical foundation.
Of all religions, Buddhism is the one that soothes Cioran the most, but an irrepressible (and covertly relished) capacity for doubt stops him from subscribing to any system.
The Book of Delusions (http://www.coronzon.com/pdf/cioran/Cioran_Hyp_May_10.pdf)
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Have you read any biography of Cioran? Every second feels like a lifetime. I will try to not take the pain personally.
https://youtu.be/a958VuleRwM
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I did not burn all the old diaries. I saved a handful of "special ones" like #74 from the summer of 2003. I just flipped it open to where I had transcribed Tomislav Sunic's great essay, Cioran and the Culture of Death (http://www.mediamonitors.net/tomislavsunic3.html). Notes of this start on page 8 of diary #74, the digitized version. It was a small notebook, so you might have to rotate it as it was copied sideways. Or just use the above link and choose no adds ... then save it on your drive.
When I was out West drinking myself into oblivion ... and just as miserable as I ever was "bask east", I read An Infamous Past (https://emcioranbr.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/thinkers-and-liars-review-on-marta-petreus-an-infamous-past-joseph-frank/) which kind of judged the younger version of Cioran harshly.
I try not to take anything personally, especially when it is not even about me, but only about a thinker who has gotten me through suicidal phases ...
There is more about it here (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/02/portrait-of-the-philosopher-as-a-young-man).
It gets rough, I know.
I am now collecting blank notebooks ... unruled, no lines ... using mostly pencil ... keeping many notebooks at once ...
Maybe I am replacing the burnt diaries with something more coherent ...
I just like filling up pages, I guess. At least if I stick to exercises in math books, I won't be filling the notebooks up with more pigshiit. I've already written plenty of that.
I did a quick search. I'll "cut and paste" from here (http://alina_stefanescu.typepad.com/romania_revealed/2009/03/20-interesting-bits-of-information-about-emil-cioran.html):
12 interesting bits of information about Emil Cioran.
I am reluctant to just cut and paste a good biography of Emil Cioran on this website (though I have certainly discovered one or two) because something about Cioran's character does not lend itself well to linear models. If I had the time or the talent, I would write 20 aphorisms about Cioran to paint the most accurate picture possible of this tremendous human being, but time is more expensive than clothing and talent is not for sale. So I am settling with this list of twelve bits of information about Cioran that I have gleaned from my readings.
1. In one sense, Cioran was saved, for he maintained that "..the certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation".
2. Cioran was the son of a Transylvanian Orthodox priest.
3. Cioran suffered from insomnia. The insomnia made him sombre and withdrawn-- just sombre and withdrawn enough to curl up into his shell and publish his first book in Romanian, On the Heights of Despair.
4. Original sin haunted Cioran's work. He believed that man first sinned by deeming himself more important or on par with God. Since man cannot live with the possibility that life has no meaning and individual existence is insignificant, a rotten seed lies in the core of man-- a seed which germinates from the desire to imagine himself the centre of the world. Because life must have meaning, man starts creating ideas. But neutral ideas do not comfort man-- they are too sterile-- so man attaches his own passions to these ideas. Thus man lights the pyre.
5. If he were not able to write, Cioran believed he would have committed suicide. Writing was not a possibility-- it was a dictum. He once said:
"If you detest someone, just take a piece of paper and write 10, 20, 30 times: X is an a-s-s-h-o-l-e. And after a few minutes, you will feel relieved. You detest them less."
6. Cioran did not believe there would ever be an end to utopias; he would have shrugged his shoulders at Frank Fukuyama's "end of history". But he did hope that all the discussion and efforts spent seeking utopia might one day be replaced by "a focus on mankind himself".
7. Cioran held politicians and politics in contempt.
8. Among his ghosts, Cioran's flirtation with fascism haunted his later life. He confessed that if [he] had liked something about Hitler, it was "the cult of the irrational, the exultation of pure vitality, the virile expression of strength, without any critical spirit, restraint, or control".
9. There is a pregnant and unlabored tension between Cioran's philosophical skepticism and his admiration of Oswald Spengler, a committed Hegelian. This tension continues to disturb the beetles around Cioran's grave.
10. Cioran believed that the only national minorities which represented a substantial threat to the creation and consolidation of the Romanian nation were the Jews.
11. Cioran praised Antonescu's dictatorship based on his assumption that people preferred submission to freedom.
12. Though he never married, Cioran's better half was discovered in Simone Roue. They were together from the 1950's until his death.
My sources for this list include "Cioran: Comedian or Martyr?"; Philo Agora's post on Cioran; Emil Cioran on Samuel Beckett; the wikipedia entry for Cioran; "Tristele lui Cioran" by George Georgescu; An Infamous Past: EM Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania by Marta Petreu.
Comedian or Martyr (http://planetcioran.blogspot.com/2007/10/cioran-presentation.html)
Do you suffer from insomnia? That would make reporting to the salt mine job very problematic, like a real horror. Have you been sneaking in a small notebook?
