Like most people,

I have got to be where I am
   (and, in my case, want to be :
   close, but not too close
   to the bottom of the heap)
through moral cowardice.

Everything we do

(including the writing of aphorisms and apophthegms,
and little or majestic poems)
diverts our attention
from what we are
(as well as what we will become).

Everything has been said
in many different ways.  Words fail.

All religion, all civilisation,
all human progress,
the human condition,
is sounding brass,
bombs and tombs
and jangling cymbals.

Religion attacks thought;

thought attacks Nature.

DBC Pierre

famously wrote:
"Wealth makes you less nosy."
Mainly because you are less connected.

And, curiously, the richer you become
the drabber you get.

History

is a huge factory
of irony.

Revenge

may be and sound
sweet,
but it tends to
rebound.

Raptor!

(Bemused.)

It is when we have an explanation

for everything
that we begin to feel reduced,
plundered
and insatiable.

Justice

is possibly
a sillier thing to believe in
than God.

There's nothing fixed

that can't be broken
(again).

From sharp stones to smart phones.

We (and almost every organism on the planet)
are inevitable and ineluctable victims of our crass technology.

Adam's Sin

was Belief,
with its shadow (handmaiden),
Hope.

The problem with 'wisdom'

(which is only a concept)
is that the human mind
seems to have been designed
to block it.

An Astrophysiotheological Question

[after Hafiz]

What would happen if God leaned down
and gave you a big wet
Kiss ?

Assuming that there was ever
or would be a God-the-Creator
with body and lips,
who would want to,

you would surely start blabbering
all day, unceasingly
mind-blasted,
devilish poems
even more shocking than this.

When you are open

a lot of doors shut in your face.

Loving

is a release
into another enclosure.
Not-loving
is another kind
of letting go.

This side

of suicide,
the best that one can hope to be
is in the world, but impossibly
not of it.

'Theory of Mind'

It is very much easier
to "read" a dog
than a human -
but very few humans
bother to "read" dogs.

What I learned at University:

was that I absolutely didn't want
to be an achiever,
or even employed.

I like being "a loser",
and now, in happy senile solitude,
I make witty remarks to my dog
which my mother would have enjoyed.

The problem with Hamlet

is that, like most of Shakespeare's characters,
he's shallow, self-regarding, and not very bright.

Our little planet as seen from (even smaller) Mars.

No big deal.
I guess the other two are Venus and Jupiter...?

On Prayer.

Most people
especially kids
pray for good things
to come to them:
prayer as metaphysical and venal tool.

I prayed only
for tuberculosis
so I would not have to go to my odious semi-private school.

(I also stood on the shed roof below my bedroom window on winter nights
shivering bravely for as long as ten minutes as a time,
in the hope that I would get pneumonia or rheumatic fever,
which I never.)

The Invisible Hand of The Market

holds millions of people
by the throat.

The Homosensual

is a man who discovers
that his penis is more antenna
- or ground -
than receiver.

Cheese and Music.

Ireland produced no cheeses -
but a lot of good music,
especially Slow Airs.
France produced hundreds of cheeses
but very little good music.
French peasants
were too busy making cheese to make music.

The choice

for most of us, it seems,
is to dissemble
or be disassembled.

for Édouard Louis & Didier Éribon

a first line by Wisława Szymborska

There is no debauchery worse than thinking.

Nie ma rozpusty gorszej niż myślenie.

Belief > doctrine

Doctrine > dogma
Dogma > cant
Belief in Democracy,
in Western Values,
is not as rational as we imagine.

What is Art ?

Art is one or both of these:

artefacts that you appreciate;
artefacts that make you think
often by engaging the emotions.

Music, dance, ceramics, painting, writing...

Art exists largely because
language is so inefficient,
insufficient.

The Possessed.

Most men are islands -
women, too, I think -
though claiming to be peninsulas at least.
We are too complex to be able
to relate to one another, so we like magnets,
compulsively connect to things instead:
a tragic species-specific love-affair with property.

What's so wonderful about courage,

'pushing yourself to the limit',
and overcoming all sorts of adversity ?
I'm content to be a cowardly and petty
(if stubborn) resister of Authority.

The best Last Words - ever ?

"Is this all there is to it ?"

- Bobby Jones, famous golfer.

Cleanliness

is next to Genocide.

"The Common Good" -

there is, of course,
no such thing.

"Original Sin" :

the sexualising of nudity,
making nakedness taboo.

I don't claim to know anything about Love -

but I guess it must - at least - be like
a Romantic trio - by Beethoven, Schubert,
Brahms, Chausson - or a Nocturne by Chopin.
But less repeatable.

When does dog-shit stop

and become just mud...

and mind ... ?

Nelson Mandela asked his grandson

(who had come to Robben Island to see him)
what he (the grandson) wanted to do when he grew up,
the boy answered: To go to prison.

What isms and ocracies hate most:

interiority.
Perhaps it stinks of Neanderthality.

Even as we extinguish them,

animals are mercifully unaware
of our intentions.

How can anyone be "free"

who has been stultified and desensitised
- if not turned into a zombie -
by an "education" system ?

Freedom can be achieved only by the utmost stealth,
and thus is nearly as precarious as it is precious.

The noblest ambition ?

Certainly the most difficult:
 to be harmless.

The Movies.

As a child in Belfast in the 1940s and 1950s
I didn't much care for Cowboys and Indians,
I hated circuses, Disney, Tom & Jerry
and all loud, violent films.
I particularly hated Tarzan
because he was grotesque
and hideously white.

I guess I fancied Kirk Douglas in "The Vikings",
but of course I had to be in London to see
my first non-American film, the first to show me cinema as art
and as true as poetry:
Bergman's The Virgin Spring.

Since when I have seen rather few American movies.

For a misanthrope

love is,
simply and purely,
the absence of dislike.

"This world

is a comedy to those who think,
a tragedy to those who feel."

- Horace Walpole, English Historian.

For us who think and feel,
this world is, of course, a tragicomedy,
or, if you prefer, a plutonian joke -
Elektra written by Aristophanes.

The rich man who looks at the sole of his shoe

is checking for dog-shit;
the poor man is checking
that the sole will get him home or to the hostel.

Spirits and demigods

are celebrated with joy
and wine and flowers. 
All-powerful gods need blood.

Having a go (Joe)*

for Antony Beevor

Glorious Hitler Weather
on the Leader's last birthday,
the cruellest, enclosed month of 1945.

From corpse-tattered gardens,
through burnt-out ruins
where no-one's left alive,
the sinuous scent of lilacs
insists its sweet, voluptuous dance
upon the evening air
with the languorous impassiveness of plants.

Then Lenin's birthday.
Then Shakespeare's on the feast-day of St George
(patron saint of Moscow, Georgia and of England).
Then all Berlin collapses into void,
the city split between destroyers and destroyed
as soldiers spend their seed and energy
in drunken gang-rape -

and rush to the next starving, recently infected woman,
the next stinking ruin wherein to re-engorge.



* 'Have a go' was a BBC programme popular near the end of the war in Europe and afterwards.
   During the Third Reich, a warm, sunny spell was called Hitler Weather.
   There are references in the poem also to a famous Paris café-bar popular with surrealists
     and once frequented by Lenin,
   Eliot's Waste Land, and Baudelaire's Harmonie du Soir.

Cent Ans Après : Remembrance = Glorification

Military parades
commemorate only militarism.

There's always a dictator

at hand to fill a cultural-philosophical vacuum,
just as there's always an urinal
to put in an art gallery.

read on >