It occurred to me recently

that bitterness
is a sure sign
of shallowness.

And also (a little later)
that the truly 'spiritual'
are invisible.

A Day in the Life

Foremost in the morning
is the fearing.
In the evening
is the fill of feeling
good and almost true. 
And in between
is the knitting of the minutes
one by one,
knit one, purl two.

Beauty and the Beast

Joe Louis (representing white Americans, Jews and Democratic Values)
in 1938 before the boxing-match with Nazi German World Champion Max Schmeling
(representing, er...Nazi values such as the racial inferiority of coloured people -
an idea totally anathema to white Americans and Jews in the democratic
United States of America, especially in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc.).

Joe Louis won - along with American racism - though it has to be said that
American racism did not kill millions of Jews, nor cause the deaths
of tens of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Serbs, Greeks...

Coloured American GIs (in segregated brigades) were amazed at their freedom of movement  in Europe, which is why so many stayed in Paris after the war...which is why Paris is
the Modern Jazz Capital of the World.

After the war (WW2in which both served) Schmeling, hired by Coca-Cola (Germany), became a millionaire.
Joe Louis, not hired by Coca-Cola (Atlanta, GA), did not.

I have a dozen plants in bloom (outside) this late-December,

including this Bidens hybrid and white cyclamen
in one of the troughs I have scattered about within 20 metres of my house,

Chænomeles x 'Scarlet and Gold',
Winter Jasmine, very pale blue Vinca,
two other colours of cyclamen,
two varieties of rose, Iris foetida,
Schizostylis (also known as Kaffir Lily!),
Salvia x Greggii, Echeveria species...

This is not, however,  due to climate change.

Homage or Insult to Miss S. ?

Turtles on the trot
a lot
Turtles on the trot
A lot of turtles
on the trot
not on the spot
not on not in the pot
nor muck
not right to rot And tortoises
(not porpoises) Not
purposelessly
stuttuttering oyster-noises
(noise annoys terse turtles quite a lot)
Turtles run amok
all teetering and tottering they patter
through the snot
grown lot like spirtles pottering
in the which the pitier which the potter which the pot

"After all these centuries

Jehovah lives in our darkness
like a worm in the intestines."

- Graham Greene, in The Honorary Consul

whose epigraph quotes Thomas Hardy :

"All things merge into one another -
good into evil, generosity into justice,
religion into politics."

"The sea of consciousness has come from naught.

From it only red herrings have been caught.
Although philosophers have claimed to plumb its depths,
from its oceanity scant wisdom has been brought."

- Omar Khayyám (trans. Dingo the Dissident)

Omnivore.

A List of Some Foods He Enjoyed :

Aubergines/Eggplants
Olives
Squash
Globe artichokes
Turnips
Hummus
Plums, Pears, Apples
Sea Scurvy Grass, Spinach
Hunza Apricots,
Potatoes, Eggs, Bananas
Zabaglione, Melon Rind
Blackberries, Strawberries, Raspberries,
Stewed Rhubarb, Porridge, Gooseberry Crumble...

The diet of most dogs is severely curtailed.

Round and round

exhaustedly they go
justifying themselves to each other (and themselves).
Death is sweet release.

A pamphlet

which argues the obvious:
that Jesus of Nazareth's original message
was anti-natalist as well as anti-hierarchical,
anti-property, anti-misogynist,
and (consequently) egalitarian:

Fraudulent Christianity

If you can't read French use

https://www.deepl.com/translator

I don't want to sound unpleasant

but I have found (with rare exceptions)
that the more you get to know people
the less you want to know them.
This is part of the lunacy of living.

Civilisation :

The exhaustion of the many
feeds the appetites of the few.

The oldest technology

may still be the most destructive.

Christian Evangelical Problems.

Many East Asian languages
"are barren in abstractions,
which provided the most appalling difficulties
when it came to translating Holy Writ.

"To give just one example,
he cited the text God is Love.
In Rhadés there is no word for God.
In fact, these people didn't get the idea [of God] at all
without a great deal of explanation.
And there is no word for Love.

"So the text came out in translation:
The Great Spirit is not angry."

- from Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent -

Travels in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, 1951.

This problem began conveniently to be solved
by the liquidation of "tribes" such as the Rhadés of Viêt-Nam
through slave labour for Michelin.
Then, after the French were expelled,
came the Americans
and carpet-bombing, Agent Orange,
total war...
now total capitalism
and slavery abroad.

Why are sloths not extinct ?

The pursuit of 'happiness'

ends in dissatisfaction.

And God divided the Light from the Dark

and was thrilled at having invented dualism.

On Your Birthday...

Art cannot be perfect

because Nature cannot be imperfect.

Words are

our most intimate enemy.

I don't understand

why people (as I read in novels)
need others (or another)
to need them -
because it precludes the necessarily-voluntary in relationships.

Deaf Worms

My brain is
an ear-wormery.

The problem I have with Literature

is that (like plants)
it is so much more interesting and relaxing
than actual people.

Today's Neologism.

Indigeneity.

Maybe better than Indigenousness and Autochthonicity,

but unfortunate all the same, being so tellingly close to Indignity...

Lateral thinking.

Or do I mean global thinking ?

Civilisation

photo by Graham OneStonedCrow (blogspot.com)

Street art, Paris (75014)

by 'Lady Bug'

The Glory of Western Medecine.

Though we live longer,
we may suffer longer
and more expensively from more.

