A Happy Couple

should be the icing on each other's cake,
not the cake itself.

The Food of Fools.

Bread, with its intensive, uncertain,
back-breaking cultivation, came a very long time ago,
when and where there were no bananas, broccoli,
asparagus, artichokes, cabbages, leeks, brussels sprouts,
courgettes, squashes, tomatoes, avocados, goji, oranges,
nectarines, apricots, plums, apples, cherries, pears...
rice or maize or quinoa, seaweed, seakale, spinach...
And yet people insist on eating bread, which now depends
on vast industries of seed-hybridisation (and patenting),
of machinery devoted to ploughing, planting, harrowing,
spraying, cutting, separating, winnowing, milling,
marketing, baking, marketing, transporting,
when they and the planet would be better off -
if we would only tell each other and our children to eat
all those fruits and vegetables which have been
developed since the start of the malign
and divisive dictatorship of wheat.
Bread is a complicated cultural artefact like language or religion
- and is just as toxic to the biosphere as the industry of meat.

Sic transit stultitia humana.

Leavened bread and alcohol both depend on yeast.
Bread and alcohol together constitute a feast.

Democracy will not tackle climate change,

because democracy created capitalism,
then consumerism, and nobody wants
to reduce their standard of living
(which they think is quality of life)
and dependence on things,
even on swindles like bottled water.

Only enlightened dictators can possibly
avert the holocaust to come. Unfortunately
there have never been any Philosopher Kings.
And so Planet Earth limps on
like a lamb to the slaughter.

As a tree-lover I have always worried about paper and its consumption.

I am always saving paper, writing on the backs of scraps and cut-up cardboard packaging.  Thanks to Google and Duck-Duck-Go I found this statistic :

 Top 5 Paper & Paperboard Importing Countries   (Million Metric Tonnes in 2017) 

Click to enlarge.  If it doesn't show properly, click here
and scroll down.

 Where does it all come from ?  How ?  

According to research conducted by Kyocera,
the average office worker in the UK uses up to
45 pieces of paper per day, and a staggering two-thirds of that is considered to be waste.

I feel that I have been favoured

by life - even though I regret my birth.
I never had much motivation
to search for love in bars or plazas
social gatherings or nooks
upon this sorry earth.
What I sought was inspiration,
.
  .
    .
       which I found in books 

My wicked uncle in Coventry

was wicked only to me
(his sister's awkward bastard)
because he did not like shy,
wussy, left-handed little boys.
He was a medical practitioner,
a family doctor who used to make tea
for his elderly patients,
light their fires in winter
and take an interest in them.
He or his practice-partner often knew
other family members 
and the family history.

But he frightened me.
It was he who prevailed
upon my mother to send me to a school
which would 'toughen me up'.
In this (I'm glad to say) he failed.

 

Friedrich von Schiller

declared that there were
just two classes in the civilised world :
the naïve (or natural, spontaneous, uncorrupted)
and the sentimental (or filled with false sentiment,
hypocritical, corrupt).  He was discussing poets
(presumably male), but the idea is worth expanding.
I know from experience that sentimental hearts
are mean, rococo, and that naivety in men
deprives them happily of all standing.

 

No good hermit

is monotheistic.

Vanilla-flavoured everything.

Today's news:

"Scientists have developed a technique to turn waste plastic bottles into the synthetic vanilla flavouring vanillin."

What then happens to the millions of litres
of unused (unusable ?) vanillin ?
And what about the millions of plastic bottles
in the middle of the Pacific.
Who will fish them out ?

Every psycho-quack that I was ever sent to

could have done with some help from me
to 'loosen up'.

The word quack is one of many Dutch words
(as well as pronunciation-changes)
that crossed over to Britain
with William III of Orange:
Kwacksalver = a healer-spieler.

Nothing to do with Quicksilver.

Word-association.

A couple of months ago I discovered
that flapdoodle meant not only 'nonsense'
but (originally) was a wonderful
word for the male member or pizzle.
Codswallop is another graphic term
for the same appendage..
Today I learned that baloney is a synonym
of Bologna, a kind of spam sausage, as well
as for hogwash, bullshit, and so on...

...and on to jiggery-pokery, presumably by weenies
- from Wiener[wurst], another kind of sausage.

ORPHEUS IN SOHO

My new web-page of poems by
ROSEMARY TONKS

can be read here.

I discovered her only yesterday.
She is as good as Sylvia Plath.

She had a Kurdish lover.

She reminds me of Jean Rhys.

She had a break-down,
subsequently became a Baptist
and was immersed in the river Jordan.

