Death of another hero,

who declared that he passed
from adolescence to senility
with no intervening maturity

and whose songs, he said,
spread like herpes. 

"Words were invented...

 ...so that lies could be told." 
– Mary Ellen Pleasant.

If “perception is controlled hallucination”
morality is imposed insanity.

Nietzsche and the Crocodile.

"I haven't the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is."

– Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce Homo 

As for the crocodile, click here.

RIP GWR.

Today I finally got round to using the Tor (gateway) browser, and found that it is theoretically very much easier on the dark web to hire a killer, buy polonium, or find very nasty porn sites than to (for example) find a suicide forum.  

In theory, you can buy Sodium Pentobarbital online,
but almost certainly you will be scammed.
I used it once as a very beautifully-dreamy sleep aid.
I also had a shy and gentle, caring friend who was an early member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Given that suicide is not a crime, but hiring a killer, adding polonium to gin, and looking at horrific 'kiddie-porn' are definitely criminal, what can we conclude about our Great Western Civilisation ?  The sooner it goes the way of the Great Western Railway, the better. 

Jony Ive,

"a darling of Silicon Valley
since overseeing the design of the iPhone, claims that

'Humanity deserves better'".

Another nail in your coffin.

 

After five whole days

of a catchy theme from an early
piano concerto by Mozart, my ear-worm
changed this morning to a few bars
from Dvořák's 12th string quartet.

In days of yore, adolescents like me
would write to East European embassies
to ask for the freebies they lavishly bestowed.
From the Romanian embassy I was sent an LP
of music which they insisted was not
Romanian Gypsy Music which I had asked for,
because music was either Romanian or Gypsy, not both.

Accompanying the Supraphon LP
from the Czechoslovak embassy in London
was an irritated cold-war note to say
that they objected to the tag American
on Dvořák's loveliest quartet,
which he composed in the USA.

A long time ago

(just a few decades)
my poems and haikai were praised
by respected, pacifistic
writer, reviewer, translator,
poet and haiku-composer
James Kirkup,*
and I was invited to his Pyrenean home.
Unfortunately, he (famously eristic)
'fell out' with me soon after.
Why couldn't I for once
have been a 'brown-noser' ?

*who translated the Guinean
writer Camara Laye's disputed 
Radiance of the King 
(Le regard du Roi) into English.
It is the title of one of my paintings:

Summertime -

and the fishing is easy.

A Gatekeeper Moth.

photo by Wili Cave

 

After the last two

(if not three) Covid-19 vaccinations
my mood dropped considerably and unpleasantly
for at least two weeks.

"COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Therefore, special cautions are necessary for administering additional COVID-19 vaccinations to populations vulnerable to psychiatric Adverse Effects." 

   
– https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02627-0

I will not be getting another.

But see here.

The phrase (or meme)

'I'm not dead yet'
has been uttered by all and sundry –
princes, billionaires and goat-herds,
(and Monty Python, more famously).
But it has never been quoted
as anyone's actual last words.

*

The actual last words
of a prisoner of conscience
to a torturer
in an Assad-period Syrian prison were:
I'm going to tell God what you did.

I was born to disappoint

my ravished-virgin mother,
and I never let her down.
Even better,
she never knowingly let me down,
and in due course she seemed
quite happy with her lot.

One of several coincidental factors

which led to the unfortunate success
of early Christianity was the laziness of the plebs*
who were first attracted by it. To be able
to stay put and pray and worship a conveniently
invisible god was a good deal easier than to traipse
from shrine to shrine, statue to statue, temple
to temple to offer money or petition for a better life
which was unlikely to arrive.  For much less effort
and ritual (apart from once-only baptism) they
could expect eternal happiness in an afterlife
in an overworld quite unlike the underworld that
Greeks, Romans and Germans expected.

* The demos of the Greeks, whose oafishness
will inevitably destroy demo-cracy.

Ne obliviscaris.

