This year, the Anarchist Olympics

highlights the ancient sport of
Butcher Rugby, in which players
run and kick and push and shove
with shorts and jock-straps
around their ankles,
and nothing worn above. 

Last night's haiku.

On its back
                   the moon
is like an infant
                         waiting to
be ravished by the sun.

From the wrong to the ridiculous.

While English usually borrows from French
pretty elegantly and fairly accurately,
the opposite is true
when French borrows from English.

An early example of wrong was Starter,
which is French for choke
(only cars as old as mine have them).
A recent example of the ridiculous
is Swiper* (the infinitive of a verb)
for which there is already Glisser.
There is no bon mot in French for cadge
(or fadge)
but the French for swipe-card, 
is, I'm sorry to say, Badge.

* Probably not pronounced 'sveep-eh'.

Given three choices

 as to who they thought is the greatest threat to world peace,
27% of Australian respondents chose the Russian president.
The same number chose the Chinese president.

Thirty-one per cent chose the US president...

but opinion-polls are not 100% reliable.

Vulnerable people

tend to like being with other
vulnerable people, because they feel
less vulnerable.  Some of them are bullies.

Quote of the Day.

Liberation,
another suspicious
piece of language...

Diane Seuss, Don't say Paris.

The Problem with Conversation

is that people say silly, stupid things;
and I, through fault of character,
reply with silly, stupid things.

My Great Conspiracy Theory.

The USA will become an oligarchic state.
Not under Trump, but his vengeful successor
JD Vance, who, with his soul-brother,
Vladimir Putin, will have arranged Trump's death
by Ukrainian assassin.

The president of Germany,

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said yesterday that he

“would never have believed that we would one day
have to protect Ukraine from the USA”.

But who is capable or bold
enough to protect the planet
against the enveloping Russo-American-Chinese
consumer-capitalist slime-mould ? 

A little bit of London.

by Mark Wilkins

 

The thinking Greeks

considered, sneered
that the Romans had an anti-culture
(or at best a sub-culture)
and they were not being too judgemental.

The Romans (fairly feared)
ran the southern European,
North African and Near-eastern world
thinking themselves invincible –
until they ran out of lead-poisoned
anti-culture,

as the Americans (like the British
and the French, though less revered)
are doing now
(sugar is the modern poison).

The Chinese, like the Ancient Greeks,
have an 'authentic'
indigenous culture
(that values tiger-penises but not tigers)
now lightly but fatally veneered
with American vulgarity.

*

The thinking Greeks also knew
that religions are crimes
against philosophy.

In Algiers.

I don't think that they are decorated like this any more!

photo by Yusuf Krache, 2014.

Show or shadow ?

A question of translation, both philosophical and kinematic.

Psalm 39:6-8

1599 Geneva Bible
Man walketh in a shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.

1611 King James Bible
Man walketh in a vain show and disquieteth himself in vain.

Only the rich

can savour High Culture,
but they are no more capable
than any of the multitude
of distinguishing good from
bad and mediocre
than those whom they exclude.

Frightening Bad Things Away

 in West Bengal.

photo by Sayan Bose

From my small perspective,

as rarely before,
'evil' is expanding exponentially,
while 'good' increases incrementally,
at best.

 

Sex and Love

"The only man
who showed me
any affection was
my abuser."

During the first term

of Trump’s presidency we talked of the post-truth era;
now we find ourselves in a world in which the truth
is taken out, tortured and shot.
This means that there will be no justice.
This means that anything goes.

Oleksandr Mykhed

 On the third anniversary
of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
we had the scandalous spectacle
of the US voting with Russia
against a British-European
UN resolution in support of Ukraine.

Timothy Garton-Ash

Each new morn, new widows howl,
new orphans cry and Donald Trump 
passes a wild executive order.

Arwa Mahdawi

Entitlement.

Except in the bureaucratic sense,
nobody, not even presidents or priests,
are entitled to anything,
not even dominion
over the beasts.

Civilisation depends
(amongst much else)
on the concept of superiority.

Civilisation depends
on our belief that we are
intrinsically superior
to all other life upon the planet,
and that life is superior to non-life.

To dispute this is insanity:
you will exile yourself
beyond the cruel Pale of Humanity.

