Let's clone Jesus

from the DNA secreted in the Turin Shroud.
Clone the Prophet from his beard at Topkapı,
clone the Buddha from his tooth at Kandy.
Such clonings will not be allowed.
There will be no new Kafka, Brahms, Mutanabbi, Gandhi,
Jung, Khayyam...or Chief Red Cloud.

At their very best

music (not blaringly loud)
and wine (not incapacitatingly strong)
are the only two creations
of which mankind can be proud.

No, I am not shocked, nor horrified

that the co-pilot of a passenger plane
locked out the pilot from the cockpit
and flew the machine and its human contents
into a French alp.  Certainly it was a much more
selfish, much less significant and grandiose act
than the destruction of the sinister Twin Towers -
but I guess that if you're going to go dramatically
(to make a point) into that good night (and alp)
why not, as a Happening, take a random selection
of comfortable, boring buggers with you
as you zoom down into the Beyond-Disconnection.

Man is the noisiest creature

full of loud and vainglorious notions,
who is currently creating
(if that is the right word)
the silent catastrophe
of the dying of the oceans.

Hymn to a Houynhym.

Through language
we lose our animal integrity.
Through knowledge
we become ever rougher.
After Descartes
scientists nailed dogs to walls 
to show that beasts cannot suffer.

Downsize your lifestyle

Downscale your lifesize
Upscale your downbeat
Download your update
Downsize your upload
Beat up your lowdown
Scale down your lifeload
Outsize your lowlife
Outsource your throughput
Put in your loadsize
Throw out your input
Downsize your lifeload
Beat down your upsize
Uplight your downside
Inside your lovebeat

- for there's always an upside
to the downbeat, a sideline
to the lifeline, and a
downside to the upsize.

As my companion said...

...it would put you off being dead.

It is impossible to know

whether life is like a bad movie -
a nice emptiness when it's over -
or whether, compared with death,
life even as an untouchable or refugee
is like skipping in a field of clover.

My wonderful and ravishingly-beautiful friend Dína

wrote to me yesterday
kindly offering to scratch my back,
and sending me a terrible canine statistic.

Dína in ecstasy.

Hanan

حَنان 
a feminine forename,
means flowy, easy-going, generous and
freely-available tenderness.
It is very limply translated
into the hard and cold
English language as 'compassion'.

Another joy of growing old:

for the first time in my life
I am able to cat-nap.

It is a very nice coincidence

that the Irish for USA
is SAM
(a wicked uncle ?)

Consciousness is only now

for this continuing, discontinuous split-second.
All the rest is just imagination.

When I was twenty-one

and madly, carnally in love with a Danish woman
I wrote a poem about the joy and satisfaction
of having my back scratched being even greater,
more immediate and straightforward
than 'the joy of sex'
- yet wanting sex more viscerally
than I wanted scratching of my back. 
Now I'm totally content with the back-scratching.
Are there back-scratchers for hire by the half-hour,
or would I have to engage a male or female whore ?

Keys were unknown

to the commensal, itinerant
Jesus of Galilee,
but...

DGD

Today's main Art Movement in France
is what I call Dégénéro-Déco, or DGD ( pronounced dégédé in French).
Its sad practitioners make the Chinese copiers of Vermeer,
Delacroix and the bleak Picasso-factory seem very creative indeed...
 
read more here >>>

It is not the first time

that Moscow has aspired to be the New (or Third) Rome
(or new Constantinople).
Tsar or Czar (царь), like Kaiser, derives from Cæsar.
Vladimir is a Russian form of the Nordic Waldemar -
for the land of Rus (from Ruotsi, Finnish for Sweden)
was a wealthy Nordic centre of trade in amber and furs,
with links to the Black Sea, Iran and the Silk Road.
Put (путь) means way
in modern Russian, but the Empresident's surname
may be Karelo-Finnic, rather than Slav.
(Unlike Britons, Russians ever, ever shall be slaves.)
Ave Vladimir Cæsar Putin.

This bust is destined for St Petersburg, however, not Moscow.

Perhaps

gentleness
is kinder than
kindness.

Jung's Theory

of Enantiodromia
is beautifully illustrated
by the almost-inevitable attraction
of the glamorous
to seediness.

The rhythm of a washing-machine

is 'like a great heartbeat,
and the rush of its waters
[is] what the unborn hear -
our last memory of peace.'

~ Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs.

As I poured the Armagnac

my companion said:
"there is a gentleness in good alcoholic drinks
quietly appreciated
that is lost to the un-self-abandoning".

A Vatican theologian once upon a time

dismissed as thoughtless optimism
the suggestion that Judas from Cerioth
was redeemable because he was part
of God's Great (if devilishly twisted
and obviously failing) Plan
for the sanguinary redemption of Man.
But of course all optimism is thoughtless.

The space between yourself

(or your selves)
and your self-presentation
might be called
self-ignorance/deception
self-preservation,
masquerade
or hypocrisy.

Rouergue

is a little-known former county in south-west France,
mostly covered now by the administrative département of the Aveyron.
Its rolling landscape is well-described by the Japanese word
Satoyama - where foothills (in this case, of the Massif Central)
are close to meeting flat lands -
a biodiverse habitat/environment where humans
and what remains of 'nature' interact more symbiotically and richly
than on the over-exploited agricultural land of the plains.

