Pay no heed to Dante.

Apart from all the greater criminals
Hell's corners are largely filled
by hypocrites like us.

Albi Cathedral:
 the punishment of the smug.

Brief encounter

with Brief Encounter –
I turned it off
It so reduced, traduced
Rachmaninoff.

What was wrong with the word

 Transvestites ?
for humans who liked to
or did dress as the opposite sex ?

Now we are saddled with the word
 Trans-sexuals for biological men
(who seem never to wear burqas
or anything that occludes their faces*)
demanding to use women-only toilet-rooms
even though women (at least half of whom suffer
abuse of one kind or another by men)
thus lose their only safe, feminine spaces.

*Except when carrying weapons or bombs.

See also : 
intersex-campaigners-fighting-to-limit-surgery-on-children

After why

is it ? and how is it ?
We should ask where
has it come from ?
and where it is going to ?

If only we had The Freedom of Choice !

But that would require pre-natal consciousness
at the very least.

 

Coyote Creates Humans.

 Coyote stopped to drink at a big lake and saw his reflection. 
“Now there’s a really good-looking coyote,” 
he said, leaning farther over.

And of course he fell in.  And of course
you will think this is a take-off on an old theme.

But what happened was,
he drank up the whole lake to keep from drowning. 
And because he didn’t really like the taste of certain fish,
he spat them out. 
And because he felt sorry when he saw them flopping around,
he sang a song to give them legs.

“Maybe they’ll become the first people,” Coyote mused aloud.

“Oh no you don’t,” said the headman of that tribe of fish,
“if it’s all the same with you,
could you just put us back where we were? 
And could you please take away these stupid legs?”

So Coyote regurgitated the lake
and put everything back the way it was.

Again he saw his reflection and said,
“Okay, you’re pretty good-looking, but are you smart? 
I’ve been trying to make the first people for a long time now,
but nothing wants to be people.
So, what do I do – huh – can you tell me?”

His reflection studied him for a long time,
then it squatted and dropped a big turd.

“Okay,” said Coyote,
“I guess that’s as good an answer as any.”

Then he himself squatted
and began to fashion the first people…

~ Peter Blue Cloud

Coyote, Coyote, please tell me who you belong to?

According to the latest

survey, there are certain

persons who, in poetic

or scholarly guise,

have claimed me like

a conqueror’s prize.

Let me just say

once and for all,

just to be done:

Coyote, he belongs to none.

from the Peruvian Andes

my Alstrœmeria psittacina,
or Parrot Lily, now in bloom and spreading.

The irrepressible Yanis Varoufakis

uses a great new term
to describe outrageous,
unstoppable, monopolistic
economic warlordism:

Technofeudal.

The Bhagavad Gita suggests

that Man is made of belief.

Henry Ford didn't believe in history.

Some people's beliefs are very precise,

bizarre, their origins a mystery.

Thinking people progress towards

believing in nothing

except that belief is a vise and a vice. 

Female Peacock Mantis Shrimp

with cluster of eggs.

photo by Peter McGee

I don't need it. But thanks for the thought..

 

Figures to consider.

A piece of ancient advice

suggests that
We should live each day
as if it were the last,

'without frenzy, without apathy,
without pretence.'

But how about trying
to live each day as if
it were the first ? 

Come as you like!

 

At the International University

of Sensual Liberation :
Scrotum-nuzzling for Beginners.
Weekend Courses
for all sexes.
Redolent Prices.

A State of Grace :

Radiant Pessimism.

Nice flippers, nice little horns, no willy -

but Triton plays the flute very nicely...
to an important Why-don't-you-stop-now? 
sea-nymph.

Musée Raimond, Toulouse.

The horrible banality of....

The U.S. Ambassador to Greece

 

Not quite à-propos,
Hannah Arendt's tired and superficial phrase
should have read:
The apparent banality of evil.

Krispy Kreme Doughnut

'Please rescue me from my grotesque and
cruel metamorphosis by a wicked wizard.'