What I used to do is carry around a small notepad or even some loose sheets of paper ... write down some ideas ... when you have a chance (like when you are up at night), you can expound upon those scribbled lines in a larger, more permanent notebook.
Just the act of writing might bring some relief.
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A good essay on Cioran at hyperboreans (http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=179).
Cioran suggests that insomnia is an induction to a secret society of thinkers.
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I read that Cioran's mother once said that if she had known he would grow up to be so depressed she would have aborted him. He suffered chronic insomnia and rode his bicycle relentlessly through the countryside at night to try and weary himself enough to sleep.
A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth… Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching, each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples — officialdom, with its rules — a metaphysics designed for monkeys… Everyone trying to remedy everyoneʼs life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society — an inferno of saviors! (from “Genealogy of Fanaticism” in A Short History of Decay)
The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. he has a voice: that is enough.
From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. (from “The Anti-Prophet” in A Short History of Decay)
Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age. Calvinism, Quakerism, Port-Royal, The Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc… what a series of absurdities… which had to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site.
Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we hate and kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice.
Abstraction has insinuated itself into life — and into death; the “complexes” seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathology — there you have all of human history. (from “Faces of Decadence” in A Short History of Decay)
“What is truth?” is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to “How to endure life?” And even this one pales beside the next: “How to endure oneself?” – That is the crucial question to which no one is in a position to give us an answer. (Drawn and Quartered)
He who hates himself is not humble.
Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.
Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place. This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.
(Book of Delusions)
In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision. (The Trouble with Being Born)
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With due respect to Cioran-description of existence as Will-to-Live ,as continual striving with no direction ,aimed at all directions at once,did ring a bell for me.
Without this we would back to Kant ,to absolute illusionism.
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"You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength."
"My strength? I've wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself ... and now I'll be unemployed forever!"
[Cioran - All Gall is Divided]
We only need to remember the corpse preparing itself within us. Sooner than we think we shall be food for worms. This is the good news.
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My school and college teachers/profs. though I believe they would want it very much-cannot hurt me any longer as I am not physically accessible to them.Same applies with regard to my previous employers &bosses.
When I am dead-no one would be able to hurt me no matter how much they would want to do it.
When I am dead,I want to stay dead.
Sorry if I am not posting a lot of things in the wrong thread,I am ,on most days,in a state of such high anxiety that my hands are almost having tremors,and I am too agitated to look for the right thread.
Advise for the kindred spirit:Never dabble in stocks.They are not for the like of us,but for the kind who can keep having one baby after another and never break a sweat.
If one of the Schopenhauer's disciplines is forced to invest at all ,due to untoward circumstances, let him do so in a fixed income annuity, and never mind the rate of return.
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Antinatalism and Cioran (http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=1054)
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Thanks for the links.I checked out both of them.The comments on Benetar's write up were quite good.I bought his book in 2011. It was very expensive then.But I bought it anyway.
https://youtu.be/sQN76Vv-nVw
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You know what,I read all the comments below Benetar's write-up and I have to say that some are them are pretty nifty & illusion-inducing-for someone who has not read Schopenhauer. With Schopenhauer as the gold standard ,it becomes rather easy to sort the dross.
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https://youtu.be/FOarnTtdyUM
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I have watched that very same clip a few times before while scanning ZooTube for AUTHENTICITY.
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I just sent my nephew a link to The Trouble With Being Born (http://libgen.io/search.php?req=Cioran+Trouble+with+being+born&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def).
Maybe it will help.
Cioran was an ironist.
I learned from Schopenhauer what the difference is between irony and humor:
"If the joke is concealed behind seriousness, the result is irony. Accordingly, the opposite of irony would be the seriousness behind the joke, which is humor."
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I want you take take a look at the following links, and I saved the best for last!
1. A m a Z o n (https://www.amazon.com/M-Cioran-1905-06-07-Hardcover/dp/B0098C1V1I/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536644471&sr=1-2&keywords=Cioran+The+Fall+Into+Time&dpID=21dT9xH%252BWBL&preST=_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)
2. ABE BOOKS (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=&tn=&kn=&isbn=9780812901467)
3. eBay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/FALL-INTO-TIME-By-E-M-Cioran-Hardcover/183381253848?epid=4714523&hash=item2ab25fded8:g:-2gAAOSwhGlbdIeO)
4. Library Genesis (http://libgen.io/search.php?req=The+Fall+into+Time&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def)
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https://www.haneswinereview.com/about/hanes_philosophy002.pdf
This may be interesting.Thanks for your links.
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https://www.amazon.com/Thing-Phenomenology-Horror-Dylan-Trigg/dp/1782790772
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I've read Phenomenology of Horror by Trigg awhile ago thanks to Library Genesis, but I would like to read through it again sometime. Did you find anything in it particularly interesting? I know you are intrigued with the malignant indifference of the universe.
As for the paper above, I am quite certain I have read this paper, but I will definitely read through it again today.
" [...] We will contrast Schopenhauer's concept of intentionality with its parallel in the works of the “father” of 20th century phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. This will hopefully
(a) show where Schopenhauer can help correct defects in Husserl's approach and
(b) tentatively point to where Schopenhauer can provide a fresh alternative to the better known critiques of Husserl promulgated by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, among others. "
Yes, father of phenomenology, indeed.
