A las cuatro y media de la mañana

At half past four in the morning
for millions
comes to pass
not arrest by the police
but the obligation to piss.

Music and Consciousness.

The power of music, the power of radio.

Last Sunday (the 18th of October) an item on a BBC programme featured an eighty-year-old man - Paul Harvey, a former music-teacher - with dementia, whose 'party trick' had always been improvisation on the piano of any four notes he was given.

He was given four notes during the broadcast on which he proceeded to improvise.

This struck a chord with so many listeners that the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra was engaged to make a recording which incorporated Paul Harvey's improvisation with excellent orchestration.

The result is an 'uplifting' Brief Encounter mixture of 80% Sergey Rachmaninov with 10% Richard Strauss, which is a powerful reminder than music is more expressive and positive than language, and is a means of bringing consolation and joy to those whose brains are affected by dementia or other disorder. 

Music cancels out the miscarriage and measurement of time which we call 'civilisation'...and allows us to live, like cats, for the sensation of life, not for achievement.

The recording (made by members of the orchestra playing separately in Covid-isolation) will be available commercially from the first of November, 2020, and can now be heard on my website.

If I Got The Covid

 and quickly recovered
(living contentedly alone and apart).
I don't think I'd let anyone know,
but just avoid people
and keep my distance,
for otherwise I would become
another very tired victim of state apparatus
and its mindless commotion.

I guess that a lot of folk
feel the same way.

And if I got it bad
I'd just stay in bed
(having taken my
convenient suicide potion)

until (of course) I was dead.

Gangrene or Misprint

Cocks went black last night
(Beautiful Voodoo,
Tar-dipping...?)
and, in Europe, there was
for millions of party-animals
an extra sixty minutes of curfew.

Today's Splendid Word :

 piety-monger.

For francophone readers, the Word of the Day
(referring to the Mayor of Bordeaux) is :

Catho-Basque.

Loneliness.

The word and concept arrived in English
with the Industrial Revolution.
The word solitude remained, with its original,~
neutral meaning.

But the Greeks knew all about loneliness.
For them, it was a state of isolation,
outside the polis or commune,
in the bleak érema (back of beyond, the boondocks,
the sticks, the wolf-haunted wildness or wilderness
beyond the pale of masters and slaves).

An éremos was a solitary, maybe abandoned,
maybe lonely person, absent from civilisation,
lacking in amenities, possibly  one of thousands
of children abandoned 'abroad' and brought up by wolves.
On the other hand, an éremitos was solitary by choice
in a 'lonely, deserted' place teeming with flora and fauna -
hence our word hermit.  The Irish word for a hermitage
was díseart (anglicised dysart) from Latin diserta, a place without people.

Some Irish hermits lived on islands and islets
from birds' eggs, seaweed, sea-scurvy-grass, mussels and limpets
- and may not have wanted for company.

Listen on my website to a brief discussion on the BBC
of contemporary loneliness.

Loneliness goes - and is often confused with - Boredom.
But you're never alone while you still have thoughts.
Even hatred can be pleasant company.

Perhaps the most depressing poem I have ever read.

Evolution Margaret Ross The corpses weigh nothing, nearly nothing, even your breath is breeze enough to scatter them We steamed them in tupperware with a damp sponge then we tweezed the stiff wings open The wing colors would brush off if you touched them 3,000 butterflies raised and gassed and shipped to Evolution, the store in New York rented by an artist hired to design a restaurant He wanted to paper the walls with butterflies Each came folded in its own translucent envelope We tweezed them open, pinned them into rows on styrofoam flats we stacked in towers in the narrow hallway leading to the bathroom Evolution called itself a natural history store It sold preserved birds, lizards, scorpions in lucite, bobcat with the eyes dug out and glass ones fitted, head turned Also more affordable bits like teeth and peacock feathers, by the register a dish of raccoon penis bones This was on Spring The sidewalks swarmed with bare-armed people there to see the city You could buy your own name in calligraphy or written on a grain of rice by someone at a folding table Souvenir portraits of taxis and the Brooklyn Bridge lined up on blankets laid over the pavement The artist we were pinning for had gotten famous being first to put a dead shark in a gallery For several million dollars each he sold what he described  as happy pictures which were rainbow dots assistants painted  on white canvases I remember actually thinking his art confronted death, that’s how young I was We were paid per butterfly The way we sat, I saw the backs of the other pinners’ heads more than their faces One’s braids the color of wine, one’s puffy headphones, feather cut and slim neck rising from a scissored collar, that one bought a raccoon penis bone on lunch break Mostly we didn’t speak Another life glimpsed in a detail mentioned, leaving or arriving  She lived with a carpenter who fixed her lunches Come fall I’d be in college I smelled the corpses on my fingers when I took my smoke break leaning against a warm brick wall facing the smooth white headless mannequins in thousand-dollar shift dresses The deli next door advertised organic toast and raisins on the vine Mornings, I tried to learn from eyeliner and shimmer on faces near mine on the train Warm fogged imprint on a metal pole where someone’s grip evaporated Everyone looking down when someone walked through  asking for help At Evolution, talk radio played all day A cool voice giving hourly updates on the bombing of another city which it called the conflict The pinner in headphones sometimes hummed or started a breathy lyric “Selfish girl—” I watched my tweezers guide the poisonous exquisite blue of morpho wings Their legs like jointed eyelashes False eyes on the grayling wingtips to protect the true face The monarch’s wings like fire pouring through a lattice Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Ross. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

