Old Love

"Why should not old men be mad ?"

To be young and to fall in love
is almost universal, quite banal -
prose thinking it is poetry.

But to fall in love as Leoš Janáček did
when he was over sixty
and I am doing now more calmly
at seventy-two -
not with a young woman
but a man of my own age -
is to start another book,
not merely turn another page.

I also love this man.

José Mujica

He is President of Uruguay,
he never wears a tie,
and is the world's 'poorest' head of state:
 "A roly-poly former Tupamaros guerrilla 
who grows flowers on a small farm 
and swears by vegetarianism
 (although he is not vegetarian),
he is an avowed atheist..."


His official protection comprises
two policemen and his three-legged dog.
He gives almost all of his salary away.
 

A dissident artwork.

"Not only a teapot of exquisite beauty,
- but it doubles as a sieve!" said its creator,
an old friend of mine, now in New York.

The slow end of our history

perhaps began some time after 1950
(well after Nagasaki)
when popular music
started to become anti-music,
when pornography became anti-erotic,
and children became parents.

A Welcome Change.

I saw a Yuletide shop-window display
In Northern Ireland
at the beginning of October.
I'm so very very glad
that Christmas this year
is already over.

The dull disaster

of representative democracy
is due to the dictatorship
of a "free" press perverted
and controlled by the dead hand
of anti-democrats.

Random statistics

I read somewhere
that there are 40 words in Sanskrit
for types and conditions of Dog
(though this may well not be true).

The second most-spoken language
in the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland (where one million
mobile phones are discarded every month)
is Polish - not Welsh, nor Lallans, nor Urdu...

A glimpse of the recent past.

Berry pickers
had to sing as they picked
to show that they were not
eating the berries.

Keep them in Perpetual Childhood.

"The first thing that will strike the observer is the sheer multitude of people, all equal, all similar, incessantly endeavouring [through wage-slavery] to procure petty, paltry pleasures with which to glut their lives.  Each of them, living separate lives, is a stranger to all the others.  Family and friends fill their vision of the world to the exclusion of others, however close in time and space.  Individuals exist only in themselves, for themselves alone.

"Above this pullulation of humanity stands an immense and tutelary Power, which alone is responsible for securing people/s gratifications,and monitors their fate.  That power is absolute, micro-managing, reliably regular, beneficent.  It would be just like parental authority if its object was to prepare people for adulthood.  But it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood."

- Alexis de Tocqueville

[He was writing about the USA, but his extremely perceptive comments could apply to the whole "developed" (once called "free") world.]

After the lynching,

the burning.

United States of America,  The (self-styled) Free World, 1956.

England - the home of Liberal Values - 2012 : 
an Iranian refugee is kicked to death
then set on fire in front of a mob.

Aspiration

is denial
of true liberty.

Literature, alas!

being work, is for its creators
more cerebration
than celebration.

Thank you, Al.

The secret of spinach

is garlic.

The truth about violent revolutions

and civil wars
is that after a while
most people will accept any government
any dictator
just for peace and stability.

Comfort

not only leads to meanness,
mean-mindedness, and ever-greater hypocrisy
- but is also as addictive as sugar.

The problem with systems

is that they have no
self-awareness.

What the moralists and legalists don't understand

is that Morals are a drab and dour
and self-defeating substitute,
crippling prosthetics,
for holo-æsthetics.

Optimism :

the simple, simple-minded
denial of tragedy.

If you systematically mated Bonobos with Chimpanzees

and fed them lots of meat and sugar
for a few thousand years,
this is what might result  >

Progress - what progress ?

Spoons
were used thousands of years before knives.
But the best spoons
were sharp shells
which also served as knives,
and could be thrown away
with environmental friendliness.

Anti-natalists

understand, implicitly or otherwise,
that almost all human problems
are problems of scale
- that is to say, numbers.

Power

also enslaves
the powerful.

When you are vegetarian

almost any home-cooked food
is better than you will find
in almost any pale-people's restaurant.

Yesterday was World Toilet Day.

