Many comfortable people live in terror

of having nothing to be frightened of.

The movement of people.

As soon as we have the financial resources
most of us travel, if only to some hideous, peopled beach.
 We are nomadic creatures, and most of our destructiveness
comes from the tensions and frustrations of staying in one place
- apart from the evils that we construct through speech.

The best that a human being can be is

worthless.

Update on Risk Statistics

In Caylus, a small village in south-west France
you are (I was) more likely to fall off a ladder or stepladder
than be "gunned down" by anyone.

Some people, mainly Socialists

used to talk and write about The People
as if about a decent and coherent multitude
with shared values.  Now we know that
The People never existed, but were just
an imaginary peg on which to hang
the high-falutin' yearnings of a tormented section
of the pompous bourgeoisie.

For the fortunate

life is an enjoyable Progress
or progression that can only be wrecked
by introspection.

A Christmas Cracker.

'To search for an ultimate cause for anything,
or even a reason to go on living
is emotionally understandable
but intellectually incoherent, if not idiotic.'

Jerusalem

has, for the past two thousand years,
been the world capital of yearning
(wrote Justin Cartright),
and will so continue.

Cosmic Awareness ?

We are no longer afraid of giants.
Instead, we are in awe of giant Black Holes.

Paintings

are wordless, even when titled.
Yet we talk about them,
talk over them, spray them
with our compulsive
narrative and glibness
instead of blessing or cursing
them with silence. 

Fake Festivals

The zombies converted Mothering Sunday*
to Mothers' Day, then went on to invent
Fathers' Day (yuck!) which, this year, is today,
the longest day - at the beginning of which
thousands of zombies, for no intelligible reason,
watched the sun rise over Stonehenge.

*One of the few days in the year when itinerant farmhands
were allowed to go home.

Statistics

are published in order to change our attitudes or habits.
Many of them are dodgy.
Here is my dodgy statistic :
0.1% of human beings are sane.
This may be an over-estimation.

The Little Free Library

in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

is always open.  Just put a book or two in
and take a book or two out.  There is a shelf
of books in Dutch, and two shelves of books
in English, but today I saw only one book in French.

Role-models.

The idea of a role-model never ocurred to me -
unless, perhaps in a vague way, it was Jesus,
who, if not a role-model for thousands at least
is nothing, just an earnest tinker's damn.
Since he almost never is a role-model,
the religion constructed around him
is a putrefying sham.

Hindsight

One can feel that the past is 'texture'
- or as an impediment - or worse:
a curse.

The unromantic, unhygienic truth,

In a kiss
saliva passing
from lip to lip
and mouth to mouth:
clots and clouds
of bacteria transmitted
by hand also
to friends, relatives
and strangers in crowds.

Patchwork fun.

I went yesterday to a little local patchwork-exhibition.
This was the most original piece:

O

the obol
in the open orifice
empty as opera
O God
the old oroboulos
in the ordure of Oradour
malodorous Maldoror
O
bullet-hole
bull-ring
wedding-band
round table oaths, orisons,
opinions, circumlocutions
circumscriptions, cisions, stances
cycle of everything
and/or nothing
zyklunical zero

My latest artwork

Rímaldió-Mildóría : L'âme catalane / The Catalan soul

Zum anderen Ufer.

Men who feel that other men
are truly other
are pushed by shame
and by those other men's machismo
into a lame
parody of penetrative sex
with other men who feel the same.

Animal Pride

Better to be a contented pig
than a discontented Socrates.

The "Business End" of Bach.

"In the days of J.S. Bach organ bellows were, of course, pumped manually.  This duty was usually only given to fit muscular young men.  They would rouse themselves early in the morning so they could go to the Thomaskirche and blow Kapellmeister Bach’s organ.

"Bach was very particular about which blowers he worked with.  Since he was so fond of his magnificent organ he would play with it for hours at a time.  This required a blower that could match Bach’s endurance.  If the bellows were ever allowed to go limp, he would whip his blower with whips until they were once again fully swollen with wind.  Fortunately, the strapping lads of 18th century Leipzig rarely disappointed Bach.  So grateful was he for their strength and skill, he would frequently reward them with a nice long fugue."

 – Willy Apple

See the pumper and listen to Bach here >>>

"I have no walks

 to throw away on company,"
wrote the insufferable Thoreau.  
Did the poor man not have a dog
to illuminate his justly misanthropic fog ?

Rome is still falling

and Athens long buried
under the concrete
and the rubble of faith.

European history

has been unremittingly crammed
with war-crimes, famines, pogroms,
witch-hunts, land-grabs, mass-deportations, genocides
and other crimes against humankind,
domestic and wild animals, forests and the planet.
This is the culture and civilisation
that we are so proud of that we force it into
and make it penetrate and infect the remotest places,
via bombs and blasphemy, religion
and by the education of our victims' victims
so that they will bomb the remaininhg victims
into the totalitarian future.
Our most useful weapons are not our nuclear bombs
or drones,
but schools, museums, art galleries, greed, comfort
and hypocrisy.

Poets and philosophers of old

were not generally admired
except in romantic reports
by those who scarcely
or never knew them.
Defeat
is not unwelcome
when you're tired.

Civilisation :

the extreme
(and extremely comfortable for a few,
extremely uncomfortable for most)
stupidity.

Formal Education

(hence most people's lives)
is like an aeroplane taxiying in fog
and following
the flashing 'Follow Me' van.

Sport

is a very poor religion.

The Least Unreal

people are the hopeless cases
with whom I cannot connect
for fear of losing my unreality.

Do-it-Yourself Personal Evacuation Facility

or Stool-chair
for person with damaged lower limb.

Equipment required:

One typical French dining-room chair with removable (usually straw) seat.
Four pieces of wood appropriately fashioned (e.g. 4 slats from a discarded modern bed) and saw to correct lengthssee photos.)
One bucket, ideally one already used to contain 'grey water' for garden use.

Method:

1. Remove straw seat

2. Position two shorter slats to accommodate buttocks, thus making the unpatentable contraption nevertheless maximally-adjustable

3. Support slop-bucket on two lower (and longer) slats.

5. remove bucket

…Et Cætera, then flush evacuation down conventional porcelain installation (known as a water-closet) which it is not advisable to use in circumstance of lower-body trauma.

On the bright side.

Before standing on a chair one day
(to adjust a gew-gaw on a beam)
and falling a full fifty centimetres
to the floor,
I despised all living humans - except two.
Now, twelve days later,
smelling (unsurprisingly) of Old Man
I despise all but one.
Looking on the bright side, however,
I have finally mastered the amazing
virile art of pissing while prostrate
into what in France is called, delightfully,
un pistolet.

After a week of morning Nescafé

I find that it's acceptable...
have difficulty remembering
the taste of real coffee.
This is how
totalitarian systems work.