'Libertarian'

in Europe suggests the advocacy of freedom from
oppression of various kinds,
whereas in the USA the word implies
freedom to oppress anyone you don't like -
and to carry a gun.

When you are "a little bit deaf",

you will be able to distinguish
between philosophy and colostomy
on the lip-less radio only by paying close
attention to context.

Swiss author Max Frisch :

 "One can tell any story except one's own." 

Hmm...  Disregarding the Big Question of Truth,
stories depend on language
and where language is lacking
the story is lacking.

Thus there is no such thing as a complete story.

The Dictatorship of Language

decrees what we must not, cannot talk about,
such as the utter, solipsistic
solitude of consciousness.

Sexual education and terminology.

Every adolescent should know
that for a 'blow-job' you should not blow,
and sucking is chokingly
unsubtle, unsophisticated.
We, the sensually-advanced, initiated
by tongue-tip round the glans
and frenum are ecstatic fans
of a practice easy and uncomplicated.

Perhaps the Bulgarian

government is the most rational
in Europe by not favouring
the expensive old
in their vaccination programme.
After all, my pampered generation
has already benefited from
an unasked-for extension of life.

Rather late in life,

I have been trying to get to grips with crazy Lacan.
who makes me think of the legendary
theologians who for years enjoyed
calculating how many angels
could dance on the head of a pin.
But I like the idea that human consciousness
(and the search for 'knowledge') is ineluctably paranoid.

He was obsessed
with the effects of mothers and fathers
(and their mere genders) in infant development. 
He seems to me himself to be (like Freud)
a driven victim of extremely limited middle-class attitudes.
Since I never had a father (and hardly even noticed)
and no mother that I know of for the first year of my life
(she turned up later, as my 'aunt', after she adopted me)
and am less up-tight than most,
by Lacan I (a happy solitary) am not impressed.

"Speech is silver...

 

...but silence is golden."

California

 "First came the Spaniards
then the dutiful Chinese.
These quiet docile workers were replaced by
the hysterical Italians, the cagey Swiss,
the stoical Mexicans, the snobby French,
the crazy Germans, the friendly Greeks
and the unfathomable Armenians."

- Alan Parker, The Sucker's Kiss, 2003

(And the others ?)

Word of the Day.

Yesterday, on the radio, I heard the word
DEIFIC.

I think the speaker meant divine.

The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

Normal human activity
is worse for 'nature' 
than 'the greatest nuclear accident in history'.

I might have declared (and posted) this before.

Happiness is
sheer existence
without pain
or hope.

Or soap.

The Barbarians

are no longer at the gates,
but in McDonald's
piling up their plates.

Henrietta Lacks,

an African-American, had cells taken from her body in 1951
when she was suffering from cancer.
Those cells were found to be unique in a most particular way.
They continued to reproduce endlessly in the laboratory.
Culture from those cells have since been used
in thousands of scientific experiments.
But - of course - Henrietta herself was never asked
if her cells could be used in medical research.

Much less rewarded.

"Love is not an end

but a process through which
one person attempts to know another."

- John Williams, in STONER, 1965.

I don't know whether or not I have experienced love.
I have felt many fondnesses, from deep
to superficial, and some infatuations,
which by definition are superficial passions
that come and go...
but love, I think, is something other people feel,
or claim to.

"...how will we ever know
True love, how will we ever know ?"

When I was seven years old,

I wanted to be a (male) ballet-dancer.
At ten I found an interest in astronomy.
I prevailed upon my mother to take me
to meetings of the Irish Astronomical Society.
In 1953, when I was eleven,
I had my first little essay
published in the school magazine.
It was a review of Flying Saucers Have Landed
by Leslie and Adamski.
Long before sheeple became interested
in space travel, I had read Werner von Braun
- and abandoned astronomy because
it was too mathematical, and in any case
it was probably a childish pseudo-intellectual pose.
But this very day I hear that the Department
of Defense in the USA is about to publish
its hitherto-unrevealed documents on UFOs.

Facts and fictions.

Thought depends on data, also known as facts.
But facts change - especially in the inappropriately-named
'social sciences', which should really be called
'the evolution of prejudices'.

Many 'facts' have been shown to be fictions,
racist and sexist propaganda based on crude assumptions,
or wishful thinking.
For example (on the one hand)
the socialist myth of 'primitive egalitarianism',
and (on the other hand)
the misogynist myth of 'Stockholm Syndrome'.

Thinking to Some Purpose can be criminal.
Who ever 'abandoned themselves' to Reason ?

Pasay Cemetery (Manila ,Philippines)

 

Have you no compassion for me ?

173 Years Later.

Sex-workers of the world, unite !
You have already lost your adolescence,
your passports, even your names.
You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Hope

may be more destructive than
hate.

Fugitivity.

Let us hide
from purposiveness,
aspiration and reward.
Let us find fringes
to exist on,
non-linguistic spaces
to desist in.