I like to think of Schopenhauer not only as the grandfather of the psychology of the unconscious (the gorts give Freud all the credit, of course); but also as the grandfather of phenomenology.
But, who has time for bickering over credits when we all so rapidly slip into the void?
Thanks for the link.
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What I found interesting was the possibility of asking you the question that as you have been studying mathematics a great deal, have you discovered any invariant phenomenological structure in the conscious experience of the mathematical studies?
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Senor Raul,
I found the following by a man from an African country who goes by the name of Nihilistboy,I'd like to share with you:
A Letter To My Unborn Child by Nihilistboy-
Stay right there,sweetheart.It's not safe here.
Daddy loves you!
Also,my apologies to all the members and readers and guests of this message for my random posts-the fact is when I get off the work I am so tired and exhausted that I can barely find my house ,let alone the relevant thread. I try my best. But if someone finds the posts random,my apologies.
Keep well,Senor Raul,please take care of your eyes.
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Holden,
Please do not apologize. You have priorities there. Thank you for sharing Nihilistboy´s words. The man from Africa. I read that more than one million children and adults die from AIDS in Africa every year.
Daddy loves you, says the Nihilistboy in the letter. I often see mothers kissing their children. Soon these same mothers will be weeping for them. Soon their offspring will experience the burden of life. Soon they will become farm animals like their parents. They won´t even have the right to exit this jail called Earth.
On Saturday afternoon I saw four teenagers on the avenue. They were not smoking regular cigarettes. They were smoking some substance wrapped in paper. They looked at me. But I went my way. Will they reach adulthood? Who knows?
I read last year an interview with a Paraguayan female doctor, Lourdes Zelaya, head of the mental health department of the pediatric hospital in Asunción. She said that those adults who suffered mistreatment and abuse in their childhood and adolescence will have suicide attempts, post traumatic stress, psychosis, personality disorders, dissociative disorders, anxiety, depression, toxic substances abuse and alcohol. It also leads to prostitution and pregnancies.
The doctor said that 20 % of the adults who suffered abuse will replicate these violent episodes with their children. When they reach adulthood these people may have problems with their roles as parents and are unable to protect their children.
Take care.
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Senor Raul,
"The only reason why I flatter myself, is that I understood very early, before the age of twenty, that one should not procreate. My disgust towards marriage, family and all social conventions has its source in this. Crime is to transmit one's frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing, to force someone to the Way of the Cross that may be worse than our own. I could never agree to give life to someone who inherits misfortunes and evil. All parents are irresponsible people, or murderers. Procreation should belong only to brutes. Pity makes you not want to be a "progenitor". This is the cruelest word I know." (Emil Cioran, "Cahiers 1957-1972" ["Notebooks 1957-1972"], 1997)
"If I was a believer, I would be a Cathar." (Emil Cioran, "Cahiers 1957-1972" ["Notebooks 1957-1972"], 1997)
Keep well.
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That is a powerful statement!
I will quote it since the page just turned to 3.
Quoted by Holden:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The only reason why I flatter myself, is that I understood very early, before the age of twenty, that one should not procreate. My disgust towards marriage, family and all social conventions has its source in this. Crime is to transmit one's frailties to someone else, to force someone to experience the same things we are experiencing, to force someone to the Way of the Cross that may be worse than our own. I could never agree to give life to someone who inherits misfortunes and evil. All parents are irresponsible people, or murderers. Procreation should belong only to brutes. Pity makes you not want to be a "progenitor". This is the cruelest word I know." (Emil Cioran, "Cahiers 1957-1972" ["Notebooks 1957-1972"], 1997)
"If I was a believer, I would be a Cathar." (Emil Cioran, "Cahiers 1957-1972" ["Notebooks 1957-1972"], 1997)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks Holden of Northern India. Those notebooks are difficult to come by. There is a version that may be in Portuguese (like Spanish? almost the same?) Cuadernos (1957-1972) = Notebooks (1957-1972) (Biblioteca E.M. Cioran) (https://www.amazon.com/Cuadernos-1957-1972-Notebooks-Biblioteca-2012-12-30/dp/B019TM8HK4/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Cioran+Notebooks&qid=1550375212&s=books&sr=1-2-catcorr). There are a bunch of copies selling at a reasonable price.
It looks like there is an English translation of "Notebooks" (https://www.gettextbooks.com/isbn/9781559706322/), but only 3 copies are available, one in Brazil, one in Switzerland, and and one in Australia. The one on Senor Raul's continent looks to be the most affordable.
As long as you are putting in the years at that salt mine office, Holden, you really deserve to reward yourself with such a priceless hardcopy. There are no digitized version to be found, unless you or anyone else knows of any. Holden, you deserve to have one of those rare copies!
