Language

sanitises.
or, at least,
deodorises.

It is no surprise

to misanthropes
that the world's richest man
is a white supremacist
from South Africa
who eggs on mindless men in black
to bomb and burn their neighbours.

This is a predictable result
of capitalism and its
'Christian Values'.

in 1945
not far from where this interview would take place,
on the Newtownards road, somewhere
near this burned-out bus,
I was tricycling happily (aged 4) 
in between the tramway-tracks,
when I was accosted by two big Constabulary men
in almost-black uniforms who very gently
told me that I could not ride into town.
I did not resist or even protest. 
They put me in their nice black car
and drove me with my tricycle the couple of miles
home, back up the road
that I had largely free-wheeled down.
It would be many years before they took
my fingerprints.

I have been free-wheeling ever since.

A Conversation-piece by Giulio Romano.

Zeus as writhing serpent with hairy willy
supervised by Zeus as lightning-wielding eagle
and God (or a neighbour, or Mr Olympias)
coming into the room ?
Or have I got it wrong ?

Jupiter seducing Olympias, 1526-1528. 

Mr Blackbird

yesterday evening
in the trees below my balcony.

(turn up the volume if necessary)

A funeral pyre

upon a Varaneshi ghat
requires less wood than you'd suppose
because of subcutaneous fat.

In today's newspaper

 

Belfast (of course).

and London.

Why is this revelation not better known ?

“Ninety-nine percent of who you are 
is invisible and untouchable.”

- Buckminster Fuller

Did he ever meet Carl Jung ?

Man pulling his beard

while missing his penis.
Perhaps it was used locally
as a dildo or fecundity-charm...
anyway, it was never returned.
There may be others.

Corbel on the parish church at Crespos,
Burgos, Spain.

Cui bono ?

There's not much benefit
in a 'Free Press' 
when all media
are spineless.

Cancer

is where the money is,
and money is unpreventable
cancer.

Wild, precious forests and my sedentary life.

 

More importantly:

The Metaverse.

'Evolved Capitalism'
progressively isolates non-joiners
on the widening margins

while openly decrying solitude
(if only by calling it loneliness) 

because solitude, like silence
encourages contemplation
and the privacy and resulting
(and maybe only slight)
independence of thought.

the-novelists-who-predicted-our-present >

Instead, you should consider
all the stuff and services you have not bought...

The Story So Far.

 This is the story of two madmen,

both are financial criminals.

The first is mad with hate and revenge.

He wants to destroy Iran, a nation as old as his own.

The second is mad with greed and narcissism.

One day, the first discovers exactly where Iran's 

King of Kings, now re-named Supreme Leader

will be in a few hours.  He phones up the second,

who says - OK. We'll get him.

And the Supreme Leader was assassinated

alongwith some henchmen.

The rest of the world was surprised, but not too dismayed...

...until the Two Insanities jointly decided that

they would bomb Iran to bits and instal a new Leader

(anti-Israeli, and anti-American)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by name, still somewhere

in the background.

However, the even more anti-Israeli and anti-American

Son of the King of Kings popped out of a hideout

and was declared Supreme Leader.  He declared

that Iran was unbowed and would retaliate.

And so we have the mess that is the latest Mesopotamian War.

Only nihilists are happy about it - well, not exactly happy...
maybe semi-contenty.

Mesopotamian wars have not been counted,
but there must have been

dozens at least. One of the earlier ones can be found in the Bible,

at 2 Chronicles 36:20.

The Flip-Side*

of human purposiveness
is the appalling catalogue
of unintended consequences -
which, as we vaingloriously persevere, 
lead towards the Great Smothering
of the biosphere.

*also known as the B-side of a 78 rpm gramophone record.
cf B-movies.

There is no functionality

beyond how we think.

A forest is a forest,

not just a Carbon Sink.

I talked to a chatbot

about a French word I have invented,
derived from BUT = goal :

BUTISME*
might be a neat rendering of Purposiveness,
the curse of civilisation.

Here is the chatbot's very impressive reply:

Nice coinage. Here are three concise options for meaning and usage you can adopt for "butisme":

1. • Meaning: a philosophy or practice centered on setting and pursuing clear goals.
   • Example: "Le butisme encourage la fixation d'objectifs précis avant d'agir."
2. • Meaning: an artistic/movement term describing works focused on purpose or teleology.
   • Example: "Le butisme dans la peinture moderne privilégie les œuvres à portée intentionnelle."
• Meaning: a behavioral trait—an excessive preoccupation with achieving goals (pejorative).
• Example: "Son butisme l'empêche d'apprécier le processus."
  
  

* Not to be confused with BOUTISME which is the French for the I.T. term Endianness.

Incidentally, the French décroissance is much less ugly
than degrowth in English, don't you think, clever chatbot ?

I have gone on to invent butisme's opposite:

l'ANTIBUTISME

= goallessness, antigoalism, anti-purposiveness, anti-intentionality.

Urged in adolescence to consider a career,
"in this world of suffering and strife"
I confess that I've endeavoured
to make nothing
of my life.

What is past, or passing, or yet to come.*

The cross, the crescent and the star of David.

after Najid al-Ali

*Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium.

