The Ultimate Reality

is not death
but solitude.
Available even now.
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Indoor pollution.

I should have died long ago from
some pulmonary condition
because I have always lived with
an open coal (now closed wood) fire
and spent most of my adolescent winters in a room
heated by an Aladdin paraffin stove
(of the old wick-burning type)
I could cook on. Now I have the more advanced
(equally-smelly) injection
kind for winter mornings. (Needs electricity.)
For twenty-five years I smoked a pipe.
Since 1970 I have cooked with gas,
and only during Covid and in a crowd
put on a mask - insofar as spectacles
and hearing-aids and claustrophobia allowed.

But I have hardly ever had a chest-cold,
let alone asthma, emphysema or bronchitis.
Most old people die of pneumonia.
I'll probably die of pudibonditis
turning me into unpleasant
human detritus.

'Normacorc'

In no way are plastic bottle-stoppers 'green'.
What proportion of them is actually recycled ?
They are an insult to, a weapon against

the ancient cork forests
of Eastern Portugal 
soon to be facing ecological collapse
due to climate-change and plastics
which cause climate-change
- and easy screw-top caps.

One of the nastiest words in English.

BANTER.
The bane of my school years
and one of the reasons
I avoided pubs, sport and other
unpleasant masculine situations.
'They're only teasing.'
I 'went mad'. Nearly was expelled.
To a tree-loving Aspy
they were very dis-easing.

*

The most celebrated banterer in Europe.

Over-confidence

is a serious symptom
of optimism.

Some days

I devote several hours
to getting my head
together, gathering
my wits in one place.
Then it's time for bed.

Since today is

let us consider the greater holocaust
perpetrated by Europeans
in the Americas,

and smaller ones all over Africa
and in Australia.

Let us not forget the other genocides
all over the world, including Armenia,
Cambodia – and holocausts of hunger
as in India and Soviet Ukraine.

And now the offspring of offspring
of holocaust survivors
are venting ire and fire on Palestine.

Dating Questionnaire.

Question 3.

In ten words or fewer, describe yourself.

Thanks be to the Welfare State, I'm
an octogenarian, vegetarian
Marxist Oblomov.*

Oh, sorry ! that's 12 words plus two commas.
Does I'm count as one word ?

*A book I haven't got round to reading.

Homeless in Oklahoma.

photo from The Guardian

 

On the upward escalator.

photo by Mark Wilkins

 

In most modern societies

the stress of hypocrisy
is a 'major cause' of illness.

Suburbia, Atlanta, USA.

 

The sad thing about cinema

is that it got so quickly taken over
and almost submerged by
ruthless and ugly
Jewish-American heterosexuality.

Vincent's Ear.

A report on Vincent van Gogh's damaged ear
by the handsome Dr Félix Rey (left)
sent to Irving Stone in 1930.

Following weeks of living in poverty
with the ego etc. of the insufferable Gauguin,
Vincent committed the symbolic act
and rushed to the local house of transient
pleasure, where he handed his bloody ear-lobe
to a maid called Gabrielle Berlatier -
whom, unfortunately, he did not celebrate in paint,
nor the bordello.
But he painted this one in Arles, in 1888.

To put it mildly (and succinctly) :

I have for decades understood
that evil often begets evil,
but good rarely begets good.

Is an illustration really necessary ?

 "I'll show you my Pacemaker
if you show me yours..."

The 'Greenland Shark'

 

But...

Joseph Maclise,

an anatomist born in Cork
liked drawing male genitals
and, assuredly, regarding them.

He drew them well.

 

Ruthless optimism

enables ruthless capitalism.

Palestinians

  "will be allowed to exit Gaza,” 

 said the Israeli prime minister last year.  

– in the same way that Jews who could pay
were allowed to exit Germany
in the mid-1930s.
Though the scale of its evil and hypocrisy
is tiny in comparison with Hitler's Germany,
who would have imagined
60 years ago
that Israel could become a
vicious little power
(with useful concentration-camps)
in alliance with
illiberal autocracies
to assure its Lebensraum ?

