Leucocracy.

Although it seems that the Greeks and the Romans
were not obsessed by skin-colour,
the Chinese and Indians were - and are.
Skin-lightening products are big business in India
whose rulers have for long been pale.
White has forever been associated with clean
and pure; stains are dark. Stains on character,
stains on souls, stains on underwear, stains on walls...
Christianity glorifies white and light and illumination.
Hell and the Devil are black, as were Moors, Muslims,
Blackamoors blind to Salvation in outer and utter darkness,
while doubters and atheists suffer the soul's Long Dark Night.
Aztecs awaited pale saviours who came and destroyed them.
White even starts with advantage in chess.
Depressingly, it always claims to be right.

An Introduction to the Rigidity of the French Mind.

"You cannot serve raw with cooked."
(Very Claude Lévy-Strauss!)
Only a foreigner like me in France would eat salad
together with something hot.
It is a gustatory crime
which I commit all the time.

Jesus, in paintings,

never looks cheerful, always looks thin,
a bit gaunt, sometimes emaciated, his skin
colour that of the painter's countrymen*.

But his mother is quite a different
kettle of fish - almost always simpering
teenage soft porn.  So I was pleased
that a Valencian furniture-restorer
gave some earthiness to a copy
of a painting by Murillo (a painter of the Sentimental
School of art) which he volunteered to restore
(for a fee).




On the left you can see
the original (copy of the) cute little
porn-Queen of Heaven,
and on the right, the two more-convincing
(if badly-painted) imaginings of the restorer.

Why would Jesus' mother have conformed
to some European male fantasy ?  Why would
she not have been 'ugly', scrawny from hunger,
perhaps even bruised by
her fraught relationship with her husband ?

more here >

*Being bearded and skeletal, though not circumcised,
 I was once proclaimed Saviour
as I gave suck to a sweet and impassioned
(perhaps over-wrought, too-religious)
young man in a corner of Venice at night.

The Insistence of Memory.

Time is ripe and short,
an illusion, a curve,
a line, a dimension,
a wheel within wheels
an invisible beast.

Zero, like time, is not nothing,
is the world without us,
unfeeling, unseeing,
without numbers or data,
without urgency, timeless
for the time being.

My best friend

is silence
who lolls voluptuously
beyond the grave, behind the veil
of time and hope, beyond the pale.

Sparisoma cretense says hello.

And by the way, everything that is not human matters more.

"Great White Hunters"

loved to kill the finest specimens
of Big Beautiful Animals,
thus weakening the species.
Because of their particular æsthetic
they tended not to include hippos
in their collections of trophies.

Just say NO.

Human credulity
is matched only by the
human capacity for distrust.
"Our Common Humanity" ?
No, thanks.

The tee-shirt.

(reblogged from somewhere)

Imagine that you are part of a tiny minority

engulfed by a criminal majority whom you have defined
not according to 'race', 'ethnicity' or colour or accent
but because of your belief that the eating of meat
has become a crime against nature -,
especially the raising of animals and birds in horrible conditions
solely to end up in abattoirs,
sometimes ground into sludge to feed other animals.

The more unconventional and downright dissident you are
the more tolerant of the majority you have to be.
In my case, not just the thoughtless breeders and meat/fish eaters,
but also the police, people in any kind of uniform,
beer-swilling sports enthusiasts,
tv-watchers, Facebook-slaves, mindless 'holiday-makers'
(trippers who trudge through mediæval villages gazing at their screens),
dog-dislikers, plant-destroyers, water-wasters...almost everyone
outside my moral twilight zone.

Thus I (who could almost be an anti-natalist kind of Jain)
feel sad, impotent and ashamed when I wake up each day.
But I cheer up as I realise how splendidly tolerant I am (if inclined to whine
about these matters in this blog)
as my snot-green age surpasses seventy-nine.

