"Good Friday"

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster
told us on the radio this morning
that Jesus died of asphyxia on the cross,
not even considering a heart-attack,
tetanus, dehydration, battery, lack of food,
a combination of some or all of these - plus
of course, hematohidrosis and loss of blood...

I'm glad I failed

to do so many things,
to be as others wanted,
I'm glad
that I declined some invitations,
left early, failed to cope
with certain situations,
I took the earlier bus*,
didn't take someone's advice.

I'm glad I never had a job or wife or child,
brother, sister, father or grandfather;
I'm glad I was for so long immature
and challenging and wild;
I'm glad I kept away from hypocrites
and never myself pretended to be what
I was not and never could have been.

I'm glad I live alone
in what I (but rampant consumers would not)
consider to be considerable, unearned luxury.
I'm glad that I am glad to be such
a quiet, self-motivating, unconsidered parasite
within a culture and a horribly-parasitic species I'm ashamed of.

I hope that I do not 'protest too much'.

*Had I taken my usual bus on Bloody Friday 1972,
I would have been injured by an IRA bomb in the bus-station.

'Spirituality'

is just a pretty, loaded word
for narcissistic and religiose psychosis.

Haiku

I fancied I heard
a cuckoo today, but it
was just tinnitus.

The saddest "losers"

are the "winners"
who lack a sense of humour.

One of the many Lists of Love.

Desire and lust (of course),
hastilude and jousting,
infatuation, adoration,
possession and possessiveness,
great fondness, heartsomeness,
lasciviousness, lechery,
control, concern,
romantic foolishness,
sensual-spiritual fun,
debauchery, insanity,
sentimentality, servitude,
vulnerability,
blackmail,
escape, co-dependence,
tingling ecstasy,
pure empathy,
panic, hate, fear,
self-inflation, self-deflation,
self-suppression,
sweet fondness,
affectionate toleration...

...and more...

No country is too small to have a Gulag.

In Enver Hoxha's little "communist" Albania
(the size of Massachusetts)
a little group of "Enemies of The People"
was collectively sentenced
to 1,700 years' hard labour, exposure and starvation.

Johann Wolfgang von Gœthe

did not like humour.
He thought it beyond infra dig,
hateful.  Maybe in his early life
the only humour he encountered
was 'dirty jokes' - which indeed
are utterly hateful. 
And so  the sadly sententious von Gœthe
missed out on irony, and the ridiculous...

...which is also missing from the Grimm brothers'
Märchen or 'fairy tales',
many of which date from the Thirty Years' War,
when famine was so universal that wolves
actually did raid villages for what they could find -
food-scraps, shit or abandoned babies.

I have already mentioned

that in Istanbul there is an old and Ottoman tradition
of being kind to dogs, especially on cold nights.

But I didn't say that Mehmet Ali Ağca,

the Turk who tried to assassinate the Pope in 1981,

now devotes himself to looking after dogs and cats 

in that ancient city of Byzantium.

Bears and the 'Pandemic'

The hideous industry of draining bile from the ducts of live bears
- the profitable glory of Traditional Chinese Medicine -
encouraged by the Chinese government,
is doing very well out of Covid-19.



In Thailand, there are Bear Bars where there are bears in cages
hardly larger than themselves.
Stupid, evil people can go in and choose the bear whose bile
will be "milked" on-the-spot for them.

This sort of thing makes me hope that 100% of humans die
of something much worse, and far more agonising
and protracted than a flu virus.

Rough Cloth.

When my mother, despairing
of 'my future' pressured me to join the Air Force (!)
55 years ago,
I declined the opportunity to be an officer
and joined the ranks as a trainee interpreter.

This one of several unlikely futures
lasted just six weeks because of my insubordination.
I certainly was not made of  'military material'
though, being of slender build, looked well in a uniform.

Already anti-British,
I had looked forward to being a spy in a tie.

Things have come to a pretty pass

when the only semi-sane leader
is the dictator of Belarus !
Vodka and saunas are certainly more attractive
than silly surgical masks.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-belarus-president-refuses-to-cancel-anything-and-says-vodka-and-saunas-will-ward-off-coronavirus-11965396

The Romans shared wet rags on sticks.

So who needs toilet-roll ?

"The larger the issue

the better the joke."

- Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Apparently, I am ... a Vulnerable Adult.

Vulnus is Latin for wound,
and indeed I have always been easily
(but superficially) wounded.

