"In some strange way

we devalue things 
as soon as we mention them."

- Maurice Maeterlinck, quoted by Robert Musil in his epigraph to Young Törless.(1906).

Existential.

The Fifth Quartet

The indecent din of poetry
can be relieved
only by the poetry of silence.

"...you’ve got to be a serious con-artist

just to get your basic needs met.”

- Sam Lypsyte, Hark (2019)

Shall I overstep the mark ?

In the Lap of Luxury

without TV
I endure Existential Angst
and Anomie.

Our only memorials

should be the trees
that we planted.

...

(from Facebook group 'The Warning Archive')

Onus of Entropy.

Anus of intellect.
Rebus of rationality.
I feel
that I'm sinking
slowly below
the weight of futility.

Another few words on

civilisation :
the progressive limitation
and regulation
of spontaneity.

Perfect, the planets

devoid of life.

The odd thing about monogamous 'heterosexuals'

is their tendency to fuck each others' wives.

Insanity in Franglais...

Another great epitaph :

'Really,
I don't know why I bothered living.'

Religion is

spiritual abuse.

God is

where the money is.

Muddy books -

because I often read
after planting or transplanting.

The world belongs to gamblers,

because the essence of capitalism
is not enterprise and trade
so much as gambling on the outcomes
of enterprise and trade.
And we are not afraid.

On his days-off

from ferrying the dead in silence
Charon spent his time
keeping an even keel
by trying to un-invent the wheel.

From sharp stones to smart phones

we are victims of our technologies
- but the planet a million times more so.

The Fall of Man

was language,
and poetry the sin of poets -
though the worst
and perhaps the best
remain unpublished.

Our brains jangle with words.
Language destroyed silence.

Revolutions are rarely Progressive (in either sense of the word)

The "Neolithic Revolution"
which brought us agriculture
merely allowed more humans to procreate
by herding them in camps
and villages, and towns, and cities,
and making them dependent on
un-nutritious carbohydrates,
rather as they are doing today
in obscene, grotesque pig-farms
in the USA.

Cave-men lived like kings

when other humans
sheltered in fragile huts
from pelting rain and snow
or sweltering sun
not so many thousand years ago.

So, possibly,
caves were the first
human spatial property...

The best sex scene in the history of cinema ?

Less than 10 seconds long.
No groans.
Just one line of speech:
"I think it slipped out."

And for other reasons also
I thoroughly recommend this film by Bong Joon-ho :
Memories of Murder.
which I acquired, as always, by Torrent/P2P

Fitting in

Getting on
Getting off on
getting on...

I just don't get it

on or off

though so far I've been
getting through

rather well and quietly

and appreciating my

continuing, rare,

beyond-compare

beyond-wealth luxury

of solitude and silence

(we are, of course, all islands)

I'm one of me
not one of you

The most efficient solution to 'global warming' :

genocide.

Following the wiping-out of 50 million (and more) native Americans
by Europeans and their diseases,
trees and shrubs grew on that continent,
carbon dioxide levels dropped world-wide,
and temperatures lowered - for a time.

I think however, that the killing (or suicide)
of fifty million humans might not be enough
this time round...

Beyond.

2018/9

Snowdrops on my grave.

Haiku

A winter dog-walk
The little bag of his turds
briefly warms my hand

Many men who chase women are actually misogynists.

And many men who chase men
don't like them at all, or only a little bit,
or are scared of them.

From the otherworld of statistics.

“92% of sex workers would stop if they had enough money.”

"99% of retail workers would leave if they had enough money."

"Y’all think janitors and service staff are showing up for a fun way to pass the time ?
I can guarantee at least 92% of workers in any industry would kick their own boss out of a fucking window and leave - given the chance. "

Ah, chance, the dance of chance...

- thanks to eduardo-.tumblr.com/ - a great blog with lots of fish.

It gets harder and harder to be poor in the rich countries.

www.theguardian.com/

If you don't know how to work a cocktail-shaker

don't perform this ludicrous (not to say insulting) test on yourself.

https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

Almost a million Americans

are living illegally in Mexico.

How about a wall to keep them out ?

Most poetry is dire.

But if you find some utterances
that are not dire or dreary or facile or banal for you
(amongst the tens of thousands),
you could feel enhanced, or even improved
by them.
But it might not be worth the effort.