According to an article in Aeon,
"...approximately a third of adults suffer from multiple chronic conditions,
wreaking untold havoc on healthcare systems and economies across the globe.
In developed countries, it might be closer to three in four older adults
who suffer from multiple conditions.
The proportion of patients with four or more diseases
is expected to almost double between 2015 and 2035 in the UK alone.
Frighteningly, these statistics don’t even account for chronic illnesses in children,
which are likewise on the rise."

A short lesson in Astrophysics.

His best poem.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
  club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
  with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
     on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
  to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
     in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
     my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
        my life when they murder by means of my
           hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
     frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
         waves call me to folly and the desert calls
           me to doom and the beggar refuses
              my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
  come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
  humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
     would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
        one face, a thing, and against all those
           who would dissipate my entirety, would
              blow me like thistledown hither and
                 thither or hither and thither
                    like water held in the
                       hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me

Louis MacNeice

.

"We all live in a..."

Reality Distortion Field.

I first heard this term in a broadcast discussion
about the President of the United States
and the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But it could describe all seven billion
bubbles of human consciousness.

One Stoned Crow

A Namibian blog with some splendid photos...
and a saved-from kidnap, saved-from-electrocution monkey.

http://onestonedcrow.blogspot.com/2009/08/soul-sister.html

Time.

Time was invented by railway companies
to keep trains running on it.

Religious art with a dazzling political overtone.

12th century altar-front from the Catalan church of Sant Martí de Gia
showing St Martin of Tours on his death-bed dismissing the Devil
who has appeared to the 81-year old saint in his final and fatal fever.
The unwrinkled blanket displays the colours of the Kingdom of Aragon,
whose patron saint is...St Martin.

Dilettantes are less and less acceptable.

I have an intelligent interest in
Trees and shrubs
Plants generally
Dogs
Middle Eastern and North African rugs
Middle Eastern and North African music
Middle Eastern (and any) vegetarian cuisine
Indian, European, Japanese, Middle Eastern and North African classical music
Irish slow airs
Balkan traditional musics
Folk-Fusion jazz (especially North African)
Ceramics (world-wide, non-industrial)
Pre-modern European diet
Landscape that is not flat
Painting, from Roman to contemporary
Iconography and the metamorphosis of motifs
Romanesque 'marginal' sculptures
Megaliths
Literary novels and political thrillers
Poetry of the exalted kind
Poetry of the honest kind
Fascinating facts (such as that the Prague-Vienna express train has a fresh orchid in each of its toilets)
Corkscrews (I have reduced my collection to around 50)
Linguistics and toponymy (place-names)
Experimental photography
'Vernacular' architecture from corbelled hen-houses to substantial farmhouses
Distilled fruit alcohols such as those made from quinces, sorb-apples, blackberries, holly-berries...

       ...and so on.

But few people that I meet are interested in more than one of these -
which is why I am somewhat solitary.

But, my widowed neighbour Josette Porquelette has feelings of the same order.
She even understands some of the complexities of the Irish Border!

Why do I remember

the botanical names of plants
and less than 5% of my life ?

Why was the vodka-and-tomato-juice drink called
Bloody Mary
and not Blood of the Lamb ?

A Long History of Time.

There was no beginning
and there will be no end,

I am only my passport.

Most people define themselves by an imposed (or, if they are lucky, chosen) identity -
something I never wanted or understood. I remain undefined,
except by the passport I would rather not have to have.
Am I 'socially blind' ?

My New Genetically-modified Internet Friend.

Luttrell Psalter, 1325-40

Adults are shallow and cold

like mass graves.  They need to be so
to make out of wrinkles
the half-born children
who, in asylums of words,
wash the world dry.
Schools are parers of ruins.

Water is Truth -

to drink and to drown in.
We are the only creatures
to know and deny the desiccating truth
that we are Death,
heart-wizened, face-painted
bedizened destroyers.

(Nor is truth a reversible raincoat.)

My comfort-thought :

I will be less than a shadow
on a Nagasaki wall.

The wabi-sabi of Google.

If you look up wabi-sabi in Google images
you will see a completely different
- and far better - set of pictures
from that which you will see
on looking up the Japanese  侘 寂

Putting it yet another way :

for all our self-proclaimed intelligence
we are the roughest, toughest, stupidest of beasts
wrecking the world through sheer intransigence.

It is not difficult to imagine

that what we know as 'floaters' flitting through
the aqueous humour of our eyes
would have been for millennia interpreted instead
by some as spirits of the air, or of the dead.

Sibilant or fricative ?

The reassuring sound
of gas street-lights.

(Now heard no more.)

Jesus is not recorded as saying

that real people don't have families,
but seems to have assumed it is so.

Wallace Stevens said

(or rather wrote that) the self
is "a substitute for all the gods."
And - I would add - an outrage
against natural humility.  And all our selves
pollute the world with terrible imagination,
murderous alphabets, accursèd languages,
repulsive rivalries, our pride, our money.

The planet will spin on unpaid;
the shroud above its crust will be our filthy bed.

Art is not stuff -

but how you live your life.

The thing about dolls

and stuffed animals
is that they feel no pain.
We treat each other like dolls
and animals as if they had no sentience.

Silk.

The more that Nature is defeated
the less subtle we become.

Between

routine and dance
lies the opening
of awareness.

Comfort

is the enemy
of consciousness.

The Flood.