An adult is someone
compromised, perfidious,
impure, diluted - in fact,
adulterated.
But I never quite grew up.

The story so far.

Some 25,000 people (including combatants) have so far died, worldwide, from Covid-19.
Some 500,000 people (including combatants)  have died in Syria since 2012.
Some 230,000 people (including combatants) have died in Yemen since 2015.
Who is laughing ?

Democracy ? No, thanks.

I wonder about people who would have this
expensive Mazzega Murano object
hanging by its chromium throat
above a shag rug...




...but I suppose that they have the right to vote.

"Contrary to popular discourse,

humans are not inherently wasteful."











https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-disposability-is-a-new-and-noxious-fiction

Hope is a trap

because it so often leads to
frustration,
and frustration can lead destructively to
rage.

Rhinorrhœa.

To emphasise how pointless are
the totalitarian attempts to prevent the spread of The Virus,
I woke up this morning with a runny nose.
For the past five days I have been isolated and alone
except for a visit to the almost empty grocer's
and two visits to the almost-empty bakery.

Somewhere, somehow I was infected with the common cold,
which is only slightly more infectious than Covid-19.

The story so far.

Governments have opted for the risk of psycho-social disintegration
in the ludicrous hope that they can prevent the spread of the virus
and hence economic collapse.
No life-skills are taught in schools,let alone the basics of epidemiology;
civilisations have progressively abandoned them,
and all sorts of independence and intelligence have been deliberately discouraged.
Social breakdown will automatically lead to economic 'crash'...

But perhaps I'm being over-optimistic.

Mined.

My mind
is my most intimate,
perhaps my most dangerous
enemy.

Far more effective than a virus,

humankind's deadliest weapon :
stupidity.

"There will be no return to 'normality'

Projection by Matías Segura – Santiago (Chile)

because Normality was the problem."

Rejoice in The Virus !

Hallelujah !

Covid-19 may Save The Planet (from us, for a time)

– but only if a few hundred million succumb.

Where do I volunteer ?

The chief beneficiaries

of the present panicdemic
(apart from the predatory police)
will be the 'drug cartels'
supplying the 'needs' of rich
and poor alike,
who will continue
almost unhindered
to rake in the trillions
- much of which will be
suitably laundered
through Liechtenstein, Jersey, Grand Cayman, Curaçao...
for lending to
bankrupt governments.

PS  Current beneficiaries (at least in France)
include wild animals, which will not be hunted down
by the usual licensed gangs.

PPS  Online gambling will do quite well, too...

In times of Crisis

governments treat the governed
(except for the very rich)
like naughty children.

At election times
governments treat the governed
like stupid teenagers.

At all times
governments are composed of stupid teenagers
and the governed actually are
recalcitrant children.

Frankly, most of us
are unqualified to vote,
much less to govern.

The police in France

are in Seventh Heaven
because they again
(after a gap of 75 years)
can stop, question and arrest
anyone who leaves their house
without a silly bit of paper
or a Permitted Reason.

France is always just one Presidential Decree from being a totalitarian state.

Christianity is a scant

and defective morality
without a philosophy
- let alone a basis in fact;
Buddhism a philosophy
upon which religion
and superstition
are often crudely tacked.

Yet another little irony.

Chloroquine
an anti-malarial favoured
in French Guiana -
and my drug-of-choice
to end my long life
of mild cultural neurosis
is claimed to reduce the symptoms
and severity of Covid-19
- in 500-milligram doses.

As I get older

I don't too much regret the diminution of my faculties.
But when my taste-buds start to falter
and I cannot enjoy my cooking any more
will be the time to die (if not before).

Panicdemic.

The god Pan was the god of extreme behaviour,
and is celebrated in the word panic.
But the pan in pandemic
as in pandemonium
comes from the Greek word for all.

Heraclitus is famous for his dictum
πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei): All is flow.
Life is tide and undertow.

A misanthrope like me,
Heraclitus reportedly did not like Pythagoras.
Some of his declarations
are cryptic or vague.

My village of Caylus,
during the continuing emergencies
of the Hundred Years War
and another hundred years
of religious, town-burning hostilities,
was visited five times by Plague.

Hierarchies

create unhappiness
- which is probably
why they are so popular
and (apparently)
so successful.

A lovely phrase

which I heard the other day:
Doing the think-through.

Three Cheers for Direct Democracy in France.