Generally speaking,

Man does not appreciate the dark,
and thus produced the Hydrogen Bomb.

'Ahead of the Game' and 'In the Vanguard',

I am in the front row of social breakdown
(and mixed metaphor), indulging in the lunacy
of "personal journalling" for 17 years. 

'The sale of video doorbells
is one of the few consumer growth areas.'
But not for me. There are no calls at my door
apart from the occasional delivery
of books and plants, and, last week,
some warm and inexpensive
Chinese hosiery.

Don McCullin : NEPTUNE

"This man slept by a fire in Spitalfields market,
very close to the City of London,
which generates billions and billions of pounds f
or the people who own it.
You couldn’t have more of a contrast.
One side is everything, and the other side is nothing.

"I call this picture Neptune, because he looks like the sea god.
I thought he was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen."

He also looks like a Western Islander.
This portrait is now famous.

for comparison and contrast:

a photo by Jake Lee Green

Overcrowding.

Gap Im Hong
goldfish in a pond in Ottawa.

TWO NOVEMBER HAIKAI

1. After Basho

November night has paled,

slowly disintegrating

into dawn, dank and cold.

2. Inspired by Issa

Another daybrrrreak.

Fog from the Aveyron slinks up

over my breakfast-cake.

On a frosty November morning, I wondered

what were The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
that was the title of T.E. Lawrence's famous book.

And it may be that they were the supports
of the godly, heavenly house full of goodies
lived in by The Righteous.

The uncountably-more
pillars of stupidity
are not mentioned.

Electronic Ozymandias.

Of course it can't last.
The real doomsday event internet experts still worry about is a sudden, snowballing error in the decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet.   -|-   Photo by Sergio Azenha

Guerrilla mosaic

in a bomb-crater,
Mostar, Bosnia.

 

A doctor was brought forward in court

to state that Young was genetically predisposed to being abused.

Doctors are no more trustworthy than police.

possibly-the-most-prolific-sex-offender-in-british-history

I have been 'dipping into'

the edited letters of Evelyn Waugh,
stylish and amusing English novelist...

came across this from 1948 :
'I am reading Proust for the first time.
Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.'

In another letter he pities Americans
for their 'superstitious belief in democracy',
an ancient intellectual caprice
which, in its mad modern developments,
indeed has proved to be as much
a mere three-witches-smoke-and-mirrors doctrine
as those of progress, the Brotherhood of Man,
the robustness of the dying biosphere
and World Peace.

"The Temple of Vaccinia".

Edward Jenner's laboratory/shed
where he demonstrated and proved (1796)
that inoculation with the blister-pus of cowpox
'vaccinated' successfully against smallpox.

For at least hundreds of years before that,
within the Turkish Empire
smallpox pus was used with considerable risk
and mixed results. In the 18th century 
observations on the link between cowpox
and subsequent smallpox immunity had been made.

Life's changes.

I guess it's at least ten years
since I was invited to dinner,
maybe five since I entertained
anyone here.

Before that, I received or was invited
at least once a week.

Life changes. Apparently
I'm an old man
with two short arms and a Pacemaker.
(I have to cut off the cuffs of my shirts.)

Next week I could be ashes
in a crematorium
in south-western France, not
southern Poland.

Changes, Switches.
One-zero, one-zero.

To kill certain people or certain
types of people is Obligatory
for certain people during a war.
Then, suddenly, it is forbidden
War is the pride of religion.

Millions are never invited
to share food with others.

I have a new doctor.

Who types with one finger
not two, just one finger.
His skin has the beautiful hue
of dark chocolate.
He is even less competent
than the last one, but his radiant smile
(as much as the drugs he signs off on)
keeps me bright and buoyant* –
at least for a while.

                             *Jung's Puer Æternus ?

It's funny

/not funny at all :
what people will rush or just bother
to do "for their country"
- things they would never do for each other. 

