There's nothing like an open-air hot-spring bath

 on a cold January morning.

Taken when I had more hair.

Then, nicely warmed up, I go and
waken my canine pals.

Fifty-three

years ago
this was me.

Longer ago than that,
a rhinoceros sniffed Dalí 

More recently,
in Aït Mansour,
I took tea.

ⴰⵏⵜⵓⵏⵉ, ⴰⵉⵜ ⵎⴰⵏⵙⵓⵔ

A fine machine

on which to ride into 2026.

Kidus Tesera  and his wood-framed bicycle

Pandora's Box

Hope, unfortunately,
springs
(or dribbles out) eternal
from human cocks.

'The Secret of Eternal Life'

If it's a secret
I don't want to know it.

Snowdrop today !

Hooray !

Outside my door, 29-12-2025.

My friend Bob's

equinoctial, Christmas and New Year
(and anytime-you-like) card.

Thank-you, Bob. 

To add to (and depict some) December gaiety
here is a painting by a splendid painter 
who once lived here in Caylus
(with her husband, Yosip Zadkine).

Valentine Prax - Drunkard

Bromance in Florida.

 

Was this another Bromance ?

Armenian Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan 
(Անաստաս Հովհաննեսի Միկոյան, right)

was the only one of the original Bolsheviks
to survive, and indeed, steadfastly outlive Georgian
Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin (left).

also from Wikipedia:

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი), represented in Russian as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили; pre-1918: Іосифъ Виссаріоновичъ Джугашвили) adopted the alias "Stalin" during his revolutionary career, and made it his legal name after the October Revolution.

We anti-beings,

cut-out creatures of the universe,
live as if we were significant.

photo by Sergei Gapon

 

Inequality of Sympathy.

The housed-and-well-fed

bereaved

grieving 

or angry

should have a passing,

discomforting thought

for the malnourished bereaved 

who are homeless and hungry.

 

On the Feast of Holy Solitude.

The temperature was just two degrees

when I woke up on Christmas Mo[u]rn 

I put on my new moccasins (hardly worn)

made in the distant orient (Cathay),

my old but clean green corduroys worn at the knees,

and a clean shirt (only slightly torn)

bought with small money wisely spent,

and went downstairs to breakfast

on delicious cold porridge

made last Saturday 

from bulghur-like pinhead oatmeal,

with fromage-blanc and half a lactase-pill,

and very dark coffee from Rwanda 

in deepest, starkest Africay, 

filched from a supermarket 12 miles away.

*

Oscar Wilde

said shallowly
that Outcasts always mourn.

But the unreviled

Inkept, sometimes profoundly careworn,

don't so frequently rejoice
on the back-side of Paradise.

'Waste not, want not.'

Waste of resources

Waste of space

Industrial waste

Human waste

Life of waste

Waste of life

Time of waste

Waste of Time

Time misplaced

Van Gogh admired Cézanne

but Cézanne, the old grunter,
did not admire van Gogh.
By comparing these two self-portraits
it's easy to see which is the 'better painter'.

Two Portraits.

The first, by Vincent van Gogh, is known as
Portrait de Paysan (1889). But it is actually
a portrait of Jean Barral, whose parents were
wicker-workers (basket-makers) and who himself
(then 28 years old) tended land close to
where Vincent was being looked after
in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
He had not been identified
until long after his death in 1942,
so no-one ever asked him about the painter.
He might not even have remembered the portrait,
which of course was not sold
until long after Vincent's death.

The second (much smaller)
is a piece of poker-work by J.L.
which I bought at a village sale
in Rouergue around 2014 for two euros.
Unknown artist (in unusual medium),
unknown subject, unknown date. Very nice
to have, especially at the price!

I would prefer a living elephant.

Twelfth-century reliquary
in Burgos Cathedral, Spain.

I wonder if a non-Arab writer of the kufic script
copied a line from left to right
and had to squeeze it in ?

The peacock was a symbol of immortality

from Sumerian times.

Peacock on the palm-Tree of Life,
Iran, late 20th century.

Would Sartre's hell

of other (or 'other') people
be tolerable if they peeled
off their masks ?
Or would they still repel ?

How many stars

has The Hotel of Non-existence ?

I've pushed the table

against the wall.
Who's going to dine with me ?
Nobody at all.

My only friend here
doesn't like my food
and likes to eat in solitude.

 

The immensely learned and distinguished

professor Sven Beckert believes
that the origins of capitalism were in Aden
(the port-city of southern Yemen) in 1150 CE.
But I in my ignorant foolishness suggest
that capitalism could not have started without
the economic upheaval and stimulus
of the First Crusade, which connected France
directly with the 'Middle East',
via the four Frankish kingdoms of Palestine

The First Crusade (at the end of the 11th century)
would not have occurred
without the huge relief that the Year 1,000
had not brought the expected end of the world.
 
