Some dog-walkers

especially teenage women
especially in France
seem to prefer the lead
to the dog

An American tourist

asked me this morning
if there was mains (piped) water
in this French village.
She did not look convinced
when I told her that good water
had been running from household taps
for well over a hundred years.

Buggery at Eton

almost inevitable
was taken as normal

but buggery after Eton
was quite unforgivable.

Likewise in Ancient Greece

men with beards tarried
and frotted with beardless
and testosteronal youths
but not with other bearded men
who, inevitably, were married*.

*apart from Diogenes, of  course.
We know about Socrates' hard-done-by wife
but not about the wives of Plato, Aristotle, etc.
 

My Vast Wealth

Since artworks
are mere enhancements
of luxury
I revel in the luxury
of my many paintings.

Weddings

are now the most obvious
example of Magical Thinking.

Like the great poet

Kobayishi Issa
I say to my spiders
Don't worry,
I keep house
very sympathetically.

I keep hammering on about the futility of language.

Words are less than shit –
for at least fæces will reveal a person’s diet,
whereas words reveal
(temporarily)
only attitude.

The Inner Wilderness

Although there is
Food and Fast
for Thought
and Being
there is no
fast food for Thought
no lens or prism
or kaleidoscope
for Seeing.

A profound comment on religion

"All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on killing mosquitoes."

- Kobayashi Issa, my favourite Haikist. 

Ayre

Frigid
is a word which men apply
only to women.  - Why ?
I'm a frigid and peculiar kind of queer
strangely relieved at last to be
so, past the age of seventy-three,
and still - incomprehensibly (at least to me)
- insanely content to be alive
at the age of seventy-five.

Robinson Jeffers:

"In this changed world :-
write and be quiet."
"A handful of wildflowers
is nobler than the human race."

Norman MacCaig, poet,

interviewed on BBC Radio 4 in 1988
splendidly declared:
I don't approve of answers.

Men

often kick
when they should lick

and lick
when they should kick.

You see a field

I see stone

You see vigour
I see rage

You see flesh
And I see bone

You see a person
I see the cage

Carl Jung observed that

"Sex is a playground
for lonely scientists."

If you face the right way

in warm weather
and kiss the earth,
you will - for an instant -
find a soul

for the sun will plant
a loving kiss
in your arsehole.

Beauty and the Beast

Every human is terrible,
grotesqued by conformity.
Language is suppression
of the inexpressible.

Our world is only fashion:

we manufactured mannequins
pretend to be
but merely act,
acting out the fantasies
of other mannequins,
and call our stagecraft culture
and the show civilisation
in order to keep everything but
nature, grace and wholesomeness intact.

To die quite soon

might be a boon,
the intervening years and days
of this poltroon
passed in a pleasant
alcoholic haze.

Conscience

is not a function of 'soul',
but false regret at not having one.

One can love people

only by loving their prisons.

I'm in a love-affair with Malbec -

a grape which does not ripen well in France,
but, nevertheless, is an ingredient of Claret
from Bordeaux (accompaniment
to many a meaty English feast),
and the chief or only grape
in the dark wine of Cahors (farther to the east).
It grows better in southern Russia,
producing the black Cahorski wine
the Romanovs and Turgenev liked.
It grows better still in southern South America
and, at its best, yields up a deeply plummy-
raspberryish wine with erotic undertones
of sweaty perineum - just like the Mourvèdre
grape from farther south in France,
which grows better (as Monastrell) in Eastern Spain.
I have an intimate relationship with Malbec.
He fills me with profound delight
and eases my mere modicum of existential pain.

Ashes

to ashes,
dust to dust -
we all are victims
of uncontrolled lust.

And before we are ashes,
before we are slime,
we risk being doctored
way past our time.

Ultimate Victory

The best way
to conquer time
is to waste it
at your leisure
in many a harmless
pleasure.

Not quite 'synchronicity', but

choosing books to read at random
and judging entirely by the titles,
authors and/or front covers,
I find strange correlations.
The novel before last turned out to be
to be about the organisation of Auschwitz
from a German perspective,
while the last book turned out
overlappingly to be about
fearful Switzerland during WW2
and the sending back (from 1938)
of Jewish refugees to Austria and Germany.
It also featured a 'failed' child pianist-prodigy
which was a main theme in the book
before the book before the last -
and both these novels had middle-aged
male homosensuality at the end.
All through my life in this predestined way
books have succeeded books .

