How to make friends with coyotes.

Beyond Grief

is numbness.
Beyond joy
is death.
Beyond belief
is reason.
Beyond hope
is wisdom.

Instances of Enantiodromia are Legion

Two came to mind yesterday :

England is a self-defined Christian kingdom,
with a National (and royal) Church like the Nordic countries -
but very few Christian festivals (only Christmas and Easter) are celebrated,
and few inhabitants would have known that yesterday was Ascension Day.

France is self-definedly atheist,
but it has public holidays for Ascension, Whitsun and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary,
as well as Christmas and Easter. 
Moreover, most French calendars tell you which saint's day it is...

Go figure !

Pot calls Kettle 'Black-arse'.

A relative of the poisonous cane-toad is now breeding on Madagascar.




 Jonathan Kolby, of James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said:
"It's worrying because Madagascar has amazing endemic biodiversity -
plants, animals and amphibians that are found nowhere else.
And this one species has the propensity to damage that."

It takes some time before you notice

that intimacy has become indifference...
except when it turns to dislike
within a few sad minutes !

The mystic has become taboo.

The mystic has no narrative.

We wander like stricken minotaurs within our brains
in a miasma of constricted energy.
Within that soggy labyrinth we are stuck
in an evolutionary cul-de-sac,
the impasse of language,
out of which the only exit is suicide: 
Unanswerable Silence -
 the most mystical language and message beyond-the-tale.

The leaves of Life keep falling...

The 14th president of (a smaller) United States

said, on leaving office:
There is nothing left but to drink and die.
He expired soon afterwards
of cirrhosis of the liver.

His attitude and life was opposite
in many ways to those of
Omar Khayyám .

Quotations from the 14th president include :

If your past is limited, your future is boundless.

A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly.
The histories of all popular governments show how absurd
is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties.

We live now

in a philosophical desert.

neo-Diogenean Syllogism.

'Money is Power'.
'Power corrupts'.
Therefore money corrupts.
Corruption is not as pleasant as it seems
and wealth can lead to a miserable fate.
Therefore it is good to live contentedly
with very little - but some - money.
Such as a Basic Universal Stipend
from the nation-state.

Soon we will all be zombies,

if amazon and

get their way.  >>>

The splendid Clive James

refers, in a recent poem about the end of his life, to
Japanese anemones, pale and frail.
But only the white variety is pale,
and the plants are anything but frail -
in fact they can be invasive.
Is this poetic licence,
or just an expression of ignorance ?

At the time of Elections for the toothless - but not legless* - European Parliament.

Since the days of Thatcher, Kohl, Chirac and Craxi what has happened in Europe is very simple:

most of the poor have been guaranteed and given very basic support;
the middle classes have got all sorts of welfare benefits for free;
pharmaceutical companies have been encouraged to grow mega-rich by doping
three-quarters of the population with anti-anxiety drugs and promising miracle cures;
and agri-business has been heavily financed to poison the land and to a lesser extent most of the people - all so that the rich and powerful and would-be rich and powerful can have a free hand
to get richer and richer, while populations become more and more dully aspirational.

Moreover:

Capitalism now depends on working mothers who pay others (and other working mothers)
the lowest wage possible to look after their children.  (But not so much in Germany...)
Dystopia is just around the corner – because children soon will be sent to kindergarten
as soon as they are shit-trained…and will become excellently-dull collaborators.

(Further reading: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or any of its excellent predecessors.)

*The European Parliament is bizarrely peripatetic.

'How true - even today' - for all seven billion of us.

A throw-away remark I heard on the wireless this morning:

"Boys are less inquisitive than girls."
Hmm.  On reflection, I think that this is true.
Males are enquiring only in narrow fields
(agronomy, engines, Sanskrit, stem-cell research...)
while females are more generally curious.
Certainly, my own enquiring mind
popped out of my brain-womb only after I left university.

Just as nobody seems to mention the hideous wall

built by an occupying Rogue State,
which not only runs right through the West Bank of Palestine
but also has not reduced the number of humiliating checkpoints
that everyone must endure without protest —

so nobody seems to be asking why there are billions
of unnecessary (and mostly hideous) tee-shirts
made by poor people who have to slave in sleaze,
from cotton grown on vast areas of rich land
which could be used for growing food for the locals,
or for growing trees.

Today, at 21.45 hours I was informed

that I hadn't put up a blog.
This surprised me for a second.
Then it did not surprise me, because
I am drifting slowly and none-too-gladly
towards senility.  This is what it is to
'not be quite with it', to start to
'lose my marbles' driftingly.

I have a stash of blog-material,
but today I simply forgot to put up a blog
(like a candidate ? like a poster ?)
because I was dealing with other matters,
such as the rigmarole of changing ISP*
to one which is 10 euros a month cheaper;
and responding to a surprising
amount of correspondence arising
from yesterday's blog; and coping
with the mistake of having received an item
one of whose measurements I specified in inches
instead of centimetres; and vacuuming
the shared car just before the other sharer arrives
on Saturday
(an opportunity offered by the temporary closure
of my narrow street for work on guttering which involves
a telescopic doo-dah on a lorry/truck),
and now the computer-window has stuck...
because I pressed a key which produced a pop-up
for Google Feedback (which I was able to cancel
only when I went full-screen) -
...what was I writing ?  Oh yes...

