Wisdom,

if not meaningless,
is by definition inexpressible
(or it would long ago have deflected us
from the 'progress' of our
arrogant species-exceptional,
species-apart).
It would require not just
a guilelessly-researching head,
but also a cavernously open,
mournful heart.

Perversion

is simply adaptive
behaviour which disgusts us.

De Tocqueville was not always right

"The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced 
but even more in the new ideas they express."
- de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,  Book I, Chapter 16

Shakespeare,
who introduced hundreds of words to the English language,
did not live in a democracy.
And, although we already had the words
usual, common,
it was democracy which gave us the oppressive word
normal...

The more you know, the less you want to know.

When teachers can't spell,
punctuate, do mental arithmetic,
tell you anything about Kepler,
the Black Death, octopi,
the Danzig Corridor
or Wallis and Futuna,

can't tell the difference between
centre and epicentre, riffle and rifle,
tend and attend,
alternative and alternate,
don't realise that a quantum
is very small and not very large,

you know that the costly
'Education System' is
no such thing,
just 10-year holding-pens
to keep us all infantile
and inextricably linked
to junk-filled mindlessness.

Of all the institutions

that civilisation has nightmared up,
more infantile, more sinister
than monotheism
is contractual monogamy,
its oppressive, mind-numbing,
and destructive twin sister.

What Capitalism can provide

for any taste or quirk...

Did I already relay

this staggering statistic ?
Thirty-thousand mobile phones
are discarded every day
in the UK !

Schools

are, mainly,
restraining centres
for abandoned children.

Memories

are shifting, shadowy snapshots -
discrete quanta -
but we think
and think we remember
in linear narrative...

The Unmeaning of Life

is that culture
is merely a distraction
from being.

Expanding la Rochefoucauld

Any hard-working, family-oriented person,
who has the ambition,
makes the resolve,
and tries hard enough in this wonderful world of ours,
can, through sheer hard work and dedication, 
find the strength to tolerate, even endure,
the sufferings of others - even human beings.

"Grooming"

has assumed but recently
a sinister new meaning
in the soupy fog
which is our language.
Soon it will not be possible
to admit to having groomed
a horse or dog.

What is beautiful and ugly at the same time ?

Click here
to enjoy a beautiful
(but ugly)
scam.

"I laughed out loud." - Poète Inédit.

Good Ol' Family Values

Most bullying -
physical, mental and sexual -
occurs between siblings.

Attempts at murder
and grievous bodily harm
are not uncommon.

The more one learns about
the patristic family
the more one realises
that it is the worst possible model.

No wonder Jesus of Galilee
(no breeding fool he)
rejected it (and gainful employment)
utterly.

Evil Viagra

would be a good name
for a rock 'n' roll band
or a rapper
or a rapist
or an antique land.

On Democracy and Abattoirs

As a miraculously-happy pig
I vote that Socrates be eaten.

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied
than a pig satisfied; 
better to be Socrates dissatisfied 
than a fool satisfied."
 - John Stuart Mill.

Beards and Skirts

click to read more

Idyllic holiday home in SW France.

I believe it means 'Welcome' in the local dialect.

Tainted

by the culture of attainment,
we fail to appreciate
the appreciators
without whom the attainers
would be bereft.

It is sad

that so many of us
are more touchy
than touchy-feely.

" The best lack all conviction "

and the worst, not only "full
of passionate intensity", are often
frighteningly well-intentioned.

The future is hallucination,
the past a costume-drama
and the present is the numbing
low-level pain of descriptive,
anecdotal consciousness.

Time and consciousness
have only the most accidental
of connections. Time is an eternal
abstract stretch, while consciousness
is the awareness, unawareness,
or murderous refutation of futility.
Knowledge is mere imagination,
childish, self-aggrandising, deceiving,
self-deceiving and only sometimes
undeceiving.  There will be a time
when there is no time for generation.

" I love you "

is easy to say
before you get to know
a man
or woman -
or the human race
against time.

VOC,

alias the United East India Company (of what would become the Netherlands) was the world's first multinational corporation.

For millennia, Ternate and the neighbouring island of Tidore in modern Indonesia were the world's only source of those fragrant, twig-like herbs that were worth their weight in gold: cloves.

Cloves from Ternate were traded by Arab seafarers along the maritime Silk Route not just to China, but eastwards to the Middle East and on to Europe, increasing in value as they travelled westwards.

In China, a Han dynasty ruler from the 3rd century BCE insisted that anyone addressing him in audience chew cloves to sweeten his breath. Their origin was a fiercely-guarded secret until the Portuguese and Spanish burst into the Java Sea in the 16th Century.