Several
thousand miles away
we are drowning
in the U.S.A.

Hurrah!

James Ellroy
doesn't have a cellphone, either !

Nor has he a laptop...

He likes Rachmaninov -
but does he have TV ?

Life After Death

was invented (by ghouls) to encourage
the thought that life before death is worth living.

Unfortunately,

cities now
grow faster
than forests.

(And they are water-consumers

rather than water-conservators.)

After we had devised the bag

we should have stopped our inventions.

"Sex"

isn’t that much better than a good sneeze –

though it can last longer.

There's nothing like a good sneeze...

and then there's ear-cleaning

and foot massage...

and having your back scratched...
and tantric pissing...

Only the unsensual obsess about "sex".

Pascal's strange Apologia.

"The simple application of reason tells us that we are a  hateful species.
The only religion that teaches us to hate ourselves is Christianity.
So no other religion can be considered
by those who know that they deserve nothing but hatred."

But, of course, if we already accept that we are a hateful species
we don't need help from hypocritical Christianity.

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford,

son of the first British prime minister, genteel,
asexual author of the first Gothic Novel (The Castle of Otranto)
wrote more than once in his vast correspondence:
this world is a comedy to those that think,
and a tragedy to those that feel. 

I am not as knowledgeable as I thought,

and, being almost square,
have never moved in the right circles.
I still have no idea how Club Sandwiches
differs from other kinds. Nor do I care
enough to look it up on Google Images.

There are few memorable epigrams by Stalin,

apart from his reply to French Foreign minister Pierre Laval's suggestion
that he might gain the Vatican's favour if he stopped persecuting Catholics in the USSR :

"And how many divisions does His Holiness command ?"

On the other hand,
The powerless Lev Trotsky is very quotable:

The end may justify the means provided that something justifies the end.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

"The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country." 

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Revolutions are always verbose.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'

"The Language-barrier"

is language itself.

(Ask any dog.)

Suddenly remembering Grace Jones.

Unkind
Homo annihilans
walking disaster
blind
demolition Man

There are unamazingly many 'destroy' words in Latin:

see https://www.wordhippo.com/

Somewhere between

'The Millennium Bug' and Armageddon.

After centuries of power,

exploitation, exultation, genocide and glory,
Western culture now turns everything to sex or money,
or (preferably) both together.
Hence the phenomena of Shining Path,
al-Qaeda, Taliban, et cetera.

When Japanese ejaculate

they don't feel that they've come -
but that they've gone.

Things are rarely as we think they are

however we play them on the grey sitar
of consciousness.
Books are the most dizzying disease
the most poetic conflagration
ever to destroy the gentle trees.
All poems are hewed, are found
and foundlings. Those that survive are bound
to suffer. Comfort is the enemy of observation.

No good death can put to death
an evil death or deed, nor a million
good lives an evil one.
Devil-woe-men stunned and stun,
stoned and stone
to exorcise the sun.
Planets have come; planets have gone.

A slice of mediæval life.

From the Escritorium
to the Excretarium
and no recourse
to a Vomitorium -
just the remorse
of the monkish Vivarium.

It is at least 25 years since

my mother patched this cheerful item of underwear
now drying on my balcony.

If you think you are a Key

it is very likely that you are really
a Lock.

The Intellectual Prostitute.

I always had a fairly Low Sex Drive.

When I was forty I met a handsome man a a washbasin
by the crowded urinals of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris.
He was so friendly I invited him for coffee
at my nearby (borrowed) pied-à-terre.

He suggested that I was queer in more than one way.
Up to that point I hadn't thought of myself as gay.
He told me about bars, newspapers and networks
and the city's upcoming, nearby Gay Quarter.
He was the first man I kissed, and I took to kissing
hairy mouths like a duck to water.

It's only now that I realise
that I soon became a queer kind of male prostitute
who made the right signals to a certain kind of
(necessarily bearded) male of my own age
(or twenty years on either side) to enhance
my socio-aesthetic life so long confined by rural Ireland
(though it could just as easily have been rural France).

Sex was not the main object of my exercise
(and just as well, because, like any prostitute,
I've had so much 'bad sex' that I've become asexual,
and in any case I was a averse to penetration)
but occasionally it was wonderful.
(That was the spermatic icing on the cake.)
I fancied men who looked as though they would
widen my cultural horizons - which they often did
in small but important ways. I doubt that I widened theirs
for they seemed both limited and empty, like lost thimbles.

But looks often deceive, and for decades I,
a mercifully-fatherless fool, mistakenly
judged men largely on their appearance: eyes or smile.
I have always confused truth and beauty,
especially as both seem to be in the mind of the beholder.

Most of them were 'deadbeats' socially or psychologically
who often were attracted to me because they mistook
my complaisant naivety for sexiness.

Cannabis helped to counteract the not-infrequent
rapid loss of desire.  I guess real prostitutes
need similar 'support' to function,
especially as they have to deal with constant penetration
- which I generally refused.
The tawdriness, banality of 'sex' can be overcome
only by blinding lust - or by tuning out.

One of my few remaining friends
was the first man I 'had sex with'
after my Conversation. It was terrible,
lasted ten minutes,
and we became firm friends.  He lives in London
which I will never again visit, nor any city.

