Charles Darwin's Cousin*

invented the word, if not the idea of,
Eugenics -
which led, on the one hand,
to the Nazi extermination camps
and the Steel Wall of Palestine,
and, on the other, to the European Welfare State.
Obsessed with categorisation, he invented
the confining terms
homosexuality and homosexual,
which led, on the one hand,
to many a blackmail, many a sad suicide,
the Nazi extermination camps
and the horrible crimes of Hamas (etc.),
while on the other, to the grotesquely
confined stereotypes who haunt gay bars
and flaunt Gay Pride.

*Francis Galton

This is the cell

in which Gavrilo Princip died of tuberculosis of the bone
before the 'Great' War ended, in April 1918.
The prison was at Terezín in North Bohemia
 - to be called Theresienstadt by the Nazis.
The children of the Archduke whom he killed 
perished in Dachau, and the Archduke's uncle Rudolf
committed suicide at Mayerling some thirty years before
the outbreak of the First World War.

'Religion

is the sigh of the oppressed creature, 
the heart of a heartless world, 
just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. 
It is the opium of the people.' 
- Karl Marx, in his
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

But now the opiate is Sport.

'Maturity,

Bokonon tells us,
is a bitter disappointment
for which no remedy exists,
unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.'

Goals

are abstractions
by which people ruin the lives
of others and themselves.

The hands that stock the pharmacies rule the world.

Let us start our Republic with a chain of pharmacies,
a chain of shopping-malls,
a chain of penitentiaries,
a national anthem, and a flag.
After that, we can write a Constitution.

[adapted from Kurt Vonnegut]

Minotaurs never existed.

Obnoxious Athenians did.
And labyrinths engulf us.
Labyrinths within ever-smaller labyrinths
are culture...
                    and poems are feeble
stick-drawings for veal-people.

A philosopher-poet

is a compassless,
sometimes compassionate person
in a space strangely open
but intimate like a wound,        

around which torture, intimidation,
corruption, exploitation, collaboration
and accommodation make poetry and philosophy
utterly irrelevant, however splendid they may sound.

Remember Mao's Little Red Book ?

You will, if you are a certain age.
It captivated - especially in France -
millions of bored young people
who did not permit themselves to have an inkling
of the terrible things that Mao and his wife
wrought in China - horrors worse that those
performed on Russia by Djugashvili.

Here is John Gray on the subject:

"... one must bear in mind the fathomless frivolity of some on the French left."  [which has left its mark on an utterly frivolous French society]

He goes on to say in this review:
"The Little Red Book has now achieved what looks like being its most enduring significance:
as a piece of capitalist kitsch."

I think this particular projection is wrong

because I think Europe North of the Alps and Pyrenees

will get wetter (while Australia and New Zealand will get drier)

as Homo sapiens stultus obsesses about ease.

I like to listen

to Australian Pink Floyd
crepuscularly,
with a flagon of old wine,
plucking the electric
nipples of one,
who, not separated
by an existential void,
is tickling mine.

LUXURIA

The hypocrisy of luxury :
to live in kitschy comfort
which we affect
to despise
but refuse to reject.

with thanks to Bearz

Two 'foreign' words that go together:

LUMPENBOURGEOISIE

FROU-FROU

'The Mental Health Team

will take down your life history
in order to assess your Memory Function.'

“Take down my life-history” –
how many hours/days would they have ? 
Are they even more than half-educated ? 
Do they know what 'disingenuous' means ?
The word team is a cold hand around my heart.
Aren’t teams just gangs who think they’re doing good ?

To want to be liked

is very destructive.

What a difference
between 'friendly' and 'friend'...

Some solitudinarians

banned the reading of books.  But not Socrates,
and apparently not St Jerome, who also had a lion for company.
Call that solitude ?

Music :

The only harmless thing that humans make or do
is the only means of communication between them
that is universal, that is true.

The naming of depressing streets after people

is at least surreal if not insulting -
but I think I might not turn or fume in my grave
were a French Impasse* named after me.

* Impasse = cul-de-sac in English

A Cathar* Child's View

Satan's Willy is the size of the World
and we are Mere Molecules
of his Corrupting Cock-Cheese -
very much smaller than a Little Devil's fleas.

*see Wikipedia

In the Naive 1950s

we imagined that machines and robots would do away with most of 'work'.
That was, of course, before the devilish credit consumer economy was spawned.
Now we are surrounded by machines and robots,
and life has become much more complicated
and much more competitive
and much more expensive,
and people have to work ever harder
to feel at least as miserable as in the 1950s
that they have been short-changed by life.

And another thing:
instead of having hundreds of unreliable inkjet printers on the market
wouldn't it be nice
to have just a couple of series of robust models
that worked well and didn't jam or fall to bits
and whose cartridges were at a reasonable price...?