The future of travel

between very-warm Britain and Ireland
or Warsaw and Kyiv ?

Jewish Humanity.

Not forgetting, I hope,
the outrageous stupidity
of Hamas' Palestinian-annihilating action
of October 2022,
Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW),
a Palestinian medical NGO,
said it had confirmed that 162 medical staff
remained in Israeli detention,
including some of Gaza’s most senior physicians,
and a further 24 were missing
after being taken from hospitals during the conflict.

*

There may once have been beaches on Mars.

Good Swiss, Bad Swiss-French.

Paul Klee: painter
of happy and amusing pictures
who liked to take a line for a walk.

"Le Corbusier", actually called
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret: architect
of machines for living in,
who effectively herded tens of thousands
of people to depression in depressing,
oppressive buildings that invited
vandalism and demolition.

Henry Kissinger famously said:

To be an enemy of the USA is dangerous;
to be a friend is fatal.

Nelson Mandela famously said:

When two neighbouring countries fight each other,
just know that the USA visited one of them.

Jeffrey Sachs recently said:

In America, if you don't like 'the other side',
you don't negotiate with them,
you try to overthrow them.
If you can't do it covertly, you do it overtly.

Mr Sachs is, infamously, the great proponent
of Disaster Capitalism, which brought
misery to millions and Putin to power.

I have heard talk of

Digital Twinning.
In the absence of a father
one might apply for
a Digital Father
that I could (digitally)
kick in the balls.

Much higher than wider.

we are the tell-tale

tall tale species.

The self

is not an entity,
but a vapour, a miasma.

On technology,

climate change and other problems
caused by technology:

"human ingenuity usually arrives too late
to solve the specific problem
for which it was intended."

~ Robert D. Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy (2000)

Knit your own sea-creature.

 

Fluo Spiny Squat Lobster
by James Lynott,

A well-cut suit:

I've always wondered what it was.
I wouldn't recognise one
if it bit me in the balls.
But I think it may mean a suit
worn by a rich obese person
or diplomat
which somehow makes him
seem less obviously fat.

Dirty Windows :

I like them.

This is how 'primeval temperate'
European forest looked

and still looks
in a tiny remaining fragment
somehow surviving
in the West of Ireland.

Correl Glen, county Fermanagh.

Brain-rot.

Ever since e-mail got going
internet users have been prey
(not only to spam and scams, but also)
to internet-induced brain-rot.

I'm pleased to announce that I have
only three or four e-mail correspondents
plus the occasional message from my bank,
and I don't use anti-social media.

As for the smartphone, I turn it on
once a day, with lowered pants
during a Bowel Movement,
to check on forecasted temperatures
on behalf of my rewarding plants.

Hair and headdresses

have, for reasons of social differentiation
and cohesion been very important to human groups.

On watching Antonioni's excellent and enigmatic Blow-up
the other evening I realised why
I opted out of the 1960s:  I hated the 'pop-music'
and couldn't bear to have my hair long. 
I was happy that I so soon went bald.

I like buzz-cuts with beards on males.
Or else long tresses, the other extreme.
I was happy that I grew a beard.

I don't like pony-tails.

Italians have been shocked

by the statistic that a woman is murdered
every three days in their republic.

But that just shows how nice Italians are:

in Germany a woman is killed every day, usually by her partner or ex.

David Hemmings as Thomas

in Antonioni's Blow-up (1966):

"There's nothing like a little disaster
for sorting things out."

EU invades UK :

no problem!
Give them Northern Ireland
and then they'll go away.

A long sentence

by Richard Flanagan, Tasmanian
author of The Long Road to the Deep North.

Once I had the idea of writing the book [Question 7]
as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima,
my father living and me being born – once I understood
that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me –
then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place.

Sometimes

it must surely be
that some people's enmity
is less challenging,
less onerous than their amity.

I think it may have shrunk.

Was it the Fesoterodine ?

Those happy few

of the Dark Enlightenment

inhale Dark Oxygen

for their Voodoo.

Meanwhile, in Europe alone,
farmers are abandoning
one million hectares
(2.4 million acres; 10,000 square kilometres)
every year – to what ?

Where civilisation is peaceful.

 

Bengaluru, Southern India by Idris Mohamed.

Language:

The Primal Scam. 

First use.

