from The Diwan of Abu'l-Ala by Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri

(whose statue was recently beheaded by Sa'udi agents in Syria)

Now this doctrine for a while prevails
  Until it's by another overthrown,
  Because we dare not live with life alone,
But crave companionship with fairy-tales.

Paradox and War

Capitalism requires pools of the employable,
which are created for it by the nation-state,
its ever-indebted whore.
But its process (which is often called progress)
creates lakes of unemployment and unemployables
- except in times of war and recovery from war.

A dissident art-work.

"..not only a teapot of exquisite beauty,
but it doubles as a sieve!" 

said my old friend Tom Bevan,
who now lives in New York.

Being British.

Inventing the rules.
Imposing them everywhere
especially North America.
Priding yourself on
playing by the rules -
though, of course,
you bend them
at your convenience.

Gazing at the beautiful,

the broken-hearted fields,
I think of slaves in mines
and ploughshares made from shields.

There is a big difference

 between rights and values.
We should not be missionaries,
relentlessly presenting people
with a programme, a show of rights -
but rather inspiring them
with modest values such as old
Ottoman tolerance.

[ more ]

Inside the contemporary brain.

The more crimes

that governments invent,
the less morality
and the more venality
there is, and the more corrupt
is our intent.

Ripe imagination.

On the map
Ireland looks like a badly-damaged fœtus;
France like a bear nailed up to prove
that animals have no souls, no feelings;
and England, clutching Wales like a snatched pig's head,
looks like a Djinn or Genie rising from
a dark whirlpool in the ocean
to push Scotland towards the Islands of the Dead.

How stupid can a statistic be ?

"For every tank that is manufactured
131,000 stuffed animals are made."

- Not 131,649.

Some stuffed animals go into tanks.
They call themselves 'humans'.

For every stuffed animal that is manufactured
several hundred thousand real animals are killed,
including nice furry ones, such as Orang-Utans,
Gorillas, many species of Monkey, Polar Bears,
Badgers, Capybaras and Sea-otters.
 

Confession

of an inept old blighter.
   It was only yesterday that I learned
- via youTube (its glory is well-earned !) -
how to refill* a butane-lighter !


*It must be completely emptied before refilling,
otherwise an air-lock will occur 
- which is why my various,
previous, frustrated, stressful
attempts were unsuccessful.

The Minotaur confesses :

the cleverer you are,
the more clueless, too.

People who love living alone

don't get jealous.

Jesus said: Blessed are the Poor in Spirit.

But did he mean the moneylenders,
the moneylaunderers, the bankers
- or the normals
- or the suicides ? 
We are all poor in Spirit.

Not to mention Awareness,
being only a little more cognizant than birds
of our terrestrial and cosmic surroundings.As for the tangled, bloody thicket of our consciousness,
the most important parts of the little
we allow ourselves to be aware of
are beyond words...

The Dutch for "merry" is "vrolijk".

If only Christmas
and New Year
were more frolic
than oppression and false cheer...

A Smug Snobs' Christmas Dinner chez Auban

There are no "decorations",
no presents, no cards, no visitors.
While peppers (abandoned by a market-stall)
roast on the red-hot oak-logs,
and we download Ibsen's Ghosts from the BBC,
and we consume a simple, meatless meal,
including a deep and crisp and humble crumble,
we listen to Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata
played by Pletnev, and Schnittke's Third Quartet,
and, between the two, with glasses raised
discuss the insubstantial nature of "social capital".

Being anti-natalist anti-capitalists
we are wonderfully free of family
and marvellously rich in anti-social capital.

The self-satisfied above was composèd just before
a knocking sounded on our door -
and lo! our incomprehensible and gaily-dressed Basque gypsy mumbling marijuana-growing friend
(currently serving a suspended sentence which he received
for driving yet again without a licence or insurance)
came in (with his sweet old dog) - to ask if they could share
our no more than usually sacred meal on Christmas Eve.