I asked a handsome man to dinner

 

and he told me he had left-overs
which he really had to eat -
a brush-off which was
as brief as it was neat.

What I have done most of my life :

Reading is an excellent inactivity.

On white walls generally and in galleries in particular.

Received ideas should always be contested.
White drains colour and character
Whites have sucked out the world, divested
it of green and fur and plenty.
Gold and silver look like nothing on white skin
which suits only jet and amber and tin...
Received ideas should be taken as false
until tested.

In the unlikely event

that the Vatican and Coca-Cola were to declare war upon each other,
who could predict the winner ?
The result might well resemble the present
conveniently-inertial
truce between Mammon (slightly spiritual,
like a Bach Remedy bel canto)
and Mammon (aggressively commercial,
like Monsanto).

Attention / attentiveness / awareness

in memoriam Carlos Castaneda

Soon almost every one of the seven billion
will be a zombie – utterly
enslaved to things –
and we the one-eyed bleary
will be unnoticed kings.

Every mobile phone

is a devil's penis
to murmur to, shout at, and clutch,
which explains why people can't get enough of them
let alone too much.

Two Breeding Males Miss the Point

In the New Statesman online there is a review by John Gray
an awesome hatchet-job of a book by Kenan Malik, grandiosely entitled
Quest for a Moral Compass - a global history of ethics,
whose reply to Gray's virulent attack you can read here. 

Having read both,  I don’t know what to think…and Malik's  book is VERY expensive.

“the main problem we face in the world today is not that of too much rationality.”

is a pretty good point, not that Gray actually thinks that.
I think that what Gray is attacking is the teleological fallacy, the belief that we are improving –
though he has strong opposition there from Pinker and Diamond, who contend that humans ARE actually getting nicer. Except that we are pullulating like hideous mega-maggots on this fragile planet,
and no amount of human niceness can ever make up for the harm sheer numbers have caused the current biosphere, in what Diamond refers to as “The Sixth Extinction” [of a helluvalota life on the Earth].

A phrase that Gray uses by the by – “world-transforming sense of agency” – is interesting,
and I think that our post-Christian quasi-rationalist belief in individuals and groups,
rather than ‘humanity’ as potent agents acting more or less rationally is what Gray is against.

But it’s great to have someone like Gray growling like Cerberus in the back room, 

and I suspect that Kenan Malik, something of a socialist groupie, might be something of a smug whitewasher!  Both have axes to grind - but that is fairly normal.

Two breeding males challenge each other with misplaced self-righteousness...

An excellent reason for suicide.

The specious argument that
"it's those who are left behind who suffer" -
is insulting to those who are "left behind"
in the race to nothingness.

American Aspirational Optimism

is, as a few millions outside the USA realise,
a mass psychological disorder,
a pathological pseudo-elevation of mood
aggravated by American Food,
which has long since crossed the border.

Indian Aspirational Optimism

The licence of an Indian dentist in the USA
was revoked after he attempted to extract 20 teeth
from the mouth of a 64-year-old woman in one sitting
- which, of course, led to her death.

The dentist, Rashmi Patel, was performing the procedure
on Judith Gan on February 17 when she lost consciousness.

The procedure included placing implants in the woman’s mouth
immediately after removing her teeth,
according to the New York Daily News.

The paper quoted Dr. Patel’s assistant as saying
that he had requested his boss to stop the procedure
- but finally he had to run out of the surgery
to call emergency services -
too late: the patient soon died,
said a Department of Public Health report.
 I laughed, I cried...

The Zen of Grammar:

all objects are subjects.

more >

Бори́с Бори́сович Гребенщико́в: Переводы

adapted from part of a poem by Boris Grebenshchikov
entitled 2-12-85-06

There is 3, and there is 5, and 376915
And there are people with a High Court Judge inside
There are people with two or more zircon knees
And those with Brucey Lee between their thighs
And there are people who always call you sir
And those with many heads - up to 104
There are mystical maidens with magnetising eyes
And people who yodel among tangerine grass
And those who use coltan to make an awful noise
There are people who have more than twenty chicken-toys
Some are almost alive and some in deep birth-slumber
And nobody knows your death's phone number.

It's probably Neanderthal

genes that make me unable to tolerate
temperatures above 27° C (80° F),

and African genes which make me so
coldrife even in Irish summer.
This genetic commixture is unfortunate.

In Syria no-one is deprived

of hot and cold running
blood - not even the dogs.

The Beauty of Judaism

is that is almost the only surviving organic religion
which has grown and splintered and retrenched
and evolved  along with the people
and linguistic group who devised it -
unlike most other religions,
foisted in perverted forms on alien
and uncomprehending populations.

