More Sputnik than Beatnik.

I used to think that the 1960s had passed me by
mainly because I have a visceral
dislike of pop-music, pubs, clubs,
football, fashion and tv.  In the late fifties
and sixties I was listening to blues
and folksongs, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky
on my record player.
I was reading Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck
and Shakespeare sonnets. I went to Bergman
movies. I even taught myself to paint.

But now I realise that I was
quite unknowingly a True Child of the Sixties,
drifting in and out of universities,
to and from a Danish island,
into the Air Force for six long weeks,
and living alone in rent-free cottages
ignorant of Stevie Wonder and Pink Floyd
(but not Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- the nearest I got to pop-music).
I never had a job, not then or since,
and still am drifting, still in commodious
free accommodation - a dissident sputnik
wobbling through the Great Catastrophe,
a dark moon of the Welfare State
adrift upon the strange side of existence.

The Catholic God

sends babies
to the righteous
and the unrighteous alike
to drown what brains
their parents have left them with
in the shit of the quotidian.

Silence :

splendid company
which helps you
to understand music.

Trauenlied (second version).

Metal in mists of blood mankind
tree-stumps and stubble burnt
time maggoty out of mind
attrition without shame
beyond beneath the seas
even the ice is poisoned
and aliens or pornography
or history are to blame

How futile are the prophecies!

Dear God,

will Heaven also be full
of hyperactive people
suffering from ADD
(not to mention PTSD) ?

The least-bad future for the planet.

 

Upgrades and downgrades.

Electronic media
force us into endless upgrades
as we ourselves are somehow
continuously downgraded
to ever more mere and helpless
consumers.

Bread is stupid food.

yet I eat a little every day.
People have to
Clear the ground
Hack the earth
Sow the seeds
Scare the birds
Pull the weeds
Pray for sun
Curse the rain
Mow and carry
thresh and store
and lose a fifth to rats
Then grind
and mix and bake
and eat -
so much labour
for such little nutrition:
the production of bread
is a war of attrition.

(And meat which is fed
on grain is sheer perdition.)

Morality

pays scant regard
to æsthetics,
whereas æsthetics
always have moral content.

We are not compassionate

dolphins, nor saintly trees
nor dodos à gogo.
Nothing that we do
is morally neutral,
not mathematics
nor astrophysics,
nor any 'science' -
especially not
economics,
the new eugenics.

Goals :

the gaping jaws of Hell.

American Boom-town 2012.

"Well,
Halliburton came out and grabbed
all the rooms for the next five years,
in two hotels not yet built. Their agents,
hangers-on and shady side-kicks
are (you might say) Legion.
They miss Iraq and the towel-heads they
could shove around and disappear
like three-card tricks
for good takings.

There is nowhere decent for a man to lay his head,
unless he has a trailer or camping rig.
Even the Oil Company man camps out"

It's the same oil company that backed
the rebel fascist Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

(He would not have won without it, nor run
without British and American support
his demurely-vicious state from which
half a million of his subjects vanished
into unmarked graves -
not to mention children seized by nuns for lives
of slavery in convents, taken by priests
to sell to the childless or the child-abusing rich -
right up to the nineteen-seventies...
                                                    But we digress...)

"Of course there are the robbers, conmen, drunks,
drug-dealers, shysters, thieves.
People are being found dead in strange places,
strange positions.  Rent-boys, tent-boys,
Las Vegas strippers, whores and lap-dancers
are on the move, their services highly
and often unnaturally in demand. 
As for myself, I'll be discreetly armed."

[with thanks to The Bandit]

Eating meat :

a simple celebration
of bad faith.

It has been suggested

that the first god was Dog.
For it was the domestication of the hapless wolf
which allowed our dead-end species
to wipe out and eat
Neanderthals.
(Lucky old Neanderthals who,
unlike dogs and wolves, suffer no more!)
The oldest non-human ritual burials are of dogs,
and from prehistoric times,
dogs were killed and laid in earth
under houses in the British Isles...

It has been suggested also

that memory does not reside within the brain
but in a sort of electro-magnetic miasma surrounding it.
This sounds suspiciously
like the mythic soul:
a halo of memory - which of course
other animals have,
more reliably, and accurately -
since they don't edit it,
re-invent it constantly
where truth and language collide
inside the brain.
But where does the stuff of our dreams reside ?

Abattoirs

are hells
far from which we can also
easily and cruelly play God.

Anything and everything

is now for sale - or "marketized" :
if you are presentable
you can get good money - for example -
to have the name of a product
tattooed upon your forehead. 

The rich pay the homeless to stand
in queues for free tickets to concerts
 at New York’s Central Park,
and to queue on behalf of lobbyists in Washington. 

But then, in the past you could pay a poor person
to do your Military Service…and even go to prison for you.
We sell our labour, our talents, our intelligence.
Selling a kidney, eggs, sperm, blood
or child to buy a warm coat
or a cellphone is not so very different.
For $50 I would sell my worthless vote.