Many years ago I read somewhere
that the first capitalist enterprise
in Europe financed by shares or joint-stock
was (one or more of) the floating water-mills of Toulouse*.

*At the time a Cathar city.  Did Cathars join in any of the Crusades ?  Google etc. can tell me only about The Cathar Genocide, alias the Albigensian Crusade and its concomitant land-grab by Northerners.

What they don't tell you

about Asperger's:
when you get old
it may creep back
and take a hold.

The Chosen and the Unchosen

15 Jews were killed in Australia because they were Jews
– a few chosen by terrorists and by the world's news.

150,000 Sudanese have been killed in Sudan
because they existed and were not chosen.

photo by Izhar Khan

Across a desk, behind a window.

Governance
reduces everything
but itself.

And the government
is as much your friend
as the police.

The Nose

 

'Neurodivergence'

Minorities have mushroomed
in my lifetime. Only in my eighties
did I realise that I am an untypically
eye-contacting poly-æsthetic Aspy.
Like many Aspies
I don't like groups
or ceremonies. 

*

Now I learn
that I'm not just different and dissident
but also limerent.  

I still remember my first and only girlfriend
of sixty years ago, at least twice a week
with pangs. I've seen her Bornholmian house
on Google Earth, maybe even her car -
though I don't know if she can drive
or indeed if she's still alive.

It was another fifteen years before
I found my next voluptuous
(though not heartfelt)
sweet lover - queer
(not capable of repression or guilt
I cruised him in a WC)
but now barely remembered. 

Then, resultantly, sometimes exultantly
came another...and another...and another.
Some have faded utterly.

I am maybe more encumbered
by pangs of memory
for my second, final, comparatively-recent
fleshly passion (just as brief)
of twenty years ago
and our delicious, ultra-pleasant,
multi-sensual lechery...

Strange, serial monogamy !

Tim Berners-Lee,

inventor of the Word-wide Web,
asked recently on the BBC
how he'd manage,
if he were to be
permanently off-line
said: I'd be fine.

The name means "no water"

because the Koala gets all it needs
from eucalyptus leaves. It sleeps much of the time
because so much energy is required
to digest and detoxify the leaves. 

Moreover, can eat only a few of the hundred species of eucalyptus that grow in Australia, so its habitats, always very limited, are now extremely vulnerable, due to ever-encroaching destruction.

Weakly-interacting Massive Particles.

When two wimps collide, they can annihilate one another.

read more >

Beauty is not Truth.

 I have been a victim
of the æsthetic fallacy
and a pathetic policy
of trusting people
I think are beautiful.

This is my inspiration

for my next self-portrait.
It is by my favourite portrait-painter.

Hans Holbein the Younger.

My very different prostrate subject from 1985.

Self, by photocopier.

Ça va ? Wie geht's ?

Actually, I'm feeling pretty good
but we're not intimate and you don't
want to hear about my current stage
of joyful solitude in old age –
so I ignore your question. 
                                        I much prefer
Hello (Hail-oh! from 1830) or Wotcher (What cheer!).
Informal French has a good solution: Salut!
which means Good health! with overtones
of simple salutation, like Hi! in English
which comes from Nordic Hej! 
which also produced the slightly butch
abrasive Hey!
Dutch Hoi gave us the maritime Ahoy!
and Hallo! comes from Frisian as well as Dutch.

If there is to be no actual conversation
(God save us from that in the middle of a street!)
I think that the best greeting
 is an elegant, friendly wave,
though prissy people don't think that it's
a proper way to behave.
If you're Irish, beannachtaí! (blessings)
is elegant, respectful, unintrusive and discreet,
unlike [How's) about ye ? from Belfast.
God be with you was once common in believers' English,
like Ireland's ancient Dia duit.

How's the crack ?
was a phrase borrowed by Ulster folk from Northern English.
Crack (the word for a good bout of conversation rather than passive-aggressive 'banter') was 'culturally appropriated'
and had its spelling Oirishised,

rather as the English Julie-the-Jig
dressed in her birthday rig,
showing her thingumajig

was mumbled into sheela-na-gig.

Mike White's most countercultural belief

(apparently)
is that the current focus on
(not to say obsession with)
identity is imprisoning,
not liberating.

Unlike dogs, we are so blocked
by our inner questioning
that we rarely have an idea
of how others are thinking.

*writer, director...
creator of The White Lotus, a TV series,
apparently.

Gewürztraminer

My second-favourite white wine (from Alsace)
costs twice as much as my favourite (which is local).
But as the old saw says, Variety is the Spice of Life.

