Verbatim

"What's important...I mean
they're always having a go at me...
I mean, it's about the Play -
it's about the Story, not about me...
I mean, it's a character you're playing
and you don't want to go out of that...
I mean, if you did that, then it becomes unreal
and you'd think: He's just messing around...
you'd start to worry,
and I've said to the Director: If I start to do...
('cause I will push it) Stop me doing it
because it's not about me,
it's about the Story."

The Unspiritual Language

There is no word in English to translate
Gengangere - the title of Henrik Ibsen's
notorious last play.  French has
Revenants (which is not quite the same),
but English has too many words for things,
and too few for ideas, emotions,
different concepts and feelings intertwined,
and other subtleties of states of mind.

Ne Obliviscaris

We should never forget
that capitalism rose out of feudalism,
and feudalism from the Christian
ruins and ruination of the Roman Empire.

Just Don't Call Me Kali.

No wonder I have an identity-problem.
God, Yahwe, Alla'h,
pseudo-mystical Trinity, Gaia...
If the arrogant Jews had only called me
The Great Fluffy
how different the world might be !

Couchsurfers

I enrolled as a couchsurfer 3 or 4 years ago.
I have stayed with a couple of very good hosts,
one (in Catalonia) very young,
and one (in a Baron Haussmann flat in Paris)
who was, like me, much older than most couchurfers.
.
Last weekend Malcolm and I received
our very first couchsurfers - a very young couple
of vegetarian drop-outs.
Here is the review that they wrote:

Anthony and Malcolm received us humbly 
in their little nest at Saint-Antonin.  
They are friendly, attentive and funny. 
I hope more people stay with them. 

They sound like missionaries in Oubangui-Chari.

Sarcasm

is the least inelegant
form of contempt.

'Global Warming'

(or, more precisely, Climate Change)
is caused as much by the global proletariat
not seeing beyond its collective genitals
as by Big Bad Industry
and Mega-Corporations of consumerism.

Thus spake the Eristic Mystic.

A Reflection on Leopardi

It's not so much The Sleep of Reason
that produces monsters, but Belief
which believes itself to be
(and through conquest, massacre, education
and genocide, seeks to ensure that it is)
Universal.  Thus terrible wars are fought,
and terrible destruction wrought,
in the name of Human Rights -
and Nihilism then replaces
extirpated Human Rites.

read John Gray on Leopardi's Notebooks:
The Barbarism of Reason.

The Golden Bough

The Prosperity Gospel
welcomes Jesus as a Money-tree.

There is no such thing

as a free spirit ;
desires and goals
entrap our souls.

European citizens

can take part in the legislative decision-making process of the European Union,
through the process of the Citizens' Initiative - if the initiative
can muster one million verifiable signatures.

click here

Cats, too, are European Citizens.

Deep Statistics

The page most visited on my websites
is the one about the gentle art
of masturbation : some 300
visits every week, from computers
in Korea, Sa'udi Arabia, Bolivia, Malawi
as well as North America and Switzerland.
 Going deep
into the excellent statistical analysis
(from statcounter)
I find, however, that 94% of the visits
don't last longer than five seconds.
 It's enough to make me weep!

Since we have stopped evolving

only Man is modern.

Did I say this before ?

The best way to deal with a self
is to assume that it's false.

A book that someone should be writing :

False Dissidence - 
How True Counter-culture
is Rendered False
& Falsified.

On Dante and Translation

"..cut off from hope
we live on in desire,"
declares the pre-Christian unbaptised
in the Inferno, Canto IV (33-42).

But desire [disio] implies hope.
A better word would be
longing - which implies
a certain hopelessness.



Per tai difetti, non per altro rio,
semo perduti,e sol di tanto offesi
che sanza speme vivemo in disio.

The New Bohemians

will be the opposite of the old:
diffident, almost asexual,
frugal, vegetarian,
quietly creative, co-operative
and commensal.

Veritapedia

'Gay' [adj.]  (2) :
Replacing a lack of identity
of a particular kind
by publicly adopting
a conformity which has
nothing to do with love

in a world where most people
imitate other people.

So many blogs...

to feed our prejudices,
to feed our anger
with selected facts !

Happiness has tentacles.

