Life on Earth

exists only for its own sake,
not for any purpose or process
that we might dream up.
It exists only to exist,
to distinguish itself
from solids, gases and liquids.

But does it have to be aggressive ?

The reason why there has never been a "Just War"

is that there has never been a Just Peace.

Women

rarely
swing
around
lamp-posts.

NO DOGS ALLOWED

"...the entire civilisation is sick,

otherwise
appalling ideologies
such as fascism and Stalinism
could never have flourished."

- Jan  Švankmajer

from Little Otik

Pessimism Is A Sin.

The first thing we buy

destroys us
like a terrible internal worm.

Gardeners

are megalomaniacs
posing as nurturers.
But of course we are
The Megalomaniac Species.

Language and Time.

Guaraní - still spoken by 80% of the population of landlocked and impoverished Paraguay, not many of whom speak Spanish - interprets time differently from Indo-European, Semitic and other settled-people's languages. Time future is permanently in doubt: the word for tomorrow means if the sun rises again. The concept of time past is dual - divided between what happened (or what is alleged to have or accepted as having happened), and what was supposed to happen but did not.  This may, of course, be due to the appalling War of the Triple Alliance...

read more >

I'm not sold

on the idea of time
as other than an illusion.
One of the (not so many) wise things
that Bertrand Russell said was that
the Universe started only five minutes ago.

Why Joseph Conrad wrote so well.

MFK Fisher recounts that
he learned English as a sailor on night-watch
by reading a page of the King James translation of the Bible,
tearing it out and lighting his pipe with it,
and then reflecting on it (probably in Polish)
for the rest of the watch.

Gloss on lines by R.W.Emerson.

Don't follow paths,
don't ride the crowded monorail,
but make your own
and leave no trail.

"Education"

If we are no longer

the sole possessors of empathy, altruism
and even language, perhaps all that we can uniquely claim
are vengeance, hate, religion, complaint, hypocrisy....and apportioning of blame.

Blame

is something we should hurl only
(but frequently) at politicians,
bankers, businessmen, religious leaders and the powerful,
not something we should throw at each other,
not even occasionally.

Crime & Punishment.

Mary, a five-ton circus elephant who killed her new trainer,
was hanged for the crime by heavy-duty construction equipment in 1916 in Tennessee.
Topsy, another.wayward circus performer on Coney Island in New York,
was fed poison, electrocuted and strangled in 1903,
the execution of true justice filmed by a crew from Edison Studios...

I don't think that "Human Understanding"

whether scientific or religious
really gets much more profound than this:

“The Germans are not human beings.

"From now on the word German pierces our hearts and is for us the worst imaginable curse.
We shall not panic. We shall kill.
If you have not killed at least one German a day,
you have wasted that day [...]
for us the greatest of all joys is a heap of German corpses.”

- IIya Ehrenburg, Russian propagandist of German-Lithuanian-Jewish extraction.

On Writing Historical Fiction.

'You need to know ten times
as much as you tell."

- Hilary Mantel

This is surely also true of biography
and autobiography, which are themselves
forms of historical fiction.

The Most Evil Empire.

Churchill and Christ in a gunboat! 
Make the wogs walk on water,
set fire to their villages.
Grab whole continents
and sub-continents.
Smash factories,
destroy societies,
take all resources,
make them grow opium,
make them smoke opium,
divide and rule,
let them starve,
deliver hundreds of thousands
to firing-squads and concentration-camps,
wipe out more 'lesser breeds' than Stalin or Hitler
- and award yourself a permanent seat
on the cynical UN Security Council.

Really ?

It's just what an aircraft dinner from the 1960s

was for The Great Unwashed who travelled by cheapo charter flight -

and who now get even worse.

Reality

for most people
seems to be banality.
But real reality
(as every earwig knows)
is surreality.

Five Haikai

The brandy finished -
time to get down to business
and admire the moon.

         *

Having sucked my blood
the horse-fly dismounts and sits
on cow-parsley head.

         *

From the same corruption
emerge a stink-horn toadstool
and a violet.

         *

Ten million sperm
dripping on the book-jacket.
Words are waste of words.

         *

A brief urgency -
my bare arse is caressed by
the April nettles.

I wish I had written this...

WITHOUT CAMOUFLAGE
by Eric Chaet

I didn’t choose camouflage or invisibility.
I’ve tried, all along
to make what I think manifest
to behave as I think I should
however contrary to custom
to let everyone who wished
see that I was pursuing goals
they believe are unattainable.

But I was only one
& how I appeared was discounted
as an imagined figment
or temporary insanity
or an instance of this or that
doomed religion or political movement.

Without shaving my beard
or changing into more conventional clothes
I find myself allied with brown sparrows
who duck out of sight
among shadows, leaves, & branches
with rabbits, mice, deer
& timid boys & girls
& intimidated subordinates everywhere
engaged in every occupation
with all who have failed
or feel they’re failing—
& the stampeding so-called successes
talk clever bullshit on TV
& allocate resources
to maintain the current
& develop the next round of outrages
as tho' I’d never struggled or spoken.

You see a bit of me here & now
but soon you’ll be otherwise occupied.
If you remember, then, what you’ve seen
& decipher (which is easy) what it means
I’ll gladly be of greater service to you
than those blinded by what they expect
can imagine.

[more by Eric  HERE]

Another Sign of Senility.

I turned on the car radio the other day
(it's pre-set to boring and talky France-Musique)
and was amazed to hear some superb Arab-Jazz fusion
which turned out to be Jan Garbarek with Anouar Brahem and others.
Finally! I thought, somebody has got the message
that there is music beyond post-11th century Europe.
But when I got home, I couldn't find it on the listings,
so went to the car to check what station I was on.
I had been playing one of my own CDs.
So it's back to mainly-baroque boredom on France-Musique.

Language, Truth and Logic

If the offspring of a cat
is a kitten,
I think it highly likely that
the offspring of a mat
is a mitten.

An excellent dinner-companion.

http://dogsdepicted.tumblr.com

Haiku

Horse-fly's shopping-trip:
from dog-turd to me, and on
to someone's dinner.

Epithalamium ?

On the 14th of June 2017
we (aged 75 and 55 respectively)
had our platonic,
same-sex and boyish,
sweetly intimate
relationship
of over 20 years rewarded
for a modest fee with an official
and embossed
Civil Partnership certificate.

A Reply to Adam Zagajewski

poetryfoundation.org/zagajewski

Of course we should praise the mutilated world -
but we should rage against its mutilation.
Let us not praise in any way
our mutilating selves,
our self- and world-mutilating creeds,
'values', 'ways of life'.
Rage against the deserts we call 'gardens',
our cynical and criminal misuse of water,
our making the poor ever-poorer, rare animals rarer,
our destruction of trees by farms and fancy furniture and paper,
our pollution of the oceans through sheer greed,
our servicing of cities by continuous slaughter
which we drown out by night-club laughter.

Before there was glass

in church windows
there was thin but untransparent
alabaster.
The hovels of the poor
had the caul-
like skin of a cow's stomach
stretched and dried
over a hole in the wall.

19th century milestone, outside Caylus.

click to enlarge