Sigmund Freud wrote that

the satisfaction of a 'savage desire'
is incomparably more pleasurable
than the satisfaction of a civilised one.
But it is civilisation that produces
ever wilder and more destructive desires.

Kustodiev: Portrait of Kardovsky.

Dmitry Kardovsky looks just a bit like me.

Alas! even though he admired Mikhail Vrubel

he was not a very inspired or original painter -

which may be why he kept out of trouble

and survived as a professor until 1943.

Testosterone ?

Men seem to find it more difficult to be male
than women (oppressed by men, each other,family, marriage
and their own fertility) do to be female.

Another haiku.

Pond in a dustbin.
My pink water-lily is
pure pornography.

Haiku (on anticipation of death) by Issa.

The old snake turning
towards the western paradise
enters his burrow.

(Irish version)
The old snake turning
towards Tír na n'Óg goes
into his burrow.

Long live sharks!

These Ridiculously Long-Lived Sharks Are Older Than the United States, and Still Living It Up

In an evolutionary sense, sharks are among Earth’s oldest survivors; they’ve been roaming the oceans for more than 400 million years. But some individual sharks boast lifespans that are equally jaw-dropping. Incredibly, deepwater sharks off the coast of Greenland appear to have been alive and swimming back in Shakespeare’s day 400-plus years ago—making them the longest-lived of all known vertebrates.

Bristlecone pines can live to be 5,000 years old. Sea sponges can live for thousands of years. One quahog, a hard-shelled ocean clam, died in 2006 at the age of 507. But among vertebrates, the long-lived skew much younger. Bowhead whales and rougheye rockfish can live for up to 200 years, and a few giant tortoises may also approach the two century mark.

Now it seems that Greenland sharks more than double even these remarkable lifespans, scientists report today in Science.

The reason for the sharks’ unfathomably long lives has to do with their lifestyles. Cold-blooded animals that live in cold environments often have slow metabolic rates, which are correlated with longevity. “The general rule is that deep and cold equals old, so I think a lot of people expected species like Greenland sharks to be long-lived,” says Chris Lowe, a shark biologist at the California State University at Long Beach. “But holy cow, this takes it to an entirely different level…”

(read more: Smithsonian Magazine)
photograph via: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program

Maybe, after all, I'll learn to dance.

I don't think I would even steal this item from its peg.

(click to enlarge)

This armpit...

And maybe also after 9 years -
but I don't expect to live that long.

Now 76,

I can cheerfully announce
that there are two things I do not know:
1. Everything
2. Nothing.

Genealogy (a birthday poem).

Like almost everyone,
'I come from a long line of nobodies'.
My last Famous Forebear
was Abel.

Only in America ?

"Tampering with or disabling toilet cameras is a Federal Crime
punishable by a fine of up to $3,000."

"Dating" - a peculiar mid-twentieth-century American expression and practice.

When I was twenty, I met the only woman in my sex-life
on a live-in summer job in Copenhagen.
So I never "dated" anyone,
not even men I found sexy
when I "came out" vingt ans après.
I brought them home, or they brought me to their homes
immediately.  Or else we parted courteously.
I never understood the "dating concept" -
was it to do with calendars or palm-trees ?
Immediate invitation to dinner, bed and breakfast -
is, I rather think, very different from "dating".

'Human Dignity'

is as nothing
compared with
Canine Dognity.

The Educated Poor

(a regrettably rare demographic)
know both the price
and the value
of most things.

My friend Jindra

had this on his Facebook timeline
way back in July:

I have just come back from a short vacation up North [Ontario, Canada].
This woodcarving fascinated me.

"We are explorers from England. We mean well."
"We are not amused, neither are we stupid. Get the fuck out of here !"
"Big Bear, I am sick to my stomach about them coming here."
"Let me write this down. I find his attitude deeply offensive, Captain."

© Jindřich & Dína Hrdliča & Anthony Weir (with Asterix) MMXVII

No tree shall be felled

to publish anything I write
(poetical, tendentious, sententious or trite)
which shall stay insubstantial
in the margin of the virtual.

Doctors are

like "gateway drugs".
The more you visit them
the more you need them.

Democracy is

representative narcolepsy.

Haiku after Kobayashi Issa.

Writing trash about
moonlight for the bourgeoisie
is no kind of art.

[Issa wrote 54 haikai on snails, 15 on toads, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on fireflies, more than 150 on mosquitoes, 90 on other kinds of  fly, over 100 on fleas, and nearly 90 on cicadas, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures.]

Haiku after Bashō.

Rather than the leaves,
we admire gaudy flowers
on our planet of pain.

In the Age of Internet Artificiality

a real person or personality
is worthless.

Graham Greene

wrote in his autobiography:
'All life long my instinct has been
to abandon anything for which I had no talent.'

If only a few million more people would be so wise !

Life on Earth

exists only for its own sake,
not for any purpose or process
that we might dream up.
It exists only to exist,
to distinguish itself
from solids, gases and liquids.

But does it have to be aggressive ?

The reason why there has never been a "Just War"

is that there has never been a Just Peace.

Women

rarely
swing
around
lamp-posts.

NO DOGS ALLOWED

"...the entire civilisation is sick,

otherwise
appalling ideologies
such as fascism and Stalinism
could never have flourished."

- Jan  Švankmajer

from Little Otik

Pessimism Is A Sin.

The first thing we buy

destroys us
like a terrible internal worm.