So much for democracy !

from 'All the Tattered Stars'.

... just before the gate to heaven

is yet another hole to hell. 

– Richard W. Halperin

God bless ye

who, like my mother
and me,
smile without baring
their teeth !

There's none so authoritarian

as a modern 'libertarian'.

The selfless
tend not to be noticed.

Only by freeing capital
do you 'free the world'
- for ruthless take-over.

Best not to be noticed.

"Celebrating the rottenness,
that's freedom." 

(John le Carré : 'The Night Manager')

Best not to be noticed.

Today's Book Choice

from The Guardian. (scroll down when you get there)

The Ice Pool

 Watercolour by Andrew Wyeth.

Old and current news.

When I lived briefly in Denmark in the 1960s
 – ten years before the birth of the present prime minister –
it was hardly on the geopolitical map, a small NATO country
composed of islands, a peninsula and alleged hygge –
remote and almost exotic to a sheltered Northern-Irishman.  

It used to be quite a power – owning Norway,
Southern Sweden, Iceland, Schleswig-Holstein,
Northern Estonia, Coromandel* the Gold Coast
and some Caribbean islands for the slave trade.
Now only Greenland remains.

While I was enjoying myself on dreamy Bornholm
learning heterosex in candlelit hygge
and eating smørrebrød and kryddersild,
labskovs (known in Liverpool as scouse),
boiled cod fresh-landed and stikkelbærsgrød,
Danes were doing to Innu Greenlanders
what Russians are today doing to Ukrainians : snatching
native children to turn into Proper Danes
eating with knife and fork and being
hyggelige.  The fork was invented
only a century after the Inuit arrived on the world's
largest island from the western continent.

Now Greenland is a Prize Territory and,
apart from the Faroe Islands, the only overseas part
of the ancient Kingdom of the dithering Prince.

I was brusquely dumped by my Danish girlfriend.
I have never had one since.

Nor been to Denmark.

We are all now familiar with
Greenland's national flag.

from Wikipedia:
                             Since 2025, the United States has engaged in hybrid warfare against Greenland;^[30][31] as a result, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service included the United States as a potential hybrid threat to national security alongside Russia and China in its threat assessment that year.^[32][33]

* So it may have been, as Osbert Sitwell wrote:
On the coast of Coromandel
dance they to the tunes of Handel.

Such a pity!

 

Lucky Iranians ?

If France did the same,
perhaps I would have
a less stressed existence.

I refused to fill in the Census form online,
and insisted on the paper version.

(Roll on Le Pen and/or sidekick ???)

*

ON A DIFFERENT, MORE CHEERFUL NOTE :

Even though ...

1. Fatberg the size of four buses likely birthed shit- balls that closed Sydney beaches – and it can’t be cleared.

Promethean.

 Just as Homo sapiens stole the means to make fire
from Neanderthals, before wiping them out
one way another, so he will steal something even more
cataclysmic from the first superior extra-terrestrial beings
he encounters when on a galactic look-about.

from Polly, aged six.

Wrinkled uncle Magga Trump
You look like a Heffalump
Up above the world so high
Like a monster in the sky...

Yawning Capybara by Bob Karp

 

Senile Frustration.

There's little point in lapsing into
silent rage.
A little sense of humour is essential
for old age.

I never cared much

for American Cinema.
It wallows too anxiously
in heterosexophilia.

 

Just ignore the buggers and their profitable crap.

The wellness industrial complex !   Six rules to ditch –
and what to do instead.

Very little. Buy nothing.

'SEX'

It is a tragedy that this language
has shackled and sleazed the word,
offering no linguistic alternatives
(as Irish offers several words
for kinds and kindnesses of rain).

In a more ignorant time
(the nineteen-sixties)
we thought that the more
it was hidden, forbidden
the more toxic and driven
Sex could become for men.

We were sadly mistaken.
Anal-genital abuse is at least as rife,
sensuality just as rare in life,
since 'Sexual Liberation'.