" ...to begin with
people used potato leaves to make hats
but didn’t eat the potatoes.”

Museums

belong in museums...
where they soon will
scorch and flood and crumble
in the sad museum of the Earth.

A painting, a sculpture and a photograph.

'Paule Vézelay': Landscape 1946.

? by Rimantas Izdelis

Jerzy Durczak: Autumn in a Polish Forest

Russian Dolls.

To live
in the moment
you have to live
in a bubble
in a bubble
in a bubble...

The current PotUS

is so beyond-words
bizarre that I would not be surprised to learn
that there is a thriving market for his
preserved and authenticated turds.

He wanted to show my pictures

in his unreliable gallery. But
for even a small space
they are not 'appropriate'.
They are too intimate.

Prophetic self-portrait, 1988.

Many paintings look uncomfortable
in galleries, especially Van Goghs
in Amsterdam, permanently tortured
in a vicious concrete box.

But alas, poor prisoners!
there's nowhere else to place them.

Dear God, we

give thanks to Thee
for the invention of L.E.D.
because we
in our advancing senility
have an unfortunate tendency
to leave lights on
from dusk to dawn
and even longer.

The Unruly Mind.

Last night, lying in bed
listening to ABC Classic's
thrown-together
early morning programme,
I calculated
(using my fingers and my
ever-pullulating head
and my bedside clock,
plus the not-too-competent
continuity-announcements)
that Adelaide
(for a while, at least)*
is 10½ hours ahead

Then switched to
the occasionally-excellent
Medi-1 (ميدى1 طرب) 
DAB radio Tarab instead.

*depending on unsynchronised time-tinkerings
in different hemispheres according to season.

For millions

in The Christian World, now, near The End,
alcohol* is a friend, not an enemy;
and The Government is an enemy,
not a friend.

*or similar easily-obtained mind-comforter

Confession of a child

of a 'Welfare State'.

"It's not so much that I
'would like to die'
as that I feel that I
am lacking liveliness
& would like to slip
forever and conveniently,
easefully into soft emptiness. 

The Triumph of Mankind.

Look!
Behold!  See!
We have 
split the infinite
and set Nothing free. 

Freehold!

 Great Real Estate Opportunity. Going cheap.

Unbelievable! Who would have thought it?

 

"Reality is a trance.

Your reality is a trance of your own making.
Or someone else’s making who doesn’t have
your greatest good in mind.”

This wise observation was made by one of the many bogus gurus
from India who have abused minds and bodies in Europe and North America since the 1950s - and, along their way, inevitably have said many wise things.

On the same theme,
even the nastiest dictators can spout wisdom:

"It causes me some anxiety that the world is controlled by childish North Americans."  

Generalísimo Francisco Franco

Jerusalem, 1942.

 "It looks like there will be trouble here ere long
because of the 'illegal immigrants' who keep arriving
from Europe, scuppering their boats
and wading ashore."

~ from To War with Whitaker, the diaries of
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly.

The way of things.

Although the first snowdrop
     (which flowered on my near-future
      grave 10 days ago)
like the last rose of summer
     (which dropped its petals in January) –
is celebrated in words and music,
the last snowdrop languishes
amongst the crocuses and daffodils.

Sri Lankans don't

'see their civil war or their tsunami as traumatic –

in fact, when an army of coubsellors descended upon the nation 

after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation, because it was undermining people's resilience.

Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for 'well-being' in the Mental State of the World in 2023 report, despite such denial of the Gospel of Trauma.

'Individuals experience the world according to how they are taught to experience the world.'

~ Niklas Serning

In a hyper-individualistic culture there is a tendency to experience the world through resentment.

The only irrational animal

uses its intelligence mainly
to create hierarchies
in order to conquer and control
its surroundings, 

and now to create
and control more powerful
and competitive intelligences
which it will inevitably,

at last powerlessly, hate.

*

'A man walks on the Kolyma highway, nicknamed “the road of bones”. It was built in the 1930s by political prisoners held in the gulags, and links the port town of Magadan to the town of Nizhny Bestiakh.
The construction, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, claimed between 250,000 and 1 million lives.
They are buried next to or directly under the 1,219-mile (1,961 km) road, part of which is still not finished as it is an extremely difficult project despite modern equipment.'

