Poetic Exercise

A one-word poem:
ENOUGH.

A two-word poem:
TOO MUCH.

A three-word poem:
SOCIABILITY
BREEDS
CORRUPTIBILITY.

Why bother ?

Understanding
is very difficult
when your eyes
are dazzled by images
and your ears
are blocked by words.

Humility

comes in different grades.
A short list:
                     1. hoping
                     2. pretending
                     3. trying
not to exist.

Mixed Metaphor

Love :
an eely word which holds
whole civilisations
in its slippery,
mealy-mouthed thrall.

My true love and I
never use it at all.

The main beneficiaries of a liberal society:

1. those who exploit it for personal reasons.

2. those who despise it for personal reasons.

I, a despiser, near the bottom of the Income Heap
can live apart, aloof, disengaged,
happily unproductive, mercifully unmarried
and life-enhancingly childless -

while enjoying all the benefits of goods, services,
health-care and welfare.

The people do do worst in such a society
are those who are themselves exploited,
despised and cast aside.  And they are not all poor.

Kings of Glory

The empires
have disappeared
(in name, at most) -
but their religion
of eternal damnation
and heavenly hosts
still rules the
subject peoples.

Those not frightened of the dark
do not believe in ghosts.

Aliens.

People seem to imagine that Aliens
would want to 'take over' or control the earth -
that they would even want to
communicate with us -
that they would not want to communicate
instead with elephants or dogs or dolphins
or snails, fungi or viruses -
that they would not say something like:

"What a strange, dysfunctional little world!
What strange forms of  'life' - subject to
'evolution'  by natural selection -  not to mention
that crudely hilarious system of
competitive sexual reproduction -   
Let's get away
from the deafening planet-sized moan
of a silly and failed experiment -  Let
the Unknowables sink back
into their grisly unknown.
Let's leave that dirty wee orb
and its sad little moon alone."

Of course, they wouldn't use anything
as crude as mechanics of words,
which is why they might find out all they wanted to know
from our satellites, from dying trees,
or trilobites or turds...

Luxury

Luxuria, Abbey of St-Papoul (Aude).

creates monsters of banality.

Goodness by Numbers.

Most human competititiveness
is for the status that wealth
or achievement bring,
rather than for wealth itself.
But that is to forget another
competition that can hurt you,
and is at least as widespread
and vicious: competitive virtue.

I would like to tell you how I found love.

Internet Dating!

Simone Weil *

wrote: 

When truth appears at least as true as falsehood it is a triumph of sanctity or of genius.
Thus Saint Francis preached employing cheap histrionics to make his audience weep.

But, being Christian, St Francis preached falsehood.

* La pesanteur et la grâce (1947).

Distribution-map of 'My Readers'

over the past few days.
Rather few -
but widely-scattered.

I am flattered
to have even two...

On the Planet of Lost Souls,

'that which would lock itself in already is concrete -
perhaps it feels firmly protected in grimness of grey...'

- Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, 12.

Was sich ins Bleiben verschließt, schon ists das Erstarrte;
wähnt es sich sicher im Schutz des unscheinbaren Grau’s ?

Work will make you Free

to eat chicken ?

Feeling poor.

This morning I heard of a fatherless child
who saved up to buy himself a daddy.

Categories

People without jobs are 'unemployed'
no matter how hard they work
at being, or trying to be human
(or researching strange sculptures
on old churches while receiving
state subsistence payments).
A poet without a readership
is still a poet, though probably, too,
a pettifogger.
And a blogger whom no-one reads
is still a blogger.

LENT

I have given up giving up
hypocrisy for Lent.
It was much too difficult.

To lighten my despondency
I  Diogenetically reflect that
every civilisation depends
less on labour than
on everyone's hypocrisy.

1940

When the English and their colonists
were blabbering long and loud
about always coming to the aid
of small nations and the oppressed,
they had committed and
were still committing crimes
in Burma, India, Iraq, Malaya,
South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Australia...
[insert country here]
of which the Nazis justifiably
would have been proud.

My kind of business.

Elephant in the room.

How is it
that grown-up people who believe in God
are not receiving gentle re-education
and counselling ?