Happy New Year by the road-side.

 

I have met only one Wise Man

in the long, narrow valley
of my life. He was
my professor of philosophy,
the gentle, self-effacing
Bryce Gallie.

Aspy in his eighties.

Even now sometimes

I shockingly & unashamedly reveal,

as I did in childhood, that I feel 

the only power I have

is to throw a tantrum.

Rest In Peace,

my brilliant namesake.

Meanwhile,

The Apotheosis of Ego,

time's backwardness.
I am
אני
The Great Yam
or Yahoo in the sky.
Don't ask me why.

עֵת תעֵ

Double Rubens ; Hairy Lady !

In the recent past, studies by Rubens
have sold for between £500,000 and £1m or more.

Composite:
Peter Paul Rubens/Klaas Muller/Brafa Art Fair

The study of an old man was painted on a re-used sheet of paper, and when turned over, the silhouette of a woman’s head appears through the model’s beard.

'Neurodivergent Homosexuality'

or simple criminality ?
When I was just queer-ish,
part of its attraction
was its unacceptability –
indeed, its illegality.

Plants against Israel

in Gaza.

'The best gravedigger in Britain'

A man I could fall in love with
forever.

Jon Yaxley

 

Big Bangs

I was born just a decade before
the Hydrogen Bomb and the start
of the long Explosions of Choice
and Explosions of Ease
(even - though slightly - for its poor)
as the Free World
continued the rapid exploitation
and the slow but big
burning of our biosphere....

On Shelley's rapturous 'Mont Blanc'

To most human minds
silence and solitude are vacancy,
not chance for trance sublime and strange
nor
to ponder, each in and on its separate fantasy.

How many human minds long to 
render and receive fast influencings,
and hold an unremitting interchange
with the clear universe of things around ?

No clear universe...All is murk befogged and strife
and urbanisation,
no naked Alpine countenance of nature
but deglaciation.

Mont-Blanc:
Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni

Confession.

I love the taste

of my sleeping-pills,

which is not unlike 100%-cocoa chocolate.

They are also mildly-antidepressant

and free to the poor like me..

To delicious Zolpidem

for the the polynocturia-afflicted

(sometimes five times a night)

I am happily addicted...

An early anonymous meme:

Plus je connais les hommes, mieux j'aime les chiens !

The better I know men, the better I like dogs !
first appeared in print in 1822 in

Reflections of 'A Lady' in the Mirror of the Somme.

It is often misquoted,
or a misquotation is wrongly attributed to
Lamartine, Pascal... even Bismarck, and often to
Madame Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein,

whose best remark/dictum/aphorism/apophthegm is:

Glory is grief sparkling with joy.
« La gloire est le deuil éclatant du bonheur. ».

(And sometimes panicles
of joy are cast out of despair
like sperm from testicles.)

Lucky, but...

From what I have read
in books and newspapers,
it is often unpleasant
to have a father.

So, fatherless, I count myself lucky.

But this has meant that
I love to see men
and portraits of men
who, in a less imperfect,
less patristic world,
might have been my father. 

We two kings of orient

never were. The legend of the epiphanic kings
grew out of the stories of the Magi (sometimes
numbering twelve)
when Christianity ceased to be
a religion of slaves and the poor,
to become an imperial cult under Constantine
the Great Corrupter. 

It's rather cold outside.

 

SCRIPTS

The Kufic script
is lovelier than Islam.

THE LATIN SCRIPT
is not as ugly as
missionary Christianity;

the Hebrew script
less beautiful than
the non-evangelism
of Judaism.

A strong contender

for 'The Beginning of the End'
in 1593.

Woke Fascism

though strident
is much less powerful
than the old sleepwalking kind.

 

A lot of what

is called self-esteem
is really concern about
the opinions of others.

Because You're Worth it,*

you are, in fact, worthless.
Capitalism always capitalises,
and reduces us.

*a famous Pepsi-Cola advertisement slogan.