'Human dignity'

is cosmetic:
something we make up
out of arrogance.

May A Thousand Curses Fall Upon Them

in the highly-unlikely event that they did.

Another caption in execrable taste.

 

Sitting on a dildo, high on cannabis wafers,
'No African-American kid's dick is too big for me to swallow.'

Those Damned Cartoons

originally posted in the North-Jute newspaper Jyllands-Posten
are still causing havoc. - most recently the beheading of a secular schoolteacher
near Paris.

(this is not one of the Danish cartoons)

Until yesterday I had not seen any of the offending six cartoons.

Here they are.

I don't think any of them is particularly blasphemous
nor particularly funny.

It seems that the cartoon which caused the most offence
was the one about the failure or rupture of the supply-chain of virgins in Paradise.

The deeply offensive myth of the 72 Virgins offered to the pious male
after death derives from a Hadith composed either by

Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (Arabic: الحكيم الترمذي‎; (The Sage of Termez) or

Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad ibn ʿĪsā as-Sulamī aḍ-Ḍarīr al-Būghī at-Tirmidhī
(Arabic: أبو عيسى محمد بن عيسى السلمي الضرير البوغي الترمذي‎; Persian: ترمذی‎, Termezī; 824 – 9 October 892 CE / 209 - 279 AH),
often referred to as Imām al-Termezī/Tirmidhī. He was a Persian of Arab descent belonging to the Banu Sulaym tribe, an Islamic scholar, and collector of Hadith who hailed from Termez (in present-day Uzbekistan).

Jokes amongst Muslims about this ridiculous Hadith must date from at least the eleventh century.
Cartoons about the beheading of journalists, cartoonists or teachers may now seem to be in poor taste
but will probably not incite further beheadings.

But this one might:

SHOULDN'T WE, HOWEVER, JUST ONCE IN A WHILE,
'SEND UP' SOME OUTRAGEOUS CHRISTIAN MYTHS ?  

The caption below this superb painting by Bellini
could get me death threats from the crazy 'Christian Right',

but, fortunately, Freedom of Speech by millions means that
only ten people read my blog, none of them (so far as I know)
from the Raving Right (or the Loony Left).
I don't think that Jyllands-Posten , The Onion, 
or even Private Eye would print it,
nor any schoolteacher parade it, as an amusing example of
our cherished and much-vaunted Freedom of Expression.

Simeon:  I enjoyed you when you were a virgin; 
I look forward to enjoying your son. 

We need to talk about Education.

To suck an ecclesiastic cock
(as unpleasant as the meat
in school dinners I was forced to eat)
might not be more abusive to the child
than swallowing catechismic junk,

and considerably less than being forced
to be right-handed - with the ensuing
physical and emotional confusion,
the utter unacceptability of eating
with the same hand that wipes your arse.

Attending to a teacher's dripping dick
would have been for me much less unpleasant,
outrageous, and problematic
than years of forced cross-country runs
and rugby in the rain and mud,
mind-twisting nationalistic 'history' lessons
and the sheer misery of mathematics.

Joey - In Memoriam.

