Have I said this before ?

The mind-numbing, labour-intensive oppression of optimism
too often leads to the unforgivable bleakness of prosperity.

If Northern Ireland

was England's Alcatraz
Scotland is
her Canada.

A Nasty Old Man

click to discover her revenge

and his long-suffering wife.

Ars Longa

Most people are more horrified
by artistic fakes
than by (other) human ones.

A quest

usually
involves
a man
obsessed.

Hope.

It was this last little sprite
in Pandora's urn

which ensured
(just as much as our spite) 
the Sixth Extinction
much, much more than Nostalgia.

The problem with "Living in the Moment"

is that moments change
(from moment to moment)
and we do not.

Electro-convulsive Therapy

Close the shutters
Go to bed
End the chaos in your head
Nothing matters when you're dead

Many young Americans

(whether in their hundreds or in their thousands I don't know)
were sent to 'Psychiatric Hospitals' in the nineteen-sixties

(and possibly later)
at the Center of the Free World 
at the height of the Cold War
after telling psychiatrists that they admired
Allen Ginsberg's ranting poem Howl!
Some of them were given electro-convulsive therapy
and never recovered.

Love

is a contraction
which seems like an expansion,
a contract which seems like liberation.

Philosophically speaking,

I guess that everything worth saying
has already been said, and mostly unheard,
ignored or unread.
Saying (or writing) is, of course, not necessarily communicating,
and what seems really worth communicating cannot be said.

To "live each day as if it were your last"

is not possible
until your last day actually arrives
and you are fully aware that you'll be dead the next.

If the human mind has evolved

(as we think it has)
according to the imperatives of survival,
what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of 'reality',
when all that is required in order to reproduce and multiply our species
is that our errors and illusions are not fatal ?

(I read this somewhere recently, but can't remember where.)

In other words, how can we know that what we see and think we understand
is not a grand illusion ? 

Moreover, within this grandly-human illusion of understanding,
it seems that the more we know - the more information that we amass -
the less we can rationalise, much less control our actions as a species.

Which is the lesser of the two evils ?

The religion that Islamic State opposes
calls itself a political system - representative democracy.
Based on desire for things, comfort and will to power,
it is an inherently evil religion,
whose priests preach faith in technology,
inevitable moral improvement
and economic growth.

Both evils together in context in Raqqa. Photo by Reuters

The subtlest form of evil

is not so much the idea that evil is
a terrifying banality outside and separate
- but that it can be eradicated.

The Meek

are the microbes
who inhabit our bodies,
inherit our corpses,
and teem in the soil and all imaginable
and unimaginable places in this
and other planets.

Might this possibly be true ?

'...a senior Polish official has alleged that Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested partitioning Ukraine with Poland six years ago in a conversation with Donald Tusk, who was Poland's prime minister at the time.'

Or is it just another accusation in the centuries-long struggle between Poland and Russia ?

Despite our individualist illusions

there is no such thing as autonomy,
for we have simply moved from
kinship- and community-networks
or added to them our reliance
upon gadgets and machines
which also break down and have to be replaced.

'What is life ?'

For humans it is mostly
and increasingly
post-traumatic stress disorder
caused by culture crushing nature.

There is over a year left to listen...

...to an excellent talk by journalist Adam Gopnik.
In it, he admirably and entertainingly illustrates a corollary of Jung's theory of enantiodromia: people are bad at what they most enthuse and bang on about.
Thus the English are bad at soccer; very few readable novels come out of France;
Isis are more anti-Islamic than Hitler;
and the United States is constitutionally anti-democratic.

listen >>>

Your support is urgently needed.

The Bad Art Museum of Ohio needs a new home.
The obvious new location is France, which already is feverishly producing more bad art than all the Americas put together.

There are two obvious French locations:
1. The Eiffel Tower, a hideous and vulgar pile of ostentation.
2. The Palace of Versailles, a hideous and vulgar (but squatter) pile of ostentation.