He brought a bottle, a baguette and a tin of cassoulet -
ach! with large chunks of duck in it!
and started rolling a joint. We revised our plan a little,
replacing Beethoven with Mazzy Star, Ron Wood, Jerry Garcia and Tom Waits.
(This proved so appropriate that the 80-minute compilation was played twice.)
The spinach and tomato soup, the big mixed green salad and the humble crumble
were consumed, as originally planned,
and, the atmosphere being inevitably mellow*,
two of us reflected upon social and anti-social capital
while we smiled benignly upon our younger fellow.

 * (this word comes from French moëlleux, which originally referred to the softness of bone-marrow.
I have invented the word noëlleux, which celebrates the French language without having too clear a meaning...)

A picture to help you appreciate your Christmas dinner

I think the last sentence is something of an exaggeration !

 

"We generally find pleasure ta be not nearly so pleasant as we expected -

- 'n' pain straight-up much more painful..."

     [ read more ]

portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer in his wild youth
(thank you, Karl & Stephen)

to Clive James in memory of Leoš Janáček and WB Yeats

'The late sublime'
requires a consciousness
ripened
not rotted
by corrosive time.

Dear Readers,

I discovered today
to my horror :-)
that 19 comments
(dating back to August)
had not been published.
Please forgive me.
I have now corrected this.

I also discovered how many visit[or]s
I had last week, and where they reside:

Russia	193
United States	176
France	90
United Kingdom	56
Canada	50
Germany	29
Japan	11
Hungary	10
Netherlands	9
Serbia                 9 None in Vanuatu, alas!  Apart from that I don't know what to say...

To the corrupt only suicide is unthinkable.

"Almost everyone in Africa
has a mobile phone," the banker said.
"So let us bank the rank unbankable."

Expelled from the Paradise of Cruelty

Good and evil
are moon and sun
Heaven and Hell
have rotten doors.
The world is won
or lost by whores.

Zensualist

Zen of orgasm:
the not-having is more
sensual than the having.

        [ link ]

Grapes at Christmas

variety: Fragole (Strawberry Grape)
Still edible and delicious - since September - on the front
of my house at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val.

Arts and Institutions

Reductive, destructive, mediæval -
universities are as anti-creative
as churches, mosques and synagogues
are anti-spiritual.

To King Frost / St Nicholas, etc...

Those who don't count

are countless.

On Poetry and Publishing

What is offered freely
most people do not want.
They prefer packaged, processed cant.

(There is, of course, some really terrible stuff on poemhunter.com
- but no-one makes a mean living out of it...)

The moon is the night's glass eye

- The best glass eyes
are made in Germany.
- Which is why
every German has
at least one glass eye.
- Glass eyes are like
Murano birds.
Nor can they fly.
- Business eyes are
dead birds gorged
on poisoned snails
fallen from a blood-streaked sky.

- Yonder, shimmering, shivering,
the Isle of the Dead
is made of eyes.

December dewdrops in my orchard, Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita

What's the point of education
when people who know
the whole Divine Comedy by heart
are clubbed to death
by people who have only faith ?

Haiku

Full moon, December...
pale men in a sauna look like
ice-creams ovening.

Received yesterday

by e-mail
the message:
LOVE EVOL
bonobo
Dogs too are generous.

click to view

Essence of Humanity (1)  >

and

Essence of Humanity (2)  >

Consciousness kills

To write good narrative well
seems to be a not-uncommon ability
- to judge from the present Golden Age
of Brit-Irish fiction
- which maybe is related to
our ever-declining sense of smell,
and less and less tactility.

Oppression and interiority

The most tasteless and trashy

of cookies
might tell you the truth -
purely by accident, of course...

Nowhere near the centre of the labyrinth

A good relationship

is like a good meal
(but longer-lasting) -
not fancy restaurant-food,
but a meal you make yourselves
spontaneously, to music,
and to music consume
slowly and lovingly
by soft candlelight.

Interminable

is not the same as
infinite.

