European and white American women wore

whole birds upon their heads
150 years ago. George Bernard Shaw
complained about a complete seagull
on a woman's hat,
but, more modestly, the St Kilda Wren,
unique to a tiny group of islands,
was in great demand.

Data

is a curious word, meaning no more
than Information Offered, or, in French
[informations] données, which may well be
or be compatible with idées reçues. 

But let's be clear,
data are like you and me.
If you torture them for long enough
they’ll offer up anything you want to hear.

Being a doom-nihilist, I hope not.

 

Israel is proud of its democracy and Rule Of Law.

 

Electronic Fossils are Impossible.

The plastic pen with which you write
your shopping-list could last
fifty million years.
Fifty million of them have been manufactured
in the last six months. 

Let's not bother to consider your
(largely plastic) electric car.

Only those who consume the most
have the time and education
(bur still require the inclination)
to reflect upon the Sixth Extinction.

Long after which
I hope I'll look as beautiful
and mature as this.

Homage to van Gogh.

 

Anselm Kiefer: Crows [in winter]

Crime and Virtue-signalling.

If the Well-fed of the World
were told that they could
Save the Planet
by wearing the same clothes
for a fortnight (as I do)
rather few would do it
(and certainly not to save water)
– and certainly not
by giving up internet porn,
their cars, their cats,
or (as alleged in ancient times)
their first- or last-born.

So let not the black pot of the bourgeoisie
condemn the black kettle of the arms
manufacturers, the oil behemoths,
the mining conglomerates
and the juggernauts of the food industry.

The problem for me is that I would eagerly
give my willy or my life to save the planet
– but not to save humanity.

Sometimes it is difficult

to cope with one's own consciousness
let alone other people's.

The Book

most-shoplifted
in Russia is

In the Water Wars to come

and the total war thereafter
they will bomb the dams
and free the rivers.

 

Job description.

My two political heroes:
the artist and the comedian.

Edi Rama & Volodomyr Zelenskyy

 

Two works by Edi Rama:

and a link here to a page of his watercolours.

If I want to feel

less bad about being human
I imagine that I'm just
a small root-ache of a tree.

Kraftwerk at Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire.

Not worth watching on youTube.

Poor guy!

Jarbridge (Nevada).
He looks worried.
Strange wording:
are his current friends not good enough
or has he none at all ?
Or has his best friend wandered off
like an errant cat ?

Even at the apogee of our advance*

alpha-males rule the roost.

*In the military-industrial sense only.

A recent piece of research commissioned by the UK's Channel 4 TV suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

BUT

Elsewhere I read that although there is an alarming trend towards the far right among young males (those that interest themselves in politics, which may be a smallo number), it is young women who stand out as the more politically interesting demographic, as they are turning in ever greater numbers towards the left.

MEANWHILE,

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful. 

From plastic to paracetamol.

I got a headache from reading about
the process.

The lion replaces the lamb

and the sun still shines.

 

from Flags of Iran.

Ozymandias.

"I made America great again."

"...the lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have always loved maps.

Because I was interested in locating the mountain
under which Iran is falsely alleged
(by dangerous lunatics)
to be making nuclear weapons, I found a very fine
web-page with lovely maps, of languages, ethnicities,
and this historical one, showing areas
ceded to British India and the Russian Empire:

In Olden Times

the stupid and uninformed
knew they were stupid.  But now
most of the stupidest people
have been to and through university.

The only happy competitive sport ?

- probably.

to As, Shep, Oscar and Elektra

Human understanding is inferior to yours.
So perhaps you understood
and understand just now
just how I loved you. 
Love is prance. You prance
now only in my head.
Inevitable happenstance:
four dead (only a few)
and none to go but me.

I now talk to my plants
as I conversed with you.

No Harm Done

I don't really know what people mean
by Loss of Innocence.  Is innocence not
just a 19th century word for naivety ?

Or is it something more legal and stark ? 
For example:
is one innocent before genital mutilation
and guilty afterwards ?

