Civilisation's greatest assets

are loneliness and
a constant fear of lowliness.

Capitalism's true foundations
are loneliness and
a constant fear of lowliness.

What politicians and rulers do

is project their inner turmoil
until it finds brief residence
in the popular propense.

Good Luck

often comes
to people who think they have it.
(I'm very glad I did not
run over that rabbit!)
Many people are a great trouble
to others and themselves
just out of habit.

There is no such thing as time.

We invented it
with addled minds
and ever since
we have been panicking
ever faster
and rushing ever more inventively
towards disaster.

We fondly think

the human mind can analyse,
but all it really does is banalise.
And in this unsatisfying situation
everything we do is self-congratulation.

All thought

boils down to wondering
whether or not you really have a mind
or are merely imitating
the fantasy of other human beings.

Freedom

is not a matter of choice
between one thing and another,
but the recognition that such a choice
is an imposition.

Street Art

in Icastica (Arezzo, Italy) 2015
- by Seth.

I have, eventually, realised

why 'happiness' is so
(universally ?)
unpopular:

it gives a strange,
floating
brain-dancing feeling,

which might cause panic in many,

and doesn't
(constantly ?)
reinforce
earthbound ego
as unhappiness and discontent do.

The Beautiful and Bizarre Pointlessness of Some Human Activity

After six years,
4,200 hours of shooting,
and 720,000 pictures,
wildlife photographer Alan McFadyen 
finally managed to take a perfect shot
of a kingfisher diving into the water
WITH NO SPLASH.

But true appreciation of life is
appreciation of its pointlessness,
and the best way to live
is in the pleasure
of its pointlessness.

After "When the shit hits the fan..."

my favourite American expression is
"There aren't many ways to polish a turd."
And (Christ in a Humvee!) so much American shit
has hit fans, so many turds reconstituted,
wiped clean of flies,
and coated with Kefvar or Teflon or both
and polished until they shine like young soldiers' eyes.

The wolf

is full of wolf;
the bear
is full of bear.
Even so, my deary-o,
the world
is full of care.

Do you come here often to play ?

Urinoir (musical ?) au Bar Balkanic, Tours.

Happy humans are not only invisible

and inaudible behind, beneath
the volcanic smog of anthrópoid misery -
but they leave no record of
(let alone a recipe for)
their happiness.

Life is just

a big, bad joke,
big, bad joke...
- And who's afraid of
the big, bad joke ?
- Only the rich
and religious folk.

The least difficult and most animal

art is also the most fraught,
because most religions and moralities
ensure that all creativity, innovation
and transcendental development
in its design and execution
is nipped in the bud by guilt.

Locks and keys are instruments of the Devil.

This is a detail of a 12th century Anastasis (depiction of the Resurrection) in St.Mark's, Venice.
The alleged Messiah "hath broken the gates of brass and smitten the bars of iron asunder"
(as is written in the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus).
The handsome mauve chap with inviting beard and buttocks is Satan,
alias Lucifer, who dared to challenge the Führer (or First Secretary) of Heaven.
He is being trampled on by Mr Goody-Goody who has nail-holes in his feet.
I like to think that locks and keys and chains are entirely devilish.
The rich and the bourgeois, obsessed with 'security', are...
entirely devilish.

A silly joke to lighten things up.

In 1921,

the colonial administration of the French Congo (later the People's Republic of the Congo)  engaged the Société de Construction des Batignolles to construct a railway through 500 kms of the hilly and ravine-riddled land between Brazzaville and the Atlantic coast, using forced labour recruited from what is now southern Chad and the Central African Republic. Like Spain and Portugal, France did not ratify the 29th article of the International Labour Organisation's Forced Labour Convention of 1930. Misery and anger among the native population towards this conscripted labour and other equally-outrageous forms of oppression led to the Kongo-Wara rebellion of 1928-1931. During the period of construction (which lasted until 1934) there was a continual heavy cost in human lives, with total deaths of slave labour conservatively estimated in excess of 17,000, from a combination of industrial accidents, cruelty, malnutrition and diseases including malaria. In 1946, France's new Third Republic finally condescended to ratify the ILO's article 29, because of indigenous indignation and revolt.

