Sibilant or fricative ?

The reassuring sound
of gas street-lights.

(Now heard no more.)

Jesus is not recorded as saying

that real people don't have families,
but seems to have assumed it is so.

Wallace Stevens said

(or rather wrote that) the self
is "a substitute for all the gods."
And - I would add - an outrage
against natural humility.  And all our selves
pollute the world with terrible imagination,
murderous alphabets, accursèd languages,
repulsive rivalries, our pride, our money.

The planet will spin on unpaid;
the shroud above its crust will be our filthy bed.

Art is not stuff -

but how you live your life.

The thing about dolls

and stuffed animals
is that they feel no pain.
We treat each other like dolls
and animals as if they had no sentience.

Silk.

The more that Nature is defeated
the less subtle we become.

Between

routine and dance
lies the opening
of awareness.

Comfort

is the enemy
of consciousness.

The Flood.

Several
thousand miles away
we are drowning
in the U.S.A.

Hurrah!

James Ellroy
doesn't have a cellphone, either !

Nor has he a laptop...

He likes Rachmaninov -
but does he have TV ?

Life After Death

was invented (by ghouls) to encourage
the thought that life before death is worth living.

Unfortunately,

cities now
grow faster
than forests.

(And they are water-consumers

rather than water-conservators.)

After we had devised the bag

we should have stopped our inventions.

"Sex"

isn’t that much better than a good sneeze –

though it can last longer.

There's nothing like a good sneeze...

and then there's ear-cleaning

and foot massage...

and having your back scratched...
and tantric pissing...

Only the unsensual obsess about "sex".

Pascal's strange Apologia.

"The simple application of reason tells us that we are a  hateful species.
The only religion that teaches us to hate ourselves is Christianity.
So no other religion can be considered
by those who know that they deserve nothing but hatred."

But, of course, if we already accept that we are a hateful species
we don't need help from hypocritical Christianity.

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford,

son of the first British prime minister, genteel,
asexual author of the first Gothic Novel (The Castle of Otranto)
wrote more than once in his vast correspondence:
this world is a comedy to those that think,
and a tragedy to those that feel. 

I am not as knowledgeable as I thought,

and, being almost square,
have never moved in the right circles.
I still have no idea how Club Sandwiches
differs from other kinds. Nor do I care
enough to look it up on Google Images.

There are few memorable epigrams by Stalin,

apart from his reply to French Foreign minister Pierre Laval's suggestion
that he might gain the Vatican's favour if he stopped persecuting Catholics in the USSR :

"And how many divisions does His Holiness command ?"

On the other hand,
The powerless Lev Trotsky is very quotable:

The end may justify the means provided that something justifies the end.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

"The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country." 

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Revolutions are always verbose.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'

"The Language-barrier"

is language itself.

(Ask any dog.)

Suddenly remembering Grace Jones.

Unkind
Homo annihilans
walking disaster
blind
demolition Man

There are unamazingly many 'destroy' words in Latin:

see https://www.wordhippo.com/

Somewhere between

'The Millennium Bug' and Armageddon.

After centuries of power,

exploitation, exultation, genocide and glory,
Western culture now turns everything to sex or money,
or (preferably) both together.
Hence the phenomena of Shining Path,
al-Qaeda, Taliban, et cetera.

When Japanese ejaculate

they don't feel that they've come -
but that they've gone.

Things are rarely as we think they are

however we play them on the grey sitar
of consciousness.
Books are the most dizzying disease
the most poetic conflagration
ever to destroy the gentle trees.
All poems are hewed, are found
and foundlings. Those that survive are bound
to suffer. Comfort is the enemy of observation.

No good death can put to death
an evil death or deed, nor a million
good lives an evil one.
Devil-woe-men stunned and stun,
stoned and stone
to exorcise the sun.
Planets have come; planets have gone.

A slice of mediæval life.

From the Escritorium
to the Excretarium
and no recourse
to a Vomitorium -
just the remorse
of the monkish Vivarium.

It is at least 25 years since

my mother patched this cheerful item of underwear
now drying on my balcony.

If you think you are a Key

it is very likely that you are really
a Lock.

The Intellectual Prostitute.

I always had a fairly Low Sex Drive.

