"Things are going to get better."

APRIL FOOL !

Flowering cherry-trees

which don't bear fruit :
our grotesque crimes against birds.

Cloudy Night.

No moon.
No haiku.
There are already
ten thousand times too many.

Invisible Terrorism.

 "...the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence.
It was a terror of the mind; a daily exercise in self-mutilation.
Black versus black in a battle for self-improvement."

- George Lamming, on life in the British colony of Barbados.

An Assonant Epigram*

Philosophy
is the affectation of the rich

Morality
the plaything of the powerful

- Diogenes of Dunromin

*or aphorism or apothegm, if indeed there is any difference between them.

Positive Thinking.

I love it when the clocks go forward
because I'm an hour closer to oblivion.
I love it also when the clocks go back
because I get an extra hour of sleep,
which is a fake oblivion,
not so mercifully final, not so terminally deep.

Semiotic

 

First, there was

separation of Church and State,
then, much later,
the disjunction of knowledge and power.

Two Octopus Dreams.

It has been discovered that octopi sleep
and dream.

Here are two Octopus Dreams
by Malcolm Walker.

The Unknowing Western Zen Master,

Michel de Montaigne, wrote:

"Instead of always looking out from me, I like sometimes
to look into me, appraise myself...taste myself...
roll about in myself."

This is the feeling of being tinglingly alive
above and below the neck, and gently
commingling with an inevitable cosmic flow,

which in the Japanese tradition is achieved
by the contemplation of suicide,
and in some other cultures is sometimes reached
by absorbing things that grow.

It is, perhaps, the opposite of 'amour-propre' and 'self-respect'
and one day may even become 'politically-correct'.

for more of Montaigne see here.

When I was a very young reader

I thought that misled rhymed with
wild and smiled, or possibly drizzled,
and that disguise rhymed with goose.
I guess I am still a little obtuse.

I have never understood why African-Americans

have not rejected Christianity outright.
But of course, hidden within that murderous religion,
is the slinky message that "all are equal in the sight of God".

And there is the remarkable phenomenon of the
Hush Arbors, about which you can read here.

They certainly did not look like this:

Frankly,

it's bizarre that a small tribe on the lower Rhine
gave their name to honesty, directness and freedom,
as well as to children all over Western Europe:
Franck, Franz, François, Françoise, Francis,
Francesco, Francesca, Francesca, Prionsias, Ffrancis,
František, Frans, Ferenc, Francine, Frances, Marie-France...
and, in the Southern Asian term Farangi,
to any European or white-skinned American.

But it took a long time for people between the Loire,
the Pyrenees and the Alps to think of themselves as French.

The latest word

in French (if not yet in English) :

VACCINODROME

To live 'in the moment'

inside your momentous body
is magic, if your body and moment are good -
which, of course, they are not for most members
of our mad species at any given moment.

On World Down Syndrome Day

it is worth remarking that the WHO*
designated 'homosexuality'
(and, with it, homosensuality)
as a 'psychiatric disorder' until 1990.
The world is not a stage, dear William,
but a Punch-and-Judy Show.

*World Heterosexual Oligarchy

Capitalism welcomes Covid

in its ruthless drive
to separate humans from each other
(except when they have to breed)
so that each one can become
individually and remotely dependent
on supplies they do not need.

Relatively speaking,

Marcel Proust lived a short time
before the fragile spider-web internet,
a time that is lost for at least
the time being - except in books
which will not last
beyond our overdue extinction,
when we will be slime
amongst our detritus and ruins
at the end of mercifully
unrecoverable tick-tock time.

Civilised

means trapped
by trade and walls.

Nobody civilised is free.

Sport

 is play turned into work.

It is easier

to discover the deep secrets of Nature
and the Universe
than to understand the depravities of humans.

John Love posted this photo,

(taken on a visit to Los Angeles)
to the FlickR Worst Photographs of 2020 group
- which was more interesting than their
(three times larger)
Best Photographs 2020 collection.

- SO, MODERATE YOUR FUCKS !

The End of Eden

was work: the unfortunate discovery
that some could bully others into labour
in fenced fields by the simple inculcation
of the joined-at-the-head-twin concepts
of property and inequality
through religion and morality
to keep us in our place
in time and in conformity.

A beautiful relationship.

 

Soft Power and Moral Duty.

"...aid to distressed countries
which would enable them to buy more goods
and by buying more goods strengthen the spiritual links..."

- Graham Greene : Our Man in Havana (1958). 

Bird-cloud.

One of many photographs of starling-murmurations
by Søren Solkær, more of which can be seen here.

Killing Time.

Boredom
is the absence
of a good relationship with time
and (of course) with oneself.

After the French Revolution

some famous convents and monasteries
(Fontevrault, Clairvaux) were converted into prisons.

Perhaps in the next revolution the prisons will be
converted into monasteries and convents.

(At present, to call a French policeman an asshole (un con) in public is considered to be as great a crime as robbery with violence
and will attract a mandatory 3-month jail-sentence suspended for 5 years.)

On the first anniversary

of the declaration of Sars-Covid-2 as a pandemic,
I thought you'd like to view a landscape near you
as it may be some time after the next
modest pandemic reaches your shores

(hæmorrhagic fever, bleeding from eyes
and all other orifices, suppurating sores)
via some stressed animal or other - maybe another kind of bat
from a horribly and humanly-degraded habitat.  

photo by Rover

The Destructive Fear of Entropy.