I always hated to see animals in cages,
so when I was given a budgerigar (rather than the dog I wanted)
I used to take him out in warm weather
to perch and preen and fly among the apple trees.
He would come back into his cage and await another outing.
But eventually, inevitably one afternoon he flew away,
never to return.
That was seventy years ago today.

The Mummy Industry - an insight into early modern Christian Europe.

"For most of the history of European collection of mummies,
the primary thing Europeans did with them was grind them up...
mummies were considered a [beneficial] drug."

read on >

'Mummy-juice' as a 'cure' for Covid-19 ?
Maybe better and much rarer, nobler than beef extract...
Cannibalism will always attract.

see also 
Sugg, Richard, 2011, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The history of corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, (Routledge). 

An Enema of the People

found Covid in tap-water.
She's now dead
and so is her daughter.

On Death and Dying.

My neighbour Josette
who is 'three years my junior'
and has various ailments
says that what keeps her going
is curiosity about how things will turn out.

Of course 'things' are not cakes or crème brulée,
but keep on developing, fracturing, metamorphosing.
As for me, too, death is not dreadful at all.
My dread has always been our dreadfulness
and our malignant machinations;
that dread will die with me.

What worries me unduly is the prelude to the Great Release
from life's prison, the gradual incapacity, maybe pain - or worse.
Like Josette (and many) I'd like to exit suddenly:
a massive stroke or heart-attack (preferably in bed),
or even blown by bomb-blast into smithereens.
Meantime, in the freezer, I store The Other Means.

In many human cultures, for example Austria-Hungary
before the First World War, suicide was a respected act.
'The grieving relatives' were expected to get over it.
(I often wonder if the Wrong Side won that war.)

However,
if I were incapacitated (for example) by a partial stroke,
being a superannuated loner, with no relatives,
I'd be quite happy for the underpaid to give me morphine,
empty my bed-pan re-fit the catheter
(my morphine experience - while I listened to a surgeon saw off
the head of my femur - was wonderful)...

...except that I am too aware of the huge financial
and environmental cost
of keeping millions of people alive just for the doctrinal sake of it -
while slaughtering other people and animals
with horrible abandon -

except that food in French hospitals is vile and meaty,
no salads, no satisfaction let alone joie de vivre in eating it.
And if I were to be sent home
with underpaid carers to pop in and out, to do this and that
with catheters and needles,
I'd get similarly vile reheated meals delivered by a van.
In that case, I'd still have The Other Means
and probably manage to employ it.
But  I must remind myself
that very few of us suddenly become completely incapacitated
or fall into a coma. (NE PAS RÉANIMER* will shortly
be tattooed on my belly by the sexy inker just 3 minutes from my door.)

For millennia (despite the Christian and Muslim claim that Death
held no horrors for their kind of Believer)
it was the prospect of a gruesome Afterlife
which was so dreadful.  People did not live so long
nor die protractedly. Now, more and more of us
have no fear of a mediæval Hell.
We, in our moral decadence, just want to leave this life
unsufferingly, neatly, unbothered and untubed,
and, like ancient Greeks and Romans, well.

*DO NOT RESUSCITATE

For some of us...

A las cuatro y media de la mañana

At half past four in the morning
for millions
comes to pass
not arrest by the police
but the obligation to piss.

I cannot believe

that Black Souls Matter
to the racist, sexist, polyphobic
god of the whites' religion

but Black Minds
whitewashed
think differently

Accidents

We are all victims
of history: hundreds and hundreds
of historical accidents
and unintended consequences
which have made not only our terrible, collapsing
human world and shrivelling Earth,
but you and me, accidents
(and maybe unintended consequences)
of sperm and egg and birth.

Word of the Day.

Uptick.

Interesting Anglo-Indian Words

current in English, from a longer Wikipedia list.

Bandana 

from bandhna (बांधना) to tie.

Bangle 

from bāngṛī बांगड़ी, a type of bracelet.

Blighty 

"Britain" (as a term of endearment among British troops stationed in Colonial India): from Hindi-Urdu vilāyatī (विलायती, ولايتى) "foreign", ultimately from Arabo-Persian ولايتي "provincial, regional".

Bungalow

from बंगला banglA and Urdu بنگلہ banglA, literally, "(house) in the Bengal style"

Cheetah 

from chītā, چیتا, चीता, meaning "variegated".

Chutney 

from 'chaṭnī', چٹنی ,चटनी, ultimately derived from full-infinitive word 'chāṭnā', چاٹنا ,चाटना, meaning 'to lick'.