Club loyalty / Le règle du jeu.

More people were killed in Iraq
after the Anglo-American invasion
than were killed by that country's
previous, post-Ottoman régimes.
And all because rulers, traitors
to their electorates,
would rather see mere populations die
than assassinate dictators.

My friend Jindra

(pronounced Yindra)
has quoted me at the top of his
VLOG.
It is such a good quotation
that I shall re-blog it :

'Perhaps people who miss people
really miss themselves.'

Multi-tasking Male.

I can brush my teeth
listen to the radio
and shit
all at the same time.

Life's progress.

From confusion
to illusion
via collusion
to disillusion
and back to confusion.

When you sup with devils

your spoon is only as long
as your conscience.

A 'voltaire'

is a kind of chair.

"If God did not exist,
it would be necessary to invent him"
is thought to be the soul of wit
and wisdom -  not a bit
of depressing shit.

A picture is worth...

Just as words are,
ultimately, lies.
deception lurks
in the camera's works.

We cannot predict the future.

We fabricate the past.
The present is mostly mystery
until we become history.

Shortsightedness :

to weep for parts of life
when the whole of it calls for tears.

Foxes and chickens.

Science is systematic denial
of the principle of Good Enough
- which is good enough for
every other living creature.

Attention

is to intention
as Jesus' words
are to Christianity,
and transparency is to
criminality.

Don't mention love that's other than maternal.

Mention attraction, interest, fondness
maybe fascination, respect...
Do all these added up amount to love ?
If so, I have loved...
Dogs.  Like a dog,
incapable of rancour.
And of course I love 'nature'
(as opposed to 'humanity'):
plants, especially -
particularly those that you call 'weeds'.
Ashamed of being human,
I don't feel that I know what love is.

Is it a feeling in my groin
when I look at someone ?  If so,
I have loved.  Or is that just
testosterone, infatuation,
 brief desire to bond ?
Certainly, I have been
in fond and gentle lust -
but I don't feel that, when they talk of love,
I know what people mean.

'Their flesh became one...'

Flesh becomes one
only in a healing wound
- or extreme infibulation.
Otherwise, delightful or terrible
or something in between,
it's just penetration.

Zugzwang

How depressing
but not surprising
that all human activity
can be reduced to Game Theory.
And when you refuse to play the game,
what then ?

Progress.

You cannot be a politician
without telling big lies.
Representative Democracy
effects its own demise.

The Catholic Repository

moved down the street.
The Redemption Centre
(for Green Shield Stamps)
replaced it.  Where it once stood
are Travelodge's wheelchair ramps.

"Go! Sell everything you have...

 

...and give to the poor."

(Mark X, 21)

Loneliness

is to solitude
as latitude
is to longitude.

Pornography and other Anti-art

It is such a pity
that people (especially the paler tribes)
don't have the imagination
to leave things
to the imagination.

Our little bubbles

of awareness are only
slightly larger than those
of dolphins, dogs and chimpanzees -
hence our troubles.

Game Theory & the Dog-shit of War.

The winning side (W) crossed the river (R)
and took the fridges, the tv sets, the CD players,
the electric power-tools (and much else)
from the losers (L), their neighbours,
whom they had butchered earlier.

But the electricity sub-station (E)
was a long way behind the losers' lines,
who now live in a different country
which soon will be in the European Union (EU).


The Background (B) :
during the Second World War (WW2)
side L (fascist) had massacred
thousands of men, women and children
belonging to side W (anti-fascist).
Numbers multiplied in the re-telling.
'And so it goes.'

Divide and Rule.

This motto of the British Empire
was first - and successfully - implemented
in Ireland, in the 17th century.
Ireland remains divided.
The greater part is under the fiscal rule
of the European Union.
The smaller part belongs to the
quaintly-named United Kingdom.
The division of the Indian Empire
into India and two Pakistans
resulted in the deaths of millions.
What hope is there for Bahrain ?

Badgers eat bluebell bulbs

as well as slugs.
Theirs are amongst the nastiest turds
rolled on by dogs.

Official Recognition ?

A 'follower' reports
that this blog is blocked
on Northern Irish
Public Library Service computers.

Thus indeed I am
as a prophet in his own country...

A common cause

of the misery of couples
is that each member feeds
- or even feeds on -
the other's flaws.

Growth

is always sliming from the lips
of companies and banks,
ministries of finance, economists.
Growth is the human tumour
closing down the planet...
and 'in due course' (they fantasise)
Mars, and one of the moons of Jupiter.
If we 'are part of Nature'
how 'natural' is life ?

Older people

often know
when it's time to die -
but MegaMediCorp
won't let them go.

I have never visited Mount Rushmore.

Knowing that there's no stasis,
I have no need to contemplate
vast, ugly, hubristic faces.