ISBN-13: 978-1-55970-632-2 / 9781559706322
Here in one volume, are the essential writings in the 34 notebook's Cioran left behind at his death, not a journal but a sort of exercise manual, in which he tries out his formulations, perfects the expression of his obsessions and whims. The notebooks are rich in anecdotes, accounts of meetings, portraits of friends and enemies, descriptions of excursions and sleepless nights. Here are the lists, day after day, of failures, sufferings, anxieties, terrors, rages, and humiliations, curiously at odds with the daytime Cioran, so mocking and tonic, so comical and various. These brief entries constitute a backstage glimpse of a tormented mind, wise in its very torments, solitary in its wisdom.
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Holden,
Thank you for sharing these wise words by Cioran. But we, humans, are not wise Only a few like you, Hentrich, Silenus,Ibra and others I do not remember in this blog are wise enough to read Cioran.
This morning I went to the hospital and in the pediatrics section there are many mothers with their children. I saw a pregnant woman with three children playing with her smartphone waiting for the doctor. Another woman was taking his child with glasses. Others were just waiting too. It is in women´s software to offer their intimate parts to the males´ hungry phhallusses. Years ago I used to go to a **** store in downtown Asunción. I saw the owner giving the price of huge dildos to the couples sometimes. Sex is business. I am sure going to **** stores will be forbidden by law.
Unemployment is increasing and I start seeing female taxi drivers, some of them pregnant, and sometimes bus drivers. I wonder if their children will be able to endure life. As we have mandatory military service for men, for women is the mandatory pregnancy service. The wolves in power need sheep for sacrifice.
I read somewhere that for the Aztecs the women who died giving birth to children for the first time they were equal to the warriors who fell in the field of battle. All of them went to the House of the Sun. When the sun set in the morning the brave warriors celebrated these women until noon came.
As you wrote before:
“After so many wars and so much mayhem the hospitals are still filled every day with the cries of new born babes.Why do the babies cry-is it because they realise the kind of mess they have got themselves into by being born?”
“In the Victorian era the infant mortality rate was exceptionally higher. Before van Gogh was born there had been another Vincent who died when he was just one.van Gogh was taken by his mum to the grave of the other Vincent to pay respects.”
I guess the first Vincent turned out to be the luckier one.”
Take care on the train.
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(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41XKSZV7QFL._SX313_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
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"We cannot forgive those we have praised to the skies, we are impatient to break with them, to snap the most delicate chain of all: the chain of admiration ..., not out of insolence, but out of an aspiration to find our bearings, to be free, to be ... ourselves. Which we manage only by an act of injustice." ~ from The Trouble With Being Born
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Senor Raul,
From Karl White:
What a curse the libido is. An absolute curse. I went on a few dates with a very attractive lady before Xmas, who was willing to 'go all the way', but made it abundantly clear that her sole aim in life was to be impregnated. For once, I made a rational decision and cut loose.
(She's 38 and in a massive hurry to hatch).
Keep well.
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From: The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.
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Commentary from just another aging student of mathematics (2019)
This is one of those aphorisms which may prove quite useful as a meditation to begin the day with, as soon as one gains consciousness. Even when tragic accidental deaths occur, such as the case of a speeding automobile, operated by a driver in the throes of overdosing on narcotics, taking the life of a gas station attendant from India (and two patrons) in New Jersey (https://abc7ny.com/3-dead-in-nj-crash-caused-by-driver-on-drugs-sources-say/5145193/), one can trace the disaster back to the original distaster of having been born in the first place. Maybe that is an extreme example, but for an aphorism to become a mantra, it surely must be capable of being applied to even such extreme cases.
On that note, another aphorism from the same section of The Troble With Being Born:
Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral. ...
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Holden,
Thank you for your response. I think you and Hentrich and others in this blog say it all. I have nothing much to add. Karl White, yes, from Say No to Life, wrote deep thoughts and what he did was something few would be willing to cut loose as he said. Like you, Hentrich and a few others, he went against his software, so to speak.
Cioran wrote that “The spermatozoon is the bandit in a pure state.”
I read that in Santiago del Estero, Argentina, a father locked his six-year old son in a freezer because he “behaved badly”. The police there rescued the little boy from the freezer after they received denunciations from the neighborhood. The father was arrested there. In the hospital the little boy was checked by the doctors and they found out that he had injuries of recent beatings. The father was arrested and testified before the prosecutor of the case. The father said that he locked the boy up because he stole money to buy cookies. This event was reported by Extra.com.py.
Yesterday I also saw on Paraguayan TV that a grandfather (72) was sentenced to six years in prison for raping his four grandchildren, all girls. The mother is in Argentina, like many Paraguayan women, working there. So they have to leave their children under the care of their parents.
Here in my neighborhood I see boys sleeping on the streets. They are window cleaners. Not many car drivers are kind to them.
I once told an acquaintance that should I ever go to jail for a crime, my parents would have to go with me or at least be called to testify and see how the product of their heat is being punished. You see, in judicial proceedings when someone is sentenced to jail, the court employee starts reading the sentence and says “Juan Pérez” son of “Justo Perez and Juana Pérez” etc,etc. I heard that many do not like to hear their names of their parents being read in court.
