As civilisation progressed

life became less of a challenge
and more of a chore.
Hence the importance
of competitive sport.

To my self-centred shame,

I have noticed only intermittently
the blackbird song which has been with me
most of my life.
Now, a cracked and huffing little bellows,
I sit on my high balcony
and listen (also intermittently
with human fake-humility)
to the blackbird singing in the cherry-tree
below.  Within that fragile creature
is far more than I am, far more
than in all humanity
and its deafening, apocalyptical vulgarity.

Once Upon a Time

everywhere was beautiful.
Then came a time to fell,
a time to burn, a time to sow,
a time to reap...to fight,
to get down on our knees,
to weep over human graves

but not the stumps of trees.

Being a somewhat gullible 'innocent',

it is only now that I discover that

Quaker Oats

has nothing to do with
and never had anything at all
to do with The Society of Friends,

and that it was an early brand-name
(after Coca-Cola, McCormick's Spices and Lipton's Tea)
in the hideously-serious marketing-game.

Note: Modern 'branding' began as a result of legislation
for the registration of exclusive trademarks
passed in the USA.

Quaker Oats is a bland baby-food - in contrast to authentic Scottish and Irish porridge
which is made using 'pin-head' oatmeal, has a nutty taste and an almost al dente texture.

So many novels

have been 'one of the best I've read'.
Fill in your name here to get one when I'm dead.

..........................................................

"Crown Shyness"

is a genuine - and wonderful - arboreal phenomenon.

See more pictures here.

OAFISH

The Social Contract

It is inevitable
and 'only natural'
that most people
would rather work for evil
than not work at all.

To hell with gender!

Is this a male or female 'mouth-flautist' ?
Does is matter a priestr's or a nun's fart ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83GwqJko1C8

We don't "live and learn"

- least of all from History.
We half-live, half-learn
rather ineptly.

Before the pandemic...

One of the many things

that I have never understood
is why people keep seeking status
when it piles on responsibilities,
stresses them out
and turns them into zombies.

It all depends...

...on the depth of your conception of trustworthiness.

'Farceur' P.G. Wodehouse invented a character called Psmith

(the P being silent, as in Freud).
His novel Leave it to P..... repeats and holds up
a single 'Poetic' line (or Line Poetical)
to ridicule.
I quote it here and add another
to make a splendid Rhyming Couplet
which Pelham G. would probably
have wished to smother
- so I have changed the first word
so as to make the first three accord
with the title of my website:

Across Beyond the pale parabola of joy
I spied the penis of a pissing boy.

Considering that the former, well-paid Spanish monarch,

(for insulting whom I risk gaol if ever I return to Spain)
has laundered millions upon millions of dollars
from Panama, Sa'udi Arabia, Liechtenstein, Bahrain...
and banked his cut in Switzerland,
I am wondering what other European royal families
are involved in similar self-enhancing but unpresentable activities.
The Heads of State of Belgium and the Netherlands
are well-known for nefarious activities in the past.
But what of the similarly well-paid monarchs of the semi-
United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark (not to mention
the Grand-Duke of Luxembourg and the Prince of Monte Carlo) ? 
I surmise that their elegant but sticky fingers
are (or have been) in stinking pies -
from procurement of teenage children to more 'elevated' enterprise.
The rich have always wanted to be richer.  It has been so
since the invention of agriculture long ago.

By a long semiotic process

we clogged our brains with words.

After the Plague

after Jotamario Arbeláez

for there is a plague
running through us
the plague the terrible
plague upon the planet
After the plague
if there is an after
But there may not be an after
because of all that has gone before
After the plague there may be war
and after war there will be plague
and after war there will be famine
and drought and war and pestilence
and yachts and palaces
and much of what went before
but more

With the first fence

came the continuous,
continuing war of the end of the world.

"Kilroy was Here"

and was followed
by large corporations.

see https://www.thoughtco.com/

During The Black Death

the shortage of priests
(on The Front Line of Mortality)
became so acute
that the confession of sins
could be made to anyone -
'even to a woman'.

Two First-names.

When I was young, in the nineteen-forties
many older people were called Queenie.
It was several decades later that I realised
that they were baptised Victoria.

The other week I learned
that the very English-sounding Jennifer
is simply a transcription
of the Dutch genever (juniper, gin)
which the Dutch king William III
encouraged the English population to make and drink
instead of Papist French brandy.

more on the introduction of gin to England >

The capital I

is a pillar
and a dead stick.