Gewürz is German for Spice.
Traminer is German for from Taormina, part of Italy since 1921.

'They’re selling everything as trauma :

how our emotional pain became a product.'

Emotional pain is not only encouraged,
but actually 'whipped up'
where it is seen by the Associated Psycho-industries
to be lacking.

Though obviously not in Gaza, West Sudan,
Ukraine, et cetera.

Time is less

a Great Healer,
more a sticking-plaster.

Frida Kahlo Dreaming.

El Sueño (In Bed).

Hilda Trujillo, guardian,
at a window of the Casa Azul, Coyoacán,
where Frida lived. 

In thirty years' time, perhaps,

people will have forgotten Gaza
as I forgot Goražde,
Bosnian enclave on the Drina.

What is the opposite of Hope ?

It's not despair,
nor terror of the future.
nor resignation...somewhere
in between, perhaps ?
Not hopelessness, but horror.

I am a prisoner of hope, said
Olafur Eliasson, uninspired
and depressing painter.

If hope is a gaoler
what hope of freedom ?

Ironic

Débris from WW2 weapons meant to kill
provide rare safe havens for once-thriving,
now-threatened species
in the over-fished Baltic.

Modern Medicine and Technology.

The problem
with and for General Practitioners
is that they know far more about drugs
than about their patients
or people in general.

The Great Irish Famine, 1850 – an aside.

Irish emigrants to the USA, 1850

Contrary to nurtured assumptions
few female Irish emigrants became domestic servants,
cooks, wives and mothers with reputations
for diligence and rectitude.

In the 1860s,
Irish people made up about a quarter of New York’s population
but Irish men comprised half of the male prison population
and Irish women 86% of imprisoned females.
A survey of 1,238 foreign-born sex workers in the city
found that 706, just over half, were Irish.

On the subject of women and prison,

Penal colony for women, Perm, Russia, 1990

An inmate serves boiled water
instead of tea or coffee to a prisoner in solitary confinement. 

World Wide Web

 I welcome my
dehumanisation.
Point me to
lone-lupinisation.

We should acknowledge

that Israeli soldiers did not
make Palestinians dig
their own mass graves
in which the dying lay in neat rows
on top of
the dying and the dead...

nor was there mass-rape,
though for Palestinians
there was no escape.

But Gaza has been, nevertheless,
one of the world's great ghettoes
where 'from time immemorial
much tribal blood has been shed.

Serial-killers.

Our fascination with rare violence,
tiger-hunters
and serial murderers

reflects and distracts us from
our daily eco-crimes
of drinking tea and coffee
(not to mention
monocultural wine)

eating avocados from Peru
sweetcorn from Senegal
parsnips from Australia...

and driving cars.
Naturally, no oil-executive
or mass-logging company CEO
ends up behind bars.

www restriction

and, by the way, on the www
nothing is unrepeatable.

Good tidings.

Very soon, we will no longer
have to descend into Hell: 
we have diabolically
arranged for it
to rise up and enfold us.

For the North American reader.

Do fiends enjoy themselves
in Hell,
or only out of it
(at leisure)
or both,
or neither ?

'State Capture'

is on the march –

not corruption of the system

but corruption as the system.

Compassion.

Rescued fruit-bats in an Australian hospital.

 

Vivat!

Long live 
Pathological Apathy!

Its absence is
human insanity

does-laziness-start-in-the-brain ?

'Free Press'

“What we have here in America 
is not so much censorship
as self-censorship by the press.”

– Journalist Seymour Hersh, 'Lone-wolf trouble-maker'. 

see also >

Thinking of Émile Cioran,

(about whom my ?friend Karl has written an impressive tome)
I scribbled:
When you understand that your birth was a defeat, the numbing strangeness of existence can become tolerable, and death...will undo the numbing.

Cioran wrote a lot of aphoristic tosh, such as:

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

~ They might simply be bored with living, rather than reactivate their curiosity and sense of adventure.
He is a victim of a false binary (pessimist/optimist). Suicide can be a neutral act - as mine (if it happens) will be.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

It depends on your sense of curiosity. 
My old age (since the insertion of a long-overdue Pacemaker)
is (so-far) one of the best times of my life. 
It is great fun observing the various forms of decline from ever-increasing deafness and dimness of vision to senile psoriasis,
a tendency to mislay things,
a certain totteriness, and lactose intolerance.. 

It is also enhanced by solitude, with no friends, no visitors,
just polite waves and bonjours at the market.

Like EMC, however, I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.

which is wonderfully liberating. Until the doctors get me.

My simple, cheap solution.