Why is it
that when people talk about morality and religion
they so rarely point out
that where religions are most active
there is murder and mayhem ?

Since the fourth century
most of the slaughtered millions
perished in the name of religion:
forcible conversions,
exterminations of heresies, crusades,
wars-of-religion, actual genocides
in the name of Jesus,
a beggar like Diogenes, but who,
disastrously, preached Life after death.

Fred Beigbeder, a user,

declares in his most recent book
that modern, individualist,
consumer-civilisation is symbolised
(iconised, essentialised)
by an expensive powder (produced
from a very useful plant)
which erases memory
and exhausts the brain:
cocaine.

Philosophy....

AMERICAN

and

UN-AMERICAN

The Lie of 'The Island Race'

The English
get their history from Shakespeare
and their religion
from school hymn-books.

Punishment's Progress

In bygone times
processions of flagellants
punished themselves
and each other
to expiate their own
and other people's sins
thus depriving Satan
of some souls
for his vast and fiery cave.

Now, however, people
torture themselves
extremely -
often individually -
to boost their  egos
and 'self-worth'
and make them fitter
for the grave.

If His Novel Holiness

had read Emily the humble
humbly, might he
have reversed
tradition and
taken the title of
Anonymous I. ?

People with choices

routinely pretend
they don't have a choice.
Gertrude Stein said:
"Generally speaking,  everyone
is more interesting doing nothing
than doing anything."
She also said
"If you can do it then why do it ?"
Who needs a voice ?

Well-paid Wage-slavery

Industrial cultures are extremisms
of routine, and their mass-labour,
mass-consumption rob us of our time
and our capacity to contemplate.

Albert Cossery said that "laziness"
was a form of contemplation,
even of meditation. And it is so.
Speaking wisely
(if hypocritically)
there is nothing better
than doing nothing,
which is why death
beckons to my intellect
though not to my palate.

The Gini Co-efficient.

Click the picture for a larger photo and  here to learn what it is.

The Great Taboo.

Everyone must say
'I lack, I want to buy'.
No-one must say
'I am content',
least of all
'I am content to die'.

Neanderthals

were big, well-built, hairy, and
lived in northern latitudes.
They had big eyes - for better
vision in poor winter light.
Homo sapiens were small
came from east Africa,
had smaller eyes, were much less hairy,
and, having also bigger brains,
were capable of greater social complexity,
and of what we now call social networking.

Considering my dislike of groups,
hierarchies, hypocrisy and networking,
my love of solitude and hairiness,
my fingers going blue even in summer,
and my small, low-browed skull,
I wonder how many Neanderthal,
and how many Werewolf genes
are in me lurking.

30% of people 'completely lost'...

Click on the picture to read more.

The Pharma-Titans,

future rulers of the world,
are searching for
or seeking to invent
a malady which affects
almost every human being,
and requires continuous,
lifelong treatment by medication
- preferably one with side-effects
easily treatable by a less-expensive pill.
They don't realise that they
already have this almost-universal ill:
It has a non-medical
(but Latin) name: civilisation.

"We are free only in a madhouse."

says one of The Physicists in Dürrenmatt's play.
But the 'madhouse'
to which they have committed themselves
so as not to provide the world with yet more
insane technology,
turns out to be a Facility 
where their every conversation is recorded,
and every scrap of paper
on which they sketch, compose
equations is photocopied...

And so it goes...

A short article

by this blogger on another blog:

Maps, Mists, and Megaliths.

 

On Feminism.

I told them:
aping men is not the solution.
Not even the men that men define as
'good men'.

As Hamlet would have said:
"Ay, there's the rub."

Diogenes, rubbing and lighting
his lamp in daytime, searching
gated communities, refugee-camps
NGOs and gaols,
would have said more cogently:
"Show me a good man
and I'll believe in miracles and fairy-tales." 

with thanks to Jindra

Let him clean the women's toilets!

An unctuous wave of adulation
greeted a "humble" pope -
who climbed the greasy rope
of the world's most exclusive hierarchy.

This is not a rag on a tree,

but an endangered Pygmy Three-toed Sloth.