But both my parents passed so they won´t suffer for their son. Death saved them.
I have learned never to underestimate people because even the most peaceful man or woman can react violently. I also learned that I can do ugly things. It is part of our human nature. We all love to kill. This is the reason homo sapiens sapiens is super predator, as you know already. We establish laws to punish killing and yet we dream about it.
Take care.
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To Herr Kaspar and Senor Raul,
“At the 1211 council against the Bogomils, the ones that sustained that the ‘woman breeds in
her womb with Satan’s help, and that Satan dwells there from the beginning until the birth of the child ’ were anathematized”. Although I don’t dare to imply that the Devil would show so much interest towards us as to accompany us months in a row; but I also could not doubt the fact that we have been procreated under his supervision and that he truly offered assistance to our beloved creators."-Cioran
Keep well.
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Holden,
Thank you once again for sharing Cioran´s aphorisms.
If we reincarnate, not a pleasant prospect, do you think we will come back to this mental asylum aka Earth as women? Who knows?
Other quotes, I read, by Cioran:
No longer ask me for my program: isn´t breathing one?
You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength.
My strength? I´ve wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself and now I´ll be unemployed forever.
Every action flatters the hyena within us.
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide.
Have you ever heard of Hermann Burger?
Take care.
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Are you saying that this Karl White (http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/death/emil-cioran-the-anti-philosopher-of-life-and-death) is the same Karl as from Say No To Life (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://saynotolife.blogspot.com/) ?
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Hentrich,
Thank you for the link. I think the Karl White, quoted by Holden is the Karl White of Say No to Life.
You wrote that you don’t´t “give a fuuck about what other people think of me, especially about the opinions of those who would judge me for "living off the taxpayers." In my view whatever amount of money you get from the government, it goes back to the system because you spend it in things you need everyday.
You are not transferring that money into secret bank accounts in tax havens in the Caribbean or somewhere else. You are not using that money to gamble in the casino in Monte Carlo. The thing is that you are not damaging the U.S. economy. I read that the famous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria once started a fire with US$ 2 million because his daughter was cold. It is the taxpayers that helped him start that fire.
Take care and drive safely.
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Senor Raul,
Not all suffering is bearable. -Gloria
Keep well.
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Herr Kaspar,
There is an anti-natalist group on facebook and I lurk around them with a pseudonym.That is where Mr.White writes too.I think he is the one from "Saynotolife" as he had told me before his blog disappeared that most of his anti-natalist colleagues have migrated to the facebook group.
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Holden,
Yes,Gloria is right when she says: “Not all suffering is bearable.” Honestly I can only now focus on my physical suffering, that is to say, I have prostate problems and most days after I **** I have pain in the orifice and the ophtalmologist told me that I will be half blind. I see very little with my right eye. I inherited this health problem. Nothing to be done.
Maybe if I had the fortune of David Rockefeller or Jacob Rothschild, I could get another kind of treatment. I looked at the picture of this Rothschild, and he is of the same age of my father and yet he looks probably twenty years younger. Strange really. This is the only suffering I can write about.
Take care on the train.
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Senor Raul,
If we reincarnate, not a pleasant prospect, do you think we will come back to this mental asylum aka Earth as women? Who knows?-Senor Raul
"Maybe rebirth is simply HAVING KIDS". Jack Kerouac
Keep well.
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Senor Raul,
I hope your eyes remain healthy.
You have had a rough life. But the important thing is that you have not procreated.That is important.You and I, we,are doomed.But at least we have not put anyone else in this kind of a situation.
While I was passing by the drawing room I just saw on TV that a young woman of about 30 was crying and saying "We love you" again and again over the dead body of one of the soilders who recently died.
I would never want to put any woman in such a situation.Also, love is a farce.I don't have any time to waste on women no matter how pretty.The prettier the woman,the more dangerous she is.
I wanna think about my being, my existence,while I still can.Paraguay and the US are so far away from where I am.
Sometimes I really drown is self-pity.Sometimes I think ,I delude myself,that I could have been so much better,in reality all I want to do is to stop existing.
Then again,before I cease to be, like good old Russell,I might want to check out a couple of math books.
Well,my friend ,take care of your eyes.And beware of ladies.
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Holden,
Beware of the ladies, you say, well, that is easy to follow. As I am physically repellent and worse financially repellent no lady will come near me. Even so your advice will be taken into account. Temptation is everywhere.
Indeed Paraguay or the U.S. are very far from India. No comparison is possible with the subcontinent. It is a good thing to think about your being or existence. Not many are willing to do that. Too risky. Most think about subsistence and nothing about existence. From what you have written in this blog you easily could have filled ten books.
Yes, love is a farce but millions of men and women love that farce. It is good for business after all. Good for the workforce, for the schools, law and the army and the churches. Churches would be empty if there are no baptisms.
Weddings,later babies, keep the prison going. They system will collapse if there are no weddings. Last week I saw on a Paraguayan TV station nine couples getting married in a row in a Catholic church. All the women in their white dresses and the men in black suits and ties. I suppose I could have been one of them two decades ago. In popular language older men refer to their wives as lapas (limpets in English) or la patrona, (woman boss).
