Badly-made and silly Chinese detergent advertisement

causes apoplexy amongst the politically-correct.


I merely wondered about the white streaks
on the handsome black man's face,
regretted that he had come out of the machine
transformed into a pale nonentity,
and also wondered why nobody thinks
that the ad is sexist.

Tired Words

"Next to the threat of International Terrorism
is that of Domestic Extremism."

I am the most domestic of extremists,
loving to sip pastis and smoke a cigar
between the gasp and the gap of sweet
solitude in front of the evening fire, as I hone
my misanthropy and oil my antinatalism,
singing a song beloved of Religious Extremists:
"This world is not my home"...

Absolute Arrogance

 “As God now is, Man may be.”




- Lorenzo Snow
Fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Splendid Soviet Sculpture

click on the picture to enlarge greatly

in memory of the victims of Fascism
(but, of course, not of Russian Totalitarianism)
not far from Vilnius, Lithuania.

click on the picture to enlarge greatly

Quite apart from fearing

silence around us,
fewer and fewer of us
can let ourselves be silent,
who chatter like monkeys
but are rarely so expressive
or so elegant...

Boredom

is mainly
the fear of boredom.

Silent intelligence:

Its unimaginability
tells us
all we need to know.

(from Separate Amputations)

Civilised

people will kill
for any reason
- except compassion.

(from Separate Amputations)

Perhaps

'Science'
like politics
is the domain
of the utterly insane.

Thoughtfulness is even better than mindfulness. Both together are rarer than worms' eyes.

The life dutiful, the life romantic,
the life beautiful or pedantic,
a waste of time, of egg, of sperm,
of lies,
of lust, of hate, desire, paralysis and dance -
a good death, a lovely corpse
timing, chance
- look
there is Jesus Holy-spook
a money-spinning mannequin
in the schizoid monoworld
of money-laundered human rights
and human progress - human fights
the point,
the centre, the circumference
the be-all, withal, end-all
of exuberance.

I am not Sweeney.
Hear my utterance.
(Herewith is my inheritance.)

My global online business

epigrams4u.com
quietly displays
My Mission Statement
on its home page:
Dear Customer,
The happier you are
the less you spend.
(Sorry about that.)

I have lived most of my over-thoughtful life

vainly hoping that people
would be more interesting than ideas.

The fun of discovering the wisdom of Deepak Chopra

If you're bored,

or are waiting for the paint to dry

just click here

for instant wisdom

from pi in the sky.

Warning!

Recent evidence

that most of us, especially the most intelligent,
are mere creatures of conformity:
within a mere five years the pleasant English words
'several' and 'very many'
have been almost universally replaced by
the unpleasant, fake-Latin 'multiple'.

But this is slight compared with the fact
that even 'towering geniuses' wore
ridiculous, unhygienic wigs
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries
even in India and the Caribbean...

Square roots

(Thank you, Jindra)

Why I have always hated mathematics.

Almost the only wilderness remaining

is the wilderness
of want and wanting
- most people's reality -
the ugly schizophrenia
of normality.

An Exquisite Recipe

for a home-made and delicate upper-class torture
suitable for visiting upon the Great and the Good
(i.e. the mean-minded, corrupt and evil)
such as Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, et. al.
(Allow 12+ hours for first batch)

1. Make a large batch of traditional French croissants.
2. Put in the freezer instead of leaving them to rise.
3. Bring in the mass-murderers.
4. Strip them, handcuff them, and shackle them to the floor.
4. Stick three frozen croissants one by one in each one's anus.
5. Leave the croissants to expand inside them for 6 hours.
6. Remove the croissants (with red-hot tongs).
7. Wearing gardening-gloves put in oven, bake as normal (takes 10 minutes).
8. Make them eat each other's Colonic Croissants (this is the only food they will eat for a month).
9. Repeat the process over 30 days.
10. Execute them by garrotting on a public holiday (e.g. World Peace Day, U.N. Human Rights Day, Anglo-American War Crimes Day).
in a very public place in Baghdad, Washington, London or Moscow.  Allow for crowds of one million.

Language

makes culture:
the structure
of mutual oppression.

The mind is a garden of mirrors

usually cultivated into a desert
of normality.
Long ago: the longing.
Tomorrow
the shadow
of reality.