Over 500 million women have to crap at night
out in the open or in bushes, risking rape
and murder because they have no sensible toilet facilities
after several thousand years of civilisation.
And if they had WCs there might well be no water left to drink.

Meanwhile, in China, young women are starting to wear
Hairy Legs Stockings, to discourage men from harassing
and assaulting them.

I must get me several pairs...

Dogs are our Teachers

While Muslims usually consider dogs to be 'impure' -
though the only creatures that can possibly be impure and soulless are humans -

the 15^th century Moroccan Sufi saint Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Jazuli

(probably Berber) saw them as having many virtues well worth emulating. 

Here are his Ten Splendid Attributes of the Dog:

.  

1. He sleeps only a little at night; a sign of the lovers of God (muhibbin). 

2. He never complains of heat or cold; a sign of the patient (sabirin). 

3. When he dies, he leaves nothing  which can be inherited from him; a sign of his simplicity (zahidin). 4. He is neither angry nor hateful; a sign of the faithful (mu’minin). 

5. He does not  mourn  the loss of a close relative, nor does he accept assistance; a sign of the secure (muqinin). 

6. He is happy with whatever is given to him; a sign of the contented (qani’in). 

7. He has no place to live; this is a sign of the wanderers (sa’ihin). 

8. He sleeps  anywhere; this is a sign of the easily satisfied (radiyin). 

9. Once he knows his master, he never despises him, 

even if he beats or starves him; a sign of the true knowers (’arifin). 

10. He is always hungry; a sign of the virtuous (salihin).  

 












adapted from a blog by Shravasti Dhammika 
 with thanks to WS.
 

"Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act."

after Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Now, Nature, Life, or whatever the hell you are -
take back the stuff in a bag that's me,
recycle it if you insist,  make a bush,
a cloud - anything at all - even, dammit!
another depressing and destructive human being.
But just put an end to me.

Unfortunately, light-bulbs are not what they used to be.

The Irony of 'Progress'.

While 'liberal, progressive' people
rightly condemn the genital mutilation of young girls
against their will,
some of their own daughters
(as young as 13) are pleading
for genital cosmetic surgery.

This is yet another result of
internet pornography.

Jindra's blog.: Today is really windy...

My blog.: Today is really windy.

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In the main concentration-camp
the (kidnapped) prisoners
watch compulsory American tv
shackled to the floor -
lest they hang themselves
from wires - or even the door.

I am a worrier, not a warrior.

Had I been a normal (breeding) natalist
I would have spent at least nine months
worrying whether a decent sperm
had entered a good egg.

Haiku

Mauve autumn evening
on the privy - from my balls
your smell arises.

'Burning in the night'.

'Man loves company —
even if it is only that of
a small burning candle.'

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Alfred Brendel

(to my mind, a hero of modesty)
loves the aphorisms of
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99).
Here is an example:

'Every man has his moral backside 
which he doesn't reveal unless he has to,
and keeps covered as long as possible 
with the trousers of respectability.

There are those, of course, who like to present
their backsides to all-comers.

The Pragmatic Wisdom

"politics is a series of temporary remedies
for recurring human evils." - John Gray.

So also are such puff-balls as
Universal Declarations of
Human Rights.

'Success'.

The creation of stress
and exploitation of distress
is the surest path to power.

Life is...

...the continual application
of temporary remedies.

A Modest Design for a Poster.

(Breeding more humans is burning up the world.)

The Joys of Country Living.

Come, let us praise
  the absence of central heating and television,
  of microwave and washing-machine and mobile phone.
Let us rejoice
  in an open fire and a deliciously cold bedroom.
Let us glorify
  the kettle upon the fire and the absence of running hot water,
  the pleasure of washing clothes by hand in the water boiled on the fire
  (but only after a long time on my body).
Let us delight
  in making jam in a rather cold kitchen.
Let us mourn
  the death of the beautiful big brown rat in the trap.
Let us praise
  stripey long-johns
  and electric blankets
  and electric footwarmers
  which use so little electricity.
And, O beloved, let us rejoice that we do not live in a city.