Stay well and once again take care on the train.
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Holden,
Thank you for your response. Having kids is being reborn in this mental asylum called Earth. Maybe Kerouac is right. I read sometime ago an article by an author called Jesse Bering. He had a meeting with one rabbi, a priest and minister and talked about life after death. He asked the minister about life after death and the minister replied: “Do I believe in life after death?” “Yes. I often find myself finishing a funeral by saying, ‘And we commend so-and-so’s spirit to the God who gave it.’ I don’t make judgments at these funerals.”
Then Bering asked the minister about people who died by suicide. The minister said “I’ve done maybe ten, maybe twelve over the years. I’ve done a few secular funerals, in the sense that there is no evidence of a faith in the person who died. But all their friends who get up and speak and say, ‘I’ll see you later,’ I’ve reflected on this quite often—is it a safety thing? Is it a safety saying, or do they actually believe they’re going to see the person again? I remember this one where there was a kid killed in a car accident … well, he probably killed himself, actually, because it seemed to be a deliberate attempt and fortunately he didn’t take anyone else out with him. But there were about a half a dozen of his buddies who got up and in their own way they all said, ‘Yeah, we will see you again.’
Here in the city there is a phone line to prevent suicides. The line is called in Spanish Emergencias 149. You dial 149 and you talk to a psychologist and volunteers who are students of psychology or social workers. It is under the supervision of Asociación Paraguaya de Prevención del Suicidio. The president of this association, Manuel Zavala, said in 2009 he already saved 600 lives. Saved lives or postponed deaths.
Stay well.
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.I think he [Karl] is the one from "Saynotolife" as he had told me before his blog disappeared that most of his anti-natalist colleagues have migrated to the facebook group.
That's a shame. I wonder why he took that route. I can't see myself ever succumbing to such a thing as creating an account on Facebook. Years ago, I set up an account, then a week later immediately deleted it.
Fuuck Facebook.
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A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
-Dogen.
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Senor Raul,
Human species will always conform to the majority. "Oh! over 90% of people are breeding? Well, I guess I will also make spawns of my own." Mindless fu-cking robots!
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So you really think you can bring a person into this world and have them procreate and have grandkids and have those grandkids procreate and have great-grandkids for you AND none of those poor souls will suffer immensely?? You are some deluded, selfish and egotistical POS.-
AN outreach
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did anyone watch the Coal Miners Awards Show last night that honored all the coal miners that suffered & died from black lung so we could have electricity?
Animal Liberation and Antinatalism
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That goofy self-conceited look on the face of a father holding a newborn baby. A child born into a lifetime of suffering. All because of that said father's own intellectual or emotional frailties. That look, that look is tragedy personified
-A.O.
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fake-smiling, optimistic motherfuc-kers that ain't content to be like dat
they want you to be a fake-smiling, optimistic motherfu-cker too
**** you to hell, you worthless pieces of ****-Animal Liberation and Antinatalism
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Countdown till going back to work, into the world of lies, the fake world, the matrix world
it, once again, will take its toll on my soul
AL and AN
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Holden,
Once again thank you for sharing these words.
I read that poppies since ancient times symbolize eternal sleep and death. The Romans and the Greeks gave poppies to the dead and they were grown outside the cave where Hypnos, the god of sleep resided. I would have liked also to taste the poppies and live with Hypnos forever. A nice wish never to be realized.
According to the classification of the demonic guys who rule this world we have PRIDE: Lucifer, GREED: Mammon, LUST: Asmodeus, ENVY: Leviathan, GLUTTONY: Beelzebub, WRATH: Satan, SLOTH: Belphegor. Since I admit I am lazy I prefer Belphegor.
Let me quote these two poem by Bulgarian Peiu Yavorov (1878-1914):
I do not live: I burn. Inconciliables
Two souls rival in my chest:
an angel soul and a demon soul. In myself
they breathe fire and their ardor burns me.
And both burn with flames, where I touch
Even in the stone, I hear both hearts beat ...
Always both, everywhere, obsessively
with enemy faces they are consumed until they become embers.
Behind me the wind, wherever I go,
Ash will cover my footprints. Who can know them?
Solitary, I do not live, I burn !, and my trail
will be ashes in the gloomy infinity
In vain you fear mother,
In vain you fear mother,
that my wandering through life
has exhausted me, that your son
has forgotten you
In vain you fear mother
How could I forget
the one gave me life without mercy?
Take care on the train.
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Senor Raul,
The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world.
-Wittgenstein
Regards
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https://youtu.be/yw6i1SAHetc
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ByDoug Kepanis, Contributor
High Profile Divorce Attorney
07/16/2013 04:16pm ET | Updated September 15, 2013
l.