Climate change + Artifical Intelligence
 = mass unemployment

and massive social unrest.

I have a solution:
re-activate and build
coal-fired power stations
designed to deposit
tar on their chimneys,
and employ
millions to scrape it
away and dig holes
to bury it.

I would give-all-for-my brother--this-is-climate-breakdown

If it is not arrogance

it is at least
unsubstantiated assumption :
the insistence
that life is better than death,
or that death is a ceasing, a closure
rather than an overture
to a state beyond existence.

Sick!

I'm sort-of-ashamed to admit
that, still feeling young in my head
and as lithe as I was at eighteen
(though tiring rather more quickly)
I'm quite enjoying my time at
The End of the World.

But I don't have a dog any more.

Attending a wedding

in Gaza.

Photo: Majdi Fathi

French Guiana, a sidelight on slavery.

 

It is now an enthusiastic département of France.
Haiti has had a very different history...

There is a degree

 of sadness
(I'm sure Rumi would agree)
which is a kind of ecstasy

beyond the superficiality
(and often brevity)
of joy and gladness.

Happy Recollection.

Howls
as from a prison

anywhere between
the Atlantic Ocean
and the South China Sea,

the Atlas Mountains
and the Hindu Kush.

Our dog got
his ball stuck in a bush.

It's getting less and less

 due to destruction of the forests
but there's still
for millions of uncaring adults
'an awful lot of coffee in Brazil'.

Pay no heed to Dante.

Apart from all the greater criminals
Hell's corners are largely filled
by hypocrites like us.

Albi Cathedral:
 the punishment of the smug.

Brief encounter

with Brief Encounter –
I turned it off
It so reduced, traduced
Rachmaninoff.

What was wrong with the word

 Transvestites ?
for humans who liked to
or did dress as the opposite sex ?

Now we are saddled with the word
 Trans-sexuals for biological men
(who seem never to wear burqas
or anything that occludes their faces*)
demanding to use women-only toilet-rooms
even though women (at least half of whom suffer
abuse of one kind or another by men)
thus lose their only safe, feminine spaces.

*Except when carrying weapons or bombs.

See also : 
intersex-campaigners-fighting-to-limit-surgery-on-children

After why

is it ? and how is it ?
We should ask where
has it come from ?
and where it is going to ?

If only we had The Freedom of Choice !

But that would require pre-natal consciousness
at the very least.

 

Coyote Creates Humans.

 Coyote stopped to drink at a big lake and saw his reflection. 
“Now there’s a really good-looking coyote,” 
he said, leaning farther over.

And of course he fell in.  And of course
you will think this is a take-off on an old theme.

But what happened was,
he drank up the whole lake to keep from drowning. 
And because he didn’t really like the taste of certain fish,
he spat them out. 
And because he felt sorry when he saw them flopping around,
he sang a song to give them legs.

“Maybe they’ll become the first people,” Coyote mused aloud.

“Oh no you don’t,” said the headman of that tribe of fish,
“if it’s all the same with you,
could you just put us back where we were? 
And could you please take away these stupid legs?”

So Coyote regurgitated the lake
and put everything back the way it was.

Again he saw his reflection and said,
“Okay, you’re pretty good-looking, but are you smart? 
I’ve been trying to make the first people for a long time now,
but nothing wants to be people.
So, what do I do – huh – can you tell me?”

His reflection studied him for a long time,
then it squatted and dropped a big turd.

“Okay,” said Coyote,
“I guess that’s as good an answer as any.”

Then he himself squatted
and began to fashion the first people…

~ Peter Blue Cloud

Coyote, Coyote, please tell me who you belong to?

According to the latest

survey, there are certain

persons who, in poetic

or scholarly guise,

have claimed me like

a conqueror’s prize.

Let me just say

once and for all,

just to be done:

Coyote, he belongs to none.

from the Peruvian Andes

my Alstrœmeria psittacina,
or Parrot Lily, now in bloom and spreading.

The irrepressible Yanis Varoufakis

uses a great new term
to describe outrageous,
unstoppable, monopolistic
economic warlordism:

Technofeudal.

The Bhagavad Gita suggests

that Man is made of belief.

Henry Ford didn't believe in history.

Some people's beliefs are very precise,

bizarre, their origins a mystery.

Thinking people progress towards

believing in nothing

except that belief is a vise and a vice. 

Female Peacock Mantis Shrimp

with cluster of eggs.

photo by Peter McGee

I don't need it. But thanks for the thought..

 

Figures to consider.

A piece of ancient advice

suggests that
We should live each day
as if it were the last,

'without frenzy, without apathy,
without pretence.'

But how about trying
to live each day as if
it were the first ? 

Come as you like!