She disowned her poems
presumably because she thought them louche
and un-Christian.

But where did Jesus shit ?
There are no relics.

I love the word 'WISTFUL'

as I like the word WHOLESOME,
but there is a noxious miasma of a word
which I greatly dislike.

If only we could replace LOVE
(unstable, hormonal, irrational,
mephitic, glamorous)
with GENTLE FONDNESS
we might release each other
from the inane evils
of the soggily amorous. 

[see also a previous blog]

"Thank you for the love !" said ex-king Trump to his fans.

Name-day self-portraits.

            Old Man's Leg (details).

 

Today is my Name Day,

which occurs nine calendar months
after my birth day : the feast day
of St Anthony of Padua
who had a pet pig.

Name-days used to be celebrated,
especially in Russia, when everyone
was named after an archangel or a saint.

Now we are much more egotistical,
and allegedly more 'individual'.
This is not true. 
Sheeple breed in their billions,
individuals are very few. 

[Sant’Antonio da Padova, original name Fernando Martins de Bulhões, (born 1195, Lisbon, Portugal—died June 13, 1231, Arcella, Verona; canonized 1232; Franciscan friar, doctor of the church, and patron of the poor. Padua and Portugal claim him as their patron saint, and he is (bizarrely) invoked for the recovery or return of lost property.]

'Artificial Intelligence

is neither artificial nor intelligent,'
writes Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research.

It is made from rare natural resources (e.g. lithium mines),
uses vast amounts of electricity
and large numbers of people
(mostly badly paid and non-unionised)
who perform the (mostly menial)
tasks that make the systems seem
automatic and autonomous.

It is just a new kind of resource-devouring slavery.

Haiku ?

My belly buzzing ?
No - a small bee trapped
between the pages of my book.

From the beginning,

Christianity was what we would now call racist,
and was certainly divisive.
Civis romanus sum,
declared the controlling, micromanaging St Paul,
not Iudaeus sum, nor even Humanus sum.

(If you don't know basic Latin or basic Christian history,ignore this blog.)

(Incidentally, women were not virile Roman citizens, merely women,
even if they manipulated emperors, as did Agrippina and Helena.)

(Christianity was a disaster for the planet; it produced Islam and, much worse, modern science and technology which have reduced the Earth to short-term resource.)

(And so they, the white Christians, plan to migrate to another planet, create another desert without Desert Fathers.)

(Paul hoped to "save" himself [from what ?] by "saving" others. And so he and the cult that he founded doomed the planet and its dominant race to bleak sterility.)

A pity the Romans did not have TV.

The odious Marcus Aurelius
genocidal Roman Emperor
and fake-philosopher, tycoon,
financed spectacular
gladiatorial "games"
in which a hundred European lions
(now unsurprisingly extinct)
were slaughtered in one afternoon.

Good News !

Climate-change and the collapse
in both sexes of human fertility
(due to the spate
of industrial chemicals in the water
and the atmosphere)
may shortly combine
to Save the Planet
just a little late.

VIRtue

contains the Latin word for man,
as does VIRile.
Even worse, the same syllable
occurs, slightly transformed,
in WORLD.

But women will never
abandon virtue and give birth
to women who might rescue
the human-male-choked earth.

It turns out

that most psychological experiments
have been carried out on students
in euro-american universities and hospitals.
Many of the many conclusions drawn may well not be
applicable to people of other classes, cultures and times.
And there are no Universal Human Values,
just universal human crimes.

Three New Friends.

 

No technology can save us

from the destructive effects of technology
(especially of technology which was designed to
but did not reverse or even ameliorate
the destructive effects of technology)
any better than militarism can save us
from the evils of militarism.

[read about the infamous Reversal of the Chicago River]

Apart from its very limited and blandly-benign message,

the essence of orthodox Christianites
has been intolerance,
which is the cornerstone
of arrogant, European
'Universal Values'.

A Positive Step

towards alleviating Climate Change :

World Masturbation-Celebration Month for Men.

"It goes without saying" -
which is why no-one says - that
climate-change is a function of overpopulation.

The sun-tan industry shows

that the worst thing
about being a Whitey
is being white.

The Philanthropy of the Rich

 
is always phoney.

The morally blind

love the police.

The greatest luxury

for me and perhaps for unheard millions
is to live alone, without pain,
healthy and solitary.
                                Thus I
too am quietly, contentedly
waiting to die.

Still-lives.

My latest arty photos :

'Libertarian'

in Europe suggests the advocacy of freedom from
oppression of various kinds,
whereas in the USA the word implies
freedom to oppress anyone you don't like -
and to carry a gun.

