I thought about Diogenes last night when I was watching David Shields’ excellent film, Marshawn Lynch: A History, with its clips of Joseph Campbell talking about the trickster and stand-up comedians like Dave Chappelle contextualizing the football player’s silence and refusals to engage with the media.
He would walk backward through the city streets. One day Diogenes was seen making the rounds of the ornamented porticoes of Athens, begging alms from the public statues. “Govern men,” he replied, and told the crier to call it out in case anyone wanted to buy a master for himself. When he was captured by pirates after a shipwreck and put up for sale at a slave auction, the auctioneer asked him what he could do. When a rich man took Diogenes into his house and cautioned him not to spit on the rugs and furnishings since they were very expensive, Diogenes spat in the man’s face and explained that it was the only thing there cheap enough to spit on.ĭiogenes praised people who intended to get married, or go on a journey, or enter a profession, and being just about to do so, decided not to. When asked why, he replied, “This is the kind of thing I practice doing all the time.” When a play had just ended and the crowds were swarming out, Diogenes made his way into the emptying theater against the flow. One day Diogenes was seen sitting in the public square all afternoon gluing shut the pages of a book. In a 1983 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley called Diogenes “arguably the great prototype for much performance art,” and reframed a selection of Diogenes stories as performance pieces, or “Performance Philosophy,” later collecting them into an artist’s book, Diogenes: Defictions. Diogenes said that if he weren’t Diogenes, he’d want to be Diogenes too.) Who was ultimately more powerful: the conqueror Alexander, who ruled the known world, or the philosopher Diogenes, whom Alexander could neither offer nor threaten with anything? (Alexander reportedly said that if he weren’t Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes. Tim Kreider asked in his essay, “ Power? No, Thanks, I’m Good”: Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand out of my light.” Finding Diogenes lazing in the sun, Alexander expressed his admiration and asked if there was anything Diogenes needed. There are also paintings of the time he dissed Alexander the Great, who had made it a point to visit this famous philosopher. Diogenes’s most notorious act was to roam through the city streets with a latern, looking for an honest man in paintings, he’s often shown with the lantern by his side, sulking inside a round terra-cotta tub while the life of the city goes on around him. Many people are familiar with “the man who lived in a tub,” scorning all material possessions except for a stick and a ragged cloak.
Diogenes of sinope bird how to#
Jenny Odell writes about Diogenes in the chapter “Anatomy of a Refusal” in her book, How To Do Nothing, examining him alongside performance artists, Thoreau ( Walden is much better if you think of it as performance art), Bartleby the Scrivener, and the comedian Tom Green. Here’s a comic not in the book, from King-Cat #70:
Diogenes of sinope bird series#
(I would read a whole series of Porcellino comics based on his favorite philosophers: see his book, Thoreau at Walden.)
The cartoonist John Porcellino had the brilliant idea to turn a handful of these punchlines into single-page comics in a section of King-Cat #68, which is collected in his book, From Lone Mountain. On one occasion he saw the son of a courtesan throwing a stone at a crowd, and said to him, “Take care, lest you hit your father.” He was begging once of a very ill-tempered man, and as he said to him, “If you can persuade me, I will give you something.” replied, “If I could persuade you, I would beg you to hang yourself.” Seeing some women hanging on olive trees, he said, “I wish every tree bore similar fruit.”
If you read Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the stories about Diogenes of Sinope start to read like a joke book of one-liners: “Diogenes was the first, some might claim the best, stand-up comic.”
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