If we had discovered electricity

before the steam engine
and radio waves before
the internal-combustion engine,
just think how much quieter
and happier the world would be.

Hollywood meets Saint-Antonin

A certain Ms Mirren,
someone called  Lasse Hallström,
and dozens of cool young zombies
with cellphones (all looking alike)
and a fleet of white van/trucks full of equipment
have been occupying the village like
the living dead from dawn to dusk,
at the behest of a certain Mr Spielberg
and a certain Ms Winfrey (co-producers).
Huge marquees have been erected
to feed the more lowly vampires.
Having seen what they do and what they waste
I think I will never go to a cinema again.

House-prices will probably double in two years' time
after the ephemeral banality, the trashy movie
costing scores of millions, hits the cinemas.
So I will sell my half-timbered, full-of-character
little house and move to somewhere much quieter,
much less desirable to the canaille
who watch American rather than Iranian movies.

[The film is called "The Hundred-Foot Journey"]

Pascal's Father

believed that children should be taught
only when ready and willing and apt,
not mass-crammed against the grain
by harassed, half-ignorant
teachers, according to a rigid, hierarchical,
patriarchal education system.
His son declared 'The Truth'
to be a mere religious fiction.

Even Atheists

believe in the crass
God of Categories.

Private, Lost, Stolen -

The First Law
is Property
and people, populations
are mere adjuncts.

For a bird,

a cage is worse than death.
For us,
life is, of course,
cages within a cage.
And so we put
"all Heaven in a rage".

'Human Understanding' :

the Venus de Milo
trying to open a safe
- or a coffin.

The inevitable decline of ceremony.

In my lifetime
private ceremonies have mostly disappeared
(this must be one reason why some people
convert to Islam).  Few couples
light candles every time they dine, for
dining as a reinforcing ritual of mutual esteem
is becoming rare.  Of course, in Bad Old Days
there were the dreary, sometimes very fraught,
family meals where tensions rose to fractious
outburst, or kept the diners stiffly silent.  And those
where I was not allowed to leave the table
until I'd eaten most of the gristly meat,
rubbery tripe or tubey liver. Fish on Fridays
was such sweet respite! 
Eastern and Middle-Eastern meals on cushions
with various dishes to be eaten in any order
or not to be eaten at all are so much more appealing.

Likewise with music: smoking a marijuana-pipe
while listening to the 'oud or sitar or elbow-bagpipe
is so much more ceremonial, more intimate
than a concert-hall with rows of numbered seats
for music-muzhiks to sit upright, up-tight upon!

But I digress! Not only is there no ceremonial innocence,
but there are no private ceremonies of wisdom, either.
In societies where plastic flowers are placed
where road-accidents occurred - or bombings -
sex becomes the only outlet for sweet ceremony.

But sex as loving ceremony is probably as rare
as worship of a tree or spring.
(We worship only techno-gizmos now!)
Sex is the last cellar of private ceremony,
and more and more the seekers of catharsis
are deprived of any opportunity of psychogony,
while the religious, with passionate intensity,
dream of kissing angelic arses.

The Validity Illusion

Nothing could be farther from the truth
that all you have to do to spread enlightenment
is to present the truth -
assuming that you can identify it.

The Meanness of Religion

Why do Christians
celebrate the Eucharist
in rigid symbolic parsimony
and not with generous commensality ?

America ...
Blood ...
Ba'ath ...

Beyond statistics

is the number of men
who mistake their wives
and the world
for a mat.

Near-Death Experiences

are of interest mainly to those
who think they are nowhere
near death.

Tee-shirt slogan :

An ironic sense of humour

is just another of the luxuries
enjoyed by the fortunate.

;-)

Between rough saw-bones and well-paid semi-saint,

 

Dr Mengele,
like all surgeons
was a modern alpha-male.

You,

Homo laborans insanis
are just the Missing Link
between Homo habilis
and the never-to-be
Homo sapiens ludens.

Is forgiveness

ever more than
moral condescension ?
Yes, when it is a symptom
of exhaustion.

'Drones'

which are used for non-militarist
purposes have been re-labelled
Unpersoned Aircraft,
and are still controlled by
unpersons.