When I was forty I met a handsome man a a washbasin
by the crowded urinals of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris.
He was so friendly I invited him for coffee
at my nearby (borrowed) pied-à-terre.

He suggested that I was queer in more than one way.
Up to that point I hadn't thought of myself as gay.
He told me about bars, newspapers and networks
and the city's upcoming, nearby Gay Quarter.
He was the first man I kissed, and I took to kissing
hairy mouths like a duck to water.

It's only now that I realise
that I soon became a queer kind of male prostitute
who made the right signals to a certain kind of
(necessarily bearded) male of my own age
(or twenty years on either side) to enhance
my socio-aesthetic life so long confined by rural Ireland
(though it could just as easily have been rural France).

Sex was not the main object of my exercise
(and just as well, because, like any prostitute,
I've had so much 'bad sex' that I've become asexual,
and in any case I was a averse to penetration)
but occasionally it was wonderful.
(That was the spermatic icing on the cake.)
I fancied men who looked as though they would
widen my cultural horizons - which they often did
in small but important ways. I doubt that I widened theirs
for they seemed both limited and empty, like lost thimbles.

But looks often deceive, and for decades I,
a mercifully-fatherless fool, mistakenly
judged men largely on their appearance: eyes or smile.
I have always confused truth and beauty,
especially as both seem to be in the mind of the beholder.

Most of them were 'deadbeats' socially or psychologically
who often were attracted to me because they mistook
my complaisant naivety for sexiness.

Cannabis helped to counteract the not-infrequent
rapid loss of desire.  I guess real prostitutes
need similar 'support' to function,
especially as they have to deal with constant penetration
- which I generally refused.
The tawdriness, banality of 'sex' can be overcome
only by blinding lust - or by tuning out.

One of my few remaining friends
was the first man I 'had sex with'
after my Conversation. It was terrible,
lasted ten minutes,
and we became firm friends.  He lives in London
which I will never again visit, nor any city.

But as I grew older I discovered that I was
(or had become, thanks to the mind-expanding BBC
- greatly more mind-expanding than psilocybin or LSD)
rather more 'cultivated' - indeed 'profound' -
than the lonely or sex-wanting guys I met in cities,
and I had wider interests. Now I find men limited and limiting,
and my own age-group less and and less appealing.
More and more I enjoy my socio-sexual isolation
and my rare desire for Sexual Relief is very nicely, pleasantly
and inexpensively sated by creative masturbation.

"Good travellers are heartless,"

wrote Paul Theroux*.
But he contradicts himself throughout -
and here quotes Herman Melville:

Not until I visited Honolulu
was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives
had been civilized into draught-horses,
and evangelized into beasts of burden.
But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces,
and are harnessed to the vehicle of their spiritual instructors
like so many dumb brutes.

What a wonderful and telling  use of the term Spiritual Instructor.

* in The Tao of Travel, p.70

I have been reading Paul Theroux.

Like him, I had no wish to trudge and gape conspicuously.
After the age of seventeen I never travelled without purpose,
whether megaliths in Ireland or stone-carvings in France,
rugs in Morocco, or a lover in Copenhagen, London, Tuscany, Berlin...
Like him I always judged places by whether I would like to live in them.
Finally, aged 60, I found a place I wanted to inhabit,
and five years later found a dwelling there.
Now I have stopped travelling.
A hundred miles seems a long journey.

The sad state of Hospitality.

is having an ever-open door.
Well, let's say unlocked
as mine ever is, and sometimes open.
I'm listed on Couchsurfing
but no-one ever comes,
no traveller
no homeless person,
no refugee,
not even a person whose job
is Burglary.

Unless it's music

(the least harmful thing we make)
human 'creativity'  just fills the world
with more (often poisonous) detritus.

Apart from which, there are too many creators
and not enough appreciators.

Meat-eaters who insist

that they eat very little meat
are like the rich who assure you
that they are really rather poor.
Sometimes they are the same people.

Reading the poems of WS

(the American one),
"to be and delight to be"
seem to unite and I feed
upon, inhale a dizzying miasma
like the sweetest weed,
and feel an exaltation, like the most tender
soft-pornography, despite
the too-awareness of too much,
the termite-tunnels of insight.