The runner-up is in Belfast, Northern Ireland: City Hall, a nauseatingly hideous and vulgar, though smaller pile of ostentation.

link to another Museum of Bad Art >>>

'Social Media'

(Facebook and the like)
have at the same time reified
and phantasmagorised friendship.
There will be no such thing as friends
when friends are only things.

Increasing my vocabulary.

I heard two great expressions yesterday:
Pity-party
and
Sa'udi America.

I suggest that at least 95%

of human verbal exchange
is insincere banality,
and much of the rest
is toxic gossip and false witness.
Language is such a wonderful invention!

My window-sill this morning.

On the right, a flower of one of the hardiest of the many species of Caralluma,
a succulent which gives off a smell of rotten meat to attract certain flies and wasps.

Wilde Zen

"Nothing survives being thought of."

- Oscar Wilde in 'A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE'.

A cartoon that could be called 'callow'.

Old Xenophobia.

The French expression
avoir un nom à coucher dehors
demonstrates the Fear of the Stranger,
especially the stranger with a peculiar name,
who was, because of its unfamiliarity, not admitted to an inn
but made to sleep in a stable, or, more often, turned away altogether
to sleep out in the open, presumably without access to the table d'hôte.

We should be glad that this does not happen now
to someone named, for example Władysław Konopczyński 
or Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour.

Much of human misery

is caused by conflict between
perceptions of virility
and perceptions of morality.

I feel it coming on...

Another definition of 'Depression'

(which of course is beyond definition) :
the feeling that you are dying
more than you are living.

An Irish Proverb - on a wet day.

Dhá thrian den obair í an chosúlacht.
Two-thirds of work is the appearance.

And another one:  Never sell a hen on a wet day.

'And God said:

Let there be light.'
Satan said:
Let there be heat.
Diogenes said
that a true philosopher is offensive.

Another group of Jihadists.

Galloping Insanity.

'We must put a million people on Mars
if we are to ensure that humanity has a future.'

read more >

Autonomy.

A robin-redbreast's nest inside a skull

in the Ossuary at St Leonard's church, Hythe, Kent.

(thanks, Almina)

In the end

all that "we"
"achieved"
was
destruction.

In the end

our much-vaunted
consciousness
is just a very tangled string
of feelings,
tiny pulses between synapses
and a million little black holes.

A great slogan - but for whom ?

Give History
a Hysterectomy !

Alone with one's thoughts.

A matter (but not a game) of numbers.

During the first 20 - the most violent - years of the Spanish Inquisition,
at the end of the 15th century, some 2,000 people were killed in the name of Faith.

By contrast, about a quarter of a million people (out of a population of roughly 800,000) were killed in the Vendée [Western France] when a peasant rebellion against the rationalist, anti-religious, Enlightenment-engendered French Revolution was put down by Republican armies in 1794.
And some 17,000 men, women and children were guillotined in the purge that ended in July that year, including the man who had designed the new revolutionary calendar which featured the 'rational' ten-day week.

- Read John Gray's review of Karen Armstrong's new book
on  Religion and the History of Violence.

"It's only a T-shirt!"

Insignificant and inexpensive things
which we take for granted
are produced from hard labour,
misery and pain and murderous
monoculture.

A little light relief.

What was - and is still - called The Enlightenment

was really the discovery
- or was it the invention ?
- of human ignorance,
which has led rapidly and greedily
to the trashing of the planet.

L'Identité malheureuse

[Alain] Finkielkraut works, throughout  L'Identité malheureuse, on the idea that the Holocaust and the end of colonialism made Europeans terrified of their own history. The mantra "never again!" has caused people to become stuck in expecting racism and fascism to come only from the same direction it struck from last time. Since they're looking for white people to misbehave, they gloss ideologically over the evidence that immigrants may now be generating racial hatred all on their own.

- Ann Sterzinger