(In his famous and dramatic Fire Sermon 
the Buddha allegedly said:
“The totality is conflagration.” )

The Zen of Art

is the Buddha of Dung.

Cannibal Nuns - not even !

All those illegitimate babies
born out of wedlock
that they starved and neglected
and mistreated in Catholic Ireland
weren't even eaten, but buried in sludge-pits.
They weren't even cannibal nuns,
just women whose minds
had been raped by religion.

Today, in a world of over seven thousand million people,

I have the pleasure of sharing with you my readers
some of my Blog and Website Statistics
(from the 2nd to 8th of June, 2014) to wit :

This Blog - 313 page-views of which 95 were return visits.
Irish Megaliths - 337 page-views of which 10 were return visits.
Diogenes - 147 page-views of which 21 were return visits.
Male Exhibitionists - 86 page-views of which 18 were return visits.
Holosensuality - 65 page-views of which 6 were return visits.
Absinthe - 25 page-views, with no return visits.
Omar Khayyâm - only 11 visits to my second-most-beautiful page*.
Suicide - alas, received only 2 page-views.

Why do I bother ? 



*My most beautiful page is The Parable of Dives and Lazarus, for which I have no statistics.

A Minority of One

"  Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
In one man's head alone, there it dwells as yet.
One man alone of the whole world believes it;
there is one man against all men. "
- Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, Lecture II.

From the New Physiologus*

* Mediæval Bestiary

Bewitched by technology,

we are not merely seduced by our superficial cleverness,
but hopelessly in love with it.

A painting I bought recently in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

where it hangs on my bedroom wall.

click to enlarge

(it was originally the other way up)

I have given it a title:
                                        THE ENTICEMENT OF ENTROPY.

Why I feel uneasy in many art-galleries and modern houses.

Whenever I see white-painted walls
I think of Dr Mengele.

'Dying with dignity means dying with the least amount of suffering,'

said Véronique Hivon, Parti Québecois member of the National Assembly in Québec City.
Terminally-ill patients in Québec now have the right to choose to die.

The non-partisan Bill 52, also known as an Act respecting end-of-life care,
was passed on Thursday afternoon in a free vote at the National Assembly in Québec City.

The bill passed by 94 to 22 votes, with no abstentions.

So far, so excellent.
But the least-appropriate word that can be attached to any human being
at any stage in life, in any situation,
is dignity.

Trees have dignity.

'Most people who go to church don’t believe in God;

very few of them really believe,
but somewhere deep inside they try to convince themselves there is a God.'
— Frédéric Bourdin, The Impostor.

And they often succeed.

In my early twenties

I wanted to be a great short-story writer.
But I am an unbelievably bad liar.

re-blogged from suzziepsyche on tumblr

'To have no God'

אין לו אלוהים
is Hebrew for
to have a nerve,
not to be backward about coming forward,
to have blind
effrontery, etc.
But it is usually monotheists
(not least Israelis)
who are the most forward
of humankind.

A popular but pedestrian poet

called Séamus
made famous
the typically-truculent
Northern Irish attitude to authority
summed up by:
Whatever you say, say Nothing.

I (likewise from that quasi-autistic quasi-statelet)
have always believed the contrary:
Swamp Them with information,
especially about your private life and views -
and they'll leave you alone.

And whatever you do, do nothing
They want you to do.

The increasing number of super-rich

is just another symptom
of a culture of incompetence.

The ever-increasing gap between rich and poor

will allow a new social class to appear, at least in Europe -
a class which throve from the 13th to the 15th centuries
and gradually diminished as capitalism grew:
the class of wandering, communal or hiding drop-outs,
who will be more than just a happy-clappy few.

Café Mortel

I brought my body-bag
(no coffin, please)
to a Death Café
in old Tabriz
(where Shams came from).
I said: Let's drink to
Freedom from Self
and shoot the breeze
with tea and cake,
since you're not offering
Armagnac
or wine and cheese...

O Death, where is thy Sting ?

Decease and Happiness
rarely occur in the same phrase or line.
But what if —
Happiness were Death ?
— They were the same thing ?
Heaven on a piece of string...

Iucundum tamen nihil agere.

Pliny the Younger was insightful :
'Doing nothing is delightful.'

If only

we would - or could -
just allow words to fail us.

Two interesting quotations.

Tennessee Williams:
 “Fame is the perversion of the human instinct for validation and attention.
 Without [attention] our feedback system breaks down because we don’t know who we are”

—in other words: "Fame is the greatest disgrace."

Carl Jung:
 "The recognition of your own black holes
  is the best way of understanding the black holes of others"

—and life & the world.