--It's vulgar to trumpet one's motif, to wave one's sigil, to speak one's secret name.
--Silence neither needs nor tolerates an advocate.

The individual is naked in the storm, a ruined king, like Lear. What is this 'final' form of heroism ? What is the 'last' that Macbeth tries ? — green flag

Maybe you're making too much out of someone saying "fuck this." It's a guy kind of thing. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just fuck it. It's one of the good things and one of the bad things about men. No need to make it mythological.

Maybe you're making too much out of someone saying "fuck this." It's a guy kind of thing. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just fuck it. It's one of the good things and one of the bad things about men. No need to make it mythological. — T Clark

Thanks for joining the thread. It seems to me that 'no need to make it mythological' is itself tangled up in the 'minimalism' I'm sketching.

If this is a man thing, is it not likely to involve being trained up into manhood ? Maybe we don't need Shakespeare, but is there at least the image of the father or action hero involved?

I think it might also be important to distinguish between traditional male virtue (which is 'for' something) and the extreme version symbolized by the Macbeth or the atheist/absurdist hyperindividual. What does a thoroughly alienated/transcendent (anti-)hero stick around for ? The world as spectacle ? The self taking the world as spectacle as spectacle ?

For blues folk, "fears & hopes" are nothing but shadows on the skull's wall; only courage like Sisyphus' defiance matters to us. :death: :flower:

Your talk of blues reminds me of a great Cornel West interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfD3X3f5C_w

Blind Willy's 'Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWb4XcVwIeI

Philosophy proper may play a secondary role when it comes to 'existential issues' (or, equivalently, a similar, poetic role, despite a sometimes relatively abstract ontological presentation.)

↪180 Proof
Your talk of blues reminds me of a great Cornel West interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfD3X3f5C_w — green flag

:cool: Thank you.

Plato says 'Philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death.' — Cornel West (2008)

My brutha! A philosopher reflectively practices how to die while living; how to think for oneself; how to cultivate courage; reflectively practices change, creativity (sense-making), defeasibility, (in)finitude, contingency, struggle (funk), agency, love-in-spite-of, ... ek-stasis. :fire:


https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/791991

Some bits and pieces from Wiki:

Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humor), puts forth the following theory of black comedy: "The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."

At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?"

***

Pieces from Stirner's mostly unreadable book:

This higher thought might be enunciated as that of the movement or process of thinking itself, i.e. as the thought of thinking or of criticism, for example.
...
Freedom of thinking has in fact become complete hereby...There is nothing left but the — dogma of free thinking or of criticism.
...
Criticism, and criticism alone, is “up to date.” From the standpoint of thought there is no power capable of being an overmatch for criticism’s, and it is a pleasure to see how easily and sportively this dragon swallows all other serpents of thought. Each serpent twists, to be sure, but criticism crushes it in all its “turns.”
...
Criticism is the possessed man’s fight against possession as such, against all possession: a fight which is founded in the consciousness that everywhere possession, or, as the critic calls it, a religious and theological attitude, is extant. He knows that people stand in a religious or believing attitude not only toward God, but toward other ideas as well, like right, the State, law; i.e. he recognizes possession in all places. So he wants to break up thoughts by thinking; but I say, only thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It is not thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable, incomprehensible, that frees me from possession.
...
Against me, the unnameable, the realm of thoughts, thinking, and mind is shattered.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-ego-and-his-own#toc10

The "fight against possession" should maybe be conceived as ecstatic expansion of a system always trying to represent itself from the outside or to climb out of itself. Criticism can toss any "finite" or determinate identification into the fire. But what is "Criticism" but a kind of restless transcendence of the given ? the transformation of necessity into contingency ? Criticism is empty, nothingness, the void itself.

To me the connection is that Stirner enjoys himself as the end of history, outside of language even, and Macbeth is out of lucky charms, facing the end without hope or attachment.

I see you appreciate Deadwood too. Great stuff.

:up:

You can't cut the throat of every cocksucker whose character it would improve. — Al Swearengen to Mr. Wu

A great one, with so much to choose from. I can't think of any show that's better. The doctor's prayer for the minister's death still gives me chills. "Mommy!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruSR6mB6L0Q

One of the reasons the character Al fascinates me is that he's a philosopher with bloody hands, like Hamlet, and unlike Socrates and Jesus, who are therefore institutionally safe icons. To me this is also part of the power of Macbeth. He's an antihero to which we can nevertheless relate. As Bloom put it, he's an actor who keeps missing his cues. Instead of slowing down, he decides that his error is pausing to think. "The very firstlings of my heart shall be/ The firstlings of my hand."

One of the reasons the character Al fascinates me is that he's a philosopher with bloody hands ... — green flag

:cool: :up:

Change ain't looking for friends. Change calls the tune we all dance to.

In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is… one vile fucking task after another.

Don’t you think I don't understand. I mean, what can anyone of us ever really fuckin' hope for, huh? Except for a moment here and there with a person who doesn't want to rob, steal or murder us? At night, it may happen. Sun-up, one person against the fuckin' wall, the other may hop on the fuckin' bed trusting each other enough to tell half the fucking truth. Everybody needs that.

I’d rather try touching the moon than take on a whore’s thinking.

Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.

Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man… and give some back.

Do they understand how most of what happens is people being drunk and stupid and trying to find something else to blame besides that that makes their lives totally fucked? No. They don't.