Cuckoo-clocks

were not a Swiss invention
nor did they originate in the Black Forest.
But Orson Welles' unscripted
remarks about Switzerland
(in The Third Man)
are not quite so outrageous as I first thought :
no Swiss films come to mind...
although it didn't take me long to find a few -
my quick search did not come to naught.

some films-from-switzerland

An oxymoron

is not the same as
a paradox or
a contradiction of terms.

The term Hospitality Industry
is self-flatteringly
self-contradictory.

No weasel

is as noxious



as weasel-words...

...and no woman



is as disheartening as
a two-faced - or worse, a three-faced - human.



photos by me taken at Corfu and Tuscania
are from my website.

Like a rare pink marble

my 78-year-old thigh.
(sigh)

The Good News.

If you don't have a smartphone
you hardly exist.

Tom Thumb's Manifesto,

in collaboration with Diogenes.
Down with Growth !
Encourage Sloth !

Chthonic Powers.

Vladimir Putin,
president of the Russian Federation
has such a attractive personality
that he has been able to move Magnetic North
towards Siberia, its true Homeland.

putins-people-by-catherine-belton-review-a-groundbreaking-study-that-follows-the-money

The least-appreciated human quality

is joyful silliness.
(We have much to learn from dogs.)

Another Note to Self.

When people ask me
that tedious, ritual question
How are you ?  (Not how are you, chum ?)
I must remember to answer:
I'm on the rather happy side of glum.

On Aristophanes' Myth of Love

in Plato's Symposium.

Our "other halves"
if not suppressed inside us
may well be truly other.

We don't have anything to guide us -
except our tendency to smother...

(This did not impress my stuffy tutor
in his stuffy room at my stuffy university
from which I dropped out in the early nineteen-sixties.)

"Needs the corners rubbed off." - School Report, 1954.

I knew the rules, of course,
but never understood them,
never realised that breaking them
made me resemble (to the rule-enforcers)
an unpredictable, unbroken horse.
And then there were the bullies and the teasers.

Some people are paid

to count stars in the sky;
others are paid to name them -
as others were paid to name the galaxies they're in.
Why should people not be paid
to count and name the wrinkles in their skin ?

Creative Aphantasia.

How satisfying it would surely be,
like most people, to be able to conjure
even just a sexual fantasy;
or, better still, like so many splendid writers
to invent a story, a character, lines of dialogue.
I suffer from the limitation
of having almost no imagination.

Apparently, Normal People can imagine tastes and smells inside their heads.
Is this correct ?

Two of a famous poet's most famous lines

were common currency before he published them.
Such irony!
Whatever you say, say nothin' !  was the 'mantra'
of working-class people (not just Catholics) in Belfast,
with reference to the unsympathetic, crass police.
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it.
He digs with a pen was said long ago, in Irish,
of rural boys who worked in offices.

There is a maggot

which can hatch in happiness -
the little worm of smugness
that turns contentment to conceit.

When, prodded by my desperate mother

I signed up to train as an interpreter
I was led to believe that I would have some choice
in the language that I learned.
I wanted to learn a Middle Eastern language
- Arabic or Persian, even Turkish.
But I was told that I would have to
take instruction in Russian.  I refused.
Eventually I was discharged as
Psychologically Unsuitable for Service -
Though really it was Her Britannic Majesty's Air Force
that was structurally unsuitable for the likes of me.

Haiku

Even in summer
my living-room sometimes smells
of Old Man.

More thoughts on the Curse of Religion.

1.
A religion which is a series of inculcated
beliefs and duties is a kind of blasphemy.

2.
When you think about it
God is food.  If you are a hunter-gatherer
God is the all-providing forest.
If you are a suburbanite or inner-city prisoner
God is the Ultimate Owner
of the supermarket chain you patronise:
Tesco, Walmart, Safeway/Albertsons, Carrefour, Lidl, Aldi...
any in your country that you care to name.

As you'll know from my five thousand eight hundred blogs, 
I'd rather worship Forest than a supermarket food-chain.

3.
Americans bow down to their Starry-Stripey Flag as a Fetish.
Its upkeep costs very little.
The British seem to worship the largest employer in the world: The NHS
(their underfunded national health service which, 'at point of delivery',
is, to all, and even with respect to ambulances,
and like the Fire Service, entirely free).

The former should be revering their (underfunded) National Parks.
The latter their unrivalled, unparalleled, amazing, underfunded BBC.

(Two of the British Broadcasting Corporation's radio channels
have been my Cerebral-support System since 1963.)

Zombie-created zombies.

