Nobody sees

the indecency of happiness.

An academic question.

Does generic, essential human evil
come from generic, essential human stupidity –

or the other way round ?

Or are they, perhaps, coterminous ?

Jacques Derrida

opined that a totalitarian state is one in which no one is allowed secrets, as in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. 
Like many pronouncements by French intellectuals,
this is a silly remark,
since there are totalitarian states which actually encourage secrets
in order to employ people to ferret them out.  e.g. (notoriously)
the German Democratic Republic.

Another kind of totalitarian state is one
in which the consciousness
of everyone is composed of secrets;
in which other people are entirely enigmatic. 
This is the one I find myself in.
Everyone and their gods move in mysterious ways.

I am on the outside looking in
at the secretive people on the inside
who never look outward, nor up, nor down,
nor sideways, nor even inward
except in narcissistic reflection.

I am also looking in at myself
appearing to be a tiny loose part
of the state and status quo.

Identity is only appearance
both from without and within,
is only what is on show.

Just like any religion,

education
is a process
of stultification.

Thinking about a painting

that combines the parable of Lazarus
with the myth of the Minotaur.

Is the Minotaur licking the leper's sores
while Dives dines and debauches upstairs in his palace ?

Or is the Minotaur himself the embodiment of wealth
carousing in his moral Labyrinth
while Lazarus lies at his gate ?

Or is the Minotaur languishing alone with his sores
or displaying them for passers-by ?

Certainly this latter would be the easiest
for a painter primitif to try,

though since I want the Minotaur to have
a human or male-Gorgon head upon an otherwise
abattoir-ready bull's body

the weeping sores would present
an insurmountable difficulty.

Probably,

in the choked sewer of civilisation
where we are all turds,

the best I could ever say about people
(including myself)
is that they are not intentionally evil –

but these are just words.

'Post-natal Depression.'

'Are you a man who has suffered from PND?'
asks The Guardian newspaper.

I (and millions of others, both male and female)
have suffered bouts of post-natal depression
ever since I was born.  It's basically a result
of entering this world of misery, trauma and grief.
A primal form of PTSD.

The Entropic Principle.

I love the universality
of the phrase SET UP TO FAIL.

It can be applied to anything –
from a poorly-funded local bus-service
to The (overfunded) Internet
to Democracy
to Christianity
to  'Western Civilisation'
to the evolution of Homo sapiens
to Life on Earth
and the existence of
anything and everything.

'Sensible people'

simplify everything.

More than a jot.

You wanted to kiss
and not confide.
I wanted to confide
and not to kiss.
A kiss means little.
A confidence means a lot.

The 'solutions' devised by humans

for problems created by humans
usually cause further, greater
problems for the biosphere.

Probably, the only 'clean' solution is
Nuclear War.  Unfortunately,
the opportunity for human (and my)
annihilation for the betterment of the planet
was missed in 1962.

Recycling has been promoted by the plastics industry
as a key solution to the growing problem of plastic waste.
But a study has found that recycling itself could be releasing
huge quantities of microplastics into water and the air.

Dicks are hilarious.

Vaginas are mysterious.
Both have been afflicted
by psychotic taboos,
mainly by disconnected
male Muslims, Christians and Jews.

The best experience

at the multi-exhibitor
outdoor art-show today
was the smell of new-mown hay.

 

Valentine Prax

(1897-1981) was the Algerian-born wife (of Catalan-Sardinian extraction) to the Belarussian sculptor Yossip Zadkine.  They married in 1920 at Bruniquel, a beautiful village in the lower Averyon Gorges, now famous for its Magdalenian cave and Neanderthal remains on the other side of the river.  Bruniquel has an impressive 12th century castle (largely intact) and various sculptural details such as this fine spout.

from www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/zxBruniquel.htm

They then went to live at Caylus, about 20 km north.
In Caylus, Zadkine carved his massive Crucifixion
of the naked Christfrom a single chunk of elm,
which was placed in Caylus' 12th-13th century church in 1954.

(It is very difficult to photograph, and should be seen in situ.)

The couple then moved farther north, and on to Paris
where he was a friend of Henry Miller in Montparnasse
and was represented by the character Borowski
in Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934).  During WW II
they lived in Manhattan.

