Mutterings of a dendrophile.

A Chaste Tree is not a Handkerchief Tree,
and certainly not a Judas Tree
(whose pods should not be confused
with those of the Carob Locust Tree, which are edible).
I have planted (at different times, in different places)
all three.  Two of them grew well.
A Joshua Tree is a kind of Yucca,
and the various kinds of Benjamin Tree produce Benzoin.
There is just one Moses Tree, a very ancient Plane
(Platanus) in southern Turkey
said to have grown from the prophet's staff or cane.

A Nasty Myth.

The oldest profession

is not prostitution
but espionage.

An epigram - or a slogan ?

SLOGANS
STULTIFY

Overheard in an English classroom.

 by Michael Rosen

"He doesn't speak English, Miss.

"He comes from the Congo, Miss.

"I translate for you, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his grandfather, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his grandmother, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his dad, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his mum, Miss.

"He doesn't know how he got here, Miss..."

Human, all too human.

Before Atlas Shrugged,
Lazarus Laughed,
and Nietzsche declared
that 'women' loved his ears,
which (he claimed) were small
(but not too small).
Freud, in an untimely meditation, thought
that the driven, animal-loving and fraught
author of The Gay Science might have been
homosexual.

In the world of the blind

the one-eyed have nobody 

with whom to share their vision.

My Epitaph.

He did not die prematurely.

(What human does ?)

The human mind is like a puppy

that keeps chasing its own tail.

Blame is a game -

an unpleasant, competitive game
beloved of tyrants and dictators.
It may soon become an Olympic 'sport'.
I hate competitive games and sports, and so
I have not stooped to apportioning blame
beyond myself for my many
and sometimes serious shortcomings.
I blame only my common and universal
misfortune in having been born,
despite my mother's admirable and brave
attempts to prevent it.

Many children

(but regrettably few adults)
know that you can enjoy yourself
doing nothing.

Diogenes indubitably thought
that the only thing worth doing
was nothing. (Except to sing and dance.)

And Epicurus suggested that
it should be done with elegance.

It is incredible

(given our alleged intelligence)

that we are surprised and even feel betrayed

by unfortunate events, 

by happenstance and accidents.

No surprise.

The little word avodah 

which means
The Worship of God through Labour
appears 289 times in the Old Testament.

'This man is molesting me....

 

...but really, I love it.'

                                           from The Guardian

It is easy to sneer

at the pompous Latinism of
Expectation Disconfirmation
(or Discombobulation) Theory.
It proposes quite simply that high expectation
tends to result in disappointment,
especially when the expectation is competitive.

Thus gifts which are wrapped induce less appreciation
than those which are not; likewise elaborate promises
of jam tomorrow, liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy,
prosperity...and the continuing ecstasies
of the palate or the phallus.
And what of The Gift of Life, expensively wrapped
in pregnancy, pain and the language of religiosity ? 
For many humans it is a poisoned chalice,
though only through rape is it imposed by malice.

Q: Awaiting the Barbarians.

What are we all waiting for,
crammed into The Square ?
Miracle ? Bird ? Thunderbolt ?
Amazing son-et-lumière ?

The Barbarians are due today
in mire and fury, flame and flood.
They are Satanic Pedophiles,
Sex-traffickers who drink the blood
of babies that they rape.
They run the IMF, the World Bank,
the Internet and Israel, the European Union,
the WHO, and governments from Tasmania
to the North Cape.

They drink each other's sperm
and menstrual emissions.
They own the banks, the supermarket chains
the airlines, the shipping companies and Facebook.
They cry Consume! Consume!
They have caused famines and pandemics.
They are zombies.  They are terrorists.
They have poisoned the reservoirs.

They are at The Gate.

We are choking in The Square.

Who will save us from our fate ?

Likes washing dishes

We are all demented
some of us contented
if not happily
demented

There are 300 different dementias
'and counting'
in the brambles
and the shambles
of Terminal
Uniqueness
Syndrome

So, why not a State Funeral ?

 

2022/jan/12/landmine-hunting-hero-rat-dies-in-cambodia-after-stellar-career

My latest Netflix experience,

as submitted to the Rotten Tomatoes website:

31m ago

Brilliant, almost-unwatchable Cinéma vérité with a terrific performance by Olivia Colman as a 'normal' damaged woman, daughter, mother, professor of comparative linguistics, intent on keeping creepy people at bay. Why did she go to a bleak Greek island swarming with horrible 'visitors' and screeching children ? She's trying (bleakly) to be normal, I guess. This is perhaps the ultimate anti-romantic film - and a salutary kick up the arse for the film industry. There is a wonderful (quite irrelevant) line about translating Yeats into Italian : 'chocolate on chocolate'. Well, this is a film for people who actually think from time to time.

The Myth of Sanity.

thinking
slinking
thinking
shrinking
thinking
sinking
thinking
stinking

the brain
down the drain
feels no pain

sanity
is narrative

no narrative
just quanta

(but this is narrative)

I never wanted
to be 'somebody'
now I don't want
to be anybody

(my life is not a narrative)

just quanta

My banner-slogan

for the (unforthcoming)
Suicide Pride Parade is
(as you might have guessed)
Ashamed to be Human.