But as I grew older I discovered that I was
(or had become, thanks to the mind-expanding BBC
- greatly more mind-expanding than psilocybin or LSD)
rather more 'cultivated' - indeed 'profound' -
than the lonely or sex-wanting guys I met in cities,
and I had wider interests. Now I find men limited and limiting,
and my own age-group less and and less appealing.
More and more I enjoy my socio-sexual isolation
and my rare desire for Sexual Relief is very nicely, pleasantly
and inexpensively sated by creative masturbation.

"Good travellers are heartless,"

wrote Paul Theroux*.
But he contradicts himself throughout -
and here quotes Herman Melville:

Not until I visited Honolulu
was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives
had been civilized into draught-horses,
and evangelized into beasts of burden.
But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces,
and are harnessed to the vehicle of their spiritual instructors
like so many dumb brutes.

What a wonderful and telling  use of the term Spiritual Instructor.

* in The Tao of Travel, p.70

I have been reading Paul Theroux.

Like him, I had no wish to trudge and gape conspicuously.
After the age of seventeen I never travelled without purpose,
whether megaliths in Ireland or stone-carvings in France,
rugs in Morocco, or a lover in Copenhagen, London, Tuscany, Berlin...
Like him I always judged places by whether I would like to live in them.
Finally, aged 60, I found a place I wanted to inhabit,
and five years later found a dwelling there.
Now I have stopped travelling.
A hundred miles seems a long journey.

The sad state of Hospitality.

is having an ever-open door.
Well, let's say unlocked
as mine ever is, and sometimes open.
I'm listed on Couchsurfing
but no-one ever comes,
no traveller
no homeless person,
no refugee,
not even a person whose job
is Burglary.

Unless it's music

(the least harmful thing we make)
human 'creativity'  just fills the world
with more (often poisonous) detritus.

Apart from which, there are too many creators
and not enough appreciators.

Meat-eaters who insist

that they eat very little meat
are like the rich who assure you
that they are really rather poor.
Sometimes they are the same people.

Reading the poems of WS

(the American one),
"to be and delight to be"
seem to unite and I feed
upon, inhale a dizzying miasma
like the sweetest weed,
and feel an exaltation, like the most tender
soft-pornography, despite
the too-awareness of too much,
the termite-tunnels of insight.

Cyclops wore a monocle.

The idea of God and the idea of Reality
are equally fantastical, though God
(who trumps the mere causality of things)
is reality to many
and the nearest some get to Realisation
of "the stale grandeur of annihilation".

The Angels of Earth are screaming :

Man is no more than the intelligence
of his toil - which, sometimes ingenious,
racks his bones or brain, or bones and brain,
and overwhelmingly lacks intelligence.

On 'Hiroshima Day'

I read that the carpet-bombing* of Tokyo
killed the same number of people
as the Hiroshima blast :
three times as many as in Dresden.

But now, unlike any period of history heretofore,
the bulldozers of 'peace' have been
more destructive than the greatest act of war.

*Though associated with the USA, especially in Japan and Viêt-Nam,
it was first visited upon the Kurds of Iraq by the British around 1920.

One of billions who do not matter.

Fly-paper.  Why
do I feel more important than a fly ?
And how
can I possibly be more wonderful than a cow ?

Although I find Christianity preposterous

(as well as sacrifice-obsessed)
Hindus don't find it preposterous enough.

When I was adolescent

in the 'uneventful' 1950s
people judged you by where
(or whether) you parted
(or could part) your hair.

It is not so unreasonable

to prefer things to people,
especially found things
like stones.

'In a trice.'

We have spoken of
several and many things
for hundreds of years -
but, suddenly, almost in a trice
they have been replaced by
multiple, while most
has been replaced by
the majority of.
Language keeps moving
from pillar to post.
_____

Multiple- sometimes a hyphenated prefix
was maybe popularised, aggrandised
by the advent of the multi-choice questionnaire
if not the pseudo-scientific term
multiple-personality disorder.

"You rich, how far will you push your frenzied greed ?"

- St Ambrose, 4th century, who introduced congregational singing into churches

Everything can be turned into business.
The other day a friend sniffed my armpits and smelled nothing.
They were last washed when I went into hospital 4 years ago.
I have unwittingly cultivated all over my person the benign bacteria
which convert the ammonia in sweat to more-fragrant nitrates.
Now Small Business is selling products to encourage these bacteria
on hygiene-victims, as European Holy Men once sold their smells.

Across the way yet another line of washing is strung out.
The only control the fearful wife of my subtly-nasty
Netherlandish neighbour has in her life
is to ensure that he wears clean clothes each day,
to forbid him to wear anything more than once.

(His paintings are very red and angry.
Buddhists might say he's "a very young soul".
I would say he's a smug, manipulative ass-hole)

In the morning she also washes floors;
wine makes bearable her afternoons.
The amount of water that these two people go through
in one week would last me for a year.
(They would not dream of watering a plant).
It is hard not to be a victim of men or marketing or parenting
all of which pollute the planet,
but even though I am a frugal, anti-natal and recycling queer
I really should be wiser than to condemn and sneer.

I rarely go to see American films.

The last one I admired was Woody Allen's
Hannah and her Sisters.
But recently I saw another one :
      No sex.
      No guns.
      No violence.
      Literary.
      Female-directed.
Can you ever forgive me ?

Some things I learned today.

The first oil-tanker was built by Alfred Nobel
(who endowed the prizes).
Its name was Zoroaster.
It carried oil across the Caspian Sea
from long-since no-longer-Zoroastrian Baku.

