Alzheimer's

has given Dementia
a bad name.

Perhaps...

in a world of war and schism
the most unjustifiable of sins
is Optimism.

 

In memoriam John Wieners

To know
(is a two-edged comfort)

that no
pale candles will ever burn 

in windows of horrifyingly
comfortable houses

to celebrate my
despicable fame.

'Enlightenment'

is horrifying,
horribly depressing.

Wilfully stark
is a world without dark.

Expect no trouble

if you do what's expected.
The many police prefer
people who are drably dressed.
Those who have beige emotions
and outlook will be protected.

Venn Diagrams

by Edith Pritchett.

The power of more

will always destroy
the beauty of less.

Double reality.

Since double glazing
has been ubiquitously installed
the ghost of myself
that I see sometimes in windows
now has a Doppelgänger.

And behind him a far reality.

from the Dissident Medical Dictionary :

 Life :

an addiction to sentience.

Recommended treatment : Death.

Women's Liberation

cannot progress
without liberation from the mirror.

The Vulgarity of Splendour.

 

Banquet at Versailles.

from Karl on Facebook

Walking down the road this morning
...a guy leaning over his wall starts talking to me.
Sicilian.

I'm from Palermo, but I hate it!
Full of Americans, Germans, nothing but tourists,
McDonalds, Pizza Hut everywhere!
Totally Americanised. 
I want to see Mafiosi, but they've all fled to the hills to hide!

Air Pollution in Europe.

The only pure air is in the white areas.
Inhabitants of North Macedonia,
Central Poland and Lombardy
are breathing in four times the 'safe' level
of toxic particulates.

Physicists say

that electrons kiss
and remember forever.
It's more likely
they bump into each other
and never forget.

My book

on marginal mediæval sculptures was originally published (in 1985)
by a small specialist London firm called Batsford,
which was taken over by Routledge, (formerly Routledge & Kegan Paul),
which was taken over by Taylor and Francis,
which has been taken over by Informa UK Ltd,
a subsidiary of a German firm.

This is the first royalty statement I have had in four years.

If humans were as rational as dogs

we'd be living in Paradise
and hating it.

'Take the $65,000 and run.'

 

From wide to narrow : deprive and deprave.

The more that sheople
(especially testosteronal males)
are deprived of,
deflected or 'educated' away from
the sensual,
the more they will gravitate
towards the sexual.

A&E

Since gardens are deserts
boringly pretty
it was no wonder they took
their pet snake and their rue
and their pomegranate seeds
to what they hoped would be
fresh fields and pastures new.

Civilisation is built on the lie

that human life, uniquely,
has unique worth,
and is more than the destructiveness
to death from birth.

The confusion

of the sensual with the sexual
parallels that between the spiritual
and the merely religious.

Conspiracy theorists

compulsively conspire.

There is only one true freedom:
the freedom from desire.

from today's newspaper

"Most waste-water created by flush toilets
(more than 80% world-wide)
goes directly back into the environment
with no treatment."

On the Frontier of Dementia / A la frontiêre de la demence

I was not-so-slowly
(but with almost-admirable elegance)
descending the escalator*

and I said to myself:
Don't worry,
Be happy.

Go for it in the pleasant no-mans-land !

*Moving stairway is a much less
pretentious term. This may have been
part of the same sweet socialist
production-line
that took me from school
to university without the slightest
effort on my part. Then effort was required.
It took no effort at all to jump off.
Even less than is required
to abandon the rusty cruise-liner of life.

People are stupid and the sun still shines.

Feel free to add a few more lines.

Humanity:

the terrible conspiracy.
Philosophy: a panoply
of conspiracy theories.

from The Dissident Dictionary

 CIVILISATION (noun) :

an evolutionarily-degenerative but natural process whereby natural behaviours are suppressed and aggression is targeted.

New meanings to old words.

Many of these are due to mis-hearing
and let's face it, poor literacy.

Thus coruscating (sparkling, brilliant)
has become confused with excoriating
(literally: ripping the heart out of)
and now has two very different meanings
whose context may not provide enlightenment.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/10/misusing-words-can-change-their-dictionary-definitions-coruscating

Perhaps the greatest crime of Christianity

(and hence of 'western culture')
is its relentless and continuing
sexualisation of sensuality

which mirrors the Jewish demonisation
of pluralist Græco-Roman culture that led
to Masada and the Second Exile...
and, ultimately, the Shoah.

Information and knowledge

may be new,
but wisdom is very old
and hasn't changed.

Forget the false distinction
between 'saints' and 'sinners'.

The biggest 'losers'
are of course the 'winners'.

BBC Radio

like the whole world (and the moon)
has become terminally infected
by the United States. 
Documentary programmes
now have interfering musak.
More and more contributors
are American, and are gabbling
twice as fast as contributors used to,
and, having been asked and paid
to appear on 'shows' (which is what discussion
programmes with some intellectual weight
are now called) insist on thanking
the presenter for 'having them on the show'
as if they were Lazarus at Dives' gate.