Hello, Anti-vaxxers.

I thought you might like to know
that I had all the symptoms of Mild Covid
9 days after my third vaccination.
Without the vaccinations I might be 'at death's door'
- though it is possible that I was infected at the door
of the vaccination centre,
where I had to push through a small crowd (of maybe 20)
sheltering from heavy rain under a piece of canvas tenting.

This is a picture of the vaccination centre
(entrance bottom right).

Sufi

sloths
   Zen
zebras
   Enlightened
octopi

Being dumb

might not be so terrible.
At least you would not be saying 'the wrong thing'
all your life, or suffering from
l'esprit de l'escalier or afterwit:
not thinking of the right rejoinder or appropriate response
until (sometimes much) later.

According to A.K. Benjamin (in Let me not be mad, 2019)
“at least 80% of human communication is in non-verbal behaviour,
Morrow et al. 2919."

Why are refrigerators

not red or indigo or black inside ?

दुक्ख A basic Buddhist tenet :

All is Suffering.*
But most of the time
most humans don't 
(or are not allowed to) know
that they are suffering
because they don't
(or are not allowed to) know
its absence.

दुक्ख

* Also translatable as stress or distress.

Orphaned Pages.

The term is romantic.
It refers to those pages uploaded to the Web
which are bereft of links to them.
They sit in limbo with an infinitesimal chance of being read.

I discovered one this morning
which I had written in html
and accidentally uploaded to my website.

It is an account of a DMT experience
by my friend Stuart.

It is now linked to this blog
and you can read it here.

Date to be announced.

Massive End-of-the World Barbecue
will be held at the North Pole.
All white people welcome.

Regret, remorse,

and even guilt assail the old.
Some powerful elderly even feel ashamed
of failing to live for ever -
if not of all the blood they've spilt
and the monstrosities they've built.

If I had been sent to a concentration-camp,

I would have run for the wire at the first opportunity,
in the hope of being electrocuted or shot.
We don't hear much about the suicides,
of which there were thousands in those terrible places,
some by women acting together...

'The best things in life are free,'

and for me there's no denying
that they have been
my fourteen dreams of flying.

Do we share feelings -

 or only words for feelings ?

Connectivity.

Today's good may be tomorrow's bad.
Evil has many paths and connections.
Today's joyous may be tomorrow's sad.

The Singularity.

Enlightenment for imbeciles.

 

Anorgasmic.

It emerged from the trial of the odious Ghislaine Maxwell
that her appalling co-predator Jeffrey Epstein
had to be sexually "serviced"
thrice daily by young girls.

Evidently, his ejaculations were just
unsatisfying excretions -

and so it may be for millions of men
too indulged to consider, let alone appreciate
the art of masturbation. 

'Blood is thicker than water.'

Blood and water
can both be infected,
and sperm which is thicker
dries quicker than blood.

Narcissus and the shallow pool.

When we think we're looking deep
we see just the nearest and clearest
of reflections.

Game of Thrones.

Almost the ultimate
in self-indulgent pointlessness :
the invention of fake languages
as real ones disappear.

Things we acquire

hollow us out
to clutter us up.

Dear Sheeple/Sheople

I guess that it's too late for you
to realise that rivers, too, are people.

'The Melancholy of Dissidence'

 

© Malcolm Walker, 2021

The feeling of being useless.

Ever since St Paul
people in Christian cultures
have felt that they were close
to the world's end.
And so today.
And so we get
and so we spend.

So few kneel down and pray.

Complicity and Impotence.

Dogs have to listen
almost all the time
to humans madly barking.

'Inspirational Quote'

We have (almost) all been loved
by somebody who's dead.

(Might be suitable for a graveyard gate...)

There is something disconcerting

about a lot of sheeple laughing.

Not all Europeans were land-grabbers.

In a letter written in 1804 to New South Wales governor Philip King in Sydney, whom he had befriended, the French explorer Nicolas Baudin wrote:

“To my way of thinking, I have never been able to conceive that there was justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their governments, a land seen for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals.

“[I]t would be infinitely more glorious for your nation, as for mine, to mould for society the inhabitants of its own country over whom it has rights, rather than wishing to occupy itself with the improvement of those who are very far removed from it by beginning with seizing the soil which belongs to them and which saw their birth.” 

Our Civilisation.

Dennis Severs' House, Spitalfields, London.

The Christmas Fox, Caylus.

 

click here for more animal sculptures by
Belbet-on-the-Ground.

A Sugar Mountain

requires thousands
of lacerated and
traumatised slaves.
It results in addiction
and millions of rotten teeth.

Elephants are just as edible
as mammoths were,
but we are more delicious
and abundant.

People with big noses

photo by Almina Kaselis

 

amply illustrate the ugliness
(that some might call 'sublime catastrophe')
of Man's grotesque dominion.

Emptiness

is densely-populated.