The train now standing...

click the image for more

Give me simplicitie that I may live.  George Herbert

Technology

like religion
is very close
to madness.

Both technology
and religion
claim to help us
(in different ways)
to live better...

Negativism:

the ability to describe things
as they really are.

(adapted from the Book of Jindra XLVIII, 96v)

If only

we could
be happy
to fail early

and then enjoy
the rest of life!

Never mind

the arrogance of prayer
and the ritual hypocrisy
of 'remembering' the insane
human soldiers killed
in evil human wars -

who condescends to remember
the beautiful
saintly horses
who also were blown to bits
in their millions ?

A blog comment from somewhere on the Web :

'I have been through every kind of depression. 
I find existential depression the best and finest.' 

If civilisation

could produce general
(if not universal)
contentment
it might be quite a good thing...

click the picture for more

A first step towards human sanity.

There is too much stuff.
It's smothering the world.
We keep on inventing it
frenetically, and frenetically
producing it.
There is no tomorrow,
neither bookshops nor salaries,
so we cultured types
should take the initiative
by blowing up and burning down
'cultural centres', museums and art galleries.

"The idea of burning down a museum...
always seemed more enticing to me than the opening of a cultural centre or a...new hospital."

- Luis Buñuel

With acknowledgement

and apologies to Clay Bennett
and the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Success is the greatest disgrace.

My Career never started.
It was not stillborn, but not even conceived.
Always seeking a stressless,
godless State of Grace,
I have become a smelly old man
blessed in his private hyperspace.

Is it part of our pathetic fear

of impermanence
that we are obsessed with
the recording of ideas, thoughts,
events, and memories...as I am doing here ?

What banks put in their vaults :

Stocks & shares
Wine
Art
Gold

Humans hate to feel helpless

- and so we make things worse.

"How would you describe yourself ?"

she asked.
I said:
I am a person
who respects a tail that wags,
and plastic bags.

"Page of the Month"

is more a pagelet than a page.
Click HERE.

Marshall McLuhan didn't get it right :

Education should be entertaining
in the sense of fascinating,
but not entertainment
in the sense of passive pleasure.

A gem from The Eristic Mystic

It seems to me
that the more you
think you know,
the more you
do NOT know.

"Learning Disabilities"

If more of us had them
fewer would learn to be destructive...

Why, oh why

explain the sky ?

When words fail

- as they usually do,
being trivial -
music without melody
(but not tinnitus)
takes over,
and when it fails,
silence rules.

For silence is not nothing,
but everything,

and nothing
is more important than you make it.

I am a Testosterone Donor.

Not because I want to
fortify the epicene,
but because, being more pheromonal
than testosteronal,
I would just like to get rid of the poison.

Kids in Captivity

Modern media
have shut down
experience -

except, of course,
where there are war, rapine,
rape and famine
to titillate the media.

'Workaholic' :

A person with no capacity for
self-entertainment,
self-fulfilment
or even self-satisfaction.

from  The Dissident Dictionary.
 

'The Jehovahs'

came to the door today.
I have a soft spot for Jehovah's Witnesses,
they seem so guileless (unlike other Christians)
and I always tell them that Entarteten like me
wore pink triangles in concentration-camps,
while they had purple ones.
(Though I might have ended up with more
than one triangle, being
'work-shy', 'anti-social', pacifist...
They are kind to dogs.
I tell them that if there's a non-jihadist heaven
they'll be there. Maybe I'll be with them.
I always tell them, too,
that I am a Transcendental Atheist.
The one who did the spiel today
was so sweet and beautiful,
gentle and earnest
that I wanted to hug and kiss her
and bring her in
and tell her the Good News
of Transcendental Atheism.

Life is just a little bubble

we get trapped in for a while,
or, as le Carré says*
'what you're left with'.

* in A Delicate Truth

'Depression'

is like 'sex':
what works
works,
and it's a matter of whom you know
or get to know
and what you find out
for and by yourself...
and sexy cuddles can do wonders for your feelings.