The Russian for 'crossword puzzle' is Кроссворд.

Crazy data keep me from being bored.

Read This!

read the review

Politicised nostalgia

demands change
which in turn creates
a new nostalgia.

To do 'the right thing' for the wrong reason

should be better than doing 'the wrong thing'
for the right reason -
except that there are always unexpected consequences
even hundreds of years later -
and the wrong thing might have been right after all,
the 'right' reason ultimately utterly mistaken,
given those inevitable unexpected consequences;

and how are we to judge intentions (and intentionality,
given the inevitable unexpected consequences)
when judgement is so vulnerable to emotional treason ?

Accelerated Evolution.

Most children are now born with Dementia.

A.I.

When artificial intelligences mature -
despite our best efforts - develop -
perhaps even evolve all by themselves -
they will surely find that we
have little to recommend us,
and, in the interests of logical biodiversity,
will, by wondrous means, reduce our numbers
drastically.

In memoriam :

the wonderful Jessye Norman
who died yesterday.

Im Abendrot

Inconsequentialities

are the specialities of modern poets :
word-spiked, un-ironic
un-self-effacing,
un-metaphysical
very personal trivialities -

except when producing yet another translation
of The Divine Comedy, Beowulf or The Odyssey.

I partly-blame Eliot
the last of the pretentious,
self-considering
super-literary sages,
who washed up in the beautifully-enunciated
metaphysic shallows
of Little Gidding 
after the so-precise
so-whatness of The Dry Salvages.

Nazi Logic

Abnormals and Mutants should not be seen by Normal People.
(This was not much in dispute for at least a hundred years.)

So they, whether hare-lipped or stammerers,
with Down's Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy,
must be locked away from sight.

Keeping one of these in an institution
costs as much as training a soldier.
So it is best to get rid of them altogether,
by or after performing Useful Experiments on them.

Those Useful Experiments informed modern psychiatry,
and most of the experimenters became respectable citizens
in the USA as well as Germany.

Very difficult for some.

You don't need to know people
(unlike animals)
- you only need to like them.

What is Hope ?

Emotion
and faith-in-emotion
apparently justified by
the very rarity of its realisation.

Dis-united Kingdom ?

'Bene qui latuit bene dixit.'

To live well is to live in obscurity.

- Ovid, Tristia.

Over a third of American motels

are owned by Gujarati Patels.
And some are utterly disgusting.

(see Paul Theroux: Deep South pp. 159-163)

I wonder how the English language

has continued for so long
without the word I heard this morning:
operationalize.

"For the old

nothing is shocking except
the obvious repetition of human stupidity..."
wrote Paul Theroux
        in Deep South (2015).

But that last shock soon dissipates, too.

For all their 'individualism'

most people have very little individuality.
In the global homogeneity of European cultural
totalitarianism, few people are worth knowing.

"Scientists have picked up a radio signal from the other side of the universe

It's from a galaxy like our own that's 8 billion light-years away."

This seems to be easier (or at least more exciting)
than picking up visual and verbal signals
from creatures on this little planet.

Plus ça change...

Jacques Brel : Les Bourgeois

I don't know why people

(not just the French)

liked him or his songs.

He seems to me unlikable, unpleasant,

falsely semi-literate,

and quite the opposite of Georges Brassens.

He did not like pigs.

Pigs are not like like bourgeois people,

but beautiful, sweet-natured, intelligent, affectionate

- and don't get stupider as they get older.

whereas humans becoine
'progressively' colder.

Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons

Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient bête

Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons

Plus ça devient vieux plus ça devient...

One of the stupidest

and nastiest
most hypocritical
and unforgivable
human sayings :
The worm forgives the plough [plow].

"Terrorism"

is a desperate tactic
employed by the weak against the strong
 for the simple reason
that the weak are deprived of the means to employ any other method.

Our feelings

are only stories
and stories are only words.

The more we crowd the earth, the more we separate from each other.

Being naive and ever-trusting,
having (like my mother)
taken people at face-value
or judged them by their faces,
it is only now, having read so many
(mostly literary, mostly perceptive)
novels in my 78 years of life
I have come to understand
that, if you are innerly rich,
other people are best avoided

lest you be looted
ruined
or sucked dry.

I am in

the where of no,
the microscopic who of ever,
considering
the what of not.

With reference to Company -

Nobody
is usually better than
Anybody

though perhaps not
Somebody.

Most men

seem to worship their willies
and their Power of Reproduction.

Some men used to
wave their rather distressed
willies at other men
hoping for connection

of sexual kind
at least
or at best.

It is quite ridiculous

to keep postponing suicide
because you enjoy your life too (though not) much.
Every pleasure that we take
is at someone else's, some other creature's
pain and sorrow,
some other forest's misery and death.
Every day we steal tomorrow.

Robin Hood.

"If I didn't shop-lift
and buy second-hand
I wouldn't have money
to give to the homeless."

As we get richer

(and anyone who reads this
is richer than a Roman Emperor)
the world gets poorer.

As we get richer
we get drabber
and deafer and blinder
(but, alas! not dumber -
we are the Shouting Species).

As we get richer
we get meaner
and ever more demanding

and Nature
is reduced to little more
than branding.

Not a good social strategy.

I tend to be complaisant,
seem 'easy-going' -
but 'down the line'
I burst into anger
when my complaisance is  imperiously,
unacceptably exploited,
taken for granted.

This is how I lose friends.