I have my mother's naivety, and then some,
and I think I'm only now 'losing my innocence'.
It's a strange feeling, a bit like my insouciance
that I'm not able to come.

Monogamy

is terribly

unnatural

and has

inexorably

led to the

world-beating

catastrophe

of the

nuclear family.

"It is in the nature of betrayal...

"that it not only changes the present,
but that it reaches back with its dirty hands
and changes the past."

– Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate, 1994

Auden (Wystan Hugh) wrote:

Death is the sound
of thunder at a picnic.

For me, it is the silence
of lightning at a funeral.

Today's news, and probably tomorrow's.

Zionist Warmongers attack Terrorist Tyrants.

Temu offers cheap diapers for geese.

Discarded clothes dumped in protected Ghana wetlands.

CONSPIRITUALITY

A single conflated neologism
can say a great deal about
our self-obsessed and infantile
culture of 'individuality'.

Some cheerful news.

and some ordinary old
run-of-the-mill cheerless stuff. 

I'm not a fan of Leonard Cohen, but...

Everybody knows that the world's in trouble.
No-one cares what it's been through.
Everybody knows that the end is coming.
Let's fly to Iceland for the view.

Eighty years ago it was 'Now or Never'
and Never won for the profits it would bring.
Everybody knows that governments betray us
Deception's the most human thing.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking.
The smugglers and the coastguards lied.
Every time you hear a politician speaking
You know that another species died.

(to be improved/continued)

'POLICE STATE' EXHIBIT

CLOSED TODAY
DUE TO POLICE STATE.

 

Well, not exactly.

Three and a half days after Pussy Riot’s founder
occupied her "durational" installation,
entitled Police State,
the National Guard evacuated and closed
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
The exhibit was a facsimile from memory
of a prison cell from her incarceration
for the group's tastelessly dissident
performances and anti-Russian behaviour.
She remained part of the installation.

Birds

don't just sing.

They also listen.

"Functioning autists"

probably don't suffer from
"impostor syndrome".

On Cushendall Beach

as a boy I carefully made
monastery ruins
and watched the incoming tide
wash them away,
no trace remaining.

What a grasp of things
I nearly had before
my painfully crude correction
from left-handedness,
the ugly start of my social training.

At school
we were encouraged to have
a Purpose In Life,
something worth attaining.
I never had one. Now knowing
that the best of Man is his ruins,
I would like to leave
life with no memory
of me remaining.

Co-operative inter-species art

from a Dordogne cave in France:
bear-scratching 'framed' by human engraving.

photo by Christophe Archambault

Just Two Words:

Ambition
Corrupts

'People are always saying'

that there are two kinds of people:
the These and the Those.

My contribution to the
painfully long list of such
simplistic contrasts is that

(apart from the primary distinction
between me and everyone else)
the most important division
is between those few
who have a sense of fairness
and 'existential balance',
and those multitudes who do not. 

As Armageddon advances

in the Middle East and Ukraine,
we can divert ourselves with the first photo
of the hairy bottom of the sun.

Hugger-mugger,

surprisingly,
has little to do
with rugby*
or with buggery,
but with complicity
and secrecy.

*also known as rugger.

Not quite the male gaze.

A very fine nude study of her lover
by Tamara de Lempicka, 1928.
It would have made a wonderful
sculpture, too.  Could it have influenced
Henry Moore ?

Rafaëla

Bogus photo

on Etsy, obviously generated by A.I.,
bears little resemblance to
what will arrive by dropshipping.

A Song for Those Who Know.

"something must be done right away
that much we know
but of course it's too soon to act
but of course it's too late in the day..."

read the rest >
of the poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

So much for our culture of individuality.

When I first checked my full name on Google
around 2002 (after uploading three websites,
but long beforeI had even heard of blogs)
I found only one other listed: a chap languishing
in Penal Servitude (Stateside).

But if I were to do it now, I would find that my name
is only slightly less common than John Smith,
Jean Martin or Kim Min-jun.

Beautiful Stalinist Architecture:

The main entrance of the Medea Sanatorium
in the Tskaltubo Sanatorium Complex, Georgia.

