“Good enough”

is an alien notion to the far-from-perfect people of the West. 
They oppress themselves and the world
with the blasphemous notion,
the virulent infection,
of Perfection.

Theseus was, of course, a racist bully.

But perhaps a bit of his common-sense violence could be applied
to those aspirational middle-class parents
who actually stretch their "too-short" children by surgery,
as Procrustes did to his victims.
The middle classes are already oppressing themselves
even more than the underclasses.

It seems obvious to me

that literacy precludes 'wisdom'.
So, 'Books of Wisdom' are bogus,
though not books which help you
overcome the handicap of literacy.

Obviously,

much more thought goes into a
suicide
than into a pregnancy.

It's a pity there is so little thought
amongst so many people.

When I was a bit younger

I pissed in all the holy-water stoups I passed,
whenever possible.  Now, however, I visit few churches
(having finished my researches into 'marginal' motifs),
so I piss instead into the conveniently-placed
letterboxes of the ever-odious bourgeoisie.

Two (of the many) things I hate:

Machismo (except self-ironically)
and the grotesque, false femininity it has created
and relies on, like Pharaohs
on pyramid-builders.

"The Damaged

will not politely go away."
   - William Trevor

Civilisation makes sure that we are all damaged
to a greater or lesser extent.

A bit of heavy entertainment.

For those with an antique idea of a gay man,
this is a Pansy/Faggot looking for friends online.

Aways very conveniently placed for decent-sized dogs.

The Family is absurd.

As Bourdieu said,
'the family' is not a unit
but a disparate assemblage of strategies.
And even a series of scenes
from the Theatre of the Absurd.

Dog born without hind legs

walks on his front ones.

Socialists of the world - wise up !

Margaret Thatcher famously, and rightly, said
There is no such thing as Society.
There is no such thing as The Working Class,
much less the Urban Proletariat.
All is flux, always.
The appallingly-ground-down English workers of Engels' time
bear little relationship to those of today.
The Russian workers of Lenin's time
had little in common with the German workers
celebrated by Brecht and Käthe Kollwitz,
or to the English workers cast in concrete by Hoggart and Lawrence,
or the American ones celebrated by Woody Guthrie.
The French working-class of today is very different from that of 1950,
and from the American underclass,
and from the Chinese factory-workers,
and from, worst of all, "illegal immigrants"
and the Indian Untouchables.

Bourgeois anarchists like me and Prince Kropotkin
and Peter Pan
tend, however, to inhabit the same Never-never-land.

Ostrichism.

On the one hand,
scientists, the World Health Organisation
and governments are ensuring
that there will be no more Great Pandemics
like the 1918 influenza outbreak -
which killed more people than World War One.

On the other hand, they criminally ignore
that we humans are already
the most dreadful pandemic so far.

Being queer

was fun with a pal
when it was illegal.
Now that it is pretty well normal,
and nasty right-wing, racist Christians
claim to be 'gay',
I have become happily asexual.

Philosophers

are fools by definition:
wisdom is not more lovable
than inanition.

Dogs and children

(such as Wendy and Flush)
are the first to suffer
when the machine of capitalism
comes and starts to crush.

The real Gay Liberation

is primal,
is freedom from the Male Gaze -
the compulsion to look at women in general
as sexual objects of greater or less merit.
Instead, queer men, male gays
exhibit a rather more selective and discreet
tendency to appraise and appreciate
certain types of men whose manner
and allure appeal to their gonads via their eyes,
as flies are appealed to by meat.

Belief

is, by definition, irrational;
and 'faith'
(as the great rationalist Nietzsche wrote)
is fraud.
Unreason
is God.

Sustenance through food, and oblivion through alcohol.

Throughout History
and ten thousand years before,
'Women were concerned
with the immediacy of survival,
while men needed escape
from the consequences of their war.'

Antony Beevor: Berlin, the Downfall 1945, p. 310

One of the main reasons I left Ireland

was because within my lifetime
I witnessed the inexorable decline
of flora, fauna, mushrooms and fish
through that mean little island's
unwholesome agricultural devastation.
In my last years there in rural solitude,
earthworms  had given way to flatworms,
Agaricus campestris had vanished utterly
and, although I still saw the robin and wren
in my garden, and heard the blackbird sing,
I heard no cuckoo, no lark (though I'm going deaf)
and no swallows came to my barn in spring.

Agaricus campestris  (Field or Meadow Mushroom)

I hardly noticed that I had no father,

and I think I have been most fortunate
in not having one (except for one primordial, unfortunate moment
which cost my mother dear).

But here are two poems by a great Irish poet

who seems to have revered her father.

My Father, Long Dead

My father, long dead,
has become air

Become scent
of pipe smoke, of turf smoke, of resin

Become light
and shade on the river

Become foxglove,
buttercup, tree bark

Become corncrake
lost from the meadow

Become silence,
places of calm

Become badger at dusk,
deer in the thicket

Become grass
on the road to the castle

Become mist
on the turret

Become dark-haired hero in a story
written by a dark-haired child

*

Guardian

My father,

a most gentle man,

fed the leavings of the table
to nesting crows
that screamed and whirled
in a nearby stand of trees.