The Nazis,
occupying vast Eastern territories
could transport Jews (and others)
for extermination almost wherever they liked.
The Jews,
with selective tunnel-vision
and occupying only the coveted West Bank,
can only annihilate the (relatively
small number of) Untermenschen-

Philistines on-site in Gaza.

 

Circuses, no bread.

It is unpleasant to consider
the trillions of dollars spent
on making mindless entertainment
for well-fed millions, while
even more millions live
in misery and want.

 

'Bon secours', ha! ha! ha!

Bon Secours is satanic shorthand for
an ever-present help in trouble,
perpetual succour
for the needy and distressed.

The Sisters of Our Lady of Bon Secours order
is part of an international healthcare conglomerate
worth billions in the US,

and guilty of mass infanticide in Ireland alone.

The crimes of the Catholic church are global.
and perpetual.

Other churches also are active.

Memory

is a liar to itself,
as, often, is romantic love.

The Capitalist Dream.

Harmonious inequality.

It's a matter of opinion, really.

Which is more worth-while :
the memorising of accumulated facts
or the widening of awareness ?

It is rare to experience both equally
through education.

'Roomster'

was the model of a car
I saw today.  How long
before I see the ultimate model,
Doomster ?

Oh! me, of little understanding.

I have never had it.
I don't understand it;
I'm fairly sure that it is
cultural-parental:
Fear of The Other,
to which I've always been attracted.

Brilliant neologism.

Bring it on !

DE-DOLLARISATION.

Bad news.

There is no good news.

Bombastic Museum

diminishes the artefacts it houses.

The shame and the guilt

descend, not because I dribble
before and after,
but that I contribute even more
to ecological disaster
by changing my underwear every day.

Wealth won't buy you sanity,

much less happiness.

The world’s richest man regularly consumed ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms during his rise to political prominence, anonymous sources familiar with his activities told the Times. 

His drug use reportedly intensified
as he donated $275m to Trump’s presidential campaign. 
He later wielded significant power through his role spearheading the “department of government efficiency”,
or DoGE.

He is one of those joyless people with unlimited wealth, medicated health and depressing paucity of mind and spirit.

meanwhile, in another part of the forest of newsprint,

Azar Nafisi, Iranian-American author of Lolita in Tehran
and Republic of the Imagination,
says she is starting to feel the same fear
that she had in Iran before she fled.

Though wolves are not mentioned

hatred of them spread
in North America
like and with the Gospel.

*

Rarely since the death of Jesus
has the Catholic church taken
a moral stand on anything beyond
or above the height of human genitals.

'Half of the Tree of Life'

has died since I was born.

Haute-Couture

photo by Robert Wun

 

Dumpling for thought.

'Great talent can produce bad art.'

Anselm Kiefer, self-proclaimed genius.

Despite the lack of buccal interpenetration,

the good thing about solo sex
with prostate trouble or senility
is that you can daily enjoy
the excitement and expectation
of genital and nipple stimulation
without the disappointment
of ejaculation.

Snail-song.

It is of the greatest importance
to be unimportant in earnest
and at home in silence. 

Ah, Progress.

The paranoid concern
of 19th century European patriarchs
was Self-pollution, which now has,
due to them, become Global.

The worst thing

about hotels today
is that no mature and bearded groom
stretches protectively across the threshold
of my room.

Ireland's Empire

was its world-wide web
of missionary priests and nuns.
Now that we know of the lusts
and cruelty of psychologically-maimed
Sisters, Brothers and the ordained
in Ireland, it is reasonable to ask
(and ask journalists to probe)
what Christian abominations were inflicted
upon vulnerable people across the globe.

 

No nostalgia for the 1940s.

It's a long time since I could take my shoes to the cobbler
to be re-heeled ('They'll be ready Friday')
nor my jug to the milkman with his horse and cart
for milk and buttermilk sold by the quart;

nor give vegetable peelings to The Pig-Man
nor the scissors to The Scissor-Man for sharpening.

It's 60 years since The Old Shawlie
beggar-woman came to our door
and I was reprimanded
for inviting her in (she pissed on the floor).

