Wilde Zen

"Nothing survives being thought of."

- Oscar Wilde in 'A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE'.

A cartoon that could be called 'callow'.

Old Xenophobia.

The French expression
avoir un nom à coucher dehors
demonstrates the Fear of the Stranger,
especially the stranger with a peculiar name,
who was, because of its unfamiliarity, not admitted to an inn
but made to sleep in a stable, or, more often, turned away altogether
to sleep out in the open, presumably without access to the table d'hôte.

We should be glad that this does not happen now
to someone named, for example Władysław Konopczyński 
or Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour.

Much of human misery

is caused by conflict between
perceptions of virility
and perceptions of morality.

I feel it coming on...

Another definition of 'Depression'

(which of course is beyond definition) :
the feeling that you are dying
more than you are living.

An Irish Proverb - on a wet day.

Dhá thrian den obair í an chosúlacht.
Two-thirds of work is the appearance.

And another one:  Never sell a hen on a wet day.

'And God said:

Let there be light.'
Satan said:
Let there be heat.
Diogenes said
that a true philosopher is offensive.

Another group of Jihadists.

Galloping Insanity.

'We must put a million people on Mars
if we are to ensure that humanity has a future.'

read more >

Autonomy.

A robin-redbreast's nest inside a skull

in the Ossuary at St Leonard's church, Hythe, Kent.

(thanks, Almina)

In the end

all that "we"
"achieved"
was
destruction.

In the end

our much-vaunted
consciousness
is just a very tangled string
of feelings,
tiny pulses between synapses
and a million little black holes.

A great slogan - but for whom ?

Give History
a Hysterectomy !

Alone with one's thoughts.

A matter (but not a game) of numbers.

During the first 20 - the most violent - years of the Spanish Inquisition,
at the end of the 15th century, some 2,000 people were killed in the name of Faith.

By contrast, about a quarter of a million people (out of a population of roughly 800,000) were killed in the Vendée [Western France] when a peasant rebellion against the rationalist, anti-religious, Enlightenment-engendered French Revolution was put down by Republican armies in 1794.
And some 17,000 men, women and children were guillotined in the purge that ended in July that year, including the man who had designed the new revolutionary calendar which featured the 'rational' ten-day week.

- Read John Gray's review of Karen Armstrong's new book
on  Religion and the History of Violence.

"It's only a T-shirt!"

Insignificant and inexpensive things
which we take for granted
are produced from hard labour,
misery and pain and murderous
monoculture.

A little light relief.

What was - and is still - called The Enlightenment

was really the discovery
- or was it the invention ?
- of human ignorance,
which has led rapidly and greedily
to the trashing of the planet.

L'Identité malheureuse

[Alain] Finkielkraut works, throughout  L'Identité malheureuse, on the idea that the Holocaust and the end of colonialism made Europeans terrified of their own history. The mantra "never again!" has caused people to become stuck in expecting racism and fascism to come only from the same direction it struck from last time. Since they're looking for white people to misbehave, they gloss ideologically over the evidence that immigrants may now be generating racial hatred all on their own.

- Ann Sterzinger 

The problem of property.

According to Jindra,
Epictetus said:

Unfortunately, most
divine presences belong to somebody
- or else are starving.

Horses

are broken by us,
and we are broken
by bridles of words.

Progress

is the paradoxical search
for permanence - for stasis.

My mother's life

like that of most women
was laid waste by men
despite her resolution
her steadfastness,
her great survival skills,
the bravery of her lifelong refusal
(almost to the end)
to be submissive or supine -
                           
and, through the punishing
advice of men  (to "have the corners
rubbed off him", to "toughen him up"
and to "make sure he does not
become a sissy because he has no father"),
she almost ruined mine.

Humanity

has shown
such an appetite for cruelty
and torture unique amongst the species
that it was the title of Stalin's
French newspaper-mouthpiece.
So it is deeply worrying
that the word is chosen even now
by the thoughtless (and 'humanitarian')
to imply tenderness, solicitude, self-sacrifice.

Another auban-adage:

Self-publicity
is self-condemnation.

Sad, but largely true.

"Politics are not for decent people."

- the housekeeper in the movie  SZERELEM (Love) by Károly Makk.

This is how

Big Farmers
and Big Pharmas
see themselves.

Shallow question, chilling reply.

When, many years ago, an English cardinal*
was asked to 'sum up' the Church of Rome
in a single word - 'a nutshell' - he replied
at once: AUTHORITY.
He did not say Humility, he did not say Devotion,
Sacrifice, nor even Service.
He had no word of hope
for  us outside the Catholic concentration-camp.
Probably most cardinals would say the same today
alongwith the allegedly-reformist pope.

*The late Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster.

