of same-sex relationships
is that they do not ape
conventional 'engagements' and marriage,
do not require promises of sexual fidelity,
and, most importantly, are as honest and transparent
as they are, inevitably, in the natural world.
Language is the cause of immeasurable misery.
of user-friendly, wholesome words
for uro-genital-anal organs of the body.
But I was reminded the other day of the word
todger, a more grown-up word than willy.
My dictionary gives no etymology,
but it rhymes with bodger, a travelling man
who made (bodged) and sold
useful items mostly from beech wood.
All bodgers have todgers,
and almost all reavers -
but only half of all badgers
and beavers.
Note: neither of these furry creatures
will accept lodgers.
With mass consumerisation
came commodification, then globalisation
followed by the monetisation
and weaponisation of everything
from the ocean bed to outer space,
and the infantilisation
of the whole human race.
I was a boy who loved to hang things up.
With my friend Sam I would take pots and pans
from the kitchen and scullery out to the shed
in the garden where we would hang them
on nails and on hooks in an aesthetic manner.
I have no idea why. We felt good in the shed.
All my life I have loved to hang things up.
In adolescence I was not hung up
about not hanging out, but hanging in
to read and listen to music.
I started painting so that I could hang pictures up.
My cellar (600 years old) has various paintings,
antique saws, bits of junk hanging up.
Today I hung up a hot-water-bottle in the pantry.
I'm an old man who still likes hanging things up.
by accounts of my life
during the few years that I kept a diary.
I have a terrible memory, and even after
reading the diaries, forget what I did,
where I went, and some of the people I met.
I can recall very little of childhood -
just a few incidents
and embarrassments lodged in my brain.
Nor do I remember my first erotic kiss,
my first fall from a bike or a sleigh,
the first time I camped out in the rain,
the first time I saw an alligator.
But this morning, 'out of the blue'
(or rather the black)
I suddenly remembered that, way back
- was it 1962 or later ? -
I asked if I might join the Queen's University
Poetry Group which included Northern Ireland's
future Nobel prizewinner and one or two
better poets than he - but was refused, because
I was not a student of English, but of Philosophy.
I am still effetely writing a sort-of-philosophical
sort-of-sub-poetry.
Is it OK to ghost on friends ?
On reading further,
I learned that to ghost on friends
means letting friendships drop -
particularly after covid-confinement.
This happens naturally as you get older
and conversation starts to ghost,
and you can no longer cope with small talk.
Old friends die off to become ghosts in your head,
and, especially if you move far away,
more recent ones ghost on you and don't care
whether you're alive or dead.
Perhaps it is because of speech, writing, printing, telephone,
internet and all the expensive paraphernalia* of interaction
that human beings communicate less well than dogs -
perhaps less well than trees (though a bit better than logs)
- because our fear of communion and connection
is as great and as species-specific as our fear of the unknown.
*Paraphernalia originally meant the private goods of a bride
distinct from her dowry.
Sometimes, even to live is an act of courage.
- Seneca
La vie n'est pas pour tout le monde.
Life is not for everyone.
- Romain Gary, in La Vie devant nous
Few are the voices raised
against mass-stupefying Hit-music
and its crude, abusive culture
blared around the world.
Mine probably sounds crazed.
is a strange and slippery word.
I am trying to think of men that I would call
manly:
quiet, non-assertive, not narcissistic, capable,
principled but not dogmatic,
forbearing, utterly reliable,
protective but not inclined to smother...
The manliest (maybe the only manly)
person I have known was, in fact, my mother.
The quintessential, the ultimate
Pyrrhic Victory has been won
by Man (and his excuses for nurture)
against Nature.
has been created...which actually tastes like meat:
artificial beef can easily be distinguished from artificial lamb,
artificial pork tastes thoroughly like pork.
So will we soon even be able to eat
artificial pangolin, artificial sucking-human,
without creature having been hurt ?
whether physical, sexual
emotional or intellectual
unsurprisingly induces anger
as well as fear - whose expression
incurs discouragement
if not penalty and suppression.
than religion, the elevation
of sport to cult offers only
a different stupefaction.
Baby-zombie bang-bang music
is just a different distraction.
Georg Lichtenberg wrote:
"Everything that matters in life flows through tubes."
and many other aphorisms, including :
"There are very many people who read in order to prevent themselves from thinking."
and
to anyone who suffered only slightly in the 1950s
at a totalitarian British private school.
Nazis created their elite schools on British model.
The country which - after Hiroshima and Nagasaki -
ensured democracy in Japan, West Germany, Taiwan,
went on to 'gun down' democracy in Guatemala,
prevent it in the former Belgian Congo,
and (helped by brown-nose Britain) overthrow it Iran,
set up a military dictatorship in South Korea.
I remember the Great Scare about Communist
'brainwashing' - just when the USA's
security agencies started a highly-successful
indoctrination of its whole population,
'master-minded' by Edward Bernays.
So it is not surprising that the United States
is considered 'less democratic' than several other countries
in what used to be called The Free World by Americans.
These include
the Nordic countries of course, Uruguay, Taiwan,
Ireland, Chile, Mauritius, Costa Rica, Germany, Japan...
and ranks 24th, among the 'flawed democracies'
just below France, but above Brazil, Botswana,
Belgium, the Baltic States - and not that far above Mongolia.
Harsh-Times-by-Mario-Vargas-Llosa---CIA-secrets-and-breathtaking-lies
Machines
have replaced our personalities
and infantilised us.
