'The false humility of hell

is an unending, burning shame
at the inescapable stigma of our sins.'
- Thomas Merton, one-time resident of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

But true humility in this life
starts with the shame of being human,
not the crime of being Christian.
- Anthony Weir, currently resident in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

What if,

after death, we got exactly what we expected ?
Would we all be in our bubbles of bliss,
the religious in their antiseptic,
unforested heaven,
the wonderers perpetually wondering,
the thoughtless forever thoughtless,
and I, fulfilled by no existence at all,
the shadow of entropy ?

Training Humans: Hints for Dogs

Remember that humans think they are pack-animals
though they are obviously herd-animals like sheep:
what the leaders do, all will do.
Give them small rewards for obedience.
Get them spayed as soon as your vet advises.
Never let them get into bed with you.
Never let them go through a door before you.
Never feed them before you have eaten.
And never, never leave them unsupervised
with children.

So obvious that it shouldn't need saying

Education is education,
And bits of paper are bits of paper.
And rarely the twain do meet.

Some good titles for Richard Dawkins

The Humanity Delusion
The Progress Delusion
The Intelligence Delusion
The Wealth Delusion
The Science Delusion
[add your own suggestions...]

скопeц

Memo from a skopyets to Ludwig
Wittgenstein

It is not enough to be silent
about what we know nothing about,
better to be silent about being silent
in the cacophany of consciousness.

Christmas

like the medical-pharmaceutical industry
and the whole of humanity
has got waaay out of hand.

Germaine Greer on Christmas 2011 :

"What's not to like
about a recession ?"

Greed will always rule.

Needless to say,
the Landgrabbers of Israël
are crowding out
the shepherds of Bethlehem.
What do 'The Faithful' care,
with only hypocrisy to share ?

Most churches

and indeed most religions
turn out to be
the Church of Me.

The ego-less
are also sinless.

It's amazing

how we fall for smiles
even though they have
so often
been picked up from the floor
and rinsed like false teeth.

Often men mount women
from behind
so as not to have to face them,
or kiss them...
around them
a withered wreath.

Adam did not delve

and Eve never span -
but the Daughters of Eve
bred Psychopathic Man.

Raison d'être - the cutting edge

Doctors 'Play God'
on our behalf - mainly to benefit
the rich and Welfare State-indulged.

While human populations soar and devour,
how medical and other earthly powers
propose to save the planet from the ailment
that is us, will never be divulged.

Science

Before we sought other knowledge
we first should have embarked on
knowledge of ourselves:
quiet studies 'in the field'.

Alas, it will come too late, long after
the arcana of particle physics, genetics
and brain chemistry are
only partially revealed.

One tree

even in a city
is more beautiful
than any city.

So now the Americans have left

the country that they trashed
and depopulated
and patched up with old tape...
while in another country that they trashed
and depopulated even more,
over a million victims
of Agent Orange
suffering, survive.

"All that Man is, all mere complexities..."

Having denatured ourselves
we have devoted our brief and tragic
time upon the planet
to denaturing in one way or another
every other creature.

[The quotation is from Yeats' BYZANTIUM:
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.]

Bad poetry

sounds quite good
when read aloud
especially upon a stage.
But good poetry
is best apprehended
slowly on the page.

I suspect

that the Americanisation
of 'homosexual' behaviour
has caused more damage
than its criminalisation.

['Americanisation' = commercialisation, reification, polarisation.]

"History is bunk."

The 'bunk' of history
is ideology: the sound
of axes being ground...


It was Henry Ford I who said
'History is Bunk'.

There are too many words on the wireless

and too many pictures on telly
and so many people, and so few trees
that our minds have turned to jelly.

[WIRELESS : a quaint old word for Radio.]

The precious rich

bestow yet more prizes now
for poetry - or rather
for poetic preciousness.
There are even precious
Poets-in-Residence.
Ah, the poets' bathetic desire to please -
will they ever get off their knees ?

Globalisation

Culture

is a structure
designed to keep us conforming
and prevent us from thinking.
The more elaborate the culture,
the more difficult it is
(even for a sage)
to think beyond the cage.

Schopenhauer :

No man does no harm.
I have absorbed him
as an egg absorbs a sperm.

America

is to capitalism
as Albania
was to socialism.

The 'communists' were right

about capitalist societies.
The capitalists were right
about the 'communist' societies.
The Protestants are right
about the corruption of the
Catholic Church.
The toads are right about the frogs.
The hills are right about the bogs.
The Jehovah's Witnesses are right
about many things -
except life after death -

and those whom I have met
are generous to dogs.

Gloss on a poem by Paul Celan

Whether time walks or flows or oozes
or even exists is difficult to say -
maybe it stumbles, strikes as we do
through our perception of it...

Time is much slower for flies
who will go on almost forever.
Maybe we surge from the womb
cracking its shells open like nuts
and then lose the kernels -
so there are seven billion different times,
different mandalas, mandorlas which never
return to the shattered shells
that are culture and consciousness.
Yet - in a nutshell - I can miraculously live
with my dying: along with the billions,
I never existed. It is long past the time
for me to sink into timelessless
gorged by and governed by flies.

Aloof,

alone within us lies
the irresponsive silence
of smothered grief,
wherein our disregard
of life within the rotting leaf.

for Paul and Jindra

Rag-tree

click photo to enlarge


How strange that money's made
from rags and trees
and not from gold
or skulls or peas
or skins - or mould.

How delicious to be seventy,

solitary, smelly,
without microwave,
cellphone or telly,
without ever having
been a debtor!
I enjoy eleven hours
a day in bed.
Life just gets better.

The immutable stupidity of humans

lies in our unshakeable belief that
it is better to do anything
than to do nothing.

The most pitiable people

of our despicable species
are the Natural Outsiders who want
to become Unnatural Insiders -
and the Insiders who patronise
and demoralise them.

In the labyrinth of aspiration
victims cannot wait
to become perpetrators.

After

birth by misadventure
the primly rosy path of progress
to magisterial, unimaginable entropy.

Meanwhile, as our toe-nails grow,
the Atlantic Ocean slowly widens.