Martin Amis: The Zone of Interest
Rose Tremain: The Gustav Sonata
Natasha Solomons: The Song Collector
 

After All

Sneering in hospitals
jeering at funerals
and all that fuss
because a single person
suffers, dies,
the true Outsider
loses all companionship
through all his shocking Whys.

It hadn't registered in my brain

that the Apple-Pie-and-Happy-Nuclear-Family propaganda magazine
Reader's Digest (found in waiting-rooms
and middle-class sitting-rooms all over the world)
no longer exists.
It occurred to me to look up the issue from the month I was born:

click to enlarge

To our non-European friends.

with thanks to scarfolk.blogspot.sy

The stupid

are the instruments
and bane of the clever
and the clever
are the nemesis of the wise
and the world.

Reason lies

Logic lies
Emotion lies
Religions lie
And so do we
Until we die

Rings and things

Badges
Medals
Brooches
Robes
Sashes
Torches
Belts
Buckles
Boots
Banners
Handshakes
Signs
Chants
Hymns
Vows
Oaths
Prayers
Rites
Rituals
Clans
Crypts
Shrines
Shows
Altars
Buttons
Bows

Police

The National Police
The Secret Police
The Religious Police
The Tourist Police
The Thought Police
The Traffic Police
The Vice Police
The Sumptuary Police
The Narcotics Police
The Auxiliary Police
The Neighbourhood Police
The Military Police
The Criminal Police
The Municipal Police
The Rural Police
The Border Police
The Security Police
The Secret Security Police
The Secret Security Police Police

Hate

is not the only
failure of imagination.*
There are also hope
and civilisation.

* Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory

A friend asked me

the simplest way to kill yourself
when you conclude that you are at the end of the road
and don't wish to end up in hopital or a "care home".
She did not like my well-researched suggestion
to use the gently-stifling plastic-bag-and-sleeping-pill method.
She was more interested in the injection of heart-stopping Potassium chloride
until I told her it was horrifically painful ("veins on fire")
and not that quick.

After buying KCl powder on eBay

(but not for the inevitable eventuality)

the "Suggestions based on your purchase"

featured various kinds of syringe.

Isn't eBay thoughtful ?

I did more research on-line.

Jumping from a high building (at least 8 floors)
or a precipice - the survival rate is low.
But jumping from a bridge is NOT the way to go.
Further googling on how to go gently into the long goodnight
I found an amusing, sobering and useful site
offering much cheer:

click here >>>

The sheer genius of capitalism

A litre-bottle of milk
is cheaper than a litre-bottle of water
(not only if you buy two litres at once).

From the Animals' Society for the Prevention of Humans

The Truths

The simple truth
The complicated truth
The plain truth
The twisted truth
The unadulterated truth
The half-truth
The basic truth
The blind truth
The blatant truth
The untold truth
The terrible truth
The inner truth
The deep truth
The unacceptable
The apparent truth
The presentable truth
The hurtful truth
God's truth
The bitter truth
The unacknowledged truth
The whole truth
The philosophical truth
The absolute truth
The hidden truth
The naked truth
The paradoxical truth
The doubtful truth
The disputed truth
The despicable truth
The economical truth
The unlikely truth
The unvarnished truth
The hateful truth
The oceanic truth
The scientific truth
The artistic truth
The elaborated truth
The absurd truth
The psychological truth
The convenient truth
The barefaced, lying truth...

Art is the is the most creative way
to avoid the truth.

Love is

(whatever it may more precisely be)
a continuing conversation.
Hate, however, like civilisation,
is, in Graham Greene's words
'a failure of imagination.'

Every homeless person

would agree,
and also every refugee
who's forced to roam -
that charity begins at home.

relativity

few of us realise
before it is too late
how the future
will seem to change
our flickering past

until I was
I will be
for an instant
all that the I
who almost fills my world
might have been
have ever been
an imperceptible
footnote to your
imperceptible footnotes

Entry for a Haiku Contest.