"Give me simplicitie, that I may live..." - George Herbert

The motto of a blog called

К черту !
- "I am a snobbish misanthrope 
and people are usually too dumb to notice it."

I call this 'Laudable Transparency'.

On the other hand, nobody reading this
my blog could be in any doubt that I, too, am
a snobbish misanthrope !

The Observing Minotaur

Most people's lives
resemble the
daubed walls of an
underground car-park.

Let there be light!

said God. And behold!
God saw incredible
piles of dirt.

Most of us

don't take humour
seriously enough.

Burglars prefer

tidy houses.

Every sedentary,

every civilised society
necessarily
depends on slavery or exploitation
of people somewhere
and animals everywhere.

Intelligence

is a kind of refined taste and appetite
for ideas.

Rhapsody on a lovely word

My cyberfriend Karl
wrote yesterday to say
that Houellebecq's Atomised
was a masterpiece.
Did I read it ?
I can't remember.
So many books...
turning into word-thought-sludge...
So little time…
turning into experience-sludge...
Grey sludge in the skull.
Brown sludge in the grave
slimy and suave
like liquid fudge.
All is sludge.

Anniversary of an Emergency

I once joined the Royal Air Force
to train as an interpreter
so I could become a Secret Agent
for the people that the British
were currently oppressing.

I was thrown out only because
I volubly protested
that I was to be taught not Arabic
but Russian - which would have led
to a dingy office and translating-job
suicidally depressing.

The Apotheosis of Appropriation

Heard on the radio:
"The whole world owns Nelson Mandela."

Words from a Spermless Wonder

No convent or monastery
can accommodate a solitary.

It is difficult for the famous -

especially the saintly famous -
to keep in touch with the real world
of the lumpen-proletariat,
the lumpen-bourgeoisie and the anonymous -
especially when they have just died
and become fantastically useful
to devilish politicians.

Perhaps

the worst thing that the Russians did in Europe
was to introduce (to the aristocrats of France,
mid-18th century) the Chinese tradition
of serving meals in courses,
where, before, élites in Europe followed
the Middle Eastern tradition of mezze,
all dishes served together, to be sampled as one chooses
- the most rational, sympathetic
and accommodating way to eat.

Have the arts of Russia (Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Schnittke,
Rachmaninov, Kustodiev, etc.) purged that  sin ?
Not quite.

The only dignity

is in humility.

An interesting piece of propaganda.

In fact Morocco was not part of the Caliphate in 841 CE,
but an independent country ruled  by the Idrisid dynasty.

An idle question

All media are thieves

of our attention - even books;
but advertisers are
robbers and rapists of our minds,
the meanest of all crooks.

A Revealing Religious Conundrum

Aziz
could recite the entire Quran from memory
at the age of ten : one of a minuscule
number of Muslims who are and have been
thus guaranteed entry into Heaven.
He is now an atheist, and attends
an Ex-Muslims Support Group.

Sea-eagle steals video-camera...

...and makes own in-flight wildlife movie.

From the Oracle of Amygdala

Smells are more subtle, more primeval than wines.
Some, pheromonal like ripe armpits, wet leaves,
twelfth-century churches and horse-sweat,
can be appreciated only by a few of us:
more rich and gorgeous than works
by Rachmaninov or Vuillard,
yet to others null - or, conversely,
comparable with crap,
as to me deodorants, after-shaves and most perfumes
are comparable with
American cinema, Zyklon-B, fast-food or rap.

Improved Hearing ?

When I told the doctor
that I found I was turning down music-volume
a little bit after each cataract operation,
and was also experiencing slightly-louder tinnitus,
he regarded me with the usual expression
of pity and contempt.
Thus the continuing arrogance
of the medical profession.

Why is there so little irony

 in poetry ?
- Probably because poets
take themselves too seriously.

How to make a splendid curse

in Early Mediæval Irish :

click on the picture

[source]

Comrac fort fri Ultach sergfas do ball ferda!