Superficially, it resembles the drumlin belt of Ireland,
but is far more forested, more diverse, less populated
by humans, whose habitations and settlements are not nearly so ugly;
indeed they are often composed almost entirely
of beautiful old vernacular architecture in the local stone.

A common form of passive aggression:

A annoys B through practised incompetence,
then sidles off just when s/he can be of use.

Hallelujah!

Perhaps

the most terrifying cliché
is
   "while / where there's life there's hope".

Human existence is an agonising show

(it has often been remarked)
of grotesque shadow-shapes that come and go
in front of gawpers with smartphones
and plasma TVs who know
nothing about anything
- especially not themselves.
It's not that multiplying humans are bad,
just that they are mad, sad
and dangerous to know.

I live below the purely notional

and arbitrary Irish, British, French
poverty line.

Here is a view from the window of my Town House:

and here is a view from my Country Home:

As well as all the political speeches

that the robots and zombies write,
they are writing
all the poetry, too.

People are often praised

and celebrated
for what is not worth praise or celebrity
- and should even be despised, condemned.
Truth is not good for their feelings.

Pickaninny

is a word which was not uncommon when I was a child
and reading books such as Little Black Sambo.
Probably it is now as taboo as Nigger.

Other forms are picaninny or piccaninny or picinniny.
It refers to children of black descent or a racial caricature thereof. 
It may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino 
(an affectionate term derived from pequeno, "little").

Of course, pickaninnies were also cotton-pickers, 
but few were ninnies,

nor indeed asses, nor donkeys - 
a word derived from the Scottish first-name Duncan
which has replaced ass in modern English...

Humanity

(in both meanings of the word
- whether sentiment or condition)
is just inanity
without the blessing of inanition.

Understanding (beyond words

despite the beautiful banality
of poetry) is just a vanity
of the simple-minded
spurners of the easy, sad
and sadly-liberal awareness
of Our verbal arrogance.

You cannot be gay

and fear
being queer.

A bird

is an egg's means
of becoming more eggs.
The dead bitch
nurtures birds
and maggots
in the poisoned ditch.
If we are not of Nature
we are Nowhere.
If riches produced happiness
all would be rich.

A reason why Neanderthals might have disappeared.

In an evolutionary contest
between Straightcocks and Curvycocks
the latter are superior.

Surely it is criminally insane

to kill one animal
to lure or feed another
kept as source of meat
or pet which fouls the street.

Civilisation

is institutionalised, hierarchical anger -
founded on the false valuation
and celebration of
certain people for what they do,
or for who their fathers are
rather than for their sweetness
of their nature.

PS - Happy International Women's Day !

Food for thought (like all my blogs ?)

"Life's too slippery for books, Clarice;
anger appears as lust,
lupus presents as hives."

~ Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs.

Looking for a suitable wood-burning stove

for our new living-room with the amazing view
in Caylus, one that will burn 50-centimetre
coppiced-oak logs and heat the whole house
if need be, I came across these pictures
of a fine old art-déco monster
- a beowulfish dragon -
suitable for a very large room
or, indeed, a museum:

Atheists

might more appropriately call themselves
'pagans',
though the word is much misunderstood:
it meant oaf or churl or hayseed,
yokel, peasant, cultchie, boor or boonie...
- in other words
someone too far beyond a town or village
to be monitored by Christians,
someone who revered a stream or tree,
a grotto, rock or phallic object,
moon-goddess or a god of fire.

But the only people to benefit
from any organised religion
(which atheism is fast becoming)
are the manipulative
and simple-minded,
whether dining in a Roman villa
or lurking in a medieval shire.

It is certainly not "love

which makes the world go round"
but universal, ineluctable
hypocrisy.

The more worthless and shallow

I consider it to be,
the more tolerable
(even pleasant)
life seems to me.

There were times when

and places where
a poem
could change
or cost you
your life.
But now,
in societies of advanced
and inculcated greed
poetry is just a screed
of fleeting wrinkles
on the occasional
literary brow.

Epigenetics

has shown that there’s no such thing 

as a normal human body, 

so how did it get hijacked by the body police ?

You cannot be gay

and fear
being queer.

'Risk-Factors'

As drug companies are able more and more
to treat people who might become sick
(because of 'genetic disposition or susceptibility'),
as opposed to patients with actual symptoms of sickness,
their profits and power become ever greater.
Thus Good Health is no longer a matter of how you feel
but how your body is perceived to perform
in (often-routine) medical test-procedures.

A bird

is an egg's means
of becoming more eggs.
The dead bitch
nurtures birds
and maggots
in the poisoned ditch.
If we are not of Nature
we are Nowhere.
If riches produced happiness
all would be rich.

Total blindness

is not always
total darkness,
but can be the
unrelenting brightness
of an exhausting
day- and night- and life-long
firework show cruelly
and randomly created
by unemployed nerve-endings.

The Elusive Secret

of the Enlightened state :
resist all temptation
to communicate.