'Madness'

is a challenge of and to perspective
unresolved by sanity.

People/Sheople

 by Veijo Rönkkönen.

Sex sometimes seemed to me

 — at least to me  — to be a dimension
more than an act, a stage of bodily attention
briefly transcending mere mind
and offering an exit from the present
malignant, mere mentality of mankind.

All moralities are oppressive —

and divisive — perhaps even to those
who order and control them.

Why is simple lovingkindness not sufficient
— or possible ?

Osho (alias Rajneesh)

would have agreed
and may even have said
that disciples are unpaid waiters
who, inevitably, are traitors.

The Mind

is an Operating System which
unfortunately can cope with a lamentably-small
number of programs or applications.
It is electrically-charged Smoke and Mirrors,
the invisible organ (or machine)
of cunning and stupidity.

In the Zagreb 'Museum of Naive Art'

you will wonder who defines such a patronising
(indeed offensive) category, and why such pictures
are banished and quarantined in a modest building
far from the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art.

     This vacuity(in the museum of Contemporary Art)

   is considered to be 'contemporary'rather than 'naive'.

                                     Go figure.

Sheople chatter all the time

unceasingly saying nothing
having given their attention
to almost nothing that is not fluorescent
or strictly-limited or trite
denying what they see
and have not noticed...
which is why I say aloud
little more than what I write.

I will tell you about the first beauty

that I saw in my captivity :

a window covered in frost.

- Irina Ratushinskaya

Mutual grooming - at a distance.

I like to talk to strangers on the street or at the market
because I know the conversations will be brief
and light and friendly and sometimes even witty
and will not lead to any kind of relationship or grief.

A dog in a flap.

Diogenes,

a man who hung about on street corners
condemning the miasma of normality
(which his followers called typhos)
and about whose death and dying we know nothing

might well have agreed with me
that the good death has no mourners.

The Yanomami

and Dani will be the last surviving humans
around 2080, if I am right. 
If so, I hope that they will
stay where they are
and not feel the need to count beyond three
much less to read and write.

Spined Orb-weaver,

Gasteracantha scintillans

photographed by Art Anker.

The Dani,

"savages" of Indonesian West Papua*,
cultivate over seventy varieties of potato.
They would rather shiver with cold than wear shirts
or anything which covers their shoulders and torsos -
just like the less-cuddly Yanomami of Venezuela.
I guess that they can't bear the sensation of constriction,

which is how I feel about car seat-belts, thus earning
me seven on-the-spot fines but only one conviction.

*Papua means fuzzy-wuzzy or frizzy-haired in Malay.

Sources: Tim Cahill, Redmond O'Hanlon.

A very strange advertisement

which pops up on my screen from time to time,
thanks to 360° Security, a Chinese outfit.
I wonder does it appear on Chinese computers ?

 

Water

I am almost
as weak as

I am almost
as clear as

The Poverty Trap in the USA.

I have uploaded an interview between Laurie Taylor, eminent sociologist and broadcaster, and Céline-Marie Pascale, Professor of Sociology at the American University, Washington DC, who has been advocating for, and describing the daily lives of people in 'the struggling class' marked by poverty, racism, violence and misogyny. 

Listen here...or later 

Yesterday

on the possible eve of a possible invasion of Ukraine

by Russia

I watched a flabby, Hollywoody film
(Munich: On the Edge) about the invasion of Czechoslovakia

by Hitler.

There have been so many books and films about Hitler,
the Rise of Hitler and the Nazis,
but so few films about Stalin,
the Rise of Stalin and his creation of a totalitarian state
much larger and even worse than that of Germany.

But, in the appalling long run - for the survivors -
Hitler did the Jews a good turn
by legitimising Zionism,

while Stalin merely won the war in the East.

Fritzi on Pets and Bonzai.

"Is there anything more nauseous than the sentimentality
visited upon plants and animals by a creature
who from the very first was their raging foe
and now finally claims to feel affection for his exhausted
and mutilated victims ?"

- Nietzsche, Daybreak (1881) Book IV.

Mutterings of a dendrophile.