Gardeners

are megalomaniacs
posing as nurturers.
But of course we are
The Megalomaniac Species.

Language and Time.

Guaraní - still spoken by 80% of the population of landlocked and impoverished Paraguay, not many of whom speak Spanish - interprets time differently from Indo-European, Semitic and other settled-people's languages. Time future is permanently in doubt: the word for tomorrow means if the sun rises again. The concept of time past is dual - divided between what happened (or what is alleged to have or accepted as having happened), and what was supposed to happen but did not.  This may, of course, be due to the appalling War of the Triple Alliance...

read more >

I'm not sold

on the idea of time
as other than an illusion.
One of the (not so many) wise things
that Bertrand Russell said was that
the Universe started only five minutes ago.

Why Joseph Conrad wrote so well.

MFK Fisher recounts that
he learned English as a sailor on night-watch
by reading a page of the King James translation of the Bible,
tearing it out and lighting his pipe with it,
and then reflecting on it (probably in Polish)
for the rest of the watch.

Gloss on lines by R.W.Emerson.

Don't follow paths,
don't ride the crowded monorail,
but make your own
and leave no trail.

"Education"

If we are no longer

the sole possessors of empathy, altruism
and even language, perhaps all that we can uniquely claim
are vengeance, hate, religion, complaint, hypocrisy....and apportioning of blame.

Blame

is something we should hurl only
(but frequently) at politicians,
bankers, businessmen, religious leaders and the powerful,
not something we should throw at each other,
not even occasionally.

Crime & Punishment.

Mary, a five-ton circus elephant who killed her new trainer,
was hanged for the crime by heavy-duty construction equipment in 1916 in Tennessee.
Topsy, another.wayward circus performer on Coney Island in New York,
was fed poison, electrocuted and strangled in 1903,
the execution of true justice filmed by a crew from Edison Studios...

I don't think that "Human Understanding"

whether scientific or religious
really gets much more profound than this:

“The Germans are not human beings.

"From now on the word German pierces our hearts and is for us the worst imaginable curse.
We shall not panic. We shall kill.
If you have not killed at least one German a day,
you have wasted that day [...]
for us the greatest of all joys is a heap of German corpses.”

- IIya Ehrenburg, Russian propagandist of German-Lithuanian-Jewish extraction.

On Writing Historical Fiction.

'You need to know ten times
as much as you tell."

- Hilary Mantel

This is surely also true of biography
and autobiography, which are themselves
forms of historical fiction.

The Most Evil Empire.

Churchill and Christ in a gunboat! 
Make the wogs walk on water,
set fire to their villages.
Grab whole continents
and sub-continents.
Smash factories,
destroy societies,
take all resources,
make them grow opium,
make them smoke opium,
divide and rule,
let them starve,
deliver hundreds of thousands
to firing-squads and concentration-camps,
wipe out more 'lesser breeds' than Stalin or Hitler
- and award yourself a permanent seat
on the cynical UN Security Council.

Really ?

It's just what an aircraft dinner from the 1960s

was for The Great Unwashed who travelled by cheapo charter flight -

and who now get even worse.

Reality

for most people
seems to be banality.
But real reality
(as every earwig knows)
is surreality.

Five Haikai

The brandy finished -
time to get down to business
and admire the moon.

         *

Having sucked my blood
the horse-fly dismounts and sits
on cow-parsley head.

         *

From the same corruption
emerge a stink-horn toadstool
and a violet.

         *

Ten million sperm
dripping on the book-jacket.
Words are waste of words.

         *

A brief urgency -
my bare arse is caressed by
the April nettles.

I wish I had written this...

WITHOUT CAMOUFLAGE
by Eric Chaet

I didn’t choose camouflage or invisibility.
I’ve tried, all along
to make what I think manifest
to behave as I think I should
however contrary to custom
to let everyone who wished
see that I was pursuing goals
they believe are unattainable.

But I was only one
& how I appeared was discounted
as an imagined figment
or temporary insanity
or an instance of this or that
doomed religion or political movement.

Without shaving my beard
or changing into more conventional clothes
I find myself allied with brown sparrows
who duck out of sight
among shadows, leaves, & branches
with rabbits, mice, deer
& timid boys & girls
& intimidated subordinates everywhere
engaged in every occupation
with all who have failed
or feel they’re failing—
& the stampeding so-called successes
talk clever bullshit on TV
& allocate resources
to maintain the current
& develop the next round of outrages
as tho' I’d never struggled or spoken.

You see a bit of me here & now
but soon you’ll be otherwise occupied.
If you remember, then, what you’ve seen
& decipher (which is easy) what it means
I’ll gladly be of greater service to you
than those blinded by what they expect
can imagine.

[more by Eric  HERE]

Another Sign of Senility.

I turned on the car radio the other day
(it's pre-set to boring and talky France-Musique)
and was amazed to hear some superb Arab-Jazz fusion
which turned out to be Jan Garbarek with Anouar Brahem and others.
Finally! I thought, somebody has got the message
that there is music beyond post-11th century Europe.
But when I got home, I couldn't find it on the listings,
so went to the car to check what station I was on.
I had been playing one of my own CDs.
So it's back to mainly-baroque boredom on France-Musique.

Language, Truth and Logic

If the offspring of a cat
is a kitten,
I think it highly likely that
the offspring of a mat
is a mitten.

An excellent dinner-companion.

http://dogsdepicted.tumblr.com