HallowE'en costume

at a famous annual party.

and a detail from Heidi Klum's costume
as an apotropaic bleeding hand.

Prophets, Racists, Zionists, Calumny

There was a lot of hoo-hah
about Britain's Green Party
labelling Zionists as racists.

From their beginning in the 19th century, Zionists wanted
to re-occupy Palestine (where in Roman times they lived
with many other groups and religions
including Greek polytheists and atheists especially in Galilee )
and push out/get rid of the Palestinians
(also known as Philistines).  

In their favour,
some people say that Israelis are only doing
what was done to them, except that
they are not doing it to the Russians, the Lithuanians,
the Poles, the Spaniards and the Germans,
nor to the English
who were the first in Europe to expel the Jews in 1290.

As to their immemorial, implacable hatreds
one only has to read the many grisly bits of the Old Testament
to understand how bloody-minded and often genocidal they were.

Their Prophets often tried to limit their excesses.

Anne Carson wrote about Isaiah
who had unclean lips :

Isaiah awoke angry.

Lapping at Isaiah's ears black birdsong no it was anger.

God had filled Isaiah's ears with stingers.

Once God and Isaiah were friends.

God and Isaiah used to converse nightly,
Isaiah would rush into the garden.

They conversed under the Branch, night streamed down.

From the sole of the foot to the head God would make Isaiah ring.

Isaiah had loved God and now his love was turned to pain.

Isaiah wanted a name for the pain, he called it sin.

Now Isaiah was a man who believed he was a nation.

Isaiah called the nation Judah and the sin Judah's condition.

Inside Isaiah God saw the worldsheet burning.

Isaiah and God saw things differently, I can only tell you their actions.

Isaiah addressed the nation.

Man's brittleness! cried Isaiah.

The nation stirred in its husk and slept again.

Two slabs of bloody meat lay folded on its eyes like wings.

Like a hard glossy painting the nation slept.

Who can invent a new fear?

Yet I have invented sin, thought Isaiah, running his hand over the knobs.

And then, because of a great attraction between them—

which Isaiah fought (for and against) for the rest of his life—

God shattered Isaiah's indifference.

God washed Isaiah's hair in fire.

God took the stay.

From beneath its meat wings the nation listened.

You, said Isaiah.

No answer.

I cannot hear you, Isaiah spoke again under the Branch.

Light bleached open the night camera.

God arrived.

God smashed Isaiah like glass through every socket of his nation.

Liar! said God.

Isaiah put his hands on his coat, he put his hand on his face.

Isaiah is a small man, said Isaiah, but no liar.

God paused.

And so that was their contract.

Brittle on both sides, no lying.

Isaiah's wife came to the doorway, the doorposts had moved.

What's that sound? said Isaiah's wife.

The fear of the Lord, said Isaiah.

He grinned in the dark, she went back inside.

'Eat more Fibre !'

Eat more fibre
– and spend hours of
trying to tongue it
from between your teeth.

President and Predator

Cochliotrumpia hominivorax

Flesh-eating

New World 

Screw-worm

Continues its rampage

More than a Dirty Look, All Souls Day.

The problem with casting the evil eye
is that you have to see your victim,

which I could not when I saw that he
had cut down the weeping copper-leaved
crab-apple tree which had dark rose flowers
in spring and whose fruit made lovely jam.

It is 15 years since I planted it with joy,
ten years since I sold my little orchard.
I was beyond weeping
when I saw the sad stump today.

Stupid people

including 'scientists'
are wondering why cancer
is increasing everywhere
despite all medical defences,

not pausing to think
that the rape of the planet
has consequences.

Yesterday's excitement

was the 'discovery' of this object

online. Given my interest since the mid-1970s
in sculpted exhibitionists, I hastened to check it out.
And produced this web-page –
yesterday's excrement ?

A bumble-bee at HallowE'en

is feasting on my cyclamen.

I am a kind of ghostly
pseudo-anthropologist,
an esprit de l'escalier
who, for most of his life
has read novels continually
to try and understand
the disturbing throng
of people he's a stranger to,
the threatening species
he could never join, only be among.

The great unlearned lesson

from ancient Greece
is that gods are even more ghastly
and nasty than humans.

 

Yellow rose.

 

I love old, abandoned houses.
I explored them as a boy.
Later, I found old, abandoned
bits of furniture...and fittings.

Bees don't like hair.

Les, by Holly Lynton

 

Considering Five Thousand (or so).

Jesus might have said
that it's better to share than to give.

How little I do of either !

César Domela:

Still-life with Books

 

Word of the Day,

hitherto unknown to me:
CALTROP

A Roman caltrop

Historically, caltrops were part of military defences
designed to slow the advance of troops,
especially horses, chariots, and war elephants,
and were particularly effective against the soft feet of camels.