They then say I am 'difficult', 'cantankerous'.
All because I cannot say No at the outset
because of an anxiousness to please, a timidity
which the French,
with their mots-justes call 'farouche'.
The English have many nice metaphors,
such as 'a square peg' (in a round hole).

Now I simply 'keep my distance' from people
whilst admiring their dogs,
and hoping that, for the next few years,
there won't be any pogroms
of the Unsocialised.

I have developed a condition which I call

Late-Onset Acquired Autism.

I'm more a homey

than a hopey person
which is why I'm often
almost happy -

given that happiness is merely
an inward projection
of  (by definition
impossible) perfection.

Political prisoners,

like those who lock them up,
are prisoners of politics.

The weeping truth.

If we were serious
in our concern about climate-change,
the Sixth Extinction of Species,
and "the end of civilisation [as we know it]"
we would (at the very least)
sterilise ourselves and boycott supermarkets.
But, truly, unsurprisingly, hardly anyone truly cares.
All we want is luxury now - and more luxury to come -
and 'may the devil take disaster'.

Few sounds
are more sinister
than human laughter.

________________


I have attached the picture referred to in the comment below :

My Solution to the Climate-change/Overpopulation Crisis

has to be implemented tomorrow:
a deadly virus transmitted by plastic.

People are whining

about 'global warming'
while expensively breeding,
and needing to live off
calamitous farming.

The Lowest Form of Philosophy...

in Polish...

in Łódź (worth looking up in Wikipedia).

photo by Ed Emmer

Navajo 'Sand Paintings'.

Some time ago I was given a Sand Painting which was signed
James C. Joe.  It languished in my cellar until recently,
when I looked up this guy via Messrs. Google.
It turns out that he is known among collectors
and the Navajo.  He lived in Shiprock (NM)
and may have been the first to make sand paintings to sell.
He has or had a son called Eugene Baatsolanii Joe
who is (or was) fully commercial.

Sand Painting was until quite recently a religious act,
part of a complicated rite involving chant.
The resulting images were destroyed afterwards.
Now, inevitably, they have become undervalued items of commerce.

Here is the painting in my possession.  It still has quite a strong religious element,
although it was not created as part of a soul-healing ritual.



I found a similar one via Messrs. Google :



Later ones may be seen on https://rijim.com/navajo_art.htm.

see also: 

                    Navajo Sand Painting (1)

and

                   http://navajopeople.org/navajo-sand-painting.htm

Hello Kitty

The power of cute
depends entirely on commodification.
Nothing has power
without selling-power
or, on the other hand, repression.

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-power-of-cute-is-colonising-our-world

The Stupid and The Clever.

The stupid are checking Facebook on cellphones.
The clever are studying the interstellar origins of life
or the palæolithic brewing of woad...
and nobody cares about the (largely-windowless)
Detention Centre down the road.

Enlightenment

is a myth.
Enchantment
is quite different

not least because it exists.

The pain we create

as if we were gods
is as great
as the oceans -
which cover two-thirds of the earth
(the planet of pain)
and are dying.

In much of the world
there is only terror
which, unlike the weather,
does not change.

There's no use my crying.

All humans are terrorists.

My hand, today.

In this old French village

there is a mini-plague of half-starved
diarrhœic cats,encouraged by very well-fed sentimentals.

But even the pasty Caylus poor

(some of whom - the men, mainly -
the women have rickets - are rather fat)

are too well-fed to consider
eating cat.

Concentration-camps in the UK.

Also known as Detention Centres,
but, officially, as Immigrant Removal Centres.
https://www.gov.uk/immigration-removal-centre 

They are not only in England, but in Scotland and Northern Ireland, too.
There is none in Wales.

They are run for profit.
The actual transport of detainees from the UK
is carried out at a profit.

Detainees can be kept indefinitely
and unknown to anyone outside Officialdom.

But the good news is that they can be visited,
provided that you know or someone knows that they are there.
There is no forced labour, just forced boredom.
In this they differ from the Gulag Archipelago
and most Nazi Removal Centres for Undesirables.
They are more like what the Chinese herd the Uigurs into
or the places where Central and South Americans can end up in the USA.

After a year in such a place you are sure you're dead.

And the British either do not know or do not care,
even though the Centres are
much closer than Ireland, Cyprus, Kenya, India, Iraq...

I'm so glad I'm not British, though I was born that way...
But I'll just check with Mr McGoo-Gull on similar Facilities in Ireland...

...ah, yes:
Work on Dublin Airport immigration detention centre to begin

Life.

NO
WAY
UP

Everywoman whispers.

There are things men can do to you
I promise you
it would be much better
to kill yourself
before they happen.

Freud versus Pieces of Plastic

In some cities it is very difficult to pay for things in cash.
In Stockholm (I heard on the radio today) almost impossible.
(I can't believe that Stockholm has no 'black economy'.)
A Londoner said that she never used 'real' money
because it's unhygienic.

God help the Addressless!

Since I am capable of writing

three or more blogs a day
(especially after wine)
I should tell my few readers
that, today, (the twenty-fifth of August)
I wrote the blog which will be dated
the ninth day of November (or as Americans say,
November ninth - or just November 9).

I probably will still be alive.
.

Before the ill-named "Enlightenment"

almost the only 'eccentrics'
were incentric monks.

Now the only eccentrics
are locked up against their will.

Eccentrics don't have 'followers'
on Facebook.

(Jesus did; Diogenes didn't.)

