Mulling over Paul Celan.

The only things worth talking about
with other human hackers of the tree of life
are the things that cannot be mentioned:
overpopulation, ecocide, suicide,
the godness of water, plants and animals
and how each delicious bite we take
has destroyed so many living things...
and so it's not so much that
one doesn't know how not to begin a conversation,
but that (having been sterilised)
one doesn't know how to make any kind of communication.

Camus was wrong.

The sole 'philosophical problem'
is human dominion.

Guilt

is a shameless
form of self-abuse.

It is so sad

that Jesus' anti-institutional
exhortations to kindness and good nature
and simple fairness and justice
were transformed into unbrotherly,
desiccated morality and moralism
by his immediate followers
and two millennia
of his rapacious traducers.

With poor sight

and slightly deaf,
slightly lame,
slightly sociable :
I live quite slightly.

In 19th century Russian towns

welcome-lamps were lit when there was food to spare
or someone needed to be comforted
or company was wanted.
The lights now outside houses
have been installed to threaten
and expose intruders.

Ever-accursed Prometheus.

Evolution
has been all downhill
since we discovered fire.

Our sadly-malfunctioning brains

have evolved either because of an unfortunate mutation,
or simply because God went mad (as Nietzsche didn't dare to contemplate
or didn't dare to tell),
and our Universe (amongst many)
is his padded cell.

Back to the Buddha!

say I.  
Everything is One – 
and unbelievably Multiple and Disparate.

Two things I'd like to remind you of.

Inca gold and silver
together with the Catholic Church
and men on benches in Bologna
were crucial in the development
of capitalism.

Serfs were freed in Russia
without a civil war
before slavery was (technically)
abolished in the USA.

When 'western culture'

largely consists of shopping, work and sex
all mixed up with 'human rights' hypocrisy;

if its popular music reflects the thoughts,
ideas and concerns of most, democracy
is doomed.

As I write I hear that there are more refugees than ever
in the history of the world,
that there is less trust in politicians and in vaccines.

Welcome to the Dark Age
of demagoguery, apocalypse.

Like breaking horses.

Education is an exercise
in bridling children's spirit -
if their parents
or other children haven't already done so -
or if they had any to begin with.

I am trying to figure

why everyone, even in a little French village,
is wearing incredibly drab and badly-cut clothes
in shades of brown, black and grey.  Obviously
it's The Style of 2019, but why ? 
The only brightness is the occasional lurid
early adolescent. There is no beauty
of apparel to contrast with the dour faces of the
modern bourgeois army.

It's quite scary,
especially as I, in my Indian cotton pants
and home-designed t-shirt, get strange or hostile looks
from the ugly uniformities who pass me by.

Kissing

Missing
Pissing
Reminiscing

Breeding
Needing
Bleeding

They tell us to praise
the darkest of days.
They tell us
that the all-powerful animal
with the ever-expanding, ever-tightening mind
as big as a galaxy, small as a turd,
is utterly exceptional, phenomenal,
and that you and I
should 'borrow' light from the blind
to give to the other unredeemables
who go unheard.

Each one of us
each day
destroys a world.

Masturbation
should be enjoyed
not resorted to.
Remember: almost anything
is holier, more reverential
than human procreation.

The reason why

most Christians have no interest
in the unstoppable result of climate change
is that it's not their kind of apocalypse.

Maybe never-to-be-lived-in.

One of Ahmadinejad's crazy, totalitarian New (ghost) Towns.
This one in the desert outside Tehran,with almost no infrastructure to support it - not even drains !

https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/06/13/

New Words to an Old Lyric*

Putting on the agony
putting on the guile;
that's what all the dumb folks
are doin' all the while.
When I look around me
I sometimes have to smile,
seein' all the dumb folks putting on the guile.

*as recorded in my youth  by Lonnie Donegan (1957)

Original lyrics by Norman Cazden. But Lonnie's best one is probably Rock Island Line which opened up for me the world of "folk music" from the USA to India, Iraq and Japan. From Leadbelly to the Trio Joubran via Fairport Convention, of course!

IS - the new global mind-game racket.

I am holding the first International
Intelligent Scepticism © ® Week
here at Caylus in August.
Only $700 for the week
including under-the-hedge accommodation.
payment via PayPal 

Never trust anyone

with clean fingernails
who wears a suit
or a beard
who keeps mentioning your name
who smiles a lot...

who has white skin
who has black skin
who has coffee-coloured skin
who has slanting eyes
who is circumcised
who has not been genitally mutilated...

who uses language.

The capitalist doctrine of Free Choice

does not extend to deities.
Partly because capitalism owes so much to
the Catholic Church, Inca gold and silver,
the Protestant churches...
and (of course) actually favours monopoly.

I think gods should be marketed properly:
     Worship one - get one free.
     Worship several - get several more free...

The most beautiful window in the world ?

Petit-Niort (Charente-Maritime), France. 11th century.

You can see Jupiter and some of its moons this month with binoculars...

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/blogs/jupiter-opposition-june-planet-moons-visible-binoculars

meanwhile...

The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/what-is-the-great-pacific-ocean-garbage-patch

Education

is the best way
to keep people quiet.
The second-best
is Employment.

In his Dictionary Dr Johnson thus defined

Job: a low, mean, lucrative busy affair.

Cellphones

Coltan
Massacres
Ebola

Cellphones
Coltan
Massacres
Ebola

Cellphones
Coltan
Massacres
Ebola

But that is not the only reason why I do not have a smartphone.

My briefly-former 'friend'

said that my skepticism
was mere cruelty,
evidence of
lack of  'empathy'.

(I have yet to discover the difference
between empathy and sympathy or old-fashioned
compassion.)

Can skeptics ever have friends ?

"As the ex-Liberal Dostoyevsky understood,

Liberalism [like Capitalism] is nothing if not a religion.
In the past, this may have been a strength.
Today it is a weakness, and possibly fatal.
Shigalyov [in Demons]was right.
Trashing old freedoms
in order to bring about a new state of unbounded freedom
can only lead to despotism.
Liberals cannot stem the on-going retreat of liberal values
because it is they that are driving it."

- John Gray [here]

Government:

system without mind
controlling minds
without system.

I used to think

that people with pleasant faces
and who engaged with me were
'nice'.
I was in my seventies before
I discovered that people had false faces
and false brains.

Having no hope

for mankind or the planet
should be personally liberating,
but in a world of killer optimists
it is merely paralysing.

Slaves

have always
been made to
bow down
to superior slaves.

Nations are male

and need to be fucked.
Nations are posters
crawling with lies.
Nations are attitudes
stupidly struck.
Nations make war
and make peace
and make war
and everything dies.

In rural France today

even the town by-pass
is lined with three shades of blue:
salvia, chicory and viper's bugloss

(not to mention marjoram,
marguerites and greater mullein).

When life is product

dependent on products,
death is the only
liberation.