"Le Rocher Tremblant"

at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val
might easily also be called The Dinosaur Rock:

click to enlarge

This is what the 'rocking-stone' looks like today - on a wooded slope.

Below is an old postcard from a photo taken early in the 20th century
(if not before) showing the village of Saint-Antonin before it spread
beyond the limit of the old defensive walls.  Very little woodland is apparent
in the postcard view, but now much of the countryside is (naturally) forested
as a result of agricultural and population decline,
and the abandonment of marginal land.

click to enlarge

Ginnungagap

Between the teeming world of different yesterdays
and the world (more teeming) of indifferent tomorrows
and their insistence
is the chasm of explanation, blame -
the gap between our flesh and earth
or earth and flame -
the violent gap of sheer existence -
the stupid gap between language and feeling  -
the inner gap of wanting
(the outer world ransacked to satisfy us) failing
the billions wanting, trampling, wailing -
the great gap of consciousness
in which joy, so rare, so tender (like 'love')
is the feeling of inspiration just being itself
(unlike 'love'), not intruding
but simply being, beholding, attending,
not holding, not seeking, not including
but tending...bending...

A brief history of Mankind (no blood shown)

This photo of this blogger (yours truly) in his living-room

was commissioned for the book
How to Design a Comfortable Building
the last of three guides to easy ecological living
by Susan Roaf et al.

click on the picture to enlarge

photo © by Cecil Bearz de Mille Beaton-Walker

The past is just a retreating wave.

When this civilisation falls apart
one way or another
or several ways at once,
there will be (amongst more obvious others)
a Pheromonal Problem,

for civilisation has abolished or suppressed
or masked all anciently-attractive smells
of cunt and cock and armpits, arse-crack, feet,
and other pheromonal, feral zones
and replaced them with chemicals
or (at best) plant-essences
(possibly with the effect
 - along with desensitising male-circumcision)
in producing grotesque sexual practices,
due to sensual 'disconnect') -

but I guess it will take just one generation
one new wave
for eroto-pheromonal sensibility
to resurrect.

Epilogue [no need for the prudish to read further] :
My own body has long been largely self-cleaning
and as pheromonal as I was made to be,
and more so now
since my accident and femur-top replacement
(before which operation I was washed all over
very thoroughly indeed, and after it, too,
for a couple of days - even under my foreskin).
Maybe it was something they used for that,
or else the shock of the fall or surgery,
or else a miracle -
but now I no longer need to wash there,
whereas before (for twenty years or more)
I had to wash that sleek
and ultra-sensitive, cheesey fold
at least twice a week.

Bad decisions

frequently result in poverty.
More importantly,
poverty often leads to bad decisions.
Who can blame the poor
and "welfare scroungers"
for being opportunist,
when the raison d'être of the rich
is ruthless opportunism ?

[The poorest Americans spend up to 70% of their income on rent
  and get no federal assistance. In the UK poor people spend up to 50%,
  but most of them are eligible for welfare benefits.
  2.8 million Americans are currently threatened with eviction.
  90% of landlords use attorneys. 90% of 'evictims' cannot.]

"The country is buzzing - really alive

and full of energy and dedication.
If I go, I'd have to stay - not just visit like some sort of gawking tourist.
Everything is too serious for that.  It would seem frivolous
just to go sightseeing in a country where everyone is deeply committed
to its future.  Commitment is the keyword."

Ironic - but not surprising - that Jews talk about Israel
the way that Nazis talked about Germany.

Today I had one of the best

of the several hundred (thousand ?)
really good days of my life.  A free old age
is far more enjoyable than childhood
- if only because one has one's necessarily (?)
restricted childhood to compare it with.

In the Home for Superannuated and Gentle Dissidents

we have fun inventing word-pairs
such as Equinuptial Gales,
and giving household objects
silly (but apposite) names
(some would make a doily blush)...

So meet Miss Sweepie

(more findable in a corner than dull
old Dustpan-and-Brush).

A Non-Deist's Urgent Letter to the Christian Churches.

It is surely time to re-open
convents and the monasteries
only as havens for the penniless, desperate
migrant, metamorphosable
teenagers
who otherwise will be snatched in the streets
of Athens, Skopje, Zagreb or Belgrade,
raped, tortured, "broken" like horses,
their "services" sold
(front and rear, and both at once, juxtaposable)
in London, Berlin or St Petersburg
day in, day out, until they are old
and, being without identity,
quickly disposable.