The word is also used figuratively:
ex-President Obama has been casting caltrops...

The US Embassy in London
is an exceptionally elaborate  example.

Democratic discomfort

 from The Guardian

Puddles

Reflections
transitory
since the dawn of time
Never the same puddle

[photos from FlickR]

The mad and the insanely rich.

 

In the same report it is revealed that 
'numerous AI researchers “have started smoking
as a way of signalling to other researchers”
that they believe AI is going to cure cancer soon.'

And then there are the big, bad politicians...

金継ぎ

I am a fan of Kintsugi.

But yet more beautiful
to my soul rather than my eyes
are the unrepaired broken
artefacts and fragments
that people despise.

...quite a linguistic

coincidence
that pierrots
used to perform
on piers.

We superior, cynical types

should humbly remind ourselves
that fools, cranks, pranksters
and disinformers –  even the presidents
of the USA and Turkmenistan
can tell a truth on occasion.

That's how capitalism works.

 

and  wars (including its Civil War)
made America super-rich.

A saucepan

with convenient
handle for emptying, especially
over a balcony

is a much more sturdy and
practical piss-pot
for men or women, than a
plastic hospital bottle.

It won't easily be

overturned, can slip under a bed,
under a chair or a sideboard
and is less remarkable,
if left lying around.

And is less eye-catching than this
rare, Victorian, breakable
'she-wee' bottle,

.  

retailing on Etsy for just fifty pounds.

It can even be used for scooping,
fending off devils
or cooking...

My Lithuanian friend

(who has telepathic connection
to one of the White Houses)
tells me that black smoke
indicates that a new Hitler has been chosen...

but has yet to be revealed.

 

The blessings of travel

expire like passports.

*

– Reason for visit ?
Nomadism.
– Permission refused. 

It's a bit early for Christmas,

 but the decoration tells a different story.

"I am being offered a job

by the government
that I can't take
because of the government."

Ireland immures itself in the Whiteys' fortress of shit.

Schubert has no copyright.

Resistance

 

Time and evil.

Tyrannosaurus rex
is closer in time to us
than to its predecessor
Megalosaurus.

Pause for thought
that the tiny, soon mini-end
of our world can't come soon enough

to end the suffering of animals
that we, unlike Megalosaurus
and its æons of successors,
torture to exploit.

Our notion of 'perpetuity'
is very much shorter
than the time-span between
the emergence of ungulates
and us.

Our superior 'intelligence'
is the Will to Exterminate.
It's such a pity that the
superior beings of East Asia
don't believe that the semen
of seamen is more powerful a medicine
than the milked bile of Moon Bears
of which there are in China alone, at least
twenty thousand in iron straitjackets,
unable to move, as their bile drips
from a catheter into a cup.

Continually, throughout its life,
a moon-bear suffers more
than a human hostage
strapped for life
in an electric chair, or a screaming soul
portrayed in medieval Hell,
tormented by a devil.

I wish I could have, at birth, resigned
from the species that invented evil.

China, Vietnam, South Korea...

Who do you know that knows or cares
about the suffering of tortured bears ?

 “The cages are extremely tiny, scarcely larger than the bears themselves and completely devoid of stimuli. The bears lack everything. They are ill and lifeless. I have seen animals that could not even lie down properly in their cage. They had to sleep in a sitting position. Bears kept on these farms usually have no access to water..."

One of the 'woke' Weasel-words

that tell you nothing, but sound
liberal and 'inclusive' :

neurodivergent.

Yuk.
I shall from now on describe myself as

wtf sociodivergent (nearly-sociopathic nihilist).

*

I remember poorer children that I liked
who were classified as E.S.N.
(Educationally sub-normal)
already the worse for wear.
I myself was designated
maladjusted,
a label I am now more proud to bear.

Close-up

of a jumping spider
'garlanded with pollen',
by John Oliver Dum

 

'Police State'

was a much-used term in the 1950s and '60s,
describing totalitarian régimes in Eastern Europe,
and more distant parts of the world, especially
Haiti, Honduras and Paraguay.
Lately, we heard talk of a mysterious Deep State.
But now we're back to Police State, not describing
Poland, Guatemala, Myanmar or even Chile
– but the USA.

Dining Out.

Ossiano's, Dubai.

"Blue Brittany Lobster (known as the king of crustaceans)
grilled over binchotan, paired with pain perdu in kombu milk,
topped with salicornia and trout roe.

"At its core, a beetroot reduction with marigold, finished with horseradish cream, smoked eel, and delicate foam..."

I think I'll stay at home tonight.

Does this explain

the original function of large stone circles ?

Reason for travel ?

 Nomadism.

Permission refused.

That's just in Finland...