The verb makes all the difference.

The American imperative
Have a nice day!
is a mis-translation of the French
Bonne journée,
which means no more than
I hope you have a good day.

The imperative makes all the difference.

Homo stultus.

It has taken thousands of years for stupid humans
to realise that other animals are intelligent and
in different ways more sensitive.

If it weren't for climate change
it would probably take a few hundred more
for self-stultifying humans
to realise their own stupidity,
but of course that same stupidity
will largely wipe humans out long before.

Ignorant immigrants.

Few of the rich foreigners
(mostly from England and Holland)
who come to live in France
have read Ronsard, Villon or Montaigne,
or Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Prévert or Verlaine;
nor do they know anything of French social history.
So 'French attitudes and behaviour'
are to them something of a mystery.

We're here to protect ducks.

Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.

 

photograph by Mendel Ngan 

Silly Emily!

Feathers are not necessarily cuddly
unless they are plucked:
I have said it before, and I'll say it again:
Hope is a vulture pecking out your brain.

Strange:

that the English language had no word
for one of the commonest, most universal
and essentially human emotions: Schadenfreude.

But then, despite the over-lauded Shakespeare,
English doesn't do emotions
like French, German or Arabic.

Diesel, diesel...

photo by Sean Rayford

 

In Atlanta, Georgia,

42 people have been charged by prosecutors with “domestic terrorism”
for trying to save the city’s last green canopy in the Weelaunee forest. 

Local police are trying to raze part of the forest to build a military-style police training academy, colloquially called “Cop City”, that already resulted in the first police killing of a climate activist in US history.

more >

Nobody sees

the indecency of happiness.

An academic question.

Does generic, essential human evil
come from generic, essential human stupidity –

or the other way round ?

Or are they, perhaps, coterminous ?

Jacques Derrida

opined that a totalitarian state is one in which no one is allowed secrets, as in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. 
Like many pronouncements by French intellectuals,
this is a silly remark,
since there are totalitarian states which actually encourage secrets
in order to employ people to ferret them out.  e.g. (notoriously)
the German Democratic Republic.

Another kind of totalitarian state is one
in which the consciousness
of everyone is composed of secrets;
in which other people are entirely enigmatic. 
This is the one I find myself in.
Everyone and their gods move in mysterious ways.

I am on the outside looking in
at the secretive people on the inside
who never look outward, nor up, nor down,
nor sideways, nor even inward
except in narcissistic reflection.

I am also looking in at myself
appearing to be a tiny loose part
of the state and status quo.

Identity is only appearance
both from without and within,
is only what is on show.

Just like any religion,

education
is a process
of stultification.

Thinking about a painting

that combines the parable of Lazarus
with the myth of the Minotaur.

Is the Minotaur licking the leper's sores
while Dives dines and debauches upstairs in his palace ?

Or is the Minotaur himself the embodiment of wealth
carousing in his moral Labyrinth
while Lazarus lies at his gate ?

Or is the Minotaur languishing alone with his sores
or displaying them for passers-by ?

Certainly this latter would be the easiest
for a painter primitif to try,

though since I want the Minotaur to have
a human or male-Gorgon head upon an otherwise
abattoir-ready bull's body

the weeping sores would present
an insurmountable difficulty.

Probably,

in the choked sewer of civilisation
where we are all turds,

the best I could ever say about people
(including myself)
is that they are not intentionally evil –

but these are just words.

'Post-natal Depression.'

'Are you a man who has suffered from PND?'
asks The Guardian newspaper.

I (and millions of others, both male and female)
have suffered bouts of post-natal depression
ever since I was born.  It's basically a result
of entering this world of misery, trauma and grief.
A primal form of PTSD.

The Entropic Principle.

I love the universality
of the phrase SET UP TO FAIL.

It can be applied to anything –
from a poorly-funded local bus-service
to The (overfunded) Internet
to Democracy
to Christianity
to  'Western Civilisation'
to the evolution of Homo sapiens
to Life on Earth
and the existence of
anything and everything.

'Sensible people'

simplify everything.

More than a jot.

You wanted to kiss
and not confide.
I wanted to confide
and not to kiss.
A kiss means little.
A confidence means a lot.

The 'solutions' devised by humans

for problems created by humans
usually cause further, greater
problems for the biosphere.

Probably, the only 'clean' solution is
Nuclear War.  Unfortunately,
the opportunity for human (and my)
annihilation for the betterment of the planet
was missed in 1962.

Recycling has been promoted by the plastics industry
as a key solution to the growing problem of plastic waste.
But a study has found that recycling itself could be releasing
huge quantities of microplastics into water and the air.