It goes without saying

that - introduced and spread
by the travelling and ski-ing rich -
The Virus most affects the destitute and poor.
But to what extent it is spread by cash itself
will we ever know - or care ?

There is only one word for 'time'

in most languages. But Japanese
has several.  We can't be freer than thought -
and thoughts depend upon words.

Oh! it's sad and it's sad...

...and it's sad...to be (like me) an intellectual
without much intellect. Such people
(Hitler, Qaddafi, Mao, Pol-Pot, Assad)
can easily go mad -
unlike real intellectuals such as Nietzsche
who contracted syphilis instead.

The sad thing about Google

is not Google's fault
but the stupidity of millions
who - even if they choose it
to verify or find something out -
only half-know how to use it.

Bossy, vulgar - and thus comforting.

"I can't stand religion," Meg said. "It's so bossy, 
so pointless, so vulgar." - Elizabeth Buchan, The Good Wife.

"And grief should stop while it is still genuine."

When a tiny number

of the astounding ancient Greeks
began to consider The Good Life
and how it should be lived,
they (all, except Diogenes, of course)
were not thinking of slaves or women,
Persians, Italians, Jews or Phoenicians,
but of the privileged young men of Athens
or Corinth, Mycenæ or Rhodes.

Epicurus wrote a splendid recipe
for living 'appropriately',
without excess, kindly - but he was not
considering the lives of women,
slaves, dogs, donkeys, captured enemies,
peasants or unwanted children.
                             
Few human beings
experience life as a pleasure - far less a gift,
and for most, living is not even an option
but a duty to others. It is only when living stops being
dutiful that it becomes an option - for the privileged -
to be crafted, ignored, explored or renounced.

'Intensive Care'

- a contradiction in terms,
otherwise known as an oxymoron.

This is the age of the portmanteau word,

one of the most ubiquitous being internet - which includes spam
(originally spiced ham in cans, a cheap-meat standby) - and which
would not have come into being without the transistor (transfer+resistor).
    Lewis Carroll invented several, but only chortle (snort+chuckle)
and possibly slithy (slimy+lithe) has entered common speech.
As with Lear and his limericks, Carroll's inventions were poor,
but since his time more-felicitous, less-manufactured portmanteau-words
have entered the language, among them: mizzle (mist+drizzle), smog (smoke+fog)
ruckus (ruction+rumpus), seascape (sea+landscape), soundscape,
sitcom (situation-comedy) and newscast.
    More recently: horrible Brexit (succeeding Grexit)
at which many word-sensitive souls like myself futilely grumble,
chugger (charity-collector + mugger), churgle (chuckle+gurgle),
brunch, and my favourites: flump (jump+flop),  thrumble (thrum+rumble)
and cremains (cremated remains of a mammal, usually human).
    I have of course invented my own: the delicious plumble (plum+crumble)
and, from snore/snort+gargle, to snore throatily rather than nasally - to snorgle.

    Note that the best of the portmanteau words end in -le.
I think that to toddle may well be a portmanteau of totter and dawdle or waddle...

    Portmanteau is not a portmanteau word, because no other words have been truncated.  It is an early example of franglais, coming from the hyphenated porte-manteau (=cloak-carrier).

Meanwhile, at the moment,
in the francosphere there is a sort of chronic diarrhœa (diarrhée) of franglais, or franglarrhée
which could fill a fair-sized booklet...hmmm...]

Monstrum.

A monster is not hideous -
but on the contrary
a horribly attractive
display - like the movies,
entertainments,
events, demonstrations
and gew-gaws
that shape and haunt
our awestruck, degenerate culture.

I dislike anniversarism

- but, on this warm September day, 150 years ago,



Léon Gambetta, Interior Minister of the new, third, French Republic,
fled Paris (which was surrounded by German troops) for Tours,
to try and re-group the defeated Imperial army of Napoleon III.

Man's Tortured Friend.