The cages of our minds do not unlock
but get ever smaller.
those who can afford it in the First World
which miscreated The World that's Not to Last
are moving gently and with ease
into the countryside because of pollution
and (the latest)(continuing) pandemic disease,
while, in the Third World, raped and pillaged by the First,
the desperate poor are moving fast
to slums in choked and choking cities, because
they and their impoverished land are cursed
by overgrazing, drought and loss of trees
or because of rising seas.
do not deteriorate,
but gardens do -
and outside the tropics
not into wild places
but dereliction.
Don't dare to give us '...your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...'
people mumbling or speaking too fast:
yesterday, I heard Xi Jing Ping
when what was said was Stephen King,
which made for a briefly-puzzling newscast.
It's not unusual at my stage of life :
a wave, a smile, a greeting
are as much as I want by way of
communication with others. Indeed,
friendly body-language is
as much as I (and probably they, too) need.
I never cared for the vapid œuvre
of Giorgio de Chirico.
But I loved the titles -
The Nostalgia of the Infinite
The Soothsayer's Recompense
The Enigma of Arrival
The Uncertainty of the Poet
The Unhappiness of Departure
The Terrible Games
Colonial Mannequins
The Nostalgia of the Poet
The Sole Consolation...
- which were supplied by his friend
the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
the great totalitarian American
monument to mediocrity,
every page the same, without quirk or humour,
presented like dead fish, lacking personality -
nothing stimulating or fresh -
it sits like a vast sub-educational tumour
policed by goon-bots: algorithms made flesh.
Those who believe that The State should kill
(or freeze or starve)
large numbers of foreigners
- not in defence of their citizens' lives -
but of its 'sovereignty' and pride -
can hardly argue that 'human life is sacred'.
Every army is a machine of death.
The ultimate nation-state is a concentration-camp.
our European education systems and prideful cultures
have programmed us to think that we are merely flawed
and can fix our infelicities, our problems, improve our species,
through Education, Science - and Applied Sociology.
The opposite has been the case.
Before the Great Enlightenment Scam
we were told that we were mere and abject victims of
Original Sin and could improve ourselves only
after death, and, before it, only through piety,
humility and Good Works (or acceptable hypocrisy).
Both these attitudes are piffle, codswallop, baloney,
cynical misinformation.
We are Freaks of Nature, organisms so perverse
that we are perhaps unparalleled in any universe.
they become security companies
serving those who can afford them."
- John Gray (in the New Statesman 3/12/2001)
This is because Nation States created them to protect the rich,
and the rich have now dispensed with nation states.
Let me count the coldnesses:
the coldness that's in human eyes
even when lips are kissing;
the coldness in my brain when
I see that coldness;
the coldness always in my feet;
the coldness of money
and organisations, armies,
governments, cyborgs
and the internet; of our frozen intelligence,
the outer space of Man's ambition;
the coldness of abattoirs,
algorithms and morgues.
*Almost all my blogs are written and dated several months before they appear. The last ones will outlive me, perhaps by several months.
Women are free to play football
but are not free from the bloated
cosmetics industry.
that makes people ill
or unpleasant.
And there's hospital-stress
which holds them in
suspended animation
until their limbo's termination.
An extremely rare marsupial frog, with its tadpoles,
recently-discovered in northern New South Wales.
Most of most of us is fiction - probably.
Our 'communities' and nation-states
are notional, our true religions and our true friends
quite mythical, our lives directed and devoted
to ineptly hiding and dissembling,
and creating destructive, adolescent fictions
such as Romantic (or Spiritual) Eternal Love.
There is not much place in the world for those
who are handicapped by expecting 'transparency'
and simple openness in others,
rather than hoardings covered with slogans, tags
blatant lies and bland deceptions.
The truth may be that, despite congratulating themselves
on bring Social Animals, humans - albeit unconsciously -
mostly hate other humans.
Oh, how we treasure
the sublimated exceptions !
under the sea, on a rock, a bamboo pole,
the root of a tree, a pebble, a tile or another shell,
its tooth-like but soft cilia swoosh water
over the bivalve’s gills. Its shells are open,
its muscles are relaxed.
An hour passes;
the oyster has filtered food
from five litres of water.
It has registered the breaking of the waves:
it opens and closes according to the tides.
As a cargo ship sounds its horn
the open oyster shuts in fright.
https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/oyster-sounds
are best avoided.
But - gutted, filleted and cooked by
any of the arts -
they are acceptable in small pieces.
Chinese and joyfully unbowed by grief,
has written 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows.
His family name 艾 (ài) can be translated as wormwood,
whose silvery leaves are a cleaner of the liver.
His first name 未未 (wèi-wèi)
means different things when pronounced with different tones
(and written differently).
of any mention of the Pyramids
of Egypt in the Bible poses
is answered easily: very few Jews
had ever been there, not even Moses.
I heard on the radio today
that coal provides less energy
(less than 20%)
than 'renewables' in the USA.
Plastic rafting :
'Invasive species hitch rides on ocean litter.'
They always did, to some (small) extent -
on clumps of seaweed, for example. Or dead creatures.
More recently on ships or jetsam.
The good news is that the more this happens
the more the world will become
unsustainable for humans.
(my first Albanian poem)
AND LIFE ADVANCES TO NO-LIFE
Ikë e ikë | On and on |
Kënga e mukës | The same old tale: |
Muri luan | A wall may give way |
Burri s'luan | A man may not |
Bota vuan | The world suffers on |
1999