Bad Wiring & Market Forces

We are in thrall to our minds
(not our brains)
and our minds are in thrall
to belief -
but never belief in truth
(it's too slippery)
or truth-telling
(it's too upsetting) -
but rather belief
in all kinds of selling.

Mythology.

Is there such a creature as a
'Responsible Person' ?

It is interesting, and almost heartening

for an anglophone,
to take note that Ethics
(like Æsthetics and Mathematics and Physics),
in English, are plural,
thus suggesting that those who subscribe to a single ethic
(such as the Work Ethic)
are totalitarian:
sad people turned into dangerous robots
by deprivation emotional
and besiegement neural.

My latest art-work.

Neighbours

Auban's (or Weirwolf's) Law

The more and better the means of communication
the less we are able or inclined
to communicate.

Faith

is no more than self-justification
re-inforced by practice.

There seems to be a consensus emerging among comfortable intellectuals 

that we are a rogue species doing insane things 

for no reason other than ‘because we can, and because everyone else does’.   

The doing together gives us the ‘faith’ (communal justification) 

to continue to do ever-more-insane things 

through the power of mad technology, 

from axes - to writing - to cart-wheels
- to money - to computers.

And lo! we lament in our comfort

the mindlessness of being sapiens -

who (we are now slightly ashamed to reveal)

wiped out half of the planet’s large mammals 

even before we invented the wheel...

The Force of History

If cowboys had worn tutus
instead of cheap, uncomfortable,
all-too-permeable,
all too clingy
de Nîmes jeans
we would now all be wearing tutus.


'Jeans' is an anglicisation of Gênes, French for Genoa,
whose sailors wore trousers made from the coarse cotton material
 produced in the southern French city of Nîmes (hence 'denim').

Denim originated in Indian fishing communities around Bombay (Mumbai) and was the fabric used for Dungarees.

An excellent website-pseudonym :

(on Tumblr) :
MISBEGOT.

What is the most destructive thing on the planet ?

he asked.
- Apart from human sperm ?
- Apart from human language ?
I replied.
- I know :
the hoe -
which brought little more
to humankind
than famine, pestilence,
slavery and indenture of various sorts,
and woe.

Lesser Dinosaurs

Four continents are teeming
with overweight males
attempting to conquer
their vacuous ennui
by turning into whales.

Civilisation

Again, people are coming to the same conclusions as I have long had.*

"Why I haven't washed my hair for 3 years"
I have no hair to speak of, except on my chin -
but, apart from hands, mouth, penis and anus,
I have applied the same principle to the rest of my body:
the principle of personal ecological balance.

*which is somewhat worrying...

The Third World Elite

according to Cockroach
"are the filth of the planet" -
the descendants of fawners and yes-men,
the arse-lickers, pus-drainers
and pisspot-emptiers
of arrogant, ignorant, petty and childishly
nincompoop empire-builders,
obscenely-prudish and prurient
Christ-deliverers,
elephant-hunters, forest-destroyers,
savage creators of cruel, unnatural borders,
and servants of the Most Ridiculous,
falsest of gods:  The Order-Ordure
in men's heads
who exists only to forbid
and give orders.

Hymn to a Houynhym

Only a phase, 
these dark café days,
human life
is a daze, a pubertal craze...
only a phase,
a sad metaphrase...
Sing me your neighs!

Gazing out into space with marvellous instruments

is all very well for the rich and well-educated,
but for the poor
and those who are long past weeping,
life is a matter of licking the piss of overfed dogs
from the snow,
digging up old phials of tears,
and boiling old socks to make soup.

It could be...

a low-technology, low-cost footbridge,
wildfowlers' or fishing-platform,
an occasional lavatory,
an 'installation',
a zen retreat,
a booby-trap,
all six at once, or at different times...

It is such fun re-writing my Will in my head,

my suicide always being next month:
 To leave my house and all my paintings
and objects to the municipality
as a museum
on condition that entry is free,
that there are no more
than 3 humans and one dog
(or snake, or frog)
admitted at a time,
the touching of objects and sound-recording permitted,
but no photography, no portable electronica allowed.

When you're feeling low and irritable

the last thing you want or need
is a visit
from one you thought
was the love of your life.

Blessèd are those

who get what they want
without even knowing
what it is they want.

The power of human imagination

"has turned the human species – at the beginning, “an animal of no significance” midway up the food chain on the African savannah – into “self-made gods”. But these “deities” lack self-restraint. Wiping out other species, they have dominated the planet without making themselves perceptibly happier. Now, with new technologies enabling them to create artificial forms of life and alter their own natures, they hardly know what to do with their new dominion. “Is there anything more dangerous”, Harari asks, “than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

- from the review by John Gray of
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, Harvill Secker, UK£25, 464 pages.