My new E-friend

and her human friend.

 

I still don't quite know what they meant

when they told me that I was
letting myself down. I felt
middling. Nor could I think
of what to be (other than myself)
when I grew up. I never grew up.
They wanted me to
do something with my life.
This meant getting a degree in medicine
(I didn't get any degree at all)
and, presumably, a classy and comely wife.
What I mostly did was to appal.

Counter-intelligence.

Because of Hollywood,
intelligent films lie in a basement
underworld of 'eggheads' and 'aesthetes'
lest they infect the general stupidity.

Socrates Wept.

 from The Guardian today:

  How Europeans see the world has for centuries been shaped and controlled by mega-influencers: not least by the churches and their monastic schools; more recently by 'Enlightenment' educators and their successors, whose practitioners ignored Greek philosophy almost entirely.

   Where you get religion you get brainwashing.
Capitalism is a much less divided religion than Christianity or Islam.

Eyes squeezed into the banal gaze,

there's just a hair's breadth where 'humanity' exists
between the trivial and the terrible.
We act relentlessly in an educated daze.

The Conspiracy-

-theory of everything:
ownership of land.

Asexual human power.

 

This man by any name

 

would smell as sweet.
The first part means “land of wood and water”
and was the name given to modern-day Jamaica
by the Taino people, early inhabitants of the island.
The second part is Yoruba.
I always wanted to have an exotic name,
and this would have perfectly expressed
the pride in my feeling of no-kin
difference at any time of my life...
not to mention
the delicious colour of his skin.

Two photos

by Pau Buscatós,
both taken in Kolkata.

Urban bovine

 

.

A good line from a bad thriller.

 "People will spend whether they have money or not. 
That is the basis of consumer capitalism."

There is also the economic requirement for inequality
in a post-feudal system.

Content but complaining!

It's all very well for people like me
to condemn aspiration and ambition
for their destructiveness, but millions
of people from Gaza to Haiti,
Burma to Sudan, quite reasonably
want to improve their lives,
have somewhere to shit
(nothing posh)
even somewhere to wash.

Basically, what drives humans
more other animals, is the imagined need
or aggravated desire for comfort, not greed.

Before Adam

there was Play
amongst fish and wolves
and octopi and gulls

which God disapproved of
and so created Man to stop
animals from enjoying themselves.

(for Peter Godfrey-Smith)

'Education, Education, Education...'

that is merely a means to an end is soulless
if not soul-destroying – for teachers especially.

In the forthcoming production of King Lear

 

in Washington DC (January 21, at dusk)
both Regan and Goneril, his majesty's daughters,
will be played by acting sensation of the year,
Elon Musk.

Ceiling of the Month,

intricately jointed and decorated
using Arab techniques then unknown in Europe,
Peterborough (Cambridgeshire, England,
twelfth century.

More on My Criminal Tendencies (09/07/2024)

When at 40 I was finally and demonstrably persuaded
by a sexy Mexican that I was queer,
I had yet another thrill in the pure realisation
that it was a crime in both parts of the Hibernosphere.

Bad graffiti.

 

National Dress is a Wonderful Thing.

There should be more of it about.

To cheer us up in winter,

Montenegro in summer.

Epiphany.

I am a smooth beast ambling
waywardly
towards death's infinite understanding.

 

The past week's "viral tweet"

amongst Iranians:

"The Islamic Republic was born with Carter.
Let it end with Carter's death."

Unchanging humanity

The evil corporations are satanic,
the few good people are deranged.
There's no way that the climate
can ever be unchanged.

More love than hope.

Planting acorns in Kharkiv's bomb-battered forest.

Literature,

whatever transcendental claims are made for it,
is just part of the entertainment industry
like music and drama, painting and ballet,
except that words don't admit to being
barriers against communication and sympathy.

The Great Democratic Ideal

was manipulated by the British and French empires*
to engineer racial difference
and rationalise colonial domination...
thus helping to civilise many peoples
through legal systems no better
than the one that now operates in Russia.

*and within the USA

Equality before the Law ?

"Uselessness

is what makes human life
so exciting to live."

– Paul Auster (author, on BBC)

One reason why I prefer

to kiss a mouth surrounded by hair
is that I can be pretty certain
that there isn't a slick cosmetic curtain.

Maybe that is why more than just some
straight men like to kiss cunt or bum ?

Maybe that is why they're not rare or sparse,
the straight men who like to kiss cunt or arse.

Bach: my New Year Treat.