A good time to die

is when one can no longer
step (while standing) into or out of one's
underpants, panties, long-johns, pyjamas,
shalwar, trousers, shorts, skirt, lederhosen or socks.
That is to say: before one becomes vulnerable
to Corona-virus attacks.

Locked-down

locked-up
locked-out
worst of all is
locked-into
an identity

Red Lives Matter !

"Chokin's too good for them Commie Bastards."

Tourists.

Most of us have been tourists at some time.
My neighbour's father
called them 'tout-tristes' or 'tous tristes' -
Sad People.  There are still a few about,
gazing into smartphones, or at nothing in particular,
devoting their attention to marshalling the kids,
or walking briskly to get the visit done and over.

Love the Logic !

"I really don't like the culture of consumption,"
says my widowed neighbour as she opens the door
of her huge stainless-steel
double-coffin-sized fridge.
"I got rid of my grandmother's jewels."

The least we should do,
in our world-weary,
world-devastating luxury,
is be perfect.

Greenland's first prison

has just been opened.

Snobbery.

Nightingales are not nearly
so melodious as "Common Blackbirds",
sing far earlier in the year
- and more clearly.

Masks (and arabesques).

I took my mask off in the almost unpopulated gloam
of the cinema while I watched a feminist Saudi Arabian film.
Of course I hadn't realised until mask-wearing
became obligatory how horrible it must be
to have to wear the niqāb outside (sometimes even inside) the home.

After ten minutes in a shop behind a mask
I start to panic, hyperventilate, my glasses steam up,
I drop things, I can't see or hear how much I owe,
I offer too much or too little money,
I leave my purchases behind, I stumble through the door...

I can no longer help my scrambled hearing
by lip-reading, and if I put in my mini-hearing-aid
it can easily fall out when I rip off my mask.
It's worse even than the seat-belt in a car
which I cannot bear and for the not-wearing of which
I have paid obligatory fines. I know this is bizarre*.

But I have the choice.  And life is much worse
for the disabled and elsewhere.
I should pull myself together.
My problem with the anti-virus mask
is solved  by not going out to public places
which, anti-social in my incipient senility,
is my inclination, anyway.
In any case I panic long before I smother.
But if I had been born a woman in Arabia I'd have soon died
in one unpleasant fashion or another.

*And goes back to my anxious schooldays 
(at Cabin Hill Preparatory School, Belfast)
where I was occasionally sat upon, tied up, 
gagged, half-choked and spat upon 
by Happy, Wholesome Rugby-players -
some of who later Played for Ireland 
in what is now their glorious past.

Jesus' last post

on Facebook:
Survivors are the Biggest Losers.

"Poetry is pretty inconsequential

when written young," wrote the Great Poet Rilke. 
"But at the end of a (preferably long)
lifetime of sense and sweetness ten good lines might be written.
Real poetry comes not from emotion, but from experience."

What twaddle!  Lifetime of sense and sweetness ?
Keats had written fine poems by the time he was twenty -
and Rimbaud at seventeen had already written some of his best,
none of them pompous, some of them startlingly unrepressed...

As our eyes aren't capable of seeing it:

CLICK FOR EXPLANATION

Old, I don't feel particularly old.

When I was young
I didn't feel particularly young,
and rarely had the energy to be bold.
Death has always seemed to me
eternal respite, return to the organic fold,
and to lose my shameful humanity
as my corpse gives up its rigidity.
And I would rather die
a month, a year, a decade 'early', quietly at home
than later in a tasteless hospital. The end of life
is when we should be least controlled.

The French are no longer starving.

The President has decreed a temporary ban on
on snaring blackbirds and thrushes with lime (glu)
on tree-branches, pending a decision on the venerable practice
by the upstart European Court of Justice.

To the terrible god of the imagination.

If only we in our heads could find ourselves
and be Us, not Thine
as wine in the cracked wine-glass is wine.