In 1652, after displacing the Portuguese and Spanish, the Protestant Dutch introduced a policy known as extirpatie: extirpation. For, just as corporations today seek to monopolise plant genes in the developing world, so The Dutch East Indies Company set about seizing total control of the incredibly lucrative spice production from The Spice Islands of Indonesia (until 1947, the Dutch East Indies).

All clove trees not controlled by the DEIC were uprooted and burned.

Anyone caught growing, stealing or possessing clove plants without authorisation faced the death penalty.

To the south of Ternate, on the Banda Islands - the world's only source of nutmeg - the Dutch used Japanese mercenaries to slaughter almost the entire male population.

Like OPEC and many other trans-national cartels today, the DEIC also limited supply to keep prices high. Only 800-1,000 tonnes of cloves were exported per year. The rest of the harvest was burned or dumped in the sea.

(adapted from BBC Website)

Poetry in the 21st century

don't mean a thing
if it ain't got no sting.

From unwholesome disorders

come Holy Orders.

Ghoti

George Bernard Shaw pointed out that FISH in English could be spelled
GHOTI :  Gh as in cough; o as in women; ti as in nation.

Unlike Irish, English has had no systematic spelling reform,
except for a rather childish, aborted attempt in the US,
when humour became humor, and axe became ax, etc.

The Great War to Come

When, at the outbreak
of the war of the end of the world
I am forced to choose a side -
Men or Women -
who can doubt that I, though male,
will choose the women -
gender-losers, gender-sinners
- if only because I could not bear
to have collaborated with winners ?

Progressive Possession

The longer
we go on grabbing
the sooner
our Nemesis will grab us.
But acquisition,
like religion,
is no statistician.

Internet Universities

Soon there will be only one kind of knowledge
to oppose the lies of religion.

More Musings of the Minotaur

“The idea that examined lives tend to be better on the whole than others
seems to me obviously false.”
 - John Gray

It depends on what you mean by ‘examined’.
Surely an individual cannot “get far”
in his or her exploration
of the cul-de-sac — or cinema — of life
without some self-examination…

A wolf is weaker

than a lion or a tiger

but does not end up in a circus.

There is a lover at the door.

'Love is not I but We,
Come in, sit down and taste our meat'.
So we did sit, and learn, and drink, and roar,
and smoke, and touch, and float,
and think, and praise, and eat.

Mobile phones,

smart-phones etc.
are, I think, less to do with communication
than with control
and the illusion of control.

The more and easier the means of superficial communication,
the less and more difficult becomes actual connection.

And sharing is much better than caring.

This is how we have ended up.

For most of us,
'free choice' 
of, for example,
50 kinds of cereal,
30 kinds of toilet-roll
(mauve is very tasteful),
and 5 flavours of condom,
is more important than social justice.

"Nearly all people* are slaves,"

wrote Chamfort,
"for the same reason that the Spartans said the Persians were servile:
because they lack the strength to say No.
To be able to utter that word, and to live alone,
are the only two ways of preserving freedom and character."

* He wrote 'men', of course...

Untitled

photo found on tumblr.

A hierophant of a shark cult ?
There are not many of them left...sharks neither...

A Point of View

Pointless
is the best that life and thought,
the world and everything could be.
How terrible if they were not...

On Life, Death and Dying : a self-help poem

(The Fortune-cookie of Lone Old-Wolfery
as opposed to the Evangelistic Congregational Atheism
of the humanists)

Let people and their messy values pass you by.
Survive if you are happy,
untainted by doctrine of attainment, then
die simply, quickly, cleanly, well
by your own hand
before the devil-doctors drag you
to their heaven of long-dying,
your hospital-hell.

Forests

are cradles of wisdom.
Since abandoning them
for progressive sleaze
we humans have been unable to
see the wood for the trees.

'There is a God !'

Floods and other
"extreme weather"
are likely to punish Britain
more often,
as climate-change
due to atmospheric pollution
affects the island which initiated
the Industrial Revolution.

35 people in Iran

went to look
at my first Uranian poems page last week
- at least 34 more than would have
seen them had they been published
in a magazine or book.

Four cheers for the World Wide Web !

Amongst a thousand other things,

we are addicted to charge and discharge,
though we know
that climax is always followed by anti-climax,
magnificence and plenitude by entropy,
and a mountain can become a chasm -
which is to some of us an argument against
aspiration, achievement, success , conquest
- and even orgasm.

'They fight for Peace'

click the photo to hear this poem

by Sháker Aamer
11 years in Guantánamo camp...

Anti-Christian Sympathy

I am sorry for the collaborators
who trash the planet with their every action
and don't get no satisfaction.

'Knowledge is Power'

which is why education systems are designed
to fill young heads with 'facts' and justifications
of the status quo, and thus prevent them
ever thinking for themselves.

A much-blogged image

New Year Resolution, 2014

To found
Vegetarian Jihad.