As I watch unpleasant children grow

unpleasantly, I know that Life
(like George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron)
is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Academé

(yes that's now to pronounce it)
kills poetry,
makes poets stale, predictable;
kills art,
and makes it the acceptable
tart of the 'respectable'.

The very rich

tend to be either hermits
or nomadic - the two basic
states of man which - now -
only the rich can afford.

Consciousness is just a mouse

squealing in a slaughterhouse.
And art is a demented choir
singing in an abattoir.

Another Chinese Export ~ and 'A Modest Proposal'

Capsules containing the freeze-dried
powdered flesh of human babies
were seized the other day
in South Korea.
Why all that bother, when fresh
and succulent baby-flesh
could be enjoyed in restaurants
along with chocolate-covered giant ants ?


[see Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal...]

[Haiku]

A raindrop twinkling -
Betelgeuse upon a bush
for just three minutes.

I like the word 'furtive'.

It incorporates fur
and has a cosy feel
in this world of the assertive
- and need not involve guile.

[Condom is a town in South-west France.]

There is no evidence that television
in its short, manipulative life
has made the world better
than the average 'French Letter'.

A near-universal truth

that neither Stephen Hawking
nor Richard Dawkins,
nor even Durkheim has commented on:
as the belly gets bigger
the willy gets smaller -
which was (until recently)
another reason why
the rich oppressed the poor.

A curious fact - or was it inevitable

that separate bathrooms (among the rich)
came into fashion at the same time
as men's underwear ?

About the €uro.

The very simple thing we didn't understand
was that it was really a slightly-devalued Deutschmark.
No wonder most of the 17 countries which joined
are in economic trouble!

The Pythian Oracle

at Delphi
could be consulted only
nine days a year.
But that was too often
for the (Christian, Byzantine)
Emperor Theodosius I,
who shut it down
after a millennium of
its pronouncements.
May he be cursed.

Governments are good at :

Solving crises which do not exist
Failing to solve crises which do exist
Inventing crises for unpleasant purposes
Creating crises out of sheer incompetence

World-wide acknowledgement

of our unpleasantness
is revealed
in the pronouncement:
'Blood is thicker than water'.

The Patron Saint

of non-achievers:
Jesus of Nazareth.
Instead of subverting earthly power
he added to it.

Dear Candide,

Your final choice of action
was as foolish as all the others.

We only need to work
because we have become too many
to lie around and loafe
and perhaps (or perhaps not)
grow cannabis
(almost no effort required)
and be happy.

Human misery is in proportion
to human overpopulation.

Love presents more problems than solutions.

My friend Yindra quoted Erich Fromm in his splendiferous blog:

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer 
to the problem of human existence.”

Much as I admire (and have been influenced by) Erich Fromm,
I think this is romantic and anthropocentric rubbish.

Food and drink and humour

and the continual and reliable joy of sharing them
are the only satisfactory and sane answer
to the problem of human existence.
 
Epicurus said this a long, long time ago -
but he was trashed - first by the Stoics and neo-Platonists,
then by the ultra-anthropocentric, mumbo-jumbo Christians,
then by the ultra-anthropocentric, ultra-patriarchal Muslims,
who still tear out the eyes of millions
lest they see the now-obvious fact
that it is not human existence that is the problem,
but the human proclivity
for constant activity.

click to enlarge

Eternity :

the everlasting impossibility
of dying of shame.

On the Tyrannical Falseness of Duty.

Nothing -
not even baking a bun
- is worth doing
unless it is freely done.

Three Famous Graves

At Yeats' grave in county Sligo
I felt inspired by place
and his resounding lines.

See more at Drumcliffe.

At Oscar Wilde's tomb in Père Lachaise
(long before the lipstick-cult had started)
I was angry, not so much at Oscar's
stupid fate as at the fate of Epstein's
splendid, generous monument
whose genitals (once fig-leafed)
have been damaged more than once.

See cleaned-up monument.

And at Auvers-sur-Oise I grieved
before the simple ivied grave
- but not so much for Vincent,
as for his saintly, self-effacing brother Theo
whose philadelphic constancy
made his life, too, a misery.

Proud to be American ?

click to enlarge

Iceland

is not in the European Union
and has almost no trees.
Not much has been heard about little Iceland lately...
I'll tell you why... 
;-)
The Icelanders
refused to pay the debts of the banks
and nationalised them,
sacked their government,
and set about amending
the island’s constitution
to include random selection
in the Athenian manner

without a shot being fired
or a meeting of Finance Ministers
or Heads of State
or central banks in Europe or America.

Iceland (population just over 300,000)
had the first democracy
outside Greece (a better one
than the Athenians had).
Greeks, trapped by their own
historic and Hellenic greed,
(they cut down all the trees
of Malta, Crete and Southern Greece)
could yet learn something from
an 'insignificant' island near the polar regions

which owes the Old World no allegiance. 

Original Sin - A Modern Take

Your Internet Service Provider
is the Snake,
the Sin is boredom,
and pornography the forbidden fruit.