Well, well -

isn't that just great ?

Sounds to me a bit like
fiddling while Rome burns.

Poets

are people whom posh people
choose to make them
feel acceptably exceptional.

The Museum of Empathy

One of these photos
disgusts me and makes my flesh creep.
Both were published on the same day
in the same article
in the same newspaper.

Adam Pearson.

Kim Kardashian

Crunch Time.

This insane clock
(here photographed on my 1960 tiled floor)
was free-on-the-street
in Caylus yesterday.
I couldn't resist it.
Note the squiggly second hand.

"And what do you want

to be when you grow up ?"

I wanted to be an Oracle.

Unfortunately

I became a barnacle.

A lovely photo

which reminds me of my previous home.

One of Banksy's

less adolescent efforts.

Banksy Museum (!) Madrid

Stigmata –

Jesus probably had no more than four
(maybe only two)
(plus a nasty spear-wound)

while women in their millions
from Alaska to China
since the beginning of time
have suffered the pains and the stigma
of the bleeding vagina.

No more-appropriate picture available 
from Google.

Texas, 1987

by Wim Wenders

 

The Hookworms of Hope.

We are the only earthly animal
which can 'take the long view'
with our lazy brains and simple eyes.

[and also, or consequently]

we are the only earthly animal
to direct itself towards its own demise.

Shock and Awe.

Diogenes (reputedly and probably) did,
but he eschewed all property,
and would have considered 'selfies'
(and cameras) obscenely vulgar.

In 1788,

in Paris, under cover of night,
there began a huge operation
to remove millions of buried bodies,
dug up and loaded on to ox carts
that rumbled across the city,
each accompanied by a priest
to what were then the suburbs,
to what are now The Catacombs.

Might this have contributed to the quasi-Revolution a year later ?

Little café, big ice stupa

storing water for the dry months,
Gya, Ladakh.

Some human brains

have survived longer than Stonehenge.
the Pyramids, etc., that is to say,
no longer than the twinkling
of a crocodile eye.

Quote of the Day :

 "I'm not a macho film-maker."

- Mike Leigh

And so he is one of the best...ever,
along with Kiarostami, Bergman,
Tarkovsky, Fassbinder...

Not only Europe.

"Europe has chosen false prophets at every opportunity."  

Jens Bjørneboe

Today, I stumbled

(indeed I fell)
upon another hero:
a pub-haunting
grungy 'common labourer'
who painted in his sitting-room
and never sought to sell.

Only his immediate family knew.
So, after he died and his house
was open to visitors, there was a queue.

This is his jacket...

This is his bedroom...

.

..and these are some of his paintings :

I admire his modesty 

at least as much as
his ability, his sheer
and sympathetic honesty.

He was once a boxer.

Read more in the Manchester Evening News
and the Guardian.

It's Chinese New Year.

Everyone has yet another face.
Everybody has a phone.
Not everybody has a place.

Holocaust Day, 2025

As Kings and other heads of state
gather to remember the liberation
of Auschwitz 80 years ago,

'

Internally displaced'  Palestinians
stream along Al Rashid road in central Gaza
towards their bombed-out houses
in the ruined north.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic...>

End of small, peculiar episode.

If environmental collapse doesn't destroy us
algorithms will,
'to punish our arrogance' super-Biblically.
Maybe Sisyphus and his as yet
unnamed bomb get up the hill
and explode in super-volcanic effulgence.
Maybe, from Pandora's box
Prometheus pulls out
not Hope, not frankincense, 
but Artificial Intelligence.

17-10-2024

The good art

of making friends.
The bad art
of making bad friends.
The poor art
of making 'useful' friends.
The sad art
of losing friends constantly.

I never had imaginary friends,
for I had books and a teddy
and no imagination.

Old friends are like old
or fading enthusiasms.
Most of my few friends
are dead - some twenty years ago.

Of friendship
I always had too-high an expectation.

And now to the Vomitorium.

The popularity of Carl Bloch's
'masterpiece',
Prometheus Unbound
would make you
more than weep.

People are fascinating –

more for their pathologies
than for their lamentably
few interesting interests.

Unfortunately, you need
to know them for a long time,
or too intimately, to discover
their fascinating pathologies.

Branding.

All dreams
are henceforth
American.

