Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Friday 31 January 2020

CORONA

(from the Latin corona and the Greek κορώνη meaning crown or halo)

is a word describing:
1.  the projecting part of a classic cornice;
2. the upper portion of a bodily part (such as a tooth, the skull or the penis);
3.  an appendage or series of united appendages on the inner side of the corolla in some flowers (such as the daffodil);
4.  a faint glow adjacent to the surface of an electrical conductor at high voltage;
5.  the gaseous 'atmosphere' of the sun which is even hotter than its surface, typically visible during an eclipse, and which emanates a  'solar wind' to afflict its planets;
6.  a circle of light made by the apparent convergence of the streamers of the aurora borealis;
7.  in medieval Latin, a unit of currency vulgarly known as a crown, krone, krona, koruna, etc.

Now we are hearing a lot about a particular corona-virus  in the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae...
which probably comes from the sun, lives in the aurora borealis, hangs about on cornices & daffodils, and is propagated (upon payment) via faintly-glowing penises of pigs and humans.

Thursday 30 January 2020

Secrets and Lies

Science tells us continually
how rational and successful we are.

Literature worries continually
at and about our tragic (often ludicrous)
irrationality.

Wednesday 29 January 2020

Tuesday 28 January 2020

The ibex,

a very large kind of goat,
is, with the snow leopard, the most revered
of the Asian mountain animals, and used to live
in mountain ranges from Mongolia to Afghanistan.
Like snow leopards, they are almost extinct.

Pickled ibex blood, thick and hard to swallow,
is considered a powerful tonic by the Mongols.

The customs of humans are like footholds
carved into the marble cliffs of inhumanity.

Monday 27 January 2020

Sunday 26 January 2020

A walker

was originally a man who trod wool or felt underfoot -
a kind of dancer.
The modern meaning of to walk came later.
Walkers are now just minor curses of the countryside.

Saturday 25 January 2020

Friday 24 January 2020

Today's YogArt®

'Fresh' (still wet) in the first photo under artificial light.
'Set' (morning after) in the second, in natural light and with different background.



Retrospective misery

is all the rage.

Thursday 23 January 2020

Most cooking

is done by women,
and in many Asian countries
they eat separately,
because a woman is considered
to be a service rather than a person.
As for Western cultures -
I wonder how many cooks
(even male ones) consider that the best part
of feasts and dinner-parties
is the cooking ?





Tuesday 21 January 2020

Today's YogArt

photographed when fresh (yesterday evening)...




and this morning in natural light.

A neglected poet.


UNSUSPECTING

There is a natty kind of mind
That slicks its thoughts,
Culls its oughts,
Trims its views,
Prunes its trues,
And never suspects it is a rind.


PEOPLE

To those fixed on white,
White is white,
To those fixed on black,
It is the same,
And red is red,
Yellow, yellow-
Surely there are such sights
In the many colored world,
Or in the mind.
The strange thing is that
These people never see themselves
Or you, or me.

Are they not in their minds?
Are we not in the world?
This is a curious blindness
For those that are color blind.
What queer beliefs
That men who believe in sights
Disbelieve in seers.

O people, if you but used
Your other eyes
You would see beings.


CONVERSION

African Guardian of Souls,
Drunk with rum,
Feasting on strange cassava,
Yielding to new words and a weak palabra
Of a white-faced sardonic god--
Grins, cries
Amen,
Shouts hosanna.


THE DANCER

Spatial depths of being survive
The birth to death recurrences
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance survive
The sand; the sand, elect, survives
The dancer. He can find no source
Of magic adequate to bind
The sand upon his feet, his feet
Upon his dance, his dance upon
The diamond body of his being.


A CERTAIN MAN

A certain man wishes to be a prince
Of this earth; he also wants to be
A saint and master of the being-world.
Conscience cannot exist in the first:
The second cannot exist without conscience.
Therefore he, who has enough conscience
To be disturbed but not enough to be
Compelled, can neither reject the one
Nor follow the other...


REAPERS

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.


STORM ENDING

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey—
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.


Jean (as in Gene) Toomer, 1894-1967

Monday 20 January 2020

Sunday 19 January 2020

Thursday 16 January 2020

YogArt

Ship in a Storm,
yogurt on black, shallow, glazed stoneware coupelle (by Michel Perfetti, 2008).

Not for Sale © Dingo/Wofl MMXX

Dogs in Winter.

The first photo is taken in Istanbul, where shop-owners are kind.









Wednesday 15 January 2020

My dim view

of fellow Irish Protestant Samuel Beckett
is that his characters were figures of fun, the poor,
deadbeats and tramps instead of the future politicians
he taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Tuesday 14 January 2020

If Cloud-cuckoolanders

think that climate change is actually reversible
they should be ready to live as Cubans lived
for fifty years, re-using, re-cycling,
manufacturing nothing from foreign
raw materials.  (The Russians brought
little more than weapons.)
No new cars, or trucks or buses;
no new refrigerators or household gadgets,
no imported food, no textiles and no electronics
made by near-slave-labour; no trashed forests,
no holidays abroad, no state-of-the-art surgery,
cancer-treatment, geriatric care...no mindless
reproduction, obsessive over-consumption...
almost all that we associate with Consumer Choice.