Cot 

from khāṭ, खाट, a bed.

Dinghy

from Dinghi, small boat, wherry-boat

Dungaree

Heavy denim* fabric, also referring to trousers made thereof, from Hindi डूंगरी (ḍūṅgrī, “coarse calico”), the name of a village.
[*Denim itself is an Anglo-French word describing the coarse Calico** fabric made in Nimes (de Nîmes) and used in North America to make Jeans, a word which comes from the French for Genoa: Gènes.
**Calico is a corruption of Calcutta (Kolkata), which produced a fabric which Wikipedia says is less coarse than denim...]

Juggernaut 

from Jagannath (Sanskrit: जगन्नाथ jagannātha), a form of Vishnu particularly worshipped at the Jagannath Temple, Puri, Odisha where during Rath Yatra festival thousands of devotees pull three temple carts some 14m (45 feet) tall, weighing hundreds of tons through the streets. These carts seat three statues of the deities, meant to be two brothers and their sister for a 'stroll' outside after the ritual worship session. They are fed by thousands and thousands of worshipers with holy food, as if the icons were living. Early European visitors witnessed these festivals and returned with—possibly apocryphal—reports of religious fanatics committing suicide by throwing themselves under the wheels of the carts. So the word became a metaphor for something immense and unstoppable because of institutional or physical inertia; or impending catastrophe that is foreseeable yet virtually unavoidable because of such inertia.

Jungle 

from جنگل जंगल jangal of Persian origin, another word for wilderness or forest, which was borrowed from Sanskrit जङ्गल jaṅgala meaning "uncultivated land, desert."

Khaki

from ख़ाकी khākī "of dust colour, dusty, grey", cf. Hindi ख़ाकी - Urdu خاکی [ultimately from Persian].

Loot 

from Loot لوٹ लूट, meaning 'steal'. Robbery

and so on to:

Pyjamas

from Hindi and Urdu, पैजामा (paijaamaa), meaning "leg garment", coined from Persian پاى "foot, leg" and جامه "garment" .

Shampoo

Derived from Hindustani chāmpo (चाँपो [tʃãːpoː]) (verb imperative, meaning "rub!"), dating to 1762.

Thug

from Thagi ठग,ٹھگ Thag in Hindi-Urdu,meaning "thief or con man".

Tickety-boo

possibly from Hindi ठीक है, बाबू (ṭhīk hai, bābū), meaning "it's all right, sir".

Toddy (also Hot toddy) 

from Tārī ताड़ी, juice of the palmyra palm.

Typhoon

from Urdu طوفان toofaan.^[A cyclonic storm.

Veranda

from Hindi baramdaa बरामदा, but ultimately from Portuguese.

When I was a little boy

the opening in the front of my short trousers was called a 'spare',
as if the buttons on it were spare buttons to replace those attached to braces (which Americans call suspenders*).

*What the British call suspenders are, I think, a garter-belt in the USA.  What, then, do Americans call the leg-bands to hold up socks or stockings which the British call garters ?

As I got older, the opening was called a 'fly' or 'flies' (as in a theatre ?),
and was no longer closed by fumbly buttons but by nifty zip.

When I was a little boy and was driven in a car
the windscreen was soon speckled by dead flies.
Some cars even had fly-deflectors at the front.

Now, almost no flies are smashed on windscreens.
Flies (like most insects) are becoming rare, and definitely not spare.

For future geologists and archæologists

visiting Earth from Mars
we are now laying down
The Plastics Sediment,
including the remains
of billions of anti-viral face-masks.

Yesterday,

Republican senator, Mike Lee of Utah, tweeted:
‘Democracy isn’t the objective [of America’s political system]; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.
We want the human condition to flourish.
Rank democracy can thwart that.’ 

He is, of course, correct.

The USA was founded as an oligarchic Republic on the Roman model, not a Greek-style Democracy. 
The Romantic principle of democracy was introduced much later. 
The same is true of France, where women were not allowed to vote until 1946,
and which only recently started to take democracy seriously.

The King of Euphemisms:

Assertive Engagement

= Aggression.

Clive James on minority sexualities :

"Some people are different from the rest of us,
and so are the rest of us."
                                           Falling Towards England, 1985.

HOWEVER
and however irrelevant,
many women with children
would rather be beaten up than abandoned.