A Chaste Tree is not a Handkerchief Tree,
and certainly not a Judas Tree
(whose pods should not be confused
with those of the Carob Locust Tree, which are edible).
I have planted (at different times, in different places)
all three.  Two of them grew well.
A Joshua Tree is a kind of Yucca,
and the various kinds of Benjamin Tree produce Benzoin.
There is just one Moses Tree, a very ancient Plane
(Platanus) in southern Turkey
said to have grown from the prophet's staff or cane.

A Nasty Myth.

The oldest profession

is not prostitution
but espionage.

An epigram - or a slogan ?

SLOGANS
STULTIFY

Overheard in an English classroom.

 by Michael Rosen

"He doesn't speak English, Miss.

"He comes from the Congo, Miss.

"I translate for you, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his grandfather, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his grandmother, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his dad, Miss.

"He says that the bad men kill his mum, Miss.

"He doesn't know how he got here, Miss..."

Human, all too human.

Before Atlas Shrugged,
Lazarus Laughed,
and Nietzsche declared
that 'women' loved his ears,
which (he claimed) were small
(but not too small).
Freud, in an untimely meditation, thought
that the driven, animal-loving and fraught
author of The Gay Science might have been
homosexual.

In the world of the blind

the one-eyed have nobody 

with whom to share their vision.

My Epitaph.

He did not die prematurely.

(What human does ?)

The human mind is like a puppy

that keeps chasing its own tail.

Blame is a game -

an unpleasant, competitive game
beloved of tyrants and dictators.
It may soon become an Olympic 'sport'.
I hate competitive games and sports, and so
I have not stooped to apportioning blame
beyond myself for my many
and sometimes serious shortcomings.
I blame only my common and universal
misfortune in having been born,
despite my mother's admirable and brave
attempts to prevent it.

Many children

(but regrettably few adults)
know that you can enjoy yourself
doing nothing.

Diogenes indubitably thought
that the only thing worth doing
was nothing. (Except to sing and dance.)

And Epicurus suggested that
it should be done with elegance.

It is incredible

(given our alleged intelligence)

that we are surprised and even feel betrayed

by unfortunate events, 

by happenstance and accidents.

No surprise.

The little word avodah 

which means
The Worship of God through Labour
appears 289 times in the Old Testament.

'This man is molesting me....

 

...but really, I love it.'

                                           from The Guardian

It is easy to sneer

at the pompous Latinism of
Expectation Disconfirmation
(or Discombobulation) Theory.
It proposes quite simply that high expectation
tends to result in disappointment,
especially when the expectation is competitive.

Thus gifts which are wrapped induce less appreciation
than those which are not; likewise elaborate promises
of jam tomorrow, liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy,
prosperity...and the continuing ecstasies
of the palate or the phallus.
And what of The Gift of Life, expensively wrapped
in pregnancy, pain and the language of religiosity ? 
For many humans it is a poisoned chalice,
though only through rape is it imposed by malice.

Q: Awaiting the Barbarians.

What are we all waiting for,
crammed into The Square ?
Miracle ? Bird ? Thunderbolt ?
Amazing son-et-lumière ?

The Barbarians are due today
in mire and fury, flame and flood.
They are Satanic Pedophiles,
Sex-traffickers who drink the blood
of babies that they rape.
They run the IMF, the World Bank,
the Internet and Israel, the European Union,
the WHO, and governments from Tasmania
to the North Cape.

They drink each other's sperm
and menstrual emissions.
They own the banks, the supermarket chains
the airlines, the shipping companies and Facebook.
They cry Consume! Consume!
They have caused famines and pandemics.
They are zombies.  They are terrorists.
They have poisoned the reservoirs.

They are at The Gate.

We are choking in The Square.

Who will save us from our fate ?

Likes washing dishes

We are all demented
some of us contented
if not happily
demented

There are 300 different dementias
'and counting'
in the brambles
and the shambles
of Terminal
Uniqueness
Syndrome

So, why not a State Funeral ?