Canker in a sickly tree:
competitions
are living death.

One size never fits all.

I have never cared for 'exercise' or effort.
I have always favoured lolling about and reading
As a child, of course I liked to play as children do,
but I loathed 'sports', and have never taken walks
for 'exercise' - only with dogs to share their joy
I would climb a mountain to see a Passage Tomb,
and enjoy hours of planting shrubs and trees
even in rain
but otherwise I would prefer to 'loafe'
(as the Divine Walt put it)
I have spent most of my life sitting in chairs
reading
Am I overweight and unhealthy ?
No
I am very thin and have a strong heart
(the doctors tell me)  And I loafe
and laugh at those mechanical masochists
who 'exercise' to keep themselves 'fit'

Fitness comes from within
The divine

Ambition

is only briefly satisfied
because the people who have it
are not.

Getting ever more popular ;-)

I find it obscene and distressing

that the manic, psychotic, anti-ludic

 Olympic “Games” in Rio de Janeiro

are far more important to our newsmongers

and presumably the demonic demos of our democracy

than (for example) the four-year siege of Aleppo…

Theodore Adorno

wrote:
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
But both the order and the chaos are false,
and the quip is falsely neat,
and most people
for most of history
and prehistory
have not had enough to eat.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Theodor Adorno
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/theodor_adorno.html

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Theodor Adorno
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/theodor_adorno.html

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Theodor Adorno
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/theodor_adorno.html

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Theodor Adorno
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/theodor_adorno.html

One enquiry leads to another...

The only horse-drawn vehicles which I knew as a child in Ireland
were the Trap (with pony) and the Irish Jaunting-car.
Much later I learned of Fiacres,
named after the Hôtel de Saint-Fiacre in Paris,
where carriages gathered for hire,
and that Saint-Fiacre was one of three Irish saints called Fíachra, namely
St Fiacre of Breuil, (died 670), who built a hospice for travellers
at Saint-Fiacre, in the Seine-et-Marne.

So I wondered if the Hackney carriage came from the inner London district of that name.

Indeed not.
It comes from the French Haquenée, originally denoting a quiet, moderately-sized mare
suitable for ladies, and thus also for pulling carriages.
The horsey verb 'to hack' is from the same source.
Then I wondered about the Landau, the Post-chaise (or Shay)
the Brougham...the Barouche...

and found this interesting web-page,
on which no mention was made (before I e-mailed the author)
of the Berlin[e] (now used in French to describe a ‘sedan’ motor-vehicle
[‘saloon’ in British English],
which term comes from the rectangular configuration of a ‘sedan-chair’
[sedio in Italian]). 
Break (in French - Shooting-brake in English)
and Cabriolet, (now also abbreviated to cab in English, as in taxi-cab)

also denote the designs of modern automobiles.

A Dog-cart can be a horse-drawn vehicle designed to carry dogs as well as humans,
or one drawn by a large dog, especially in the Low Countries,
for delivering milk and eggs.

click to enlarge

A photochrom from the late 19th century showing two pedlars selling milk from a dogcart
near Brussels, Belgium.

Lead

is the pliable metal
the roofer of the rich
the poisoner of the poor
the metal of death
the liner of coffins and sarcophagi,
quite different from the lead in man's pencil:
fragile and voluble graphitic carbon -
carbon which made us
on this carbonic chthonic and tectonic
Earth to dwell
ignores us
and our hysteric helium heaven
as well as our carbonyl sulphurous hell.

Rock-music and Relevance

"Remember when, I forget his name
but that rocker who wrote  The Marseillaise...
remember when his song started getting
all that airplay in 1792, and suddenly the peasantry
rose up and overthrew the aristocracy ?
There was a song that changed the world.
Attitude was what the peasants were missing.
They already had everything else -
humiliating servitude, grinding poverty,
unpayable debts, horrific working conditions.
But without a song, man, it added up to nothing.
The Sans-culotte style was what really changed the world."

- from Jonathan Franzen, Freedom.

On the Planet of Pain

It is silly to be miserable
about misery beyond us
and beyond our power to ease. 
Better to frolic,
listen to music –
and even hug trees.