SEME and meme...and the seam of seem

If you look for Irish Megaliths in Google
my website will be at the top of the list,
but if you type Megalithic Ireland, it comes fourth,
after two impoverished Wikipedia entries and a very limited
and patchy semi-commercial site.
If you type Prehistoric Ireland
neither this site nor mine is even on the first page,
and if you type Prehistoric Monuments [of/in] Ireland,
his site is on the first page while mine is not.
If you type Irish Prehistoric Sites
both are on the first page...

These observations may not seem too important;
they do no more than point out that, in searching Google,
a lot depends on what you type -
but also, it seems, a lot depends on Google...

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts

I was amazed to learn

that the snobbish Received Pronunciation (RP) in British English
began (so confusingly, regrettably) to lose the final and pre-consonantal R
(as in garner which now sounds the same as Ghana,
father which now sounds the same as farther,
stork which now sounds the same as stalk...
and drawer which now sounds the same as draw)
only at the end of the 19th century (though the R persisted
among some in the Upper Classes until the end of World War One).
RP is spoken mainly in central and south-east England,
so the R remains especially and unbroken
in Scotland, Ireland, rural Wales and Western England -
and of course most other parts of the world where English is spoken.

(It is common for both final consonants and final vowels to be dropped over time:
e.g. final R in French and Icelandic, final I in Romanian, etc., but it is rare
for the medial R to disappear.)

My Economic Policy

as Finance Minister Plenipotentiary of Utopia
(or, to Hostile Powers The Disunited State of La-La-Land):

Give everyone a taxable subsistence allowance
(which the aspirationless could live from with a light carbon footprint).

Legalise, regulate and tax not just all drugs, but also prostitution,
making all users also identifiable.

Institute a Birth Tax (every bit as attractive as a Poll Tax) which would impose and extra 2%
on Income Tax for the first child, 4% for the second child, 8% for the third child, and so on.

Make 'essential services' (water, electricity, etc.) free for those who use them least,
and charge those who use them most a hefty sum, which would go towards
subsidising carbonless energy such as solar panels.
This is the reverse of the present system of 'basic' charges
simply for being connected, and lower rates for higher consumption
(the principle of Bulk Purchase applied stupidly to 'essential services').

Close down all tax-havens (Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Gibraltar,
British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Andorra,
San Marino, the Vatican, Panama...) if necessary by Armed Intervention
before reducing the armed forces to a bare and affordable minimum
as in the Irish Republic.

Put music at the top of school curricula (say, for the entire school morning)
and let pupils themselves decide their short afternoon curriculum.
And no homework.  This will reduce the ever-increasing education budget.

Abolish the category of felony except for the swindling of the poor
(even if indirectly) and acts of violence (which would automatically include rape).
This would reduce the ever-increasing the prison budget.

Tax smoke and mirrors  from 200 to 1,200%.

On the question of Cultural (mis)Appropriation

This Irishman's morning-coffee bowl
was made by a Frenchman in France,
whose glaze techniques on stoneware derive mostly
from the Englishman Bernard Leach,
who was inspired by the great Japanese glazer Hamada.
Japanese ceramics were greatly influenced by Korean pots
which were that country's chief exports...

As Adam Gopnik pointed out on a recent radio talk,
Japanese painters and illustrators (Hiroshige, Hokusai)
were inspired by European painting
to create works, thought by Europeans to be typical
and essentially Japanese,
which then, in turn,  inspired van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec et al.

A little essay.

Mia Chung, an American writer of Korean descent, said on the wireless that she thought that the entire population of North Korea had the condition known as Stockholm Syndrome (Survivor Identification Syndrome), which occurs when people start to like, sympathise with and even love their captors, kidnappers, abusers, torturers.

Thinking "out of the box", it seems to me that all civilised societies are  infected with the same condition.  Civilisation is by definition the restriction of liberty and the desensitisation of our capacities, reduction of our sensitivities and thus our sensibilities, by property and perceived comfort - if not by totalitarian dictatorship.

It diminishes us and our brains, and shrivels the world, even as we think we are all-powerful through aggressive and life-alienating technologies.