Every fuckin’ beatin’ I’m grateful for. Every fuckin’ one of them. Get all the trust beat outta you. And you know what the fuckin’ world is.

Truth is, as a base of operations, you cannot beat a fucking saloon. — Thus Spoke Al Swearengen (a boss cocksucker of Deadwood of the Dakota territory)

Excellent selection. You must like Cormac too. Blood Meridian is something else, Deadwood's unfilmable cousin. It was great to see Bullock grow into his role in the movie that came much later (and it was nice to see Al face death, somehow as an old man.)

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. — Cormac

I recently discovered that Cormac is crazy about physics and extremely knowledgable. Nice Youtube interviews on this if you haven't seen them.

Perhaps this thread is about the vanishing core of heroism, its unnamable kernel. The goal is self-esteem, which seems related to a can-do courage to faith the world (I'll leave that typo in.) This doesn't require fear and hope with respect to internal things. It even shines most brightly in the face of what others call hopelessness, as against a dark background. Shakespeare saw and used that. Macbeth had nothing left but his pointless courage.

Becker's The Denial of Death opens with a quote from William James: mankind’s common instinct for reality…has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism. Humans desire to be desired -- to be recognized and self-recognized as valuable, as worthy of emulation and assimilation. The right kind of paradoxically self-transcending narcissism seems to be the goal. Virtue loves and recognizes virtue. Love loves to love love. The better self-esteem is an esteem for human virtue which one, for the time being, finds also in oneself, and probably not without properly reduced expectations. "Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all."

Hell yes! I've been a Cormac McCarthy obsessive since reading Blood Meridian and his early novels in the early 90s (thanks to Harold Bloom? George Steiner? William Gass?) Every novel Cormac's written since 2005, including his play The Sunset Limited (and the film adaption with Tommy Lee Jones (directing too) & Samuel L. Jackson) are also (lesser) masterpieces. Due to ongoing eye treatments for retinapathy & cataracts Ive put off reading his latest duopoly The Passenger & Stella Maris unril I can see well enough again to enjoy reading them fluidly.

And yes, though he's given few interviews, (I think) I've read or watched all of them. His work with / at the Santa Fe Institute on "physics, etc" is somehow incorporated in his latest novels to some degree from what reviewers have written. It tortures me not to have read those novels yet.

fyi – my most favorite (contemporary) literary novelists in English are Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, d. 2017 & Samuel Beckett, d. 1989

(& David Markson, d. 2010).

David Markson sounds great and is a new lead. Thanks !

I've read a few of Cormac's and at the moment, after Blood Meridian of course, it's Child of God.. But I thought The Counselor and No Country (which I haven't read yet ) were great flicks. I will definitely read the newest. One features an insane female mathematician. Should be fun. Gotta wait for that paperback to come out though. It doesn't make cents to go without dollars.

You must like Cormac too. Blood Meridian is something else, Deadwood's unfilmable cousin. — green flag

Love Deadwood. Best TV I ever saw. Not crazy about Blood Meridian but it is extraordinary. I prefer Cormac's Suttree... talk about the blues....

Deadwood: Calamity Jane teaching American history. 'Custer was a cunt. The end.'

Deadwood: Calamity Jane teaching American history. 'Custer was a cunt. The end.' — Tom Storm

:rofl: :up:

"Some Celtic warriors entered battle naked - a group which Roman writers called gaestae - and exactly why this is has perplexed scholars. It may be they wished to demonstrate their supreme confidence in their prowess and the protection offered them by their gods." To me it's intuitive to think in terms of pursuit and flaunting of status, something like conspicuous destruction or potlatch. Who can 'afford' to stand most naked, to question most radically ? Is this toxic masculinity? Clearly I'm approaching this in terms of the adoption of a fundamental hero myth. — green flag

According to Polybius they fought naked, at least in part, because they didn't want their clothes to be caught in the brambles. So perhaps their concern was more sartorial than anything else. But I imagine the trousers barbarians wore could be a nuisance in battle, sometimes. It's said they were mercenaries, which suggests their motives weren't entirely heroic.

OK. Perhaps in fact a particular band of warriors was being more practical than symbolic.

I still maintain that this kind of gesture exists. 'I can take you with one hand tied behind my back.' Or I can ride a motorcycle at high speeds without a helmet. Or I can drink mountain man booze. Or I can go without vaccines, without flattery, without apologies, etc.

I still maintain that this kind of gesture exists. 'I can take you with one hand tied behind my back.' Or I can ride a motorcycle at high speeds without a helmet. Or I can drink mountain man booze. Or I can go without vaccines, without flattery, without apologies, etc. — green flag

Perhaps the Native American practice of "counting coup" would work here.

:up:

Not crazy about Blood Meridian but it is extraordinary. I prefer Cormac's Suttree... talk about the blues.... — Tom Storm

I've debated getting into Suttree. I am now more motivated.

Love Deadwood. Best TV I ever saw. — Tom Storm

Same here. I can't think of anything better. Is there anything as good ? There are many great moments in Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Succession. But none of these shows overflow with one great fusion of writing and acting after another. Deadwood is like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Bukowski (and ?) somehow got put on the screen in full vividness.

I think Arrested Development is as good as any comedy I've seen, but that deserves another category. Very different experience.