And there are the commands
like light-switches.
You are required to kill certain people.
Then required not to.
And millions of corpses
in mass graves and ditches.

'Small' languages seriously threatened,

even when they have a literature
which is a thousand years old.

She complains

about men not wearing underpants. 

Long-johns are, of course, essential in winter.
But if men wore sensible clothing,
such as a djellaba,
underpants would not be useful,
especially when squatting
for pissing or shitting.

Self-portrait in djellaba.

.

Red Lightning, New Zealand.

 

Timeless in Balkh,

the Afghan birth-place of 
Mawlānā Jalal ad-Din Rūmī Balkhi,
known more widely as Rumi.

photo by Atif Ariyan

Reading, not Walking

Walking just 4,000 daily steps once a week
cuts risk of early death in older people,
study suggests...

Which is why I (always seceding
and being already too old)
sit quietly, pacemaker-implanted,
painlessly at home, reading.

Parked in the market square

 250 metres from my house.

Poor Haiku

 November house-fly
delights in home-made yogurt
just as much as I.

'A moment that changed me' :

 "I gave up small talk for a month – and the world came alive."

Being somewhere 'on the A-Spectrum', I am incapable of small talk.

If weather is mentioned, I sometimes voice my and my mother's interest in meteorology, and people mostly (mercifully) drift away.

The goats tune out, and no sheep stay.

Being 'hard of hearing' is an even better ploy...

But the world "comes alive" in a very private way.

Here is exactly the sort of snippet that I would call
Part of a Conversation.

Did you know that the famous Paisley print pattern has its origins in Persia ?  The teardrop/pear-shaped motif, known as boteh in Farsi, is probably a stylised almond or cypress cone (the cypress was sacred to Zoroastrians, and pineapple-ish cones have been much used in European sculptural decoration). 

When I show visitors my gabbeh representing a Peacock on the Tree of Life (symbol of immortality since Assyrian times) they glaze over, staying that way even when I show them my own paintings - also featuring the Tree of Life (or Immortality) without the peacock...

and so, with time, my few friends have
(like my few lovers), dwindled to nought.

My world is principally trees and thought.

People over 15 (or, sometimes, 25) may sometimes
like to learn, but generally don't like to be taught.

A waste-bin (dumpster) in Denmark.

This is probably typical of waste-bins in European cities,
but not in small towns and villages.
In my French village there are special compost bins
for non-animal food-waste, which are actually used;
I have never seen edible food in a dumpster.

Århus, Jutland.

« L'enfer, c'est les autres. » Hell is where we consign others - J-P Sartre.

Mais « l'enfer c'est les autres » a été toujours mal compris.

On a cru que je voulais dire par là
que nos rapports avec les autres étaient toujours empoisonnés,
que c'était toujours des rapports infernaux.
Or, c'est tout autre chose que je veux dire.
Je veux dire que si les rapports avec autrui sont tordus, viciés,
alors l'autre ne peut être que l'enfer." 

- J-P Sartre.

On the other hand, the common misinterpretation is, to my mind, true:
Hell is made by other people - the most depressing beings on the planet -plus, of course, oneself.

2025 Booker Prizewinner.

“Szalay has written a novel about The Big Question:
about the numbing strangeness of being alive,”
wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review of the novel.
“Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. "

Æsthetics and Extinction.

Beauty and Death:
between them
pain and its infliction.

Today's

Message in a bottle:

Enjoy your coffee.

Composition.

The New Mayor of New York.

 

Oh dear,

I have had gas hobs since 1970
and a closed wood-burning stove
since 2006.
For sixty years before that,
I lived with had open coal fires
and paraffin [kerosene] heaters.
It's a miracle that I'm alive,
even with a PaceMaker.

The Chairs

Mr Hockney,
a celebrity painter
of moderate talent
and little originality,
despises his 'public'
and insults his hallowed
predecessors
with 'work' like this.
A Big Name can sell big
any cheap little joke.

Hockney: Gauguin's and van Gogh's chairs.