The days pass in a strange kind of slow-motion
which sometimes speeds up, and I fall away...
I went with Bonobo (who has now gone to Greece)
to see the Palestinian film Girafada, which I recommend.
That was on Monday...

24 hours later:

This Friday evening I went to "the wrong film" -  
The Amazing Spiderman -
instead of Dans la Cour with Gustave Kervern & Catherine Deneuve.
It was ten seconds before I took a reality-check.I left after enduring ten minutes of pure dreck.


*Internet Service Provider

Two Good Quotations and an original Mediocre Maxim from the Spermless Wonder.

“How easy it is to be ‘deep’:
all you have to do is let yourself wallow in your flaws.”
~ Emile Cioran

Human intelligence is a kind of refined taste & appetite
- for ideas.

"'Mankind cannot bear too much reality." 
~ T.S. Eliot

As we enter the Age of Digital Humourlessness...

My friend-for-life
went to a splendid new dentist
whom I had discovered
earlier this year.
He duly filled in the form
to identify any medical problems
that would affect his treatment.
Under heart conditions
he wrote 'generosity',
since in the mean world
it can be a crippling defect.
Very gently, the dentist
asked him to erase it
and initial the crossing-out,
because, he gravely said,
no computer
has a sense of humour.

'All Out' declares that

 I would add that in rather more than 77 countries

women are considered to be inferior to men,

and even of no account except as receptacles of sperm

and incubators for men's 'legitimate' offspring.

There is nothing and no-one

which (or who) cannot be described
by (or with) an adjective ending in -ic.

To be is to deposit.

 Here is a partial list 
 of the trash that humans have left on the moon: 
 more than 70 spacecraft including rovers, modules, and crashed orbiters,
 12 pairs of boots, 
 2 golf balls,
 an assortment of empty packages of space food,
 TV cameras,
 various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels;
 backpacks, insulating blankets, 
 utility towels, used wet-wipes,
 discarded 'personal hygiene kits'
 and 96 bags containing the piss, shit, and vomit of departed astronauts.

 Humans have left, all told, nearly 400,000 pounds 
(= nearly 200,000 kg) of stuff on the surface of the moon;
 Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong alone left more than 100 items on the Sea of Tranquillity
 — including a plaque claiming that "we came in peace for all mankind."

And soon, of course, more mendacious and meretricious advertising
will be placed on the helpless, battered satellite —
a chemical drink will start off the commercial blight.

The rise and rise of Motivational Garbage.

As Sam Beckett might have said -
Quel Catastrophe !

(The worst success
is life itself.) 

May we all fail worse
and feel better.

An unbelievable number of the world's women look like this.

In no way do I intend to be misogynous -
on the contrary...I love amazing and inedible fish,
and I try as best I can to be 'holistic'.

To be 'anti-natalist'

is also to be anti-nationalist:
to want a world of few people and no borders.

Another Romantic Fallacy ?

Life's biggest mistake:
heterotrophy.

The problem with peace

is that it allows aggressive human populations to increase
which then have to be controlled by tyranny
or else reduced by war (or both).

Haiku

Gazing at blown leaves
perhaps I have understood
what haikai don't say.

[haikai is the plural of haiku]

The longest and most bitter, futile war will be

the war against the satnavbourgeoisie.

"Alas for those who never sing

but die with all their music in them," 
wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Alas even more for those whose music was squeezed out of them
by an 'education' system.
They sing, if at all,
only other people's music,
usually commercial pop and rock...

Now that I have crept fully out of the closet

as a misanthrope, I notice that my outward behaviour
more closely resembles those of 'normal' people
than it did hitherto.
This suggests to me, rather late in life,
that, just as many heterosexual men seem to be misogynist,
so most people may actually be misanthropic -
skilfully hiding it from naive chaps like myself,
or even without knowing it.

Vallotton: Paris street-corner.

Starting with 'aberrant',

proceeding to 'conflictive'
I went on through the alphabet
for words to sum up humanity.
I stopped at 'vindictive'.

Our unique power of reason

should liberate us from hierarchies.
Instead, we have created
not just hideous hierarchies of wealth,
but also murderous hierarchies of misunderstanding.

"Whenever I see or hear the word 'dreadful'

I think wonderful,"
wrote Elias Khoury in White Masks.

Expiring during intimate congress
might be a beautiful death for a man,
but not so wonderful for a woman still living.

Ovid wrote that a man can be Truly Himself only in a Bedroom.
He was a free male, and was not considering mere women or slaves.

"I'd discovered a long time ago that 'the particulars' of a woman are only discovered during sex..." wrote Roberto Costantini in The Deliverance of Evil.
I have discovered that it is 'during sex' that you will find out the paucity and meanness of a man,
who may well be revealing a part of his True Self - but still only a part,
for "sex" itself is only a very small part of our lives and our activity,
however much we may fixate upon it.