I saw these two small menhirs first about 10 days ago when I went to collect plants from a specialist and inexpensive nursery (dry stony soils).
I didn’t have camera or phone with me, so I went back yesterday, the first of January, a beautiful day. The area is a whole département (Lot) of limestone karst, as in Dalmatia or (in miniature) the Irish Burren. There are chasms and splits and pavements and lots of perforated boulders. I live just where the southern edge ends.

A pair of pillar-stones, male and female, stand 2.5 metres apart, the female with large (and largely-natural solution-pit/cup-mark + groove (artificially enlarged ?).

Male and female paired stones are rare in France if they exist at all (in Brittany ?) though there are several in Ireland. The name of the commune is Bach, pronounced Bash. 

The stones are 250 cm apart, and 120, 130 high. and never seem to have formed a gateway. Rubble has been piled behind them, so there is a faint chance that there might be a chamber.

I have marked them on Google Earth.

On my way, I found the marvellous perforated Spoon Stone which I posted yesterday.

Cacti in a Storm,

southern Mexico.

A Good Day was had by One.

New Year's Day, 2025:
Bent Spoon Day.
On the roadside near Mouillac
(Tarn-&-Garonne, Occitania)
as found.

The Ugly Vulgarity of Riches

Boucheron emerald + diamond necklace,
and Hermès bag stolen in a recent burglary.

People who like do do things in groups

tend to 'group-think'.

Group walks
Everyone talks
Nobody stops
to examine
the moss or the rocks...

Facing the future

– in comfort.

Wet Mess by Murdo MacLeod.

Absolutely fabulous.

 

A poem I transdapted from the Danish nearly 60 years ago:

after Grethe Risbjerg Thomsen's

En nat, måske en martsnat

With every passing moment
I die a little bit.
I carry death within me
through every day I live.

One night – perhaps a March night -
mild, with mist and rain,
I’ll step into the twilight
and never die again.

No: more likely 1954.

 

What would Orwell think now ?

We, in our millions, are (of course)
not brainwashed.
We have been very efficiently (but stressfully)
turned into parroting sponges to soak up
sad and destructive American Values,
along with not-quite-fake philosophy and news.

Alas!

the ignorance of the Educated – novelists
and journalists and even restaurant-reviewers
all 'high-to-middle-brows' –
who think that all cattle
(except for the occasional bull)
are cows.

 

No job too small.

Michelangelo
(di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni)
sculpted a snowman
on request (or at the behest)
of one or other of the Medici.

DH Lawrence wrote

three of the best poems in English.
In his two-volume
Collected Poems (1928)
the second part
was of verses unrhymed,

some of them refreshingly short
- just three or four lines;
some of them soppy,
others refreshingly
worse than my blogs.

I can find only one on the web*
- but I have sent off for a second-hand copy
of the abovementioned collection.

* NOTE: The oft-quoted lines about the non-connection
of a bird to self-pity are only half of a longer poem.

Worst of all –

 

If YouTube's bizarre recommendations

are anything to go by,
we'll either all be wiped out next year
- or never.

The Big Question is 
human cultural bias.
In overview it is at present
mostly American and inanely
acquisitive and optimistic.
Even the USA's most-apparent
enemies have it...so...
what's to hope for ?

The death of fun.

The more competitive
that people and societies
are, the less playful, too.

Being a difficult person

is not easy,
especially when you are downed
by diarrhœa and gastric reflux
– and fall over from time to time.

The Dark Reflector
(whom I treat sometimes as a dunce
asked if I wanted a cuddle,
but, really, it was the other way round:
he wished to receive one, for once.

Who? Me?

Interesting snippet.

Although the Romans had no theory of sepsis or antisepsis,

and, of course, no knowledge of distillation of wine to spirit
(which is antiseptic), they cleaned wounds with turpentine,
which is a fairly violent antiseptic.

Can any imagined communion

with a god, goddess or great spirit
(below, next-door, above)
compete with the felt,
if temporary, entheogenic union
of emotional, erotic love ?

 

The violinist returning home at night.

photo by Queenie Cheen, 2020.

 

'Sociability' :

the inability to be alone,
lacking interesting pursuits,
a fear of silence ?

The Bank of Mum and Dad

I listened to a broadcast on the radio about it
and how it conferred 'hereditary advantage'
in social systems said to be meritocracies,

and how it is becoming more and more important and divisive
as 'advanced' societies become less egalitarian.

I thought it amazing that no mention was made
of the empty piggy-banks of the millions
of 'single mothers', 'mums-alone'
who have to work to just manage on their own
even without the financial, social
and emotional impediment of children.