Valentine, of course, is under-appreciated.
Though some of her paintings are, frankly, not very good,
others are very fine indeed.

Here is a selection.

(I apologise for the imperfect arrangement. Google Blogger uses extremely old and clunky technology of around 2004, and it is extremely difficult to arrange photos as one would wish.)

Un dimanche sur la terrasse.

Nature-morte.

L'atelier du menuisier.
(The joiner's workshop.)

L'ivrogne (The Drunkard).

The Drunkard, other way up.

Landscape.

Portrait of an unnamed woman.

The basket of fish.

This last, superb, picture was sold for a mere 3,250 € a Christies in 2017.

I could just have bought it with my savings at 3,500 €,
and treasured it for the rest of my life.

In her Montparnasse studio.

Normal

people repeat mindlessly that despair is useless.

But hope is worse : it is destructive.

Persistent Prudery.

Yesterday I went for an ultrasound scan
of my 'waterworks', because of my need to piss
every two hours.  I shocked the young woman
who operated the scanner (which is just like
the old roller photo-scanners of the 1990s)
because  (in the 30° afternoon temperature,
in this time of pervasive pornography
and genital transplants)
I had no underwear beneath my colourful,
baggy, aerating Nepalese pants.

Time

might be the (or a) container of the universe.

The English polymath Priestley thought it was an omelette.

https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size

Taxidermy.

My friend the Minotaur
lurking in the palace.

photo © Jamie E Murray

A Manichæan Rhyme.

Dr Devil and Mr Jehovah
enjoy the game of
You Move Over.

Roll over, sweet Satan!
Roll over, Jehovah!

There they wrestle
on the cosmic sofa

which is now in poor condition,
soon to be cast unto perdition

along with the moths and skin-mite shit
that we are, in the thick of it.

The latest borrowing

that I've come across
from English into French :

Un food truck assurera le repas de midi.

Imagine a 16-wheeler providing a mid-day meal
for patrons and friends of the Animal Shelter
to which I give my unearned money.

But probably it's just a van with a hatch
offering tasteless quiches
and bits of dead animals reduced to 
acceptable nothingness.

I'll be giving the SPA* Open Day
an unpatronly miss.

*Society for the Protection of Animals
in one of the most animal-unprotecting
countries in the world.

Sanity.

There are some people who are so sane
that they make sanity totally repugnant.

A publisher's blurb on the Bible

composed by ChatGPT :

 for those looking for their next self-help read:

The ultimate guide to life, love, and eternal salvation! With enough drama and plot twists to rival Game of Thrones, it’s sure to keep you entertained for thousands of years to come. Laugh, cry, and gasp in awe at the epic stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and Jesus and his miracles. Don’t miss out on this divine masterpiece!

 

Unpopular Opinion.

Doctors are encouraged
and like to think that they,
generally speaking,
are Doing Good.
But, viewed globally, they have,
through medical industrialisation,
catastrophically increased
the planet's destructive
human population.

We all know to our cost

that invention
is much easier
(and much less successful)
than prevention.

'I have never taken any exercise,

except sleeping and resting,
and I never intend to take any.
Exercise is loathsome.
It cannot be of any benefit when you are tired –
and I am always tired.'

– Mark Twain (S.L.Clemens)

Kissies and Huggies.

I didn't come from
a kissy-huggy family.
We were Presbyterian.
But there was no lack of love.

By the time that I was twenty
I had kissed (erotically) just one
a damaged (female) Dane.

When I was nearly forty I visited
a wonderful, big Dalí show in Paris.
There, in the Centre Pompidou,
by a broken towel-machine in the cramped
and crowded ground-floor excretory facility
I met a man who introduced me
to man-kissing. He was bearded...

I can kiss men only if their mouths
are framed by hair. Like cunts ? 
But I don't remember much kissing there
when I conformed to sexual norms.

Depending on individual histories
sexual predilections can take many
(and many less cuddly-kissy) forms.

MEDUSA.

 The hair on the Great Gorgon's scalp

was composed of cheerfully-active snakes.

Her piercing gaze 'turned men to stone'

or froze their hot testosterone'.