Celebrated until now

Sir Hans Sloane Square, Killyleagh, county Down, Northern Ireland.

for his Philanthropy
with statues
and squares named after him
in London and (more recently) in a little
Loyalist-British village in the county Down
where he was born an instrument
of local colonial oppression,

Sir Hans Sloane
used some of his large fortune
made from slave-breeding
and hideous slave-labour
without compassion or discretion
in sugar-virulent Jamaica
to found the British Museum -
itself a soul-numbing monument
to empire and possession.

Flies

don't stand on ceremony
but on shit
and us
and anything that's rotten.

Ever since I've lived alone

(since 1966, in fact) people have "dropped in".
For the first few years it didn't bother me,
I even welcomed one or two of them
with open arms (or, sometimes, fly).
But soon I found it tedious, especially
when I was painting, tubes scattered on the floor
(I painted on my knees, 'in all humility').

I find it impossible to say don't come, 
I like my solitude,
or come by mutual arrangement only;
come, take me to a megalith -
or something else of interest or fun.

Somehow I have always attracted
lonely, bored, rejected people.
So they've arrived and bored me.
Is it that I'm too good a listener
or just too easy to dump loneliness upon ?

Some, with whom I lost patience (in an unruly outburst)
were so aggrieved that they never got in touch again.
People I would have liked to visit tended not to come..

Even now a lonely 'burden on the state'
(much younger, less robust than I) drops by three times a week
to ease the burden of his isolation  - with a tot of  La Réunion rum.

If you thought (as I did)

that a little of Bach goes a long way:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry_XQvxzeGQ

Vicious Circle

The father and mother
of all crimes *
is Domestic Violence
which inevitably results in
'Adverse Childhood Experience'.

* (against humans, if not against Nature.)

A date to remember.

On this day
in 430 CE
the Visigoths
sacked Rome

and some of them
made it their home.

There are people who like dogs,

and there are The Enemy.
My favourite tongue-twister is
I am an anomalous, misanthropic, Irish entity.

"Founded in 1506,

"this Care Home is set in splendid landscape
 and offers a perfect wellness-environment,

 with spacious, shady gardens
 and a balmy climate similar to that of Cannes and Nice.
 It is accessible by rail from Paris and Lyon
 via a branch-line from Tarascon which takes just twenty minutes.
 For further information, please contact the Director."

Vincent van Gogh: Quarry-entrance above St-Rémy-de-Provence, 1889.

for more astounding paintings from this place and time, see
https://www.pinterest.fr/ourartpage/van-gogh-saint-remy-asylum-paintings/

Here is a list

of the emigrants from the Swabian-German village
of  Glogowatz (now Vladimirescu) in the Banat (area then of Eastern Hungary
and now of Western Romania as well) between 1905 and 1914
to North America, mainly New York State,
on ships with such names as Pannonia (= Hungary)
Carpathia and Slavonia from Trieste,
as well as a few others from Hamburg:

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~banatdata/genealogy/DDB/ByVillage/Glogowatz.htm

And here is a painting found by my Lithuanian friend Almina in a second-hand shop
in Colorado, which has Glogowatz written on the back:



















Swabian Germans founded settlements as far east as north-western Turkey
and the Russian river Volga.  Several famous Russian musicians,
notably Alfred Schnittke and Sviatoslav Richter, were of Volga-German stock.

Teeth, etc.

Scary!
No wonder that I came to fancy
bald hairy men with rough hands and beards!

Doris Day, very popular when I was young.

The green areas on this map of Africa

show where hippopotami still survive.

The red areas show where they used to thrive.

Pink square football.

The most dangerously-biased people
are those who are most insistent
that they are not biased.

The most dangerous bias is optimism.
But I would say that, wouldn't I !

The Good News

is that failure
is a pathetic social construct.
Or, to put it another way,
the greatest success is death.

Warfaring people

want panoramic views -
and so the planet will have innumerable vistas
of treeless landscape.

The Power of Subtraction

When you take longing
away from love
you get companionship.