The Social Circus.

First conform

Then perform.

Nice to see you.

 

photo by Tanya Griffin Houpermans

Tell a man

that something – anything –
is a machine, 

whether a house,
a hospital, an army,
an assembly, a relationship,
a person, a deity,
a brain, an atom or a galaxy,

and he'll love it.

The clocks go back (in Europe).

The older I get
the less I like myself
and others.

The Next British Prime Minister ?

photo by Kin Cheung

 

One of the great truths,

written by a great writer
in the persona of Bernie Gunther :

Being wrong is an important part of being right
and only time* can tell which it turns out to be.

– Philip Kerr in Prague Fatale.

*Actually, only the end of time.

"Mondriaan painting

 

has been hanging upside down for 75 years."
What a tragedy!

Automatic Editing.

Who needs bad memories
when the good ones make you weep ?

A abbreviated taxonomy of human types.

Socio- and psycho-paths, Very Nasties,
Moderate Nasties, Shits, Creeps, Bleeders,
Proselytisers, Yes-men (and -women),
Sycophants, Followers, Fence-sitters,
Side-changers, Leaders

Scapegoats, Sheep, Compromisers,
Well-intentioned, Vacillators, The Unreliable,
The Decisive, the Thrusting, The Modest

Heroes at the right place and time,
The Saintly, Hermits in the Forest

Narva.

On the left is the Danish-built castle
in Estonia (which the conquering Danes called Estland)
...EU...NATO.
On the right is the Russian castle of Ivangorod
in the Russian Federation.
Russian is the language spoken
on both sides of the river.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct4c5r

My African friend asks me

why white people seem to smile only for show,
and say Thank-you and Sorry so very much.
I reflect on this. 
I wonder if it is because an emotional insecurity
(born of Christianity)
that has also led them to conquer and ransack the world,

has suppressed their playfulness in the interests of competitiveness,
and engendered a fear of spontaneity
in the pursuit of a grim hedonism which
has turned them into leering puppets ?

Beauty before mere cleanliness !

An Iranian hermit, Amou Hajji, dubbed
“the world’s dirtiest man”
(for not taking a shower for more than half a century)
has died at the healthy old age of 94. 

Another Corrupt Oligarchy.

The prime minister and finance minister of the UK
(England and its subject nationettes)
are both multi-millionaires. In fact, I think
that the prime minister is a billionaire.

From Azerbaijan,

"Adaptive Fashion"

not for the predatory male
nor the submissive female gaze,

and not made by glamour-obsessed queer men
for the rich and young and disquietingly thin,

but for the comfort of the wearers.

Victorian UK - today,

 feeding capitalism, not people.

"Children in school are eating erasers
to line their stomachs and dull the ache and nausea of hunger.
Others are bringing in empty lunchboxes
then pretend to dine on their phantom food
away from classmates, too ashamed to reveal
that they have nothing to eat."

Suicide is largely a masculine phenomenon

because men are rarely mothers
of sons and daughters
and fathers and wives
and mothers and aunts
and orphans and queers and loners
and bullies and rapists
and bankers and slaves.

And men more easily perceive
that everyone's an atoll
about to sink beneath the waves.

Dictators,

almost always, almost everywhere
in dictatorial banality
surround themselves with sycophants.
Their numbers are increasing.

'People hardly ever have a conscience.

Poor people don't
because they can't afford it.
Rich people don't
because it costs them money.'

– Henning Mankell, Kennedy's Brain.

Thus my economic status
suggests that I have a conscience.
But what do I do with it ?

A well-worn adage of Confucius goes :

'Better to light a candle
than rail against the dark.' 

But even a lantern, Diogenes declared,
will reveal only shadows and deceit.

Better to adapt to the darkness
than be by light ensnared,
and ultimately suffer cognitive defeat.

Climate-change is obviously unstoppable

because capitalism is unstoppable,
because every country* in the world,
no matter how it's led,
is in hock to demonic moneylenders
who have to be paid.

*except Bhutan

Salmonitis.

I can't hear you!
There's a fish in my ear.

photo by John D. Chaney

The sullenness of supermarkets

has had the effect
of making us humourless.

Poets

mostly are enfeebled people
infecting each other with words
and ambiguities, obfuscations,
and fabricated mysteries –

but they generate quotations.

This is what we looked like

 eight weeks after we were conceived.

Living under the ruler.

'Weaponisation'

is a recent word,
though it defines
our species.

*

Introspection
(a fairly old word)
is not at all the same as
self-absorption.
It is almost the opposite.

My general practice doctor is about to retire.

On my last visit today he asked me
how I would prefer to die.
Like most people, I said. Quietly,
in my sleep.  But, I continued,
there is a wonderful 19th century hoist
built on top of the castle wall 100 metres from my house,
with a clear drop of nearly 10 metres.
We then had an interesting chat about the merits
and mechanics of hanging,
and what a mess would be caused
by my head actually being torn from my body,
such is daily cleared up (or not) in Tigray,
Ukraine, Yemen...to name but three.

Human Progress

– as depicted in this inept mosaic
from Cuprom Romania.

Today's exuberant image:

Cappella del Barolo at La Morra, Piedmont (Italy).

 

I can't remember...

...but I think
that there's
a happy
jackdaw
in my brain.

I fancy
she might be called
Montaigne.

 

Traumazone.

 "At the start of the 1990s the Soviet Union - one the largest empires in the world - imploded.

It was not a slow collapse like the British Empire, but one that collapsed suddenly - in just a few months...."

This first episode is a bizarre - not to say grotesque - montage (mish-mash) of film clips with very bad subtitles, showing us rather crudely that a rigid pyramidal economic system which was bound to fail engendered corruption which would engulf Russia when it was dismantled by Boris Yeltsin. 