My serpents wriggle inside my head

they'll keep on trying to get out - or help -

until I'm dead.

Even Big Brother's pants

are watching you.

At this very moment

you are connected
to the Narcissinternet, 
and poised to read
a very Bad Blog indeed:

Jesus (probably asexual)
unwittingly gave birth to a greedy
and violent cult of blood and sacrifice

while Satan was thinking of the needy
and pleasuring himself
with a devilshly clever onanistic device.

(But maybe you have read worse
 in equally spavined verse...)

Translation traps

of words that look the same in different languages
might be counted in their thousands
or tens of thousands.  I occasionally read
Danish newspaper-headlines. Today
I found a subtle, funny
little language-trap :

'hvidvask' [hvid=white; vask=wash]
does not mean whitewash
but laundering (of money).

On Hindsight.

(All animals look good from behind.
Many humans look better from behind
than from afront.)

Foresight would be a nice thing to have. 
Maybe that was what the Straight Male Jews
were hoping to get
when they offered their foreskins
to the unmentionable Yahwe
in a classic Jewish bargain –
which turned out to be
the Notorious Jehovah-Swindle
and a futile religious rite..

(Then there is the dreadful, sometimes dubious
transparency of second-sight...)

from my American-British dictionary.

Bullhorn = Megaphone.

This is unusual, because American terms are usually more sensible than British ones – e.g. sidewalk vs pavement.  

In the good and bad

old days, people wrote letters
with pens (latterly sometimes ball-points)
(or, in my case, with typewriters)
on paper – some times several sheets
of paper, which they folded, and placed
in envelopes on which they had written
or had typed an address.

A stamp was put on it, and it was posted.
The addressee, on receiving it, would know
where it was posted, and, almost always,
where it was written, because people wrote
the place (if it was different from their home-address)
and date at the beginning of the letter,
or, sometimes, at the end. 

The sender usually knew where the letter
would arrive, and could easily imagine it
(however inaccurately).

The problem I have with 'personal' e-mails,
as with cell-phones, is that the transit is obscure.
Communications are sent from and
received in unimaginable places –

and we have become
crypto-entities in cyberspaces.

An uncalled-for thought on the endemic thought-control,

otherwise known as Brainwashing.

"...overwhelmed by depression, she took her own life." 
(Granta 105, page 161, my italics)

This is NormalSpeak for
She was overwhelmed by life and killed herself.

But she might actually have taken it back for a refund
which might (or might not) in some shape or form,
been forthcoming.

That Day

when the first Great American Bomb fell (or was it hurled ?)
was when American Conformity was loosed upon the world.

for the Great Willie Yeats

From an Ancient Scroll.

There are many Species
of the Non-entity called Death :

Flying
Crawling
Slow
Spotted
Pale
Softly-spoken
Caterwauling
Wrinkled
Winter
New-born
Pied
Mad March
Unbroken
Tie-dyed

Spot the dog

in this picture of a sunflower field
seen through a windscreen in rain.

CAMISSARY

I haven't got fatter or thinner since I was twenty.
So it's not astounding that I have a plenitude
a grand chamissitude of shirts,

one dating back to 1975 (when I was 33),
all of them second-hand,
except for one my mother made for me
on her treadle-machine in the front room
of her house in Clonlee Drive, Belfast.

She used to say (with only a little irony)
that she felt as if the next shirt or blouse
she put on would be her last. 

I won't live long enough to properly
enjoy all these shirts –
unless I behave like modern folk
and wear each just for a day –
and then, without a second thought
just throw it away.

(That gives me another month...)

The brambles are winning.

 

Trolley with removable tray-shelves.

Bought on Sunday at a village street sale
for 25 euros. Found to be too fandangly
as a plant-stand for my house – and too small;
passed to my friend the antique dealer, 
who sold it on Wednesday for 70 euros.
So I got my money back.

The trays/shelves were originally glazed.

Since the Beginning of Time

there have been more words than humans.

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day.

 

A Diogenean Syllogism

in memoriam J-P Sartre

Though it probably doesn't exist
Hell is presumed to be Bad.

Humans are Evil
and too many of us exist.

Ergo: Hell is Too Many People
and must be bad.