Part of the 'Moral Failure of The West'
lies in its aesthetic failure to appreciate flaws,
and in its inability to value something *for* its imperfection
(Persian rugs, Japanese ceramics, broken objects, beautiful decay...)
- possibly because we're terrified that our so-vaunted culture
will pass or be swept away. 

Hell - for other people.

We don't regale each other any more
with stories about men (always men)
selling their souls or shadows
to Satan, Beelzebub, the greedy Source of Evil.
But every day we buy goods
online, or in a boutique, emporium or store,
which are grown, made, processed, packed
or transported by Gross Profit's ill-paid victims.
We are The Devil.

Passive.

Increasingly, I feel
that I am living in a dream-world
semi-paralysed, enthralled
- except that as narrator-cum-observer
in my private dreams
I never feel appalled.

Dear Sheeple,

I am a maladjusted changeling
on your tragic planet.  Because of Covid
and a lack of transport
I cannot get back to Beta Cynotopia.
But thanks for your financial support.

It is better for The Environment

to be a terrorist
than to eat meat -
unless you are
a meat-eating terrorist.

My cheerful grave on a dull day.

According to French custom
I rented this grave for thirty years

in a leafy corner of a graveyard fifteen years ago,
thinking that I'd be in it by now.
I may never be in it, for I have also willed my body
to the Toulouse medical faculty, who of course
will be at liberty to refuse it
if it has putrefied too much for them to use.

Helleborus niger 'Midnight'

An Unassailable Statistic.

The fewer the humans
the less the misery.

No future was ever better.

Finally, in 2021

I can roll my Rs, and pronounce
the name of the former dukedom where I live
just as the locals do : Rouergue.
Perhaps, before I die, I'll be able to whistle
through my teeth.  My conversation
with a blackbird yesterday
was pathetically one-sided.

Fashions in speaking.

 It is well-known (amongst certain cultural historians and phoneticists at least)

that the modern pronunciations of French, Danish and English (at least)

were the result of speech impediments or mannerisms at royal courts, and, in the case of English, also of the importation of Dutch- and then German-speaking rulers and their courtiers and soldiers.

In modern times the speech of female, white Americans has altered very noticeably.  As women more and more assert their rights and grievances, their speech has become more nasal, more penetrating, faster, and (inevitably) less clear.   It sounds like souped-up Barbie-speak, and may yet evolve into Chipmunk. 

Hillary Clinton is a comparatively mild example, but I find that more than half a minute of her shrieky delivery makes me turn off the radio to avoid a headache.

Water, rocks, trees and animals

were replaced by anthropic gods,
who were by accident of history
squashed by the jealous Jewish God,
who slowly and unwillingly morphed
into Truth and Wisdom,
which were torn by barbed-wire,
corrupted by unfairness, greed, 
ideals, hate and prejudice -
which were consumed by fire.

I just thought you would 'like to know'

 that more than 10% of the 320 land mammals known to have lived in Australia in 1788 are now extinct.  Read more >

Ireland, of course, lost furry fauna (and most of its forests) before 1788 : wolves, bears, elks, wild pigs, beavers...so let us not scapegoat white Australians.

When the Chinese,

a little before the Spaniards,Portuguese,
and other European 'gangster scum' went to Africa,
they didn't go as greedy, bloodthirsty pirates seeking slaves
but with dignity of state in large (unwieldy and expensive)
ships loaded with porcelain and tea and silks
to offer as gift-sweeteners for trade-deals or tributes
from the darker people that they found
(whom Europeans were wont to label 'beasts'
and lesser breeds without The Law)
- and never dreamed of sending priests.

Things are a little different this time round.

World Government

This world is governed by a vast obese baby
who ages surprisingly, intolerably slowly
whose oozing rash we must lick happily
whose farts we must inhale
whose shit we must devour al dente
whose piss we swim through doggedly
whose sweat lubricates our brains
whose blood oils our machinery
whose feet crush us like acorns
whose hands manipulate us like puppets
whose eyes watch every one of us
whose ears record our ear-worms
whose genitals arouse us irresistibly
whose screaming mouth gives us
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
day-in, day-out and all night long
whose horns impale us
whose beard entangles us
whose perpetual infection
we happily endure
but decline to cure.

[Thanks, Almina]

Handwriting.

It doesn't seem so long ago
that I received at least three
personal letters a week from the postman
who drove down my muddy, rutty lane.
I had boxes of them, with carbon copies
of my replies. I typed all my letters because
handwriting has been a problem for me
ever since I was forced to use my right hand,
and consequently (in those days of metal nibs
dipped into ink) dropped blots amongst
my spidery, uneven script.

Then came ball-point pens, which teachers
and other cultural snobs resisted.

The great thing about e-mail is that I can choose
the font and size (Bookman Old Style 16 point),
add pictures as attachments
or within the text.  But my desk is still covered
with scrappy little notes I sometimes cannot read
because my writing never improved after the age of eight
when I was quite inappropriately
sent to a snobby school where I too often had to do
text-copying (with fountain-pen) as punishment.