(thankyou, Jehovanna)

Heaven is a state

of being
almost totally accepting
of being now, not later.
Death is an inquiry
which gathers very little data.

Papal Conclave to elect a new Rover

The moral stupidity of 'holy men'
with chauffeur-driven cars
who imagine that singing in the Sistine Chapel -
or, at the other end of the hypocrisy-spectrum,
who carry guns at all times,
even in the pulpit and playing their guitars -
has anything at all to do with the simple
teachings of Jesus and his millenarian band
of family-abandoning brothers

is matched by the moral stupidity of 'scientists'
getting high on spending fortunes
trying to find out
if there was ever life on Mars.

When science is conflated and confused
with hope, progress, expectation,
it becomes mere religion,
the worship of dead stars.

Click on the photo.

Probably my greatest crime.

In Amsterdam, in 1962
I consumed without dismay
a bowl of shark-fin soup.

In 2012
73 million sharks were killed,
and all but their fins
were thrown away.

De Natura Humanitatis

In Beijing,
a metropolis where the tap-water is toxic,
there is a Museum of Tap-water.
Half-way across the world
is Detroit, a city which itself
is a Museum of Entropy.

(with thanks to this morning's BBC Radio 4)

On André Gide, the great 'Immoralist'.

Gide by Vallotton.

 "...over the years he had antagonised
- amongst others -
Catholics, Communists,
Italian fascists, Spanish falangists,
colonialists, homophobes
and xenophobes.

"By the same token
he occupied a position for literary
and political critics similar to that
of a village lamp-post for neigbourhood dogs."

- Frederic Spotts: THE SHAMEFUL PEACE :
how French artists and intellectuals survived the Nazi Occupation.

Language and meaning.

Maybe ALL meaning from lowest to highest flees from mere words which once were ... moans, which never were birds, and now are ... drones.

(excuse the grammar, but click on the image)

Diogenes' Great Mistake

The great and largely-legendary
philosopher is said to have
gone ostentatiously around Athens
in daytime with a lamp,
searching for 'an honest man'.
He made a terrible mistake
not looking for a woman,
or a person of integrity.

'Science' -

continual revolution
- or, through complex
sacraments of technology,
continuous religion ?

On the radio.

Although there is no hint
in the uninspired lyrics,
I heard that David Bowie
derived the title Jean Genie
from my hero Jean Genet
- who might not have been
such a meanie
as to have refused
to offer him his weenie.

What is unthinkable will one day be thought

wrote Friedrich Dürrenmatt
in his play The Physicists.
What once has been thought
can never be unthought.
...

It is the duty of a boy-Jew
to be circumcised.
It is the duty of a genius
to remain unrecognised.

What a load of balls!

Helena Rubinstein
proclaimed that Beauty is Power
- thus shunting women even farther
into the ghetto of the dolls.

'Before [I went to] the Congo I was just a mere animal',

wrote Conrad.
That animal was the European Human,
a creature totally without biotic merit,
responsible for the deaths of millions
of people and tens of thousands of elephants.

What hierarchies - both criminal
and governmental - most dislike
is a free spirit.

now read the book

A Few Thoughts About Love.

Desire to control is not love.
Nor is the wish to be controlled.
Nor should love be used as an excuse
for the desire to control or be controlled.

Falling in love is what
adolescents do - I did -
Have done.
We live in an infantilising
culture based on immature
emotion and the gun.
Love shoots.  The body
has no record of the mind.
Love offers security, stability
but is anything but stable.
It has the magical ability
to conjure up a life
that seems much stronger than
a condom, life without seep,
firm and focussed like a diving-bell:

but there's just a shallow,
shadow-vision of the deep
and no view at all of what's above.
Trust and respect are worth
far more than love.

There are many people

who would rather
mess with our heads
than say what is simmering in theirs.
And, given the opportunity, many people
would rather blow out our brains
than talk about their own.
'There is something terrible about humanity.'

Whales.

The Taunting Haunting.

We keep on wanting
to paint lilies,
but are weighed down
by the heavy paint and
made mad by painting.