A New York woman decided, over her husband's vociferous protests, to get artificially inseminated during their marriage. The parties were married in the Mormon faith and their marriage was immediately tumultuous. The wife was physically abusive to her husband. At the same time, she allowed her health to deteriorate by becoming anorexic. She became pregnant with their child, by her husband and, upon giving birth, informed her husband she wanted to become artificially inseminated in an effort to have more children. The husband pleaded with her to not go through with it as he believed their marriage was already rocky enough without adding more children into the situation. Over these objections, the wife was artificially inseminated and became pregnant.
The husband believed, as a Mormon, that he should not get divorced. As such, he remained married to his wife despite knowing she was pregnant via artificial insemination. When the child was born, the wife did not list the husband on the birth certificate and gave the child her maiden name. It was only when the husband felt fearful that the wife could not care for the newborn that he stepped in and assisted, all the while maintaining the child was not his and he would not be responsible for the child.
A few months later, the wife told her husband that she was once again going to get artificially inseminated. Once again, the husband objected and pleaded with her to not go through with it. Once again, the wife gave birth and did not list the husband on the birth certificate and gave the newborn child her maiden name.
The husband then filed for divorce.
New York law provides that any child born to a married woman via artificial insemination with written consent by her husband and her, shall be deemed the legitimate child of the marriage.
The husband argued that his wife and he never saw eye-to-eye and had numerous arguments concerning her unilateral decision to become artificially inseminated. He also argued that he never consented to the artificial insemination either orally or in writing. Finally, he argued that he never intended to accept the wife's two children born from her being artificially inseminated as his own.
Case closed...? Not so fast. In New York, as in most states, the Court can still hold a husband responsible for the child born during the marriage under the doctrine of equitable estoppel. Basically, this is a fancy way of saying: "Look, we know you are not really the father but, the mother and child have come to rely on you being there, and you never did anything to cause them to think you would not be there for them and so, presto change-o, you are going to be considered the father. Good night and good luck."
Luckily, herein, the Court made the sensible decision that the husband was not equitably estopped from claiming to not be the father of the two children the wife gave birth to during the marriage via artificial insemination. According to the Court, the husband never encouraged the wife to become artificially inseminated, told her he would never support her or the children, and never held himself out to the public as the children's father.
The presumption of legitimacy is a doctrine that some think is outdated. In this day and age of artificial insemination, extra-marital affairs leading to pregnancy and the ubiquitous nature of single motherhood, the State's desire to deem children 'legitimate' or 'out-of-wedlock' is arcane. If a child is yours, then it is yours and you should be responsible therefor. If the child is not yours, but the mother of the child is married to you, you should not be held responsible therefor and you should not have to prove a negative to overcome the presumption. If the mother of the child is single and you are not married to her, and the child is not yours, but she tells you it is, and you believe her, and later find out that the child is not yours, the State will basically tell you that you are going to continue to be responsible. This seems outrageous as 'but for' the mother's original lie, the man would never have cared for and developed a relationship with the child.
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Man learns in TV-show, that his fiancé has slept with his best friend, doesn‘t want him anymore, has sold the engagement ring.
Kills himself.
Family says: it‘s the show‘s fault.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6981101/Jerry-Springer-sued-family-man-killed-show.html
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Holden,
Thank you for sharing this short horror story. Indeed it is a horror story. Nothing new. One cannot remove oneself from birth. Life is horror as you have said many times.
First of all I don´t think you are a little tortoise that crawls and crawls. I am not the person to tell you how to react in self-defense. But a tree is a weapon, a pen is a knife, a chair is a shield and you can smash
someone´s head with a printer. It is not advisable to understimate you reaction.
Stay safe.
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Thanks ,Senor Raul.This world is a disaster area and what ever political solutions folks might come up with ,are little more than bandaids.
Take care.
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Holden,
Yes, this world is a disaster area. The human drama has no solution at all. Even if there is an annihilation of the homo sapiens, well, that does not mean this monstrous experiment will stop. It may be an interruption but not the end of this madness.
This planet is under the rule of sociopaths and psychopaths. Maybe you saw this film, American Psycho where the character Patrick Bateman (Chris Bale) has no empathy for anyone. But also the common people, me, are demonic clowns. We also destroy, plunder, kill and maim. It is in our nature.
Stay safe.
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Mr.Ibra,
I quite understand that in an orthodox society like that of the middle-east, it must be very difficult to stay as a bachelor.I want to tell you that Indian society is no less orthodox ,at least my parents are very much so.
Their heads are full of unexamined and unanalysed assumptions.
In a world such as the one we have got in our hands, who in his right mind, would agree to get married.I believe that marriage is the height of optimism.That the bridegroom is giving a thumbs up to the world,to existence and is agreeing to perpetuate it .Generally speaking,I am not a kind man, but I am not so hardhearted either, that I'd bring forth my own kids in this hellish place. I would much sooner swing using noose.
On second thought, noose is really not how I'd like to go. I would like to turn the existence against itself, and let the stomach, which has digested so many things over the years, digest itself.
Take care.