This was just one small part of the French Republican Empire which, like the equally murderous British one, was spread around the globe, from Indo-China to most of West and North-West Africa, to the Caribbean and on to French Polynesia.  Hundreds of thousands of colonists occupied Algeria from the 1830s on and, later (after an extended and bloody war of occupation), Morocco, dispossessing everyone who had productive land.  Slavery was not abolished in Morocco until 1926. 
Occupied Muslim Algeria's main export was low-grade vin de table for the poor of palate and income in 'metropolitan' France.  The Algerian war of independence throughout the 1950s was a particularly vicious struggle, and at its end, French colonials moved en masse to the southern coast of France and to Corsica. They were followed by Muslim Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian unskilled and very low-paid workers who were herded into urban ghettoes all over France, especially in Marseille and Paris.

The French Republican, like the British Monarchical, Empire killed millions of 'natives' all over the world, and brought misery, deracination and deculturation to millions more.
Now France declares three days of mourning for fewer than a hundred dead rich locals and tourists (including 10 children, who seem to be more valuable than grannies) in a bizarre little 'lorry-massacre'.  The death-toll of dogs and puppies has not been announced.

It is impossible to wake up

the stubbornly-asleep -
who yet cannot be said
to be actually dead...

The French Revolution

broke out shortly before
the invention of the corkscrew
which has had no terrible
and continuing aftermath.

(two examples from my collection)

Bastille Day Confession of a Dissident in a Liberal-Capitalist Society

I skived off from my respectably-bleak Social Field,
preferring the company of misfits and  drop-outs;
abandoned most of the snobby Social Capital I was presented with;
doggedly acquired a stack of my own eclectic Cultural Capital
(Dostoyevsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Ali Akbar Khan, van Gogh)
using the very small cultural capital I inherited
from my anti-artistic middle-middle class provincial background
- and the cultural vistas offered by BBC radio in my bedroom.
I rejected the spoonfuls of cultural capital offered by television
and by the local university
by never acquiring a television, and never finishing my degree course
(due to a complete lack of ambition and respect for hierarchy)
and alienation from the Habitus of my family, religious background, and class.
For me, life has always been a game, and never a sport.
I hate sport, teams, gangs, parties and crowds -

and, after fifty years of living "off the State",
with no Monetary Capital,
doggedly counter-cultural, I love the ludic.

As in sociology, so also in philosophy and poetry :

"the main problem is to get yourself to think
in a completely gob-smacked and mind-shattered way
about structures, situations and behaviours
you always thought you had got a handle on."

- Pierre Bourdieu

The shock awaiting me on my return to Ireland :

click any picture to enlarge

PUYA species (probably alpestris) in my garden : 
the first flowering in 41 years.

I come from darkness,

the beloved - more nourishingly
lovely than the flaming light
which makes the world a prison
for the millions it has rendered blind.

Darkness contains everything:
form, flame, being, beast and mind;
absorbs all panoply and might,
enfolds mankind.

I feel a power, a penetrating
presence come to me:
I am absorbed in night.

from Rainer-Maria Rilke's Stundenbuch (Book of Hours)
1899-1903.

For other translations see HERE.

"Four Legs Good !"

Two legs : dull.
Six legs : fun.

http://dogsdepicted.tumblr.com

"...surely we choose our death

as surely as we choose our job.
It grows out of our acts
and our evasions,
out of our fears
and out of our moments of courage."

- Graham Greene: The Lost Childhood, prologue to Collected Essays.

A simple truth.

The most hateful
hate the most.

A sober observation.

The taste for the superfluous
seems to govern populations
who have long since been
unacquainted with the
merely necessary.

Perhaps

gods inhabit
the ever-larger spaces
and dimensions
left by airy
scientific theory.

Perhaps

men first created the antitheses
of Sacred and Profane
(women, like the Blessed
and resourceful Beasts,
did not consider anything to be unsacred)
in order to keep exciting and dangerous
homosexual practices
secret through religious mumbo-jumbo.

from Today's News

While Juno (a space exploration vehicle)
probes Jupiter (in a reversal
of age-old sexual imagery)
we are told how the Dead Sea
is shrinking alarmingly.
We'd rather 'understand' The Universe
than try to live together unharmingly.

How I view the probable exit of the UK from the EU

The EU is too inflexibly bureaucratic
and tunnel-visioned
and few countries within it have been free from recent dictatorship.

The UK, unlike every other member of the EU,
is unfortunately monoglot*,
and has not been occupied since 1066.

*the percentage of Celtic-language speakers
in the UK as a whole is tiny.

The True Dissident

has no secrets.

BREXIT :

Click to enlarge

Democracy can never happen -

because Universal Suffrage
(of zombified populations
given no useful information),
and political parties
are, as Jefferson and Madison
might have pointed out,
the tapeworms and hookworms of the Body Politic
which is also susceptible to the wasting disease
and disfigurement of demagoguery.