When you are "a little bit deaf",

you will be able to distinguish
between philosophy and colostomy
on the lip-less radio only by paying close
attention to context.

Swiss author Max Frisch :

 "One can tell any story except one's own." 

Hmm...  Disregarding the Big Question of Truth,
stories depend on language
and where language is lacking
the story is lacking.

Thus there is no such thing as a complete story.

The Dictatorship of Language

decrees what we must not, cannot talk about,
such as the utter, solipsistic
solitude of consciousness.

Sexual education and terminology.

Every adolescent should know
that for a 'blow-job' you should not blow,
and sucking is chokingly
unsubtle, unsophisticated.
We, the sensually-advanced, initiated
by tongue-tip round the glans
and frenum are ecstatic fans
of a practice easy and uncomplicated.

Perhaps the Bulgarian

government is the most rational
in Europe by not favouring
the expensive old
in their vaccination programme.
After all, my pampered generation
has already benefited from
an unasked-for extension of life.

Rather late in life,

I have been trying to get to grips with crazy Lacan.
who makes me think of the legendary
theologians who for years enjoyed
calculating how many angels
could dance on the head of a pin.
But I like the idea that human consciousness
(and the search for 'knowledge') is ineluctably paranoid.

He was obsessed
with the effects of mothers and fathers
(and their mere genders) in infant development. 
He seems to me himself to be (like Freud)
a driven victim of extremely limited middle-class attitudes.
Since I never had a father (and hardly even noticed)
and no mother that I know of for the first year of my life
(she turned up later, as my 'aunt', after she adopted me)
and am less up-tight than most,
by Lacan I (a happy solitary) am not impressed.

"Speech is silver...

 

...but silence is golden."

California

 "First came the Spaniards
then the dutiful Chinese.
These quiet docile workers were replaced by
the hysterical Italians, the cagey Swiss,
the stoical Mexicans, the snobby French,
the crazy Germans, the friendly Greeks
and the unfathomable Armenians."

- Alan Parker, The Sucker's Kiss, 2003

(And the others ?)

Word of the Day.

Yesterday, on the radio, I heard the word
DEIFIC.

I think the speaker meant divine.

The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

Normal human activity
is worse for 'nature' 
than 'the greatest nuclear accident in history'.

I might have declared (and posted) this before.

Happiness is
sheer existence
without pain
or hope.

Or soap.

The Barbarians

are no longer at the gates,
but in McDonald's
piling up their plates.

Henrietta Lacks,

an African-American, had cells taken from her body in 1951
when she was suffering from cancer.
Those cells were found to be unique in a most particular way.
They continued to reproduce endlessly in the laboratory.
Culture from those cells have since been used
in thousands of scientific experiments.
But - of course - Henrietta herself was never asked
if her cells could be used in medical research.

Much less rewarded.

"Love is not an end

but a process through which
one person attempts to know another."

- John Williams, in STONER, 1965.

I don't know whether or not I have experienced love.
I have felt many fondnesses, from deep
to superficial, and some infatuations,
which by definition are superficial passions
that come and go...
but love, I think, is something other people feel,
or claim to.

"...how will we ever know
True love, how will we ever know ?"

When I was seven years old,

I wanted to be a (male) ballet-dancer.
At ten I found an interest in astronomy.
I prevailed upon my mother to take me
to meetings of the Irish Astronomical Society.
In 1953, when I was eleven,
I had my first little essay
published in the school magazine.
It was a review of Flying Saucers Have Landed
by Leslie and Adamski.
Long before sheeple became interested
in space travel, I had read Werner von Braun
- and abandoned astronomy because
it was too mathematical, and in any case
it was probably a childish pseudo-intellectual pose.
But this very day I hear that the Department
of Defense in the USA is about to publish
its hitherto-unrevealed documents on UFOs.

Facts and fictions.

Thought depends on data, also known as facts.
But facts change - especially in the inappropriately-named
'social sciences', which should really be called
'the evolution of prejudices'.

Many 'facts' have been shown to be fictions,
racist and sexist propaganda based on crude assumptions,
or wishful thinking.
For example (on the one hand)
the socialist myth of 'primitive egalitarianism',
and (on the other hand)
the misogynist myth of 'Stockholm Syndrome'.

Thinking to Some Purpose can be criminal.
Who ever 'abandoned themselves' to Reason ?

Pasay Cemetery (Manila ,Philippines)

 

Have you no compassion for me ?

173 Years Later.

Sex-workers of the world, unite !
You have already lost your adolescence,
your passports, even your names.
You have nothing to lose but your chains.