Practising Eugenics.

Quixotically,
despite the remoteness
of the possibility
that my sperm would successfully
assail an egg, I had the satisfaction
of a vasectomy.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-disabled-people-support-eugenics-in-the-1930s

Sisyphean Sex :

ever on the edge of orgasm.

The Chief end of Man*

Insanity through capitalism.

Hydration Powder.
Contains no liquid.

* The Westminster Shorter (Christian) Catechism:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

1 Cor. 10:31; Rom. 11:36; Ps. 73:25-28.

For most of us,

knowledge, like information,
has become a handicap.
The remedy ?
Turn off the tap.

I am happy to say

that in my forties I was a better
painter of portraits than Lucian Freud was
at seventeen.  He disowned this early effort...

...and my portraits never improved.

PS

for comparison, here is a portrait of Moise Kisling
by Modigliani.

Finally, this is a very fine and more recent
self-portrait in the 'realist' tradition
by Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

 Self-Portrait as Photographer

Another 'Asperger Symptom' ?

Never having received
a smile from a wolf,
I have no idea what
a wolfish smile looks like.

Like a thread,

or a piece of fabric in a bramble ?
Or a backward pupil ?

Avian morality.

But even if it were 'unnatural' 
would punishment be 'appropriate' ?

 

It's obvious, really,

that some nurturers
become torturers
by stifling those they care about.

And in a wider context,
'The Welfare State'.

Who reads food-packaging, anyway ?

As a result of obligatory Franco-Belgian
food-labelling, I gather that tronk
is Flemish/Dutch for log (or stump)
as in a bûche
or little log of goat-cheese.

But not for the boot (American: trunk)
of a car.  Tronc in French refers only to trees.
Tronk is also Afrikaans for prison.
Comparative linguistics
is full of ramifications like these.

Natural smells.

Certainly, somebody
at some time told their lover
not to wash for a while
(assuming that washing,
a recent and unhealthy fad,
was possible).

Possibly not Napoleon Bonaparte
but probably, through unhygienic history,
hundreds of thousands of others.
Certainly including me.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54339/did-napoléon-bonaparte-ask-his-wife-josephine-not-to-bathe-for-several-days

'Grief-tech'

The rich can now build
avatars of their dear departed
and manipulate them
like marionettes.

Will war-lords of Ebolaland
subscribe ?

Misquoting Orwell :

There are some ideas so absurd
that only humans could produce them.

Sexual intervention

may always have been

a part of Education.

Why is the outrage so recent ?

Collaboration, The Iliad and the Bells of Hell.

Poetry
(and verse)
too often
drip honey
and worse
on truth
to reduce
and neutralise
its sting.

Oh! my arse
goes ting-a ling-a ling...

A truly-painterly

 photo by Dmitry Ersler.

A light-bulb moment

or,
Capitalist reductionism

by Lee Friedlander, New York, 1959

How not to handle

a 700-year old Arthurian manuscript.

Nature and nurture.

 

Oscar, Aghnabreck, Scotland.

Is consciousness a cliff

 that we face backwards ?

For every being with consciousness
the only world may be, as Rilke wrote, within.

So there is no 'objective reality',
and no way of knowing
if there is a consensual one.

Just a multitude of inputs.

The me-ness of my existence
suggests a meanness of existence
on this small celestial object, anyway.

Might there be qualities of existence ?

Elsewhere in the universes
existence might well be
unrecognisably
and unimaginably different

Thank you, Robert Galbraith.

Slight digressions from the good cannot be avoided.

- I Ching or Book of Changes (Twaddle, Stuff and Nonsense)

*

Probably not in the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead or Confucius:

It's dangerous to make a cult out of your own unhappiness.

A few of my days

(just a few)

have been elevator-days

when I pass instantaneously 

between floors

from surface to surface of awareness -

no keys, no doors

Two equally-ugly sisters.

 

Plants that flower underground

are, of course, very rare.
At least one baffles botanists...
but maybe Artificial Intelligence
will supply the reason...
after Human Intelligence
dies out. 

Yeats and the Internet.

As we see the world
more and more
(or rather, less and less)

in only two dimensions
we lose our sense
of wonder
and of wonder's innocence.

Painfully remembering adolescence.

Oh, the blatant lies
I felt I had to tell -
and oh, the retrospective shame
of having wanted the approval
of people I would now despise.

The most beautiful lives

are lived by those
who know nothing.

 

Wars. Plagues and Algorithms.

Getting out of bed

is more inviting

than coming to terms

with the world

and the day ahead.

Scary crockery.

Can I have twelve, please ? Delivered.

From the 'Dark Web'...

 

Manhattan, 2010 - detail.

 

photo by Harry Gruyaert

One can tire

of even the most beautiful, enchanting
human music - but not of birdsong.

The Almost-Final Fall of France

to Anglophone Forces ?

Not so much a shift as a collapse.

No, the probable reason is that people are now preferring low-alcohol drinks.
11% is quite strong enough for a red wine, and 5% white wines of quality can easily be made. Yet growers are producing large quantities of red wines at14% which are sold far too young.