I am not a princess,

and it is not a pea under my mattress
which is causing discomfort - but seams
which irritate my skin (are seams getting rougher ?)
even when I wear my upper clothing inside out.
Age certainly does not make my skin tougher.

I disliked princesses when I was a child
and am repelled by blond hair, blue eyes,
I wanted to befriend an ogre
and worked on building up my odour.

I would never have divined
that I would become so utterly refined
that I had to protect my psoriatic skin
with seamless silk -
made from worms boiled up alive.

Bad Philosophy.

It was immediately obvious to me
(first year at University)
that the statement by the odious Descartes

Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)

was simply stupid.

The only conclusion from Cogito...
is that something thinks or thinks its thinks
for, through or in me.
It might be me, but on the other hand it could be God
or Satan or Vladimir Putin,
a machine, a distant star - or you.

Sentio, ergo sum ?

The pseudo-philosophy based on
'the Cogito'
was such patent nonsense
that I gave up on philosophy.
I decided that it wasn't serious.

Thinking is just a consequence
or maybe a small part of feeling.

Incredible cruelty resulted from Descartes' assertion
that other animals have no feeling
- a belief still widely held in France.

Sentio ergo est ? 

I certainly cannot claim that there's an 'I' in me,
not even inside my pants.

Unassailable.

The equation has changed.

Capitalism = Feudalism + Usury + Slavery

                   has become

Capitalism = Feudalism + Turbo-usury + Globalism.

(Globalism involves adapted, less visible forms of slavery.)

Life is

squelchy.
Wisdom is
fuzzy.

In the USA,

expensive prescription drugs are pushed
through aggressive advertising
by their manufacturers - sometimes with help
from Federal authorities.
Hence the Opiate Addiction Epidemic, 
which, thanks to racism, has not so badly
affected Ethnic Minorities.

Over-estimating one's potential.

Until recently, I thought that
it must be terrible to realise that
you're at least a bit stupid.
Now I realise that it's not so bad at all.

Inside the terrible crowd

you can be a tiny clearing of calm.
Inside the beautiful forest
you are a destructive force.

Many people

(I am thinking of the teachers at my semi-public school
where I was forced to play nasty, 'manly' games
and go for runs in foul weather)

- many people
prefer the ecstasy of sarcasm
to the ecstasy of orgasm.

I wonder if anyone enjoys both ecstasies together ?

A Film I watched via Netflix.

 "I Care A Lot is a damning indictment of the corruption that pollutes the courts, healthcare, for-profit elderly care and, most of all, state-sanctioned guardianship, which strips the elderly and disabled folks of their agency." - (review on Rotten Tomatoes)

Audience score a mere 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, but 6.3 on Imdb.

This wonderfully dystopian (American, therefore violent), semi-satirical thriller about the criminalisation of the American healthcare system (by doctors and lawyers) has no pleasant characters. It features a lesbian relationship between two nasty-greedies, and a sexy evil Russian hairy dwarf (Peter Dinklage) who reflect the medieval prejudices of our culture.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81350429

                          see also: Ripping off the bereaved.

Double Whammy

Not only am I a precursor
of the baby-boom Me-Generation,

but also, since around 1960
I have been 'assailed' continually
by reports of famines, genocides,
civil wars...not to mention
the films and books,
now e-mails and websites
devoted to 'man's inhumanity',
humonstrousness;

and so I now most conveniently in my fugitivity
have Compassion Fatigue
from mumbling ever-uselessly
at the edge of ever more catastrophes.

Word of the Day :

 narrativize.

On Literature.

We are amazingly good at
describing our miseries,
but pretty bad at fixing them.

One of my cherished cacti is coming into bloom.

 

The greater crime (of course)

is that of bringing suffering
directly or indirectly into the world;
the lesser is to separate children definitively,
ineluctably according to their sex.

Frost in May.

When I told my farmer friend 
during a February heat-wave
here in southern France,
that I was pretty sure we'd have
frost in May, he laughed.
But I'm not bad at long-range
weather forecasting. This morning
the fields were sparkling white.

How stupid is that ?

We who want to be admired
invented gods who wanted to be worshipped !

Pederasts, Monsters and Blind Ignorance.

I was fired abruptly from my budding (and only) career
as a magazine columnist by writing, sometime around 1980
(when monster-finders switched their crusading attention
from 'homosexuals' to 'paedophiles')
that sex between men and boys was not necessarily abusive,
could be a Hellenic act of kindness and tenderness by both parties
- and that I as a fatherless and sexually-curious boy
emotionally-abused and physically beaten at school by men,
would have welcomed an occasional kindly, gentle, hairy,
therapeutic hand on my genitals from around the age of ten.

https://aeon.co/essays/pederasts-as-monsters-and-the-problem-of-active-not-knowing

Sheeple

 are stupid, and talk too much.
Animals are dumb - but clever.