BUT:  We love ourselves for loving those

who seem to be eccentric...

NB: This may be the first recorded coinage of the word
INCENTRIC...

After a poem by Yosip Mandelstam.

"And I was alive" below the blizzard
of the blossoming pear,
I sheltered from the stammering
storm of the cherry tree beneath the cherry tree's
leaf-life and star-shower,
its sap-strength, its primal, invisible
axe-susceptible power
which had nothing to do with
what I had been told was me.

What and where is the joy, the delight
that always takes flight from us
and even our shadows ?
What is being? What is reality? What is right ?

Petals wrinkle and rapture the air,
flurry and float, and I am in
time shrunk to a kernel,
time stretched to the
impossibly, unbearably eternal -
brief sweetness transubstantiating into the glory
of all-encompassing rot.

All is now. All was. All will be and is not.

Anthony Weir 30 vi 2019

A page of translations of Mandelstam's  poem BREATH 
The best one is by Paul Celan, of course.

Reflective self-portrait

from one of my other blogs

       www.caylus-cailutz.blogspot.com

My Mailbox

by the front door.

These two photos are dedicated to Karl.

And facing it, just across the narrow street, a landscaped electricity box.

Notocactus submammulosus and a Surfinia (Petunia) variety.

Two months ago.

Today: the Nicotiana have come forth.

Mainly Salvias.

Although I understand statistics

I never passed a math(s)
exam. This is why I say
that the wrinkles between my nipples
and my willy are bountiful
and awesomely uncountable.

Hypochondria.

The human soul
is an imaginary disease.

All roads

lead back into the forest
and turn it into desert.

Psychedelic

plants just let us see
and feel
what we expect to feel and see.
No big deal.

Other people

have no inkling
of how evil they are

which is yet another reason why
I'm ashamed to be human.

Friends

are what lonely people have.

I'm so glad I have never been lonely
though sometimes bereft

glad
too for all the friends I never had

I'd rather have feelings than friends

Both at once are not possible

Today's other deep thought.

Several (though now this word is obsolete
and I should say multiple) times over the years
I felt I was about to stumble on
The Meaning of Life -
but then my consciousness flipped over,
like one of those lovely desk-calendars
I always envied but never owned.

To dogs

(who are Creatures of Yes)
we are Creatures of No.

Sitting out on the balcony,

with delicious scents coming from below,
watching the swifts zoom about and listening to Billy the Blackbird's
familiar snatches of melody, I am induced to think that,
despite our escalating destructive enterprise,
large areas of our planet are still
lovely in their slow demise.

"Why can't you be normal ?"

my aunt would say to me.
-as if I had chosen to be 'abnormal'.
Now I would say to her that
in many places at many times
it was normal to be nasty
and in certain places at a certain time
it was normal to be nazi.

Of the Universe of Feeling

the shrewdest
among us know
that we know very little:
we have only the crudest
most superficial
awareness

compared with
any dog, any tree.

Buddhists say:  All is suffering.
Jesus said: Humans (only) may be redeemed through me.
I say: there is no possibility of redemption;
it is best to assume
that every plant and animal is suffering
unless, through our thin compassion
or our holy absence
we can confer exemption.

We comfortable complainers/whingers about climate-change

should remember that
many, many thousands of years ago,
(when North America was nearly twice its present size)
what is now the North (formerly German) Sea was rich and fertile land
inhabited by hyænas...and humans
who did not deign to move westward
into what was then inhospitable land,
now the not-too-hospitable British Isles,
until the inundation.
Then came glaciation...
And, eventually, our little planet-warming civilisation.

Listen here.

But let us remember:  99% of all species
that have ever lived upon the earth
are long extinct.

Today on BBC Radio 4 :

Jesus is said to have said:

"He that loveth son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me."
This also must have been a reason why
heterodox early Christians had themselves castrated.

I had myself vasectomised so that I might feel
more worthy to exist than more worthy to serve
a jealous and drama-loving son of a jealous and drama-loving god.

Sterilisation cancels out many alleged sins.

The ten most important things

to know about addiction : read pdf

And an eleventh: competitiveness is an addiction.

Many members of our species gone agley

regard others, and every living thing, as prey.
Of course, they're right -
merely because they think that way.
Which is why, for most of my life,
I've hidden in plain sight,
hoping that One Glorious Day
they'll simply evaporate
or, at any rate,
poison or explode themselves away.

I am not colour-blind.

On the contrary, I think I see
colours more differentiatedly and brightly
than most other people,
especially the fifty shades of green
and the fewer than fifteen tones of black,
my favourite shade of human flesh.
I cannot understand why - at least in the British Isles -
'black' designates pale coffee-coloured skin.

Words and The Word.

Adam and Eve
mean Clay and Life
respectively in Hebrew.
Life emerges from mud
like Eve from Adam's side -
hence Jewish Patriarchy!

The greatest writer

wrote nothing but
a suicide-note
to his pet pig.

It's only in exceptional,

uninstitutional societies
that evil does not thrive.

It is hard not to giggle at and to love crusty old Punic & poetical Tertullian.

...ab  haeretico quam ab ethnico, 
et non protenus et non ubique convicium  carnis, 
in originem in materiam in casum, 
in omnem exitum eius, immundae a primordio ex faecibus terrae, 
immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo, 
frivolae infirmae criminosae molestae onerosae, 
et post totum ignobilitatis elogium caducae in originem terrae et cadaveris nomen, 
et de isto quoque nomine periturae in nullum inde iam nomen, 
in omnis iam vocabuli mortem ?