Local elections are coming soon in France. 
Remote Rochefourchat in the far south of the country has 6 stone dwellings, a non-functional phone-box, an old church - and just one permanent inhabitant, who was mayor until he resigned a couple of years ago.  His replacement is a Paris lawyer who has a holiday home in the hamlet which continues to be designated a commune, and thus must have a mayor and local council.  The seven councillors represent the total of seven families who are also holiday-homers.

Any public works (on laneways and the only street) are carried out (or financed) by the second-homers.  The requisite 4 council meetings a year take place over a meal around a private table.  There are few decisions to be taken 

"We have direct democracy, as in ancient Athens," declared the mayor.

The miasma

of money
inflates every ego
until it becomes
yet another airship
dropping shit (if not bombs) on the wretched* and the poor.


* Irrelevant aside : why was the title of Victor Hugo's book  Les Misérables not translated into English 
(as The Wretched [of the Earth]) ?

On religious toleration.

Because almost all religions are insults to intelligence
rather than philosophies
we should be minimally tolerant of them all equally, doggedly.

Against the tide.

After the withering of heroic verse
poetry should be allied to prophecy
not to the banality of anecdote.

In celebration of self-isolation.

(Today, for the first time, I looked in Twitter
after reading about this guy.
This is not a recommendation.)

Brian Bilston
@brian_bilston

March 6th 2020
PRECAUTIONS

Coronavirus for me
holds few fears:
I’ve been self-isolating now
for twenty-five years.

The Income-tax Principle*

People who can well pay
don't pay.
People who can barely pay
are made to pay
in more than one way.

*as observed by one who has never paid tax on revenue because of a (purely relative) lack of income.

The shock

that I had when I first kissed a man
at the age of 39
was that I liked it.
He had a beard
and moustache,
for which (I heard
unreliably on the radio)
there are 17 words in Albanian.

https://fencer.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/27-albanian-words-for-mustache/

Bongs and dongs in England

Great Peter
Little John
and Big Ben
are all bells,
not fond nicknames for men's dongs.

How graffiti inspired cultural renewal.

click here for explanation

see also https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dxt1

When you don't have a father, a grandmother can be just as effective.

She didn't 'cripple me for life'
except according to the retrospective
evaluation of her kind.
I think that she empowered me at an early age
to be a happy, solitary drifter
by whacking my left hand when I used it
'inappropriately', and by sending me
to a nursery school where a co-conspirator
did the same - but with a ruler's edge.

And so I stammered, was farouche, had tantrums,
and tended to resist 'authority'
(which is usually just authoritarianism).
In my slow dissociation from social norms and expectations
these grim women were the thin end of the wedge.

I wear a watch on my right wrist
but cannot write with my right hand.

Thinking

is a big mistake
that can lead to doing
which is an even bigger one.

- The Aimless Drift Society of Shirkers, Drop-outs,Starers into the Middle Distance,
   and Writers who Cannot Write.

from "The Tanners" (1907) by Robert Walser.

“How revolting it is when those grossed out on high-end goods and services
keep on blaming the poor for their poverty!"

Camouflage in Colorado

A February fox just below the tasteful arrow.

photo by Almina Kaselis

This is a National Security Announcement.

Remember,
if you see something suspicious,
say something suspicious.

Francisco Goya meets Otto Dix:

Two of my favourite drawings by the great
Foma Jaremtschuk:

Foma Jaremtschuk (1907-1986)was born in a remote Siberian village in 1907. In 1936 he was arrested and sent to a Siberian labour camp - where he spent most of his life before being moved to "psychiatric facilities", where he died in 1986.

Some time in the 1950s and early 1960s, while under the care of Dr. Mikhail Kutanin, head of the Saratov Psychiatric Clinic, Jaremtschuk produced a remarkable body of drawings. Though completely untrained and using only the simplest of materials, he created a pictorial universe that is utterly compelling yet terrifying.

His drawings, between raw fantasy and realism, speak eloquently of the appalling experience of the extremely harsh life in the Soviet Gulags.

More pictures here

They should be reproduced on walls as 'Street Art'.

Phrase of the Week :

Bottleneck of Genetic Drift.
I think that's us, the species which boils worms alive
to make silk, kills elephants to make silly ornaments
and has already caused the extinction
of hundreds of species.

The populations and genetic drift of mammals
'exploded' after minotaurs dinosaurs became extinct.

I wonder which species will benefit after we wipe ourselves out ?
(It certainly won't be ear-worms !)