Power is always an orgy

of self-justification.

Just look at the U.S. of A.

Le Creuset

is the name of a snobby and totally impractical,
expensive cookware, made of enamelled iron.
I bought a saucepan in 1969 after reading
French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David.
The enamel stains and scratches easily, and chips
at the edges.  The handle is necessarily
short and stubby. A good-sized LC saucepan
or casserole is very hard to lift:

Their most practical item (which I bought for a euro
second-hand) is a frying-pan for a single egg.

Yesterday

he said to me:
I'm just not strong enough
to be as vulnerable as you.

 

Where are the hams, chops and sausages ?

Martin M. Miles: Noses & tails, Athens.

Myself: Shadows and stove,
two evenings ago.

Jaime Saldarriaga, Plaza Botero, Medellín.

Great first line:

The world is what it is; men who are nothing,
who allow themselves to become nothing,
have no place in it.

Pretty good cover, too.

Yeats was wrong;

there is now no widening gyre,
no falcon - just Munch's Scream
galloping along the burning, 
pavements irradiated by the ire
of the perfumed emperor of ice-cream,
and an ever-shrinking planet
consumed by thirst and fear and fire.

Solitude, not loneliness.

The blackbirds sing full-heartedly
in the dell below my balcony,
and I'm pretty sure that I'm the only
non-blackbird who listens. 

My ignorant attitude

to French Drama.

I do not care for Molière
but am quite keen on Racine. 

The Name of the Meme

is God, a swollen, totalitarian dream
– residing not in the sky,
but in the small eye of humanity. 
Stars are not what they seem.
Word is embedded in sword.
We are imprisoned by gleam.

We should listen.

Deeply
ascending
to the dark enfolding
by the stark unwoven tissue
of a near-infinity of
silently-absorbing roots,

we should listen to the news
that constantly emanates from silence. 

Silence is subtle
pure communication.
The beginning of deafness was Word.

The louder we get,
the smaller
becomes our awareness,
language turns to shards of regret
and false hope
and the forests
fall below silence.

Pictures I found this week.

Derek Jarman: Strange Meeting

Dog and Oarfish, Aotearoa

by Ralph Gibson, 1961

Not an eye-test! photo by Nick Bull.

 

Angry

is how you become
when you lack a sense of humour,

which would enable you
to inhabit an envelope of irony.

Inconceivably Dark Matters

lie between my micro-insignificant concerns
and the multi-universe of thousands of galaxies
and hundreds of thousands of planets
each, perhaps, with its own all-powerful supervising being.

Dark matter (we are told, as if by Moses
or Kim Il-sung) occupies 95%m (nice round figure)
of all the universes.  

Astrophysics (I don't think we have been told)
has a 50% chance of being a very
particular conspiracy theory.

But if it is true, does it matter a neutron whether or not
Fusarium graminearum is a rather slow Gaian solution
to the unbelievably tiny 'climate problem'
on our inconceivably insignificant planet ?

Fusarium graminearum

It causes “head blight,” a disease
of wheat, barley, maize, and rice;

is classified in scientific literature
as a “potential agroterrorism weapon,”
and already causes billions of dollars
in losses each year. 

It is, allegedly, being smuggled
from China into the USA (where else).
And could 'go back to bite them'.

It causes vomiting, liver damage,
and reproductive defects 
in humans and livestock,
said a spokesperson for the FBI.

Eaters of oats, rye and other staples are not affected

Do I care ?  The great, dear Leaders of Astrophysics
do not care whether or not I care. 
Nor does the indestructible water-bear.
And certainly not the Universes.
Nor if I (somehow, magically) distribute the ebola virus
throughout this petty race of primates; kill, disembowel,
and eat the raw livers of everyone around me;

nor even if I tread upon an ant or blewit.
Even if the earth were erased tomorrow
to make an inter-galactic by-pass,
it is unlikely that any other kind of being
in any of the Universes would notice
or be able to intuit.

Perhaps

life is
brother death
ejaculating

and dying
is when everything has gone
except the feeling of going.