From a branch of sycamore
that overhung
his newly-planted drills,
he suspended
by its gnarled legs
one dead crow;

for weeks
the wind-jigged carcass
swung there
in a crazy parody of flight.

My father,
a most gentle man,

appeasing the dark gods,
their appetite
for sustenance,
for blood.

*

EILEEN SHEEHAN

Many men are bullies.

Many men are victims.
Many men manage
to be both.

Freedom, for a man,

is primarily spatial
and, secondarily, sexual.
Which is why we have spread over the globe
in our billions,
and have made so little emotional progress.

Deep Communication.

I wiggle my toes.
He wags his tail.

Language cannot do better.

No sacred texts required.

My "religion"
is tree-worship.

Trees are "the soul of the world"
and grow through deep sorrow.
We are still cutting them down
so that there'll be no tomorrow.

My dog's favourite place to lie

is on my Immortality gabbeh.
which depicts a peacock on the Tree of Life.

This might be symbolic
but, more likely, is because
(apart from my bed) it is
the softest place in my sweet house to be
and close to me when I am tapping quietly
(as now) on my computer.

On Politics.

One should not ascribe to malice
that which can be explained by stupidity.
But, on the other hand,
one should hesitate to ascribe to stupidity or ignorance
that which can be explained by malice.
And never attribute to coincidence
that which can be explained by corruption.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

 ὁ ... ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ
To examine one’s life one has to be informed.
To be informed one has to take trouble.
To take trouble one has to take life seriously.
To take life seriously one has definitely not to take oneself seriously.
Our civilisation is horribly crammed with people who take themselves seriously.

Dating from September 1960

my address-book is entitled
The Roll of Disconnections.

Premature births

often occur.
But premature deaths ?
No-one is informed enough to tell.

Wolves are wise enough

to advance at the pace of the slowest of the pack.
Humans, on the other hand...

When I was a little boy

in the 1940s,
I took an interest in
bizarre things such as asteroids,
beetles and dinosaurs.
This was partly - no, largely - to emphasise
my difference, and was not unconnected
to my love of spiders, ogres,
and the dark that other children feared -
and my understanding
that it was not Rapunzel's hair
that Rumpelstiltskin climbed up -
but her beard.

The huge problematic of Christianity

is the belief that humans are perfectible.
From this, and the fatal Neolithic fantasy
that Nature is improvable,
arise most of the evils of our time.

"The mind

has no inherent capacity for joy...
It only imagines joy."

- Osho (Rajneesh; born Chandra Mohan Jain)

Virgil on happy, exciting moments (neatly put):

Forsan et haec olim
meminisse iuvabit.

Perhaps one day
we will be cheered up
by remembering them.

(Aeneid, Book I)

A Suicide

is perfectly able to take an interest
in the future in which he (or she) has no
intention of inhabiting.

"Real Men" suck

both pricks and pussies,
cocks as well as cunts.

More or less stuck

at a happy emotional age of about six or seven
I am very fortunate not to be stuck, as most men are,
at a dark emotional age of twelve to sixteen.

Clothes can be beautiful

and interesting, even stimulating
in different ways -
though when you are even slightly aware
you tend to see only their majesties'
fake tan underneath.

Yet another definition of capitalism:

the selling
of complicity.

'Banter,'

like mindlessly-repeated teasing,
is rarely less than verbal aggression -
which is why I always avoided
men in groups
and the intimidating pubs of Britain.

"The blood of martyrs

is the seed of the Church,"
wrote Tertullian, famously.
But not of the martyrs of fertility:
half the population of the world.

Human brains

smell sweet
but manufacture a foul bitterness
beyond all understanding.

Death

is too much reality for some
but the only reality for all of us.

There is something about

perfect and (often frighteningly expensive)
American teeth
which is more than a bit unwholesome.

My mind is now even more boggled :

https://aeon.co/ideas/there-are-more-microbial-species-on-earth-than-stars-in-the-sky

ObL ad phasmam.

You made the typically-male, typically-western mistake
of being too ambitious, over-reaching.
Instead of mere symbols of greed and power
and wage-slavery, you should have struck at the roots:
the prestigious private schools of the USA and England.

Not many people know

(certainly few of the French)
that France has one of the worst rural bus services in the world.
This is partly because of a national railway monopoly
(ironically and largely controlled by its
unbelievably-cosseted and often-hereditary or nepotic employees)
and partly to boost the car industry -
so that it is now extremely difficult to live in the countryside
without a car.  Second-hand cars are extremely expensive
and thus, often extremely old.
And so the rural economy and population
continue to decline
despite the (largely benign)
influx of foreigners.

The Capitalist Work-ethic

cannot tolerate leisure
unless, in its totalitarian scheme of things,
it "provides" people-cogs with jobs.

My blogs begin

as words on scraps of paper.
I refine them
and then "post" them
as virtual scraps of paper
in the vast gutter of the world-wide web.