Obviously, none of this is going to happen.
So, ye comfortably-off, rejoice in climate change,
rejoice.

Monday 13 January 2020

When I was in my twenties

I ate shark's fin soup in Amsterdam
without a thought for sharks,
or whether the other parts of sharks
were eaten. They are not.
Now, 'educated' people are a little more aware,
ask more questions,
but unfortunately, despite the dire meteorological signs
in wind and fire and water,
the human population keeps on
increasing rapidly while almost every other animal population
declines.

Sunday 12 January 2020

Saturday 11 January 2020

There is some confusion

about the Prophet M'hamed's literacy.
Some claim that the Angel Gabriel,
hearing three times that he was illiterate,
miraculously enabled the humble Prophet
to read and write as he revealed the
divine teaching of the Holy Qu'ran.

The question is irrelevant.
The figureheads of the other two World Religions
were certainly illiterate.
Literate men should not attempt
to found another World Religion.

Thursday 9 January 2020

For nearly a hundred years

the brains and behaviour of battered boxers
have been subjects of keen research,
but until recently the brains and minds
of battered women have, by sociologists
and neuro-scientists, been left in the lurch.

Wednesday 8 January 2020

The outrageous repetitions of history.

In Europe, the Celts occupied high places to lord over the pre-Celts
whom they pushed into the low (often marshy or densely-forested) places.
Then came the Romans.
The anti-Catholics were sent from or pushed out of Britain to the wildest part of Ireland,
occupying the well-drained high places
(and giving them names such as Richhill),
 pushing the Catholics into the badly-drained low places.
The Israelis are taking the high places in the West Bank
(and wreaking desolation on the landscape)
so that they can ignore and maltreat the Palestinians,
who, it might be said, were there before the Israeli exodus from Egypt.

Tuesday 7 January 2020

The most difficult thing in my life

has been the decades-slow realisation
that very few people are as they appear or claim to be.
Those who are not are total mystery to me.

And so I am (almost) a solitary.

Monday 6 January 2020

from The Daily Telegraph, London

by Boris Johnson, MP 
It is a tragic measure of how far the world has changed — and the infinite capacity of modern man for taking offence — that there are no two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political trouble than motherhood and apple pie.
The last time I tentatively suggested that there was something to be said in favour of apple pie, I caused a frenzy of hatred in the healthy-eating lobby. It reached such a pitch that journalists were actually pelting me with pies, and demanding a retraction, and an apology, and a formal denunciation of the role of apple pie in causing obesity.
As for motherhood — the fertility of the human race — we are getting to the point where you simply can't discuss it, and we are thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest single challenge facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not global warming. That is a secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself.
Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year.
As someone who has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel it. You can smell it in the traffic jams of the Middle East. You can see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you see mile after mile of fires burning red in the dark, as the scrub is removed to make way for human beings.
You can see it in the satellite pictures of nocturnal Europe, with the whole place lit up like a fairground. You can see it in the crazy dentition of the Shanghai skyline, where new skyscrapers are going up round the clock.
You can see it as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.
The world's population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime.
The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
How the hell can we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to the number of consumers? The answer is politics, and political cowardice.
There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father, Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN would hold giant conferences on the subject, and it was perfectly respectable to talk about saving the planet by reducing the growth in the number of human beings.
But over the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned.
We seem to have given up on population control, and all sorts of explanations are offered for the surrender. Some say Indira Gandhi gave it all a bad name, by her demented plan to sterilise Indian men with the lure of a transistor radio.
Some attribute our complacency to the Green Revolution, which seemed to prove Malthus wrong. It became the received wisdom that the world's population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learnt to make several ears of corn grow where one had grown before.
And then, in recent years, the idea of global population control has been more or less stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left. American Right-wingers disapprove of anything that sounds like birth control, and so George W. Bush withholds the tiny contribution America makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities, regardless of the impact on the health of women in developing countries.
As for the Left, they dislike suggestions of population control because they seem to smack of colonialism and imperialism and telling the Third World what to do; and so we have reached the absurd position in which humanity bleats about the destruction of the environment, and yet there is not a peep in any communiqué from any summit of the EU, G8 or UN about the population growth that is causing that destruction.
The debate is surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the insatiable Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to institute price controls in the doomed fashion of Diocletian or Edward Heath.
Even in Britain, chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is no longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may once again be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the environment may be irreversible.
It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?
This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.
This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.
All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?
~ Mr Johnson has fathered several children.

Sunday 5 January 2020

Cyprus Avenue, Belfast,

apparently now celebrated in song,
was where I played canasta with school-friends
in a nicely-decaying many-bay-windowed house in the nineteen-fifties.
Nearby was Orangefield, a sectarian neighbourhood.

Who would ever want to know this ?

Saturday 4 January 2020

"We are a starved society living in the midst of plenty.

Our possessions are many.
Our serenities few."
                                 - Laurie Lee

But serenity is achieved despite circumstances,
even those of over-consumption.

Friday 3 January 2020

Thursday 2 January 2020

Wednesday 1 January 2020