A peasant's kimono,

 Meiji Period (late 19th century)

A Book at Noon-tide

SILENCE 

by Anthony Weir

read by the author

LISTEN

  NOW  

It has been known for centuries...millennia

that is not possible to have
freedom of expression
without freedom of incitement.

Keeping him down.

Two healthy boys making sure
the sick one does not rise to infect others.
read article in Aeon >

Triple burial at Dolní Věstonice, Moravia - 26,000 BCE

Some time ago

I joined
The Defeatist Party of No-Man's-Land

from which Diogenes of Sinope resigned
a very long time ago.

Mr Beast

50 youTubers fight for $1,000,000

The politics of the near future ?

The apogee of civilisation ?

The heart of 'charity' ?

The intelligence of randomness ?

The innocent evil of the Rights of Man ?

What do you think ?

Stupid TV :

A 7-hour film
of a railway journey
with no sensation
of a train in motion.

I have no comment to make on a continuous
slow movie of a month-long moose-migration.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

 BITCOIN:  THE FUTURE.

Ultra-machismo -:

Outrageous self-advertisement
found under the flap.

Parasites

It's quite lonely inside a human brain
– which is why we welcome parasites
to suck away the pain.

Socotra Desert Rose-trees

(whose flowers are pink);
(Socotra is a Yemeni island in the Arabian Sea)
or Bottle-tree, Adenium obesum socotranum,
the Milky Way in the sky behind.

In the Warren of the World-wide Web.

Two of the few strong opponents
of the fledgling 'soft' dictatorship in Hungary
are Mr Hungarian and Mr Goulash,
Magyar & Gulyás respectively.

I had hoped that Orbán
might mean something scary
like Bluebeard, or Jackal

(but, reading from an insert to the LP record sleeve
of Bartók's opera Kék szakáll we can assume that
szakáll is not Hungarian for Jackal, 

and Wolf (a not uncommon surname
in many languages, e.g. McIntyre)
in Magyar being Farkas, a Hungarian form
of the Germanic Warg...  Orbán
is just a surname. Mumus = Ogre, Bogeyman
is not.
But enough! I'll exit from this A.I.
rabbit-hole and admire the view. 

The word for Shitface seems to be szararcú.

Welcome to Calais

if you have a home to go to.

Silly question!

Why
are we the only species
to be expelled
from the womb
apparently bereft

and raging to
impose desert
and disorder,
make every distance
between two points
into a border,

and impelled
to concoct
grand myths
of origin and theft ?

The Future of BBC Radio.

 

In just a few years, BBC Radio 4 will consist of
nose-to-tail trailers for aspirational, imaginary programmes
merely presented by real Americans.

The corporation, which is facing fierce competition from streamers and falling licence fee income, has been targeting US audiences as it attempts to increase its commercial revenues outside the UK.

Kuwait Oilfield

by the late Sebastião Salgado.

 

More available than Jesus !

Lo! I was able to walk again
after a week of painful hirpling –
by swallowing Ibuprofen.

Latest Word-horror

in today's Guardian:

     allyship

Osho on Solitude.

"To be alone is the only real revolution.
To accept that you're alone
is the greatest transformation
that can happen to you."

And, less philosophically,
from the normal crass perspective,
'company' in old age
may be of no use to you,
even if you were once a film star.

Well, whaddayaknow!

Nobody would have thought it possible
in their most ethnically-destructive dreams...

What a surprise !

Who would have thought it !
Armageddon, Ahoy!

Meanwhile in neutral Switzerland,
the Land of Nuclear Bunkers
and bunkered banks...

For Christian centuries

the two most serious crimes were
the crime against the Holy Spirit
(suicide, committed by few).
and the crime against Nature
(anal penetration, practised by some
for preference and by many
as a means of birth control).

Now we realise that we are the crime against Nature
and the Sacred Spirit is a spiritual hole. 

The Suicide Taboo

is, I think, mainly due
to the physical and moral claim
that some humans, like invaders
make on others
– as shared or private property

portrait by Aimée Walton