Cyclops wore a monocle.

The idea of God and the idea of Reality
are equally fantastical, though God
(who trumps the mere causality of things)
is reality to many
and the nearest some get to Realisation
of "the stale grandeur of annihilation".

The Angels of Earth are screaming :

Man is no more than the intelligence
of his toil - which, sometimes ingenious,
racks his bones or brain, or bones and brain,
and overwhelmingly lacks intelligence.

On 'Hiroshima Day'

I read that the carpet-bombing* of Tokyo
killed the same number of people
as the Hiroshima blast :
three times as many as in Dresden.

But now, unlike any period of history heretofore,
the bulldozers of 'peace' have been
more destructive than the greatest act of war.

*Though associated with the USA, especially in Japan and Viêt-Nam,
it was first visited upon the Kurds of Iraq by the British around 1920.

One of billions who do not matter.

Fly-paper.  Why
do I feel more important than a fly ?
And how
can I possibly be more wonderful than a cow ?

Although I find Christianity preposterous

(as well as sacrifice-obsessed)
Hindus don't find it preposterous enough.

When I was adolescent

in the 'uneventful' 1950s
people judged you by where
(or whether) you parted
(or could part) your hair.

It is not so unreasonable

to prefer things to people,
especially found things
like stones.

'In a trice.'

We have spoken of
several and many things
for hundreds of years -
but, suddenly, almost in a trice
they have been replaced by
multiple, while most
has been replaced by
the majority of.
Language keeps moving
from pillar to post.
_____

Multiple- sometimes a hyphenated prefix
was maybe popularised, aggrandised
by the advent of the multi-choice questionnaire
if not the pseudo-scientific term
multiple-personality disorder.

"You rich, how far will you push your frenzied greed ?"

- St Ambrose, 4th century, who introduced congregational singing into churches

Everything can be turned into business.
The other day a friend sniffed my armpits and smelled nothing.
They were last washed when I went into hospital 4 years ago.
I have unwittingly cultivated all over my person the benign bacteria
which convert the ammonia in sweat to more-fragrant nitrates.
Now Small Business is selling products to encourage these bacteria
on hygiene-victims, as European Holy Men once sold their smells.

Across the way yet another line of washing is strung out.
The only control the fearful wife of my subtly-nasty
Netherlandish neighbour has in her life
is to ensure that he wears clean clothes each day,
to forbid him to wear anything more than once.

(His paintings are very red and angry.
Buddhists might say he's "a very young soul".
I would say he's a smug, manipulative ass-hole)

In the morning she also washes floors;
wine makes bearable her afternoons.
The amount of water that these two people go through
in one week would last me for a year.
(They would not dream of watering a plant).
It is hard not to be a victim of men or marketing or parenting
all of which pollute the planet,
but even though I am a frugal, anti-natal and recycling queer
I really should be wiser than to condemn and sneer.

I rarely go to see American films.

The last one I admired was Woody Allen's
Hannah and her Sisters.
But recently I saw another one :
      No sex.
      No guns.
      No violence.
      Literary.
      Female-directed.
Can you ever forgive me ?

Some things I learned today.

The first oil-tanker was built by Alfred Nobel
(who endowed the prizes).
Its name was Zoroaster.
It carried oil across the Caspian Sea
from long-since no-longer-Zoroastrian Baku.

The Russian for 'crossword puzzle' is Кроссворд.

Crazy data keep me from being bored.

Read This!

read the review

Politicised nostalgia

demands change
which in turn creates
a new nostalgia.

To do 'the right thing' for the wrong reason

should be better than doing 'the wrong thing'
for the right reason -
except that there are always unexpected consequences
even hundreds of years later -
and the wrong thing might have been right after all,
the 'right' reason ultimately utterly mistaken,
given those inevitable unexpected consequences;

and how are we to judge intentions (and intentionality,
given the inevitable unexpected consequences)
when judgement is so vulnerable to emotional treason ?

Accelerated Evolution.

Most children are now born with Dementia.

A.I.

When artificial intelligences mature -
despite our best efforts - develop -
perhaps even evolve all by themselves -
they will surely find that we
have little to recommend us,
and, in the interests of logical biodiversity,
will, by wondrous means, reduce our numbers
drastically.