At the Airport

I observe that
wealth does not become us.
(But, as the Arab proverb has it,
Money Loves Money.)

Three Spring Haikai

Swallows from the shed
scythe through the gloaming to catch
the last daylight flies.

Wind sways a window
and the countryside swerves
before the rain comes.

Mouldy winter straw
is the only reminder
of old politicians.

The Serpent in Paradise

is the Tongue : language
obliterated beastly grace.
And most of the space
of what we call 'memory'
is occupied by explanatory words.

The End

is a rather silly concept.

No fences :

no defenceless.

My mantra:
'misanthropy'.
Keep repeating until happy.

'Mindfulness'

is now 'all the rage' -
but it's what I have
unwittingly practised
since I was ten years of age.

My favourite words

include wholesome in English,
complicité in French,
Welträtzel (and of course Weltschmerz) in German,
 Забвение and apparatchik in Russian
(who is not an apparatchik now ?),
uddhar in Sanskrit
and wabi-sabi in Japanese.
There are others, which
in my near-senility I can't recall,
but it's enough to mull over these.

History shows

(and simple Jungian insight, too)
that those who fight monsters
are either monsters themselves,
or become new specimens
in the vast and frightful human zoo.

Courtesy

is an expression of a sense of honour
now disappearing
from our culture of entitlement.

If we are what we eat,

we are also what we download
from YouTube.

A poem by 'Flying Lemming'

was sent to me today.
I am passing it on with a dedication to Dína:


Happy Dog

I'm a happy dog at the beach
If I had the power of speech
I would tell you all
To throw my ball
I'm a happy dog at the beach

I'm a happy dog at the beach
There are no new tricks you can teach
I am bouncy and glad
And my tail wags like mad
I'm a happy dog at the beach

I'm a happy dog at the beach
As I hear the seagulls screech
I chase and I bark
Long into the dark
I'm a happy dog at the beach

I'm a happy dog at the beach
And I don't want to start to preach -
But if you ask me
The best thing to see
Is a happy dog at the beach.

More poems from Flying Lemming

To an anti-natalist correspondent who thinks that 'normal' people are stupid - and happy.

If stupidity makes people ‘happy’ why begrudge them their ‘happiness’ ? 
In my opinion fewer and fewer people are happy.
To be middle class is to be discontent
if not profoundly and secretively unhappy.
More and more people (millions in India and China)
are joining the middle class, the lumpen-bourgeoisie,
the class which is truly in the grip of consumer capitalism -
the stupid class, the tasteful class,  the anti-reason class.

Anti- and non-breeders can express an opinion,
appeal to reason and sober statistics, piss against the wind,
but we can do nothing about 99.99% of irrational humanity.
I have never been excited by the prospect of breeding,
but  have only recently expressed antinatalist views,
and then only to certain people, and, sometimes, on this blog.

I don’t like the term ‘anti-natalist’.
I would prefer ‘rationalist’.
But it is very difficult to be rational in a world turbo-charged
by rampant anti-rationality and shrouded in a choking go-get fog.

The decline of sham democracy in Europe

The People  (who used to be called
The Proletariat, and are now called The Voters)
have come to realise that Politicians
(apart from other strident imperfections)
now generally come in just three flavours:
the inept, the incapable and the cynical,
all trying to be camera-friendly,
all interested above all in winning elections.

Progress

In the sky
the Plough replaced
the Great Bear
and the Big Dipper.

Dipper

Modern Feudalism

Governments
now want women
to employ other women
to bring up their children
while they go out to earn
the necessary money.
So much for Good Sense
and the Family Values
vaunted by our governments.

Septuagenarian Romance

(pervert-doggerel for Mr Anonymous)

We simply met
by internet
which I would qualifiedly recommend
if all else fails
for isolated man-loving males
and woman-loving females.

I love his smile, his surreal humour,
his dusky aromatic parts,
his sensual subtlety.
He loves my every wrinkle
and my dirty fingernails.

But one can have too much of a good thing
(if love can be called that),
especially when one is getting-on,
so I'm very happy to let
this (last) relationship
remain a long and intermittent
kind of gentle fling.

Northern Ireland, 1966.

The cry went up from disenfranchised,
gerrymandered citizens :
One man, one vote !
(because One person, one vote didn't sound so good)
It may soon be heard again
this time in the USA
whose fake democracy is now based
upon the principle of
 One dollar = one vote.

(PS the = sign was invented by a 16th century Welshman...)

What started as a puerile rumour

(possibly based on guilt)
ended up as the greatest hoax in history.
Now two popes canonise two other popes
in rich magnificence
with no sense of the ridiculous
and without the least humility.

The Sentimental Society.

In Oklahoma, USA, a convicted rapist
and murderer is executed messily
to some disquiet, while in Arizona
forensic experts take great pains
to identify the desiccated remains
of would-be immigrants
who have perished in the desert's
dry heat and chill,
so that they can be sent back to their families
in Honduras or Brazil.