Parked in the market square

 250 metres from my house.

Poor Haiku

 November house-fly
delights in home-made yogurt
just as much as I.

'A moment that changed me' :

 "I gave up small talk for a month – and the world came alive."

Being somewhere 'on the A-Spectrum', I am incapable of small talk.

If weather is mentioned, I sometimes voice my and my mother's interest in meteorology, and people mostly (mercifully) drift away.

The goats tune out, and no sheep stay.

Being 'hard of hearing' is an even better ploy...

But the world "comes alive" in a very private way.

Here is exactly the sort of snippet that I would call
Part of a Conversation.

Did you know that the famous Paisley print pattern has its origins in Persia ?  The teardrop/pear-shaped motif, known as boteh in Farsi, is probably a stylised almond or cypress cone (the cypress was sacred to Zoroastrians, and pineapple-ish cones have been much used in European sculptural decoration). 

When I show visitors my gabbeh representing a Peacock on the Tree of Life (symbol of immortality since Assyrian times) they glaze over, staying that way even when I show them my own paintings - also featuring the Tree of Life (or Immortality) without the peacock...

and so, with time, my few friends have
(like my few lovers), dwindled to nought.

My world is principally trees and thought.

People over 15 (or, sometimes, 25) may sometimes
like to learn, but generally don't like to be taught.

A waste-bin (dumpster) in Denmark.

This is probably typical of waste-bins in European cities,
but not in small towns and villages.
In my French village there are special compost bins
for non-animal food-waste, which are actually used;
I have never seen edible food in a dumpster.

Århus, Jutland.

« L'enfer, c'est les autres. » Hell is where we consign others - J-P Sartre.

Mais « l'enfer c'est les autres » a été toujours mal compris.

On a cru que je voulais dire par là
que nos rapports avec les autres étaient toujours empoisonnés,
que c'était toujours des rapports infernaux.
Or, c'est tout autre chose que je veux dire.
Je veux dire que si les rapports avec autrui sont tordus, viciés,
alors l'autre ne peut être que l'enfer." 

- J-P Sartre.

On the other hand, the common misinterpretation is, to my mind, true:
Hell is made by other people - plus, of course, oneself.

2025 Booker Prizewinner.

“Szalay has written a novel about The Big Question:
about the numbing strangeness of being alive,”
wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review of the novel.
“Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. "

Æsthetics and Extinction.

Beauty and Death:
between them
pain and its infliction.

Today's

Message in a bottle:

Composition.

The New Mayor of New York.

 

Oh dear,

I have had gas hobs since 1970
and a closed wood-burning stove
since 2006.
For sixty years before that,
I lived with had open coal fires
and paraffin [kerosene] heaters.
It's a miracle that I'm alive,
even with a PaceMaker.

The Chairs

Mr Hockney,
a celebrity painter
of moderate talent
and little originality,
despises his 'public'
and insults his hallowed
predecessors
with 'work' like this.
A Big Name can sell big
any cheap little joke.

Hockney: Gauguin's and van Gogh's chairs.

Thinking about Tunisia

(where I was for three months
in 1960, while the Algerian
war of independence was raging)

China, Viêt-Nam, and Prague :

protesters who set themselves on fire
make a country's situation no less dire,
just busier.

The Generosity of the Human Male (to other males).

"Epstein and Maxwell began lending me out to their friends."

– Virginia Giuffre 

 "As I left that night, I felt that familiar scooped-out, empty feeling."

At around the same time, 
Dominique Pelicot hired his unconscious wife out
to friends and friends of friends (often several at a time)
at very reasonable rates...

Not all pessimism has been suppressed.

'It's not the despair, Laura.
I can stand the despair.
It's the hope.'

John Cleese in Clockwise, 1986.

Well, that's a relief !

'First, you invent yourself,

then you get to believe your invention,'
wrote John le Carré. But most of us
are at least partly invented
by at least one other's wish and intention,
whether accepted or resented.

When is a civil war 'within control' ?

Only when one side is winning.

 

The Future

near you.

Surtsey

I remember the awe and wonder
when Surtsey arose
from the deep blue yonder,
amongst the Vestmannaeyjar

off the Icelandic coast.

I even bought (or stole) a book
of chronological photographs.

Surtsey erupting from the sea-bed.

read more >

Surtsey now.

Full of Healthy Goodness

Lemon Blueberry Oat Boosts
(always remember to read the packet)

I think I'll stick with plum crumble plus cinnamon.

The future. The face

 of the planet.

La France Profonde.

 

The clever

fools who want
to live forever
(maybe on the moon)
will harbour
in their blood and guts
and brains
more and more dementifying
microplastic
unless somehow
in their perverse ardour
they (pretty soon)
take steps and pains
to make themselves immune
and able to trip eternal light fantastic.

Sea, rock, sky.

 

Northumbria.

Costa Brava.

Thoughts

are mind-farts that can
too easily become
incontinence/deep shit.

Samhain de-hallowed.

The nearest that kooky
Cocacolons can get to the numinous :
 'spooky'.

Ghost-turnips,-pucas,-fortune-telling-and-evil...>

Missing the point.