Sins of omission

- such as spelling it's as its -
are a little less heinous
than sins of commission -
like spelling its as it's.

Of course it has been said before,

but it is worth repeating
and expanding:
'Everyone is somebody's 
terrible friend' -
or parent, child, or spouse.

'We must provide'

'schools and hospitals'
for 'hard-working families'
so they can 'better themselves'
and 'provide for their children',
and, helped by 'cutting-edge science',
'die with dignity'.

Psychoparalysis

SDS :
Sincerity Defiicit Syndrome
is the invisible pandemic.

How long will he be well-remembered ?

Like a lace doily
on a scrubbed farmhouse table
the very translatable
and genteel poet.

The most mysterious centenary.

A 'Fatberg'

as big as a bus
in a sewer
is as nothing
compared with the 'data'
choking the world.

                 (Huge 'fatbergs' composed of fat, disposable pads etc. form like snowballs in sewers, and have to be dispersed.)

Western worship

of energy, drive, acclaim,
towering inanity
and technology
has driven millions
into the hell of
comfortable insanity.

The idea of an afterlife,

invented by people who cannot bear the idea of finality,
is no more unreasonable than the idea of finality
invented by those who cannot face the horrible possibility
of endless experience.

Bacon Sundae from Burger King.

Well, if you're addicted to a legal (if toxic) substance,
there's no stopping you...

Quite a few things are better than sex,

as any dog will corroborate.

Here are six things
in three random categories
which for me
are better than sex:

Passive
             Getting a head-rub*
             Having my back scratched
Neutral
              Gooseberry crumble
              Clos Saint-Denis**
Active
               Shaking a gabbeh***
               Planting a tree

* I used to love having my hair pulled by sadistic teachers
at a woefully bad school called Campbell College.  Now I am happily bald.

** This is a rather wonderful Burgundy wine.

*** For some reason, the kundalini-energising activity of shaking a rug vigorously gives me mini-orgasms.  Below is a picture of one of my gabbehs...

I bought it in Toronto in 1998 for $200.  Toronto is a big centre for the sale of Persian rugs
which are then smuggled across the border into the United States of the Great Satan.

The Iranian seller did not know that it represents the peacock of immortality
perched on the tree of life, a very ancient motif which resurfaced in Europe
in the Romanesque period.

The red lozenge may represent cultivable land, the yellow triangles desert,
and the blue triangles the sky.

Five every hour, every day

are slaughtered for their ivory.

Help

 

Hippocampotamus

Instinct tells us not to give up.
Reason asks why not ?  Science
and technology also stifle Reason.

The most important thing

that I learned from 13 years at school
was that other people's good opinion is worthless,
because almost no other people, even if likeable,
are worth respecting.

Call me Fido

or call me Cerberus.
People should be named after dogs,
not dogs after humans,.
Call me Bonzo.
Call me Whippet.
Call me Doodums.

An 'Environmentalist'

parent is just
a bad stand-up comic,
a sad self-satirist.

Americans -

 “They’re so Puritan!  How awful
to have so poor an idea
of how to be playful.”
 
-Sophie Fontanel

A Couple

Living apart
gives us the space
to savour each other
and keep in good heart.

Unimportant Notice

The Quinquennial Meeting of The Association
of Apathetic Atheist Misanthropic Antinatalist Terrorists
will now be held in a garden shed,
and not in the Much Bonding
Village Hall.
                       Our motto:
   It's not what you don't
   it's the way that you don't.
PS
We don't stride into the world -
we prefer to crawl.
PPS
Bring your own champagne.

The USA exports many things:

arms and armaments and aeroplanes,
tobacco, cereals, soya-beans, peanut-paste -
and is the world's largest supplier
of pornography and toxic waste.

from the notebook of Jindřich K. Hrdlička

Reason tells me I am nothing.
My dog tells me I am everything.
Between the two my life flows.

- 31st August, 2013.
 

 











 

And God said :

Behold! Ye have more chance
of winning the Lottery
than of finding Life-after-Death.
And lo! If there is no Life-after-Death
what is the point, the function
of the Lord your God
or any supernatural beings apart
from the Demons in your hearts ?

Boon Companions

Just as sentimentality
often accompanies cruelty,
so cruelty often accompanies
morality.