Language

is a very old conspiracy
to prevent us understanding each other
better than dogs or chimpanzees can do

by filling our consciousness
with chains of words
in labyrinths of narrative
hatred, prejudice, religion.
Language is our ever-tightening,
bloody crown of thorns.

Would you trust this man with a gun ?

Would you get out of his way on a busy street  in broad daylight ?
You'd better!  He's a typical Texan Police Officer
- currently in Hunt County  jail for murder -
 but (I suggest) only because of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Shaun Lucas : read more

Faces like his remind me of policemen I used to see in Northern Ireland
before the reform of the police service there.
He is of Irish extraction, like so many police officers in the USA
since the Great Emigration.

I don't judge books by their covers,
but this man's face fills me with terror -
and I am not at all surprised that he would beat up and kill an African-American
out of 'solidarity' with his 'racial identity' - or just for pleasure.

On the other hand, he might well attract favourable attention in a gay bar...

My intellect

is like the mechanical grab
in a fun-fair slot-machine
which never quite gets a hold
of the almost-worthless object
in the pile beneath.

The sea! the Sea!

 Photograph by Paulo Oliveira

 

Is any bonhomie

not false ?

On hearing that the Arctic

is melting far faster than predicted:
to estimate the damage of any human activity
done to the biosphere, imagine the worst -
then double it.

Further to my blog on Portmanteau Words a while ago,

I have just discovered the lovely word

                                      SHEEPLE.



Black sheeple are, of course, pretty similar to white sheeple.
Impossible to tell them apart - apart from the colour, or the dye.

When 'empowered' they commit the same crimes as white sheeple.
(sigh)

With my lack of imagination

I would have thought that composing music
is easier than writing novels.
But a few seconds' reflection
suggests the opposite.

"Personality Measurement"

(one of the more bogus jobs)
must be a bit like measuring
sticky, oozy blobs.

A short e-mail to an imaginary friend.

'Letter-writing's a disease',
wrote Peter Abelard
to Héloïse.

Beyond reason,

humanity thinks itself better served
by sending vehicles to Mars
than anti-malarial vaccines to Africa.

Peacock Mantis Shrimp, planet Earth.

It was well over a million years ago that the Martians,
having exhausted their planet's atmosphere,
took off for a more comfortable location.

‘The human brain secretes thought

 like the liver secretes bile.’ 

-  Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis (1757-1808)

Simple-minded Walt

wrote: The earth never tires.
But it's exhausted by us
the billions of vampires
who suck it dry in concerted assault.

Jumblyism.

Existence is the sieve

in which all life rides

upon the sea of non-existence.

Dear Willy,

I guess that you have long since realised
that your best friend is my hand.
Once upon a time there was a certain human entity
who made you feel wonderful,
but alas! was highly unappealing to the rest of me.

I think that it is time

for Misanthropes to come out of the closet.  

We are more numerous than the sexual deviants or dissidents
and also include some sexual anomalies  - such as myself. 
I think also that some “Anarchists” are misanthropes
who are attempting to deny their deepest feelings.

The problem is:
Donald Trump is quite obviously a misanthrope.

Like most people (!)

I think that abusive pornography
- especially kiddie-porn -
is more obscene than ostentatious wealth.
But it is worth pointing out that
we are constantly programmed
(even before school)
to adsmire* the rich for being cool,
and capable, and so we rarely investigate the seediness
and obscenity of affluence.

*my portmanteau word: admire + aspire.

Hustler Banana Slicer: no home should be without one.

 Sorry, that should read Hutzler.

Read the reviews  >

With a few exceptions,

I have found travel books tedious.
The few good ones tend to be by people with an anthropological sensibility,
or actual anthropologists such as Colin Turnbull and Nigel Barley.
Often they are just a chronological list
of White Mens' experiences in exotic places.
But in one such book (by William Dalrymple)
I came across this wonderful paragraph:

Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. 
Their men are almost all handsome, with dark, supple skin and strong features:
good bones, sharp eyes and tall masculine bodies. 
But the women share their menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. 
Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent.
Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies.
Here must lie the reason for the Turks’ easy drift out of heterosexuality.

The Ideological Strip-Mall also sells antiques.

Haiku

Dead already,
I have no interest
in what has killed me.

I wrote a memoir

got to chapter 23
then realised
that I was a
pompous old whiner.

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.