'Indigenous' peoples,
whether in Australia or North America,
had no concept of ownership,
especially of land.

Which is why it wasn't desecrated,
pillaged and destroyed.

Thucydides.

Being somewhat deaf,
I may have mis-heard,
but I think

to anthropion 
τό ανθρώπιόν
was a word he coined
to encompass human
-ness, the human condition,
and human behaviour,

but definitely not
Roman-Christian
humanity/humanitas 
in its religiously
self-congratulatory
sense, which arose much later.

In these blogs

is ineptly outlined
my woolly anti-doctrine of
Ineffective Nihilism,
which does nothing
to combat or resist
or even recognise
Effective Altruism.

On the opposite side of my street.

 

Still-life.

photo by Yamazawa Eikoeiko

 

Still-Life

by Don McCullin.

Unicorns,

I am led to suppose,
don't have dilemmas. 

Such fortunate creatures !

The Central Hospital, Montauban.

My recent experiences
reminded me of lines by world-famous
Seamus Heaney, whose poetry
I have never liked. This mediocre poem,
for example, is ruined
by the jarring, laboured
'eyebeams threaded laser-fast'.

For me, the only good experiences
were the jolly, jolty trundlings 

by ambulance and trolley,
flat on my back as a dozen
cheerless ceilings passed.

The the operation itself, 

during which I was conscious and intrigued,
proceeded with blows and punches
to get the pacemaker in position, flesh-fast...

As usual,

after the clocks go back,
I forget to turn lights off when going to bed,
and start lighting the wood-stove
to micro-add more to the wholesale
collapse of the world.

Two glasses of wine

with my evening meal
give me a pounding headache
within sixty minutes.
It's not unusual, but
it's more common for old people
to have a next-morning hang-over.
So I've reduced to one,
followed by two glasses of water.

Recently deceased,

 "The most beautiful boy in the world"
sixteen years old,
(white, characterless, passive
and, to me, fairly repulsive
in the celebrated film of Death in Venice)

claimed that Luchino Visconti “
didn’t give a fuck” about his feelings.  

“I’ve never seen so many fascists and assholes
as there are in film and theatre,” said Björn Andrésen.
“Luchino was the sort of cultural predator
who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
And, one should add, for his desire and ambition.

Much older is much more beautiful.

Is human language over-rated (by humans) ?

 

read more >

A line from Tennyson

was the motto of my dispiriting school:
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"
- especially on the vicious rugby-football field.

Striving for the sake of striving
is the foundation of our culture
with which we cannot help conniving.

I am the greatest

threat to Effective Altruism
by my Declaration
of Ineffective Nihilism.

A wave

is as good as
a few banal words
about weather.

 

The apotheosis of colonialism.

 

I'm all ears.

photo by Henry Szwinto

 

Dear Asterion,

Life is the Dragon.

 

Today's typical environmental news.

environment/2025/oct/21/

I have never had a decent camera.

It's just one of God's punishments for being alive.
Apart from being alive.

But here is a fine photograph
of a corner of his one-room flat,
taken on an obsolescent phone
(donated by one of his bourgeois acquaintances)
by my necessarily-minimalist friend
in London.

photo by Dennis Greenwood

'Sexuality' and 'Gender'

are of little consequence
when you feel that you
have been co-opted into
the wrong species
on a planet in the
wrong part of a universe. 

As for 'Identity',
it's just my passport.

Cleopatra bathed

in asses' milk
which went quickly sour.
I'll have to make do instead
with a salty, caramel
cornflake-shower.

Throw them in the Seine !

Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, said: “The Louvre is a global symbol of our culture. This robbery, that has allowed thieves to take the jewels of the French crown, is an unbearable humiliation for our country.”

 

For animals

terminally addicted to novelty
war is deliciously appealing
after too much peace.

Fungus on a spider.

Gibellula fungus

 

Walls don't have ears.

But some walls have microphones,
and some walls have mice,
and mice have ears.

Cells in a rat's liver.

 First, catch your rat...

photo by Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez

Too deeply felt.

I can't understand
how so much erotic activity
is underhand
as well as below the belt.

Bad painting missing.

Someone else's treat.
If I found it
I would leave it on the street.

Commerce existed

for thousands of years
before capitalism,
which is commerce
with menace.

But, Mr Blake,

there are so many millions
of unkind buildings.

Trees are so kind
and we are so blind.

Painterly.

Audun Rikardsen/Wildlife Photographer of the Year/PA

Awesome.

Indeed, I am awed
by the profligacy of
eighty billion neurons
in the human brain
determining
a creature so flawed.

"These are crazy times.

In Russia, they have always been
crazy times."

"In fact, the disposal of vast numbers
of human beings is just about
the only dynamic the country has ever known."

– Last Rights, Tim Sebastian, 1993.

Boreholes are the Future.

(Not to mention perpetually-burning
coal-seam fires.)

Homo-eroticism

offers the opportunity
for more art than urge
– simultaneously.

The food industry, a promotional photo.

So we are fed
into the feeder.
Human history's
Follow the leader.

Toadpoles

 

photo by Shane Gross