Jesus said

Leave your job, your restricting family,
get up (if necessary from your bed)
and follow me.  A long time later
Paul came, turned Jesus on his head
(he of the thorny crown)
and invented Christianity.

Allegedly,
Peter was crucified upside down.

Jottings of the Day.

If you have pretensions,
ambitions to be phatic,
you need to be more than
slightly charismatic

*

Deft I never was
in anything.
Deaf I am
becoming.

*

Inner-auditory
involuntary
creativity:
when you have earworms
all the time
occasionally they
get confused.
(Apologies, no rhyme.)

*

Money
demeans us
and makes us
(even if we weren't already)
mean.

*

If novels and newspapers
are not total rot,
the richer you are
the more nervy you get.

*

To call a Spade a Spade
has less to do with horticulture
than with skin-colour;
and Clubs are often
bruisingly exclusive.
(It was only today that I learned
the composition of a Club Sandwich.)

*

With only a little weed, a sneeze
becomes an orgasm in the nose.

*

We didn't need 'science' to tell us
that we are an environmental curse;
on the contrary, science ensured
that our damage gets worse and worse.

*

Did I hear correctly ?  'They' of the Israeli nation
were vaccinating Palestinians against polio
so that they can better endure
stinking-camp starvation.

*

The problem, Senator Yeats
(Ireland's supremely-phatic scrawler),
is that the Gyres don't widen;
but get smaller.

Probably because young males

have been fed better, and with more meat,

and women may well like that.

Parent, Peer, Pædophile...

To feel shame
you have to be made
to feel ashamed.

Or are we all born
with the shame that Jehovah
put into Adam
who passed it on to Eve 
– or is that merely guilt ?

I have started painting again.

This is the second of a series
of calligraphic paintings.

Solitude, January 2025.

Too many thoughts.

Pensive, inexpensive, I write down 

two or three ideas every day.  

A few weeks later

I throw most of them away.

I am not a good communicator.

The constriction of Luxury.

How limiting to have been born
into a family and a home with
running water, indoor water-closet,
bath or shower, electric light and power,
the telephone...the internet and to
take them all for granted,
not to know frugality !  Since 1965
I have acquired all these things,
and now wonder at the cost
to the environment.

 

Be careful what you read

in Medical Journals and the 'Yellow Press'.

In 1914, The Lancet and various popular newspapers in the UK republished an article by the doctor Edward Huntington Williams on cocaine in the southern United States. Williams claimed that any Black man who took up the Cocaine Habit was ‘absolutely beyond redemption. His whole nature is changed by the habit. Sexual desires are increased and perverted; peaceful men become quarrelsome and timid ones courageous.’

Sidney Felstead, author of The Underworld of London (1923), claimed to be similarly appalled by how often ‘some pleasure-sated girl dies from an overdose of cocaine or morphia, supplied to her by some black or yellow parasite.’

And so it continued...and, presumably, continues.

Linguistic coincidences

are legion, some felicitous,
some unfortunate, many 
misleading or confusing.
Famously, Gift is German for poison.
More to the point, Fear in English
spells in Irish (a different
pronunciation of) man.

My new E-friend

and her human friend.

 

I still don't quite know what they meant

when they told me that I was
letting myself down. I felt
middling. Nor could I think
of what to be (other than myself)
when I grew up. I never grew up.
They wanted me to
do something with my life.
This meant getting a degree in medicine
(I didn't get any degree at all)
and, presumably, a classy and comely wife.
What I mostly did was to appal.

Counter-intelligence.

Because of Hollywood,
intelligent films lie in a basement
underworld of 'eggheads' and 'aesthetes'
lest they infect the general stupidity.

Socrates Wept.

 from The Guardian today:

  How Europeans see the world has for centuries been shaped and controlled by mega-influencers: not least by the churches and their monastic schools; more recently by 'Enlightenment' educators and their successors, whose practitioners ignored Greek philosophy almost entirely.

   Where you get religion you get brainwashing.
Capitalism is a much less divided religion than Christianity or Islam.

Eyes squeezed into the banal gaze,

there's just a hair's breadth where 'humanity' exists
between the trivial and the terrible.
We act relentlessly in an educated daze.

The Conspiracy-

-theory of everything:
ownership of land.

Asexual human power.