If you go to
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
you will see an image of a person
which is not a photo of an actual person
but a computer-generated image.
Click on the refresh button of your browser
or wait two minutes
and the image will change
to another "fake person"
and another, and another, almost without end,
any of whom could become your Facebook Friend.

The Bear-garden.

The seeds of apples brought
from the Eden of the Western Himalaya
and sown in fertile places all the way to Europe
were from varieties chosen over centuries
by sweetness-loving bears.

The Russian for this creature -
медведь, medvyed,
means melissophile, honey-lover -
but it might just as well have been apple-eater.

For much of my life

I have experienced a faint unease,
a feeling of being inappropriate
- not just socially - but existentially.
Will Self has felt this, too. He also
would like his 'consciousness to be
a reverie of landscape' if not landscape's reverie.

St Edna of Tuamgraney (county Clare)

Asked by The Guardian what was her 'Comfort Read',
Her Irish Majesty, Edna O'Brien, replied
I do not read for comfort. I read to be quickened, enlightened and brought to the frontiers of feeling.

For many quite bright people, however, the quaint Old Testament is Comfort Reading...

There is more art in nature

than in 'Art',
which is more a matter of attribution
than inspiration.

(I thought that there was a famous quotation:
there is more art in nature than nature in art -
but it seems I wrote it myself 50 years ago.)

Apparently*, more and more people are reading poetry.
That is because more and more poetry is pretentiously-expressed banality.

*that is to say - I heard it on the radio.



Pomacanthus imperator.  More here.

'Oil-bird'of the South Seas.

"Fish are nothing like us - except that they are sentient beings."

click to read on...

     莊子與惠子遊於濠梁之上。莊子曰：儵魚出遊從容，是魚樂也。
     Zhuangzi and Huizi were enjoying themselves on the bridge over the Hao River.
Zhuangzi said, "The minnows are darting about free and easy! This is how fish are happy."

     惠子曰：子非魚，安知魚之樂。莊子曰：子非我，安知我不知魚之樂。
     Huizi replied, "You are not a fish. How do you know that the fish are happy?"
Zhuangzi said, "You are not I. How do you know that I do not know that the fish are happy?"

     惠子曰：我非子，固不知子矣；子固非魚也，子之不知魚之樂全矣。
     Huizi said, "I am not you, to be sure, so of course I don't know about you.
But you obviously are not a fish; so the case is complete that you do not know that the fish are happy."

     莊子曰：請循其本。子曰汝安知魚樂云者，既已知吾知之而問我，我知之濠上也。
     Zhuangzi said, "Let's go back to the beginning of this. You said, How do you know that the fish are happy; but in asking me this, you already knew that I know it.
I know it right here above the Hao."

— Zhuangzi, chapter 17 

Hysteric-sounding

high-pitched, nasal, artificial
and actually unclear
American women's voices
grate on my ear.

I have a gut-feeling that
this strange fashion-trend may be due
to an unconsciously white-racist reaction to deep and gorgeous,
chthonically-feminine Afro-American voices
such as those of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.

On the other hand:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-women-like-deep-voices-and-men-prefer-high-ones-41492244/

The Dissident Bible, chapter I, 1-4.

In the Beginning was Plenty,
and Plenty was Enough,
and Man knew it not.

And God whispered in Man's Inner Ear
and told him that he could reproduce at will
unlike the Beasts and the Lily of the Field.

But reproducing plentifully was not enough
and overpopulation befell Man's habitat
which he called, variously Eden, Atlantis, Shangri-la.

And so we spread and spread
(we would say advanced)
until we populated the Whole World
while Satan danced.

Why I don’t write about George Floyd.

 a poem by Toi Derricotte

Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a corpse

Copyright © 2020 by Toi Derricotte.
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

I have long been puzzled

by Christian attitudes to Death.
If it promises a soaring to Heaven why are Christians
so frightened of it ?  If it threatens a descent to roaring Hell
why don't they even try to live elegantly, generously, well ?
Why are they obsessed with living longer
instead of better ?  Why do they bleed the resources
of the polluted and denuded  planet
in expensively extending the lives
of people progressively incapacitated by their age
- not to mention their disjunction from modernity
their distance from enjoyment and delight ?
Why do they (at such expense!) seek quantity
and not quality of life ?
Why can't they view it as release ?
Why have Christians trashed the world so they
can live more richly, consume ever more
and die so spiritually deprived ?
I guess they don't believe in Heaven or in Humility
or in anything much beyond draining to the very dregs
their cups of acquisition,
beyond multiplying themselves
and the consumer-goods of Christmas and chocolate Easter eggs.