Only consider the millions who are abused by and in love with the fraud that is the American Dream, totalitarian Christian or Muslim sects, or plain patriotism - people who sing the deeply-unpleasant Marseillaise and actually believe that they live in a country of liberty, equality and fraternity, when they are imprisoned in a very comfortable and highly-desensitising culture of obedience and conformism which only the very few most privileged AND rebellious can leave.
Across the English channel the millions of victims of the class war embrace class passionately instead of rejecting it as a category in their lives.

Back within the box... is Christmas, oppressive and stressful for most whites and Christians,
yet most people claim to love it.  It's "for the children" - who are of course stressed by physical and mental restriction, and surveillance, as well as by inculcated envy, desire and greed.

Humans are the only addictive species.  It is an evolutionary quirk exacerbated by civilisation's stresses and supplies.  We are addicted to any number of substances - to alcohol, to testosterone,but more subtly to habit, to comfort, to activity, to noise, to work and the work-ethic, to anxiety (adrenalin) and to the fear of freedom proposed by Erich Fromm in his book with that title (Escape from Freedom in North America)...

Because hunters (those who kill "for sport"
with expensive massacre-machines)
like to kill impressive alpha-males, whether in Scotland,
Queensland, Montana or South Africa,
the "game" species are, decrementally
getting physically smaller, weaker -
just as we are, "spiritually", mentally.

We are benormed, deformed.
To return to ourselves, we'll have to
subvert the rules, empty the schools.
Dissidence must be free and well-informed.

The problem with The Past

is not just that it is dangerously unpredictable
but that it is also highly immoral.

A great part of Politics

is the appeal of
and appeal to
false memory.

Racism :

the only human attitude
more vulgar than snobbery.

What al-Ma'arri, the sceptic Syrian poet might have written today.

Christians rave in factions, Muslims twist and shout,
Jews wail inside their razor-wired redoubt.
We humans are divided into two bad schools :
The rationalist knaves and blind religious fools.

"Abu 'L-ala Ahmad b. Abdallah al-Ma'arri (973-1057), born in Syria not far from Aleppo, and sometimes known as the Eastern Lucretius, is the third of the great zindiqs of Islam. No true Muslim feels comfortable in his poetic presence because of his scepticism towards salvationist religion in general and Islam in particular..."

MORE >

Taking a break

on World Naked Gardening Day 2016
and looking forward to

World Naked Dog-loving Day.

The Joy of Misanthropy :

hum(or)ously
whomanly
happy
to be
ashamed
to be
human

At the heart

of every fantasy
sits mere banality.

One of the many joys

of living in a mediæval village
is the names of the old streets.
Obvious ones such as
Tannery and Drinking-trough street,
but also particular ones such as
Cauldron-makers' street
Nailmakers' street
Stonemason street

White Penitents' street
Hat-maker street
Plumbers' street
Paradise street
Rue du Coin de Madone
(Madonna-nook street)
Dark Doorway street
and, even more poetically
rue des Chantepleurs:
the street of the Weeping Singers.
All of these are in Caylus
where a lot of history lingers.

A Hacked Penis

has much less than a tenth
of the subtle sensitivity
of an uncircumcised one.
The underside of a man's foreskin
is dense with Merkel cells,
Herbst corpuscles, Grandry corpuscles
Ruffini endings as well as free nerve endings.
The glans, however, has only a few free nerve endings
which are often desensitised by masturbation and rough clothing.
This would suggest that
sex between humans of certain religions and traditions is fated
by human caprice and false gods to be altogether more violent
and unpleasant than sex between those whose genitals remain unmutilated.

Which would explain why monotheistic societies
are so 'hung up about sex'.

Television

is The Great Dictator
who says Watch Me !
- so millions watch
and mostly believe.

Perhaps Satan

was Jehovah's
rejected lover.

For polytheists
the only gods worth having
are amphibious, shape-shifting,
divinely fluid ideomorphs,
who inhabit the several worlds
between and beyond 'Heaven' and 'Hell'
- not just the narrow, anthropocentric
monotheistic and stifling prison-cell.

Coincidence or Correlating Folk-memory ?

When people are asked to choose a number between 1 and 10
6 is the number least chosen.
6 is the Number of Evil in the pseudo-Christian
Book of Revelation
(or, Apocalypse of John of Patmos)
in which one of the two Great Beasts -
the nameless Beast from the Sea
- bears the Mark (a brand ?) which is the uncomputed
number Six Hundred, Sixty and Six - not DCLXVI, but

though, textually, this can be disputed....