What horrible, unreported destruction
is Google wreaking elsewhere ?

his blog is hosted by Google.

Haireas.

Baldness does seem to indicate high testosteronal activity
(but not in my case). 

Armpit hair stores the sexually-attractive pheromones
from armpit sweat,

which I used to ask one or two pheromonal males to let me sniff.

Pubic hair is bushy so that will catch and keep and emanate
the odour of a rival - or at least it did before
the obscene modern obsession with washing 

and mortifying the flesh with chemical scents
and acrid deodoriser...which, come to think of it
might help reduce the rate of population-increase.

A Face of War.

   Awaiting eye-surgery, Ukraine.

I started painting in 1965

because I had nothing on the walls
of my primitive house (no electricity,
no bathroom...).
Of course, I keep moving my pictures about...
...for the wicked, no rest...

 

...and in in my much more recent,
much larger French home
I can never decide which wall
shows this one off best.

Burning Big and Burning Small.

The ruling class would rather burn the world
than share it with the poor,
writes George Monbiot, almost slogan-trite. 

There are several 'ruling classes',
some only semi-ruling.

The poor can only, on very rare occasions,
led by trouble-mongers, loot pathetically
and set vehicles alight.

Tele-non-communication.

Both my phones stay at home
in my never-locked hermitage.
Neither instrument has rung for weeks -
until today the fixed phone rang
and I actually picked it up,
looked at the dodgy number,
and, nevertheless, pressed the connect button.
Silent proof that there's nobody out there...

So I continued the blog I was composing
about originality.  
Somewhere I had read:

"Very few people are original.
Because to be original means you have to stand alone."  

To stand alone requires not just stubbornness
but also a feeling of otherness....

Hope, perhaps,

is a kind of moral collapse.

 

Planting a Narcissus bulb.

God in his own image.

Taking a Selfie,

not in Paris, but another European capital:

the clue is in the flag used as a scarf.

Republican Ogres.

 

In fact, the Gendarmerie (Gens d'Armes
unlike British and Irish police
who don't have guns about them,
except in Northern Ireland)
is a unruly-when-necessary
part of the armed forces.
The CRS or riot police is even more
unaccountable and terrifying.

This is why France is so often on the edge
of turning into a Police State.
French 'Law and Order' (with some exceptions)
had a lovely World War Two.

read more >

But it's not very far from Calais to Dover.

A Palestinian slogan

shouts Resistance is Existence!
For me, existence has mostly
been some kind of resistance.

Binary.

In a dualistic, duelistic
Manichæan world
Satan inevitably wins -
for winning is Satanic.

Two sculptures

carved thousands of years apart.

Gilgamesh between two Minotaur demigods
holding up a sun disc.

          New translation of the Epic >

A corner of Hell, Girona cathedral,
Catalonia.

Senile confusion

I have unsuccessfully tried two books by Sarah Dunant
(who writes novels about the Italian Renaissance and the Borgias)

because I mixed her up with the late Helen Dunmore,
who wrote a marvellous novel about Leningrad, 
called The Siege. 

Two Duns made for confusion in my addled brain.

But, on pursuing my error,
I found this fine poem by Helen Dunmore:

CITY LILACS

In crack-haunted alleys, overhangs,
plots of sour earth that pass for gardens,
in the space between wall and wheelie bin,

where men with mobiles make urgent conversation,
where bare-legged girls shiver in April winds,
where a new mother stands on her doorstep and blinks
at the brightness of morning, so suddenly born —

in all these places the city lilacs are pushing
their cones of blossom into the spring
to be taken by the warm wind.

Lilac, like love, makes no distinction.
It will open for anyone.
Even before love knows that it is love
lilac knows it must blossom.

In crack-haunted alleys, in overhangs,
in somebody's front garden
abandoned to crisp packets and cans,

on landscaped motorway roundabouts,
in the depth of parks
where men and women are lost in transactions
of flesh and cash, where mobiles ring

and the deal is done — here the city lilacs
release their sweet, wild perfume
then bow down, heavy with rain.

* * *

(But lilacs are not that common, and are slow-growing...  I wonder if she might have mixed them up with Buddlejas which are everywhere (like fig-trees here), including behind wheelie bins and growing out of walls, but usually flowering later than Spring... More addlement.)

Pillage and predation

continue, of course, everywhere,
including Gabon.

When there are riots and looting

(resulting from peaceful demonstrations)

it has been usual and convenient, since before the 1920s,
to blame "the extreme left". 

However, as Naomi Klein (amongst others)
points out, chaos now benefits the ultra-rich,
not the poor.  Socio-statistically, I count as poor.

Although the price of local lettuce has recently doubled
while the price of coffee has not,
I live comfortably on my 1,050 euros a month,
in green rurality, waiting for a war.

Comment by First Dog on the Moon >