My new book is not stocked
by Amazon
or anyone.
it is called
Beyond God - How to get there
and keep your boss happy -
in 147 easy visions.

In any case, praise from people I despise
would amount to contumely
and lead to scary mind-divisions.

Dear Ms Stein,

'A rose is a rose
is a rose', but noses
vary even more
than roses.

Chastity upon a crag,

Hope upon a pedestal.
Faith blind from her desire for deity
(but what if belief made us happy
and happy not to brag ?)
Charity spreadeagled on the ground
receiving bleak despair
receiving ugliness
receiving lust and guilt,
the upsurge to shock
by shoddy spontaneity,
while oracles and sybils flit around.

A Lysergic poem in memory of the Great Gertrude.

My buttons are topless
are capless & hapless
and hipless & cupless
and dripless - not lipless,
not nearly hopeless
not merely sinless & finless
but queerily, surgily,
urgently urgy, lysergic,
mergily nervy, strung like a lyre
and not pervy not twinless
but sunny inside and out
in front of the fire.

The Happy Ourobolos - another Lysergic Poem.

for "A friend of Dr Peters"

[see comments in the blog below this] 


 









Sardonicynicyclical
never taking flight -
scratch and sniff repeatedly -
I am beautiful in candelight.

A certain Dr Peters

thinks we have three components to our mind:
Chimpanzee, Human and Computer.
He left out the fourth - the Loony.
He has (of course) written a 'self-help'
book to join the thousands of others
and make some money -
groom his Inner Chimpanzee.
It is called
The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme
to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness.

You see ?

Well, anyone who thinks that mind
can be 'managed' and that happiness
can be 'achieved' is certainly a loony,
and likely dangerous.

Glory be to Entropy!

"You would think that shaking up a box with a couple of chains inside
would end in sadness and a bunch of knotted chains.
But as you can see in this video, it doesn’t always work out like that.
These two chains - both made of plain metal beads - coil and uncoil around each other
until they are completely separated.
The box is shaking at about 20 Hz, or cycles per second,
and the photographs were taken five seconds apart."
[writes metaconscious]

It is an error to equate entropy with chaos.
.

Just to let y'all know...

...I'm proud to be in the
Fourth Circle.

Psychology:

human puzzles
trying to solve
other human puzzles.

Another puzzle.

I have never understood
what people are 'on about'
when they talk of identity.
I am not aware of having one.
Is it like a spleen, unfelt
until it bursts and causes pain ?
Is it like underwear,
invented recently
and changed now and again ?

Is identity ego ?  no more
than the sum of our thoughts
which is god and  the finality
of death's door
above which is written:
The Glorious Impossibility of Immortality.

Those who value liberty

don't like mobile phones.

Schools

are dolls' houses of society,
being composed of three classes:
bullies, bullied and the uninvolved.
People think that this is fine
until the bullied (with their broken glasses)
can take no more -
as at the High School, Columbine.

The reason why people "take drugs"

is that they are too much controlled
by others, by social structures, by their brains
which have been moulded by others,
and they want release,
or a few moments' peace.

Beard of the Week

challenged vertical pseudo-democracy
in tired and fractured Italy

with horizontal liberal consent.
But is he just a flash in the pan
before the hierarchies (the old
tired mutual back-scratchers, the Vatican)
bribe their way back again with gold ?

Page of the Month on

click the picture to view

Where civilisation is involved

most growth
is cancerous.

You have heard of 'Occam's Razor'

- but there is also the
principle of Occam's Beard:

William of Occam (Ockam, Hockham) 1288 – c.1348

'Things are almost always
more tangled than they seem.'

The Meaning

of Liff:

NEW ENTRIES

1.Crossgar:
The plastic purchases-divider
on a supermarket check-out conveyor belt,
usually labelled
NEXT CUSTOMER.

[Crossgar is a village between Belfast and Downpatrick,
in county Down, Northern Ireland.]


 2.Condom:

 A crude rubber contraption
designed - before the arrival of AIDS -
to prevent conception by blocking sensation,
thereby initiating the epidemic of
penetrative sex between men.

[Condom is a town in the département
of the Gers in south-western France.]