Those legendary Last Words.

“A nurse from the hospice told me 
that the last words of the dying tended to be the same: 
almost everyone calls for (or out to) their mother* with their last breath.”

- Hajo Schumacher in Der Spiegel.

*As a greeting ?

Only in Australia (?)

http://fickleprickles.com.au/sempervivum/196-sempervivum-hairy-balls.html

Kick Out The Rich

https://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/08/19/worlds-poorest-president
-explains-why-we-should-kick-rich-people-out-of-politics/

Posting (or posing ?) as a Parasite and Welfare-scrounger, Dependent of the Nanny State:

(Yes, I know I said that I would stop blogging, but Old Habits Die Hard
(as the Reverend Mother said to the KKK man), and A.K. posted this on her voluminous Facebook "Timeline"... so I couldn't resist 're-blogging'.

There is nothing quite so comforting

as being proved wrong.

"L'enfer, c'est les autres." "Hell is where we consign others." - J-P Sartre.

" Mais « l'enfer c'est les autres » a été toujours mal compris. On a cru que je voulais dire par là que nos rapports avec les autres étaient toujours empoisonnés, que c'était toujours des rapports infernaux. Or, c'est tout autre chose que je veux dire. Je veux dire que si les rapports avec autrui sont tordus, viciés, alors l'autre ne peut être que l'enfer." - J-P Sartre.

Narbonne (Aude), église Saint-Paul.

http://www.philo5.com/…/Sartre_L%27EnferC%27EstLesAutres.htm

Sisters - reclaim your body hair !

http://www.weirdhistorian.com/vivian-wheeler/

"We never fall twice into the same abyss.

 But we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread."

                       - Éric Vuillard, The Order of the Day.

Hell: Santa Maria d'Assunta, Fornovo di Taro (Parma), Italy.

Quotation:

"Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes:

so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until
you've shot 'em both,
and then it's too late"

              - M.L. Stedman, The Light between Oceans.

Leominster, Shropshire: West Door, detail.

A small reflection on the narrow mind of Emile Cioran.

"I eliminated word after word from my vocabulary.
When the onslaught was over, just one word had escaped:
Solitude*. I woke up in a state of euphoria."

* translated from the French, in which language Solitude can mean loneliness, isolation or solitude.
In English loneliness and solitude are very different things.

We think only because we have language. 
Language - not place, territory, tribe or kin -
is (as Cioran pointed out) each human being's only home -
and a very fragile, rickety home it is!
Some fortunate people have several such homes, but they are rarely rich.

(Languages are becoming fewer year by year, 
and now the only truly 'international' language is English Bureaucratic - 
a language ideal for making statements and 'marketing'
rather than suggesting the subtleties of process, mood or sensation.)

Without thought, hence without language,
we would not be leading the planet into its Sixth Extinction.

Cioran reduced the significance of language to the single solitary word.
I, more generously (or more fatuously ?),
allow two in order to make the only song, the only poem, the only novel, the only dirge:

             Humanity:

             Catastrophe.

But beyond our mere consciousness-through-language
(and our mere solar system)
what is 'catastrophe' ?

Only the business of being born and 'socialised'...
which (ironically and uniquely) we
can lighten with a sense of humour,
an amused acceptance of the ridiculous vanity of being
- à la Beckett.
  
Emile Cioran took himself, his birth and his death so seriously as to be ridiculous.
Hence his cogito, ergo glum appeal to other solipsists.

*  *  *

This is the last post of my blog, begun in February 2008.

'Inspired' by Wallace Stevens and Jalal-ud-Din Rumi.

Although I know hardly anything
about What Is Going On.
ever aware of much, too much,
and much too much,
I no longer dare to care
about such and such and such...

Homo arboricidens,

pompously self-entitled
Homo sapiens,
is (alas! alack!
for woe is us)
quite obviously
(but to whom ?)
an evolutionary dead-end,
impasse and cul-de-sac.

The Zen of Pooh.

The microcosm is the macrocosm.

The council workmen
"clean" the little stream
of watercress.

from the ill-dressed man with a beard.

After the last simpering,
whimpering Yes, maybe,
almost certainly, comes
the magnificent No,
the glorious non-human
beyond glory;
and inside Never
lurks, sometimes, always -

existence is only a story.

(after Wallace Stevens)