I fear that Adam Curtis has 'lost his touch'.

 YouTube.

Lucretius,

interpreting Epicurus, thought
that life is like a party – maybe
an intimate dinner-party or
maybe one of the more riotous kind.
If the latter, a good one is when
death arrives before the police,
or before you are raped. If
it's a bad one it's best to leave it
at your earliest convenience.

One of the greatest logos ever.

(Pity about the films.)

Sheople

who call sheeple animals
know nothing about animals,
not even sheep.

From what I hear and read

online and in sociological and literary sources,
normal men are constantly evaluating women
as sex-objects, and many need little encouragement
to dominate, abuse and even rape them
in back-alleys, hotel-rooms and on golf-courses.

When (in the nineteen-forties) I was very small
I thought it great fun to chase little girls across
the stony playground, into their dismal toilet-stalls
to pull their hair.  In the boys' toilets
next-door, other boys competed to see
who was the highest pisser over green-slimed walls.

I grew out of my behaviour pretty quickly,
but perhaps other boys grow into it at puberty.

How I hate

the precious designation Work of Art.

If a shit-shifter's work or a grave-digger's
is not Art, then it must be of a Higher Order,
nothing to do with The Dignity of Labour
but with the brave, the fine
humility that mantles the downtroddenly divine.

Every other day

I come across a new word.
How rich our language is becoming !?*वृक 

Today's is wealthist (maybe a person who wants
to be among the wealthiest).
Next week there might be stealthist.

It is SO much easier

to deflect an asteroid
with a rocket
than to create peace
in Palestine.
It has always been simpler
to invade than to persuade.

 

Life is a bit like

reading a library book
with all the wrong phrases underlined.

'94% of a man's body is parking lot.'

wrote Ben Lerner.
Being a solipsistic,
heterosexual male he forgot
to add that 98% of a woman's
body is a scarier statistic.

Holy Mother Russia.

 

Some people's lives are –

 No – some people think that their lives are
stories,
and some people think that other people's lives are
stories.
Some people's stories seem like projections
of actual lives
with a lot of details missing.

My life is just a few tattered chapters
consisting of not-very-well-composed
paragraphs
and poorly-constructed sentences.

It will have to do.

Uruguay,

a little-known, mature democracy,
a 'welfare state'
with stable government,

where no indígenas have been
allowed to survive.

A piece of 1970s Nostalgia.

 

Rights and Responsibilities.

"I can’t talk about women’s rights without talking about community rights. I can’t talk about community rights without talking about the environment we live in and depend on.”

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, founder of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad.

Bullfighting and the Catholic Church.

In October 1940, fervent Catholic dictator Francisco Franco invited Heinrich Himmler to a bullfight at Las Ventas bull-ring in Madrid. It was reported that Himmler, an animal lover and architect of the Nazis’ final solution, was so appalled at the cruelty of the spectacle that he almost fainted.

Bullfighting, an ancient 'pagan' practice with Cretan origins, had been banned in Muslim Spain, and thus became a symbol of Christian resistance. Later it was prohibited by various Christian kings, who considered it unsuitable for aristocrats and gentlemen, with the result that it became increasingly popular among the peasantry and the tiny working-class... 

Since Franco's death, bullfighting's appeal has greatly diminished.

Today's bizarre (slightly scary) creature :

a Blanket Octopus
by Katharine Lu.

Christian Morgenstern

said that sheople
don't so much speakle
as quotle and repeatle.

Here is my version of his poem
The Birth of Philosophy :

Sheep glares at me with shock and awe
as though I were the first biped it saw.
Mesmerising glare!  We stand like we're asleep.
It seems the first time that I have seen a sheep.

Morgenstern's Gallows Songs (1905) are well-known amongst German speakers, and influenced Bertolt Brecht as well as Otto Dix.

My Neologism of the Month

is French : PISCINABLE,

an adjective from piscine meaning a pool,
informs you that, in a garden
attached to a house you might be thinking of buying,
a pool might be constructed.

And from this adjective a noun might be constructed:
PISCINABILITÉ.

It contrasts with an English neologism I saw yesterday:

FUTILITARIANISM.

After a Gallows Song by Christian Morgenstern.

TEMPORALITY

Imperfect and Perfect Past
drank to a friendship made to last.
They toasted Future Simple tense
(which just shows their common sense).

Conditional and Perfect Plu
decided they would join in, too.

Conversation in a pedal-bin.

Tissue 1: 'You wouldn't believe it – I've got snot all through me.'

Tissue 2: 'That's nothing, kid. I stink of semen.'

Tissue 3: 'You've had it easy, sisters – I'm completely saturated with menstrual blood.'

Chorus: So we go to the landfill site,
the landfill site, the landfill site.
Off we go to the landfill site –
diapers, dead dogs and mud.

Dinner without wine

is like sex without laughter.

Pony-tails

look much better on equines

than on humans.

The Company of Men*

Eliza Carthy:

I've given blow-jobs on sofas
To men who didn't want me any more.
Why didn't they tell me before ?

Well, they wouldn't, would they ?
They wanted to have their cake and eat it.
Or eat their cake and keep it.
Cake and more cake, with whipped cream.
Love is just a meme...

*Also the title of a book by Romain Gary.

Beyond Eighty.

It is ridiculous to hold on to life
for the occasional bits of pleasure
you might get hold of through the fog
like food-scraps to a sad but hopeful dog. 

Regret

the assassination of a pig
as much as the shooting of a president.

We are shadows of ignorance
cast over violence.

We don't like human corpses.

Донецьк

Donetsk, 
I discovered today, was formerly known as
Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka),
Stalin and Stalino! 
The inhabitants will be so grateful
if it's renamed Putino.