 

2022/jan/12/landmine-hunting-hero-rat-dies-in-cambodia-after-stellar-career

My latest Netflix experience,

as submitted to the Rotten Tomatoes website:

31m ago

Brilliant, almost-unwatchable Cinéma vérité with a terrific performance by Olivia Colman as a 'normal' damaged woman, daughter, mother, professor of comparative linguistics, intent on keeping creepy people at bay. Why did she go to a bleak Greek island swarming with horrible 'visitors' and screeching children ? She's trying (bleakly) to be normal, I guess. This is perhaps the ultimate anti-romantic film - and a salutary kick up the arse for the film industry. There is a wonderful (quite irrelevant) line about translating Yeats into Italian : 'chocolate on chocolate'. Well, this is a film for people who actually think from time to time.

The Myth of Sanity.

thinking
slinking
thinking
shrinking
thinking
sinking
thinking
stinking

the brain
down the drain
feels no pain

sanity
is narrative

no narrative
just quanta

(but this is narrative)

I never wanted
to be 'somebody'
now I don't want
to be anybody

(my life is not a narrative)

just quanta

My banner-slogan

for the (unforthcoming)
Suicide Pride Parade is
(as you might have guessed)
Ashamed to be Human.

Hello, Anti-vaxxers.

I thought you might like to know
that I had all the symptoms of Mild Covid
9 days after my third vaccination.
Without the vaccinations I might be 'at death's door'
- though it is possible that I was infected at the door
of the vaccination centre,
where I had to push through a small crowd (of maybe 20)
sheltering from heavy rain under a piece of canvas tenting.

This is a picture of the vaccination centre
(entrance bottom right).

Sufi

sloths
   Zen
zebras
   Enlightened
octopi

Being dumb

might not be so terrible.
At least you would not be saying 'the wrong thing'
all your life, or suffering from
l'esprit de l'escalier or afterwit:
not thinking of the right rejoinder or appropriate response
until (sometimes much) later.

According to A.K. Benjamin (in Let me not be mad, 2019)
“at least 80% of human communication is in non-verbal behaviour,
Morrow et al. 2919."

Why are refrigerators

not red or indigo or black inside ?

दुक्ख A basic Buddhist tenet :

All is Suffering.*
But most of the time
most humans don't 
(or are not allowed to) know
that they are suffering
because they don't
(or are not allowed to) know
its absence.

दुक्ख

* Also translatable as stress or distress.

Orphaned Pages.

The term is romantic.
It refers to those pages uploaded to the Web
which are bereft of links to them.
They sit in limbo with an infinitesimal chance of being read.

I discovered one this morning
which I had written in html
and accidentally uploaded to my website.

It is an account of a DMT experience
by my friend Stuart.

It is now linked to this blog
and you can read it here.

Date to be announced.

Massive End-of-the World Barbecue
will be held at the North Pole.
All white people welcome.

Regret, remorse,

and even guilt assail the old.
Some powerful elderly even feel ashamed
of failing to live for ever -
if not of all the blood they've spilt
and the monstrosities they've built.

If I had been sent to a concentration-camp,

I would have run for the wire at the first opportunity,
in the hope of being electrocuted or shot.
We don't hear much about the suicides,
of which there were thousands in those terrible places,
some by women acting together...

'The best things in life are free,'

and for me there's no denying
that they have been
my fourteen dreams of flying.

Do we share feelings -

 or only words for feelings ?

Connectivity.

Today's good may be tomorrow's bad.
Evil has many paths and connections.
Today's joyous may be tomorrow's sad.

The Singularity.

Enlightenment for imbeciles.

 

Anorgasmic.

It emerged from the trial of the odious Ghislaine Maxwell
that her appalling co-predator Jeffrey Epstein
had to be sexually "serviced"
thrice daily by young girls.

Evidently, his ejaculations were just
unsatisfying excretions -

and so it may be for millions of men
too indulged to consider, let alone appreciate
the art of masturbation. 

'Blood is thicker than water.'

Blood and water
can both be infected,
and sperm which is thicker
dries quicker than blood.

Narcissus and the shallow pool.

When we think we're looking deep
we see just the nearest and clearest
of reflections.