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https://youtu.be/VUgJmRsqVfE (https://youtu.be/VUgJmRsqVfE)
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So long as the Church was rampant, only the madman enjoyed the favors of the regime, he alone had the right to put an end to his days: His corpse was neither profaned nor hanged. Between ancient stoicism and modern “free thought,” between, say, Seneca and Hume, suicide suffered—aside from the Catharist interlude—a long eclipse, a dark age in fact, for all those who, wanting wanting to die, dared not infringe the ban on putting oneself to death. Cioran
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I found a pdf file of Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (http://www.edarcipelago.com/freebooks/CioranHeightsofDespair.pdf)
"Why am I on this earth? I feel the need to cry out, to utter a savage scream that will set the world atremble with dread. I am like a lightning bolt ready to set the world ablaze and swallow it all in the flames of my nothingness. I am the most monstrous being in history, the beast of the apocalypse full of fire and darkness, of aspirations and despair. [...] My symbol is the death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me"
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Herr Hentrich,
Sorry I could not respond sooner. I was bogged down with a great deal of office related work.
I hope your body aches are getting less intense and that you are being able to get proper sleep and eating nutritious food.
I think you would have liked the kind of weather India has, generally,because here,except for the region around Kashmir, winters are not very severe, well, certainly not severe when compared to how cold it gets at your place.
Maybe you could think about getting some kind of inexpensive space heater,if you do not have one already.When I was at a place where it used to get very,very cold, I was making use of two space heaters in the room.
I also hope that you have managed to get back to your mathematical endeavours. I think I am beginning to see how mathematics could be a source of endless fascination.
I think the reason I seek as much solitude as I possibly can is because it is the closest thing to being dead while still being alive, if you know what I mean.
Like your father mentioned your cousin getting promoted at job, my father mentioned a friend of mine, who was with me in the college back in the day.Well, he is studying in Pace Univesity now,which I believe is rather close to where you are.Also he has been given scholarship by his employer( a big consultancy firm).It is the same guy who was trying to get me to join their Whatsapp group. Now, personally I have nothing against the man. When we were studying together, he was one of the few people who helped me out when I was sick( during my pancreatitis related hospitalisation I told you about) and he is quite genial. He also has two kids. He is the only friend of mine whose wedding I attended(in 2011) because he was kind to me during our time together in the college.
I think the reason he wanted me to join the group was because, indirectly, he would have been able to inform me about his scholarship by way of a general message in the group.Anyway, the chatterbox that my dad is, he,I guess,talks to this guy more than I do, and so during one of their converstations he told my dad and he told me.He thought I would feel jealous or something or it would motivate me to work harder in some weird way.
Well, here is how I look at it, my friend maybe closer to you,geographically, I am closer to you “philosophically”, and that matters a whole lot more. Also, I would rather study at “ Hentrich University” than at Pace University.
Take care.
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Free copy of Minority Interest by Martin Butler :
https://www.patreon.com/posts/59465426
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I have been reading Minority Interest very attentively, some parts out loud. I had taken a look at the book Raul of Paraguay suggested, The Nihilist (http://whybother.freeboards.org/gortbusters/the-nihilist/msg11728/#msg11728), and finished it quickly. The author took a great deal from Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (http://whybother.freeboards.org/general-discussion/born-to-fear-interviews-with-thomas-ligotti/msg351/#msg351); but, all in all, I could easily identify with the protagonist/author, except for maybe his sexual appetite. Mine, fortunately, is not so very fierce, thankfully. It is still there, though. I won't deny it. Still, I can use reason to remind me of all the wrong trees I've barked up throughout my life. Maybe eventually I will lose interest and just be content to "take matters into my own hands." :-[
Martin Butler has a good grip on the horns of the bull. Thank you for suggesting this Minority Interest. It is hard to face all the negative emotions caused by life experiences but reading Butler has given me a little more courage to continue in my defiant manner to maintain a comic attitude of disdain (and even contempt) for the world, in general.
I have been feeling a little more trust in the life processes, and that we might actually experience great relief upon facing our mortality. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for not pressuring me to construct or publish a book. I really am after authenticity, and I would not be bothered in the least if all I leave behind are hand-written cursive diaries. I am not at all embarrassed to reveal to the human world just how beaten-up I feel by life itself.
This is why phrases such as, "Life teaches us not to want it" (Schopenhauer) are so powerful for me. Life experience, at least my own personal experience, validates many of Schopenhauer's conclusions.
In the end, we will come to our own conclusions about the nature of our existence; but, as you have stated many times, the suffering, confusion, and despair can often be suffocating, paralyzing even. What can one conclude from this underlying stress and anxiety except that these are the life forces within us manipulating us through FORCE, the force of want and need, the force of desire ... the desire to continue to experience breathing, eating, shiTTing, sleeping ... understanding.
I am honestly perplexed that more people do not think about these things at great lengths. Why are there not more Ciorans and Holdens? There is the possibility that there are more introverts out there than we would expect. It's just that the extroverts bully the introverts into submitting to outer-directed goals. I like Butler's take on social control and how he makes it very clear that following some of his suggestions will lead others to hate us, to disapprove of us, and to resent us for our refusal to submit to the same oppressors they do.
Be kind to yourselves.