Not even in this old French village
do kids play on the empty street...
I remember
skipping-ropes and hopscotch, whipping and guiding
a tyreless bicycle wheel along roadways with a stick;
being terrified while hurtling
down a hill in the go-cart that my cousin made
using roller-skate wheels with ball-bearings in them
(now I am incapable of more than hirpling).

I didn't rob birds' nests nor torture cats
nor join in bullying (I was the mildly bullied one),
though for a while I had a beetle-trap.

Nothing was organised.  In our free time
we had free movement,
almost unhindered comings and goings.
I liked to play in building-sites
and, alone, in ruins.

This man paints

many variations on the same still-life,
and seems not to get paint on his beard.

Claude Tournie, Montauban.

Bedint.

In a biography (of odious Upper-Class people,
notably Vita Sackville-West) which I am reading,
the very rare word 'bedint' (as noun or adjective) is used to describe a bourgeois or a 'respectable' person without 'class',
not 'well-bred' or superficially-sufficiently 'cultured'
to be acceptable to posh Edwardian society
and the post-war social whirl of the 1920s. 
Perhaps a 'naff' nouveau-riche or social upstart.
It does not appear in the etymological dictionary online,
but I found a wonderful if pedantic disquisition on the word here.

Was The Great Gatsby a bedint ? (It rhymes with 'pedant'.)

It rhymes with 'pedant'.

Herewith I add my own piece of pedantry:
the word is very similar to the Danish word Betjent,
which means an attendant or servant of the upper classes,
e.g. a maître d'hotel, or a servant of the government.  
Tjene means to serve.
(cf the Middle Dutch dienen, from the Old Dutch thienon, from the Proto-Germanic þewanōną and meant “to be of assistance to, to serve; to serve at a tavern.)
Danish Policemen are known as Politibetjente, or simply betjente.

I remember a restaurant in the early 1960s, formerly a warehouse,
latterly a night-club in Copenhagen, called Laurids Betjent...

from "The Lucyverse" substack.

 "I’ve always wondered how you become a model for Temu. Do you even have to exist? If they are human, though, I get the feeling that these people probably didn’t explicitly give their permission to be shown ejaculating oil from their belly buttons, wearing Creative Raw Sausage Tee or being the before picture for Crepey Skin Tightening Firming Cream (£8.93).

"I mean, do you think these two really understood that the afternoon of ‘work’ they did in an anonymous white-walled studio in 2022 would result in this? "

Isn't it FRIGHTFULLY interesting

that one can buy an anti-EU sticker online (in French)
but not an anti-USA one ?
Long live Freedom of Choice !

The Abolition of Dominion

will never happen,
because abolition requires dominion.
and dominion is self-perpetuating
until The End.

Meanwhile,
The anonymous author of the pamphlet Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649), condemned both ‘our Indian merchants’ for ‘robbing of the poor Indians of that which God and nature hath given them, and … mak[ing] them slaves’, and the English for ‘hunt[ing]’ the ‘poor Irish’.

The Royal Dingoes.

painting by Vincent Namatjira

 

My second-favourite ineffectual politician says

 

Meantime, my favourite ineffectual politician,
Jeremy Corbyn 
is 'being wooed' to co-found an actual
British socialist party in the Trump-Starmer
soon-to-be-yet-another-police-state.

Keeping him clean in Chemnitz,
formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The primary function

of human memory
is selection
of what to remember.

What to forget
goes into
the mind's gas-chamber.

Ah, those were the days !

'Picture Post' 1945

 

Income-gaps.

In some human hierarchies
the poverty-stricken
can afford to employ
the destitute.

Dear Philippa,

Can climate change affect me bowels ?
Twenty years ago I shat (sorry to be crude !)
three times a week;
now it is twice a day. Occasionally three.
No blood.

– Anthony, SW France.

“Rich screams, wealthy whispers”

but billionaires actually run whole nations.

All of them are not just poisonous,

but also, between them, own

all sources of poison that are so far known.

European Green Lizard