Like Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian.
I have never been aware of a "mind/body" Problem,
there never having been a black hole between my body and my mind
(and much less than 'normal' between my legs)
because both were simultaneously attacked by,
and hence united in, their resistance to Education.

Not many people know

that the word heathen
comes from Latin ethnicus (and ethnica for a female).
Thank you John Updike!

For those jaded by innumerable reproductions of 'The Wave' -

this print by Ishii Shigeo (1933-62).

When we are told how wonderful our brains are

we tend to smile contentedly and then go on to more serious topics
like the rate of income tax, the price of petrol/gasoline,
or the American-Iranian World War To Come.

But this evening I listened to an old broadcast performance
of Grigoriy Sokolov playing Schubert's last sonata (D.960)

and was able to compare it (unfavourably)
with my surprisingly accurate memory
of the orgasmic performance by Mitsuko Uchida
(whose name I always have to check on Wikipedia)
which I earlier deemed better than those by Alfred Brendel and Alfred Cortot -
though the latter has divine rubato.

Mulling over Paul Celan.

The only things worth talking about
with other human hackers of the tree of life
are the things that cannot be mentioned:
overpopulation, ecocide, suicide,
the godness of water, plants and animals
and how each delicious bite we take
has destroyed so many living things...
and so it's not so much that
one doesn't know how not to begin a conversation,
but that (having been sterilised)
one doesn't know how to make any kind of communication.

Camus was wrong.

The sole 'philosophical problem'
is human dominion.

Guilt

is a shameless
form of self-abuse.

It is so sad

that Jesus' anti-institutional
exhortations to kindness and good nature
and simple fairness and justice
were transformed into unbrotherly,
desiccated morality and moralism
by his immediate followers
and two millennia
of his rapacious traducers.

With poor sight

and slightly deaf,
slightly lame,
slightly sociable :
I live quite slightly.

In 19th century Russian towns

welcome-lamps were lit when there was food to spare
or someone needed to be comforted
or company was wanted.
The lights now outside houses
have been installed to threaten
and expose intruders.

Ever-accursed Prometheus.

Evolution
has been all downhill
since we discovered fire.

Our sadly-malfunctioning brains

have evolved either because of an unfortunate mutation,
or simply because God went mad (as Nietzsche didn't dare to contemplate
or didn't dare to tell),
and our Universe (amongst many)
is his padded cell.

Back to the Buddha!

say I.  
Everything is One – 
and unbelievably Multiple and Disparate.

Two things I'd like to remind you of.

Inca gold and silver
together with the Catholic Church
and men on benches in Bologna
were crucial in the development
of capitalism.

Serfs were freed in Russia
without a civil war
before slavery was (technically)
abolished in the USA.

When 'western culture'

largely consists of shopping, work and sex
all mixed up with 'human rights' hypocrisy;

if its popular music reflects the thoughts,
ideas and concerns of most, democracy
is doomed.

As I write I hear that there are more refugees than ever
in the history of the world,
that there is less trust in politicians and in vaccines.

Welcome to the Dark Age
of demagoguery, apocalypse.

Like breaking horses.

Education is an exercise
in bridling children's spirit -
if their parents
or other children haven't already done so -
or if they had any to begin with.

I am trying to figure

why everyone, even in a little French village,
is wearing incredibly drab and badly-cut clothes
in shades of brown, black and grey.  Obviously
it's The Style of 2019, but why ? 
The only brightness is the occasional lurid
early adolescent. There is no beauty
of apparel to contrast with the dour faces of the
modern bourgeois army.

It's quite scary,
especially as I, in my Indian cotton pants
and home-designed t-shirt, get strange or hostile looks
from the ugly uniformities who pass me by.

Kissing

Missing
Pissing
Reminiscing

Breeding
Needing
Bleeding

They tell us to praise
the darkest of days.
They tell us
that the all-powerful animal
with the ever-expanding, ever-tightening mind
as big as a galaxy, small as a turd,
is utterly exceptional, phenomenal,
and that you and I
should 'borrow' light from the blind
to give to the other unredeemables
who go unheard.

Each one of us
each day
destroys a world.

Masturbation
should be enjoyed
not resorted to.
Remember: almost anything
is holier, more reverential
than human procreation.

The reason why

most Christians have no interest
in the unstoppable result of climate change
is that it's not their kind of apocalypse.

Maybe never-to-be-lived-in.

One of Ahmadinejad's crazy, totalitarian New (ghost) Towns.
This one in the desert outside Tehran,with almost no infrastructure to support it - not even drains !

https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/06/13/

New Words to an Old Lyric*

Putting on the agony
putting on the guile;
that's what all the dumb folks
are doin' all the while.
When I look around me
I sometimes have to smile,
seein' all the dumb folks putting on the guile.

*as recorded in my youth  by Lonnie Donegan (1957)

Original lyrics by Norman Cazden. But Lonnie's best one is probably Rock Island Line which opened up for me the world of "folk music" from the USA to India, Iraq and Japan. From Leadbelly to the Trio Joubran via Fairport Convention, of course!

IS - the new global mind-game racket.

I am holding the first International
Intelligent Scepticism © ® Week
here at Caylus in August.
Only $700 for the week
including under-the-hedge accommodation.
payment via PayPal