"It is but sorrow to be wise

 when wisdom profits not,"
says Tiresias to Œdipus.
But another wisdom lies
in ignoring profit and 
encouraging yourself to rise
above all sorrow, like a lark
above its devastated habitat.

A Good Title

for a new Bestseller novel:

The Omega Variant.

It may be "hitting bookshops" in a few months' time.

Flashback.

In bed this morning I suddenly remembered
returning to Europe from equatorial Africa
and my shock at seeing the grim, glum faces
of people who did not have to sleep in doorways,
under bridges and other insalubrious places.

What my dogs told me.

You can find awareness only within yourself
but it is very possible that you will be
(or already are - since we are all
so shallow and so careless)
unaware of your awareness
just as you are now are ignorant
of your crippling unawareness.

A poem by my internet friend who writes what he terms 'so-called poems',

Eric Chaet.

DOORMAN

Good morning, sir, good morning, ma’am.
Yes, I’m wearing a different uniform,
different gloves, different hat.
I’ve cleaned the glass of the door—
I discovered a new solvent.
Isn’t it glorious, how the glass
is so thoroughly transparent,
transmitting sparkle from the Sun?

Yes, you’re right, it’s a different door,
different frame, different hinges, too.
Notice, in fact, that the building
into which I’m ushering you
is a different building
than the one you routinely enter.

Please, take a good look
at your reflection in the glass—
that’s the last you’ll see of it.
It won’t survive the walk across the lobby.
Someone else will step out of the elevator
on a different floor, different company,
different industry, different agenda,
different obstacles, different opportunities,
different priorities, different purpose...

'With guns blazing',

they charged across Africa and Asia,
massacring 'the natives', burning villages,
looting temples, seizing land :-

the British in Nigeria, the French in Niger;
the British in Rhodesia, the French in Algeria,
the Belgians in the Congo, the Germans then the French
in Kamerun and Togo, with missionaries at hand.

The British bombed the Kurds, transported Indians
as 'indentured labour' to the Caribbean (already full of slaves),
the French abducted half a million 'savages'
from the banks of the Ubangi to build their Congo railway.

The British blazed away in India, the French in Indo-China,
the Dutch in Indonesia, the Belgians in the Congo,
the Belgians in the Congo,
the Germans in Deutsch Ostafrika 
(now Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi ),
and the British (followed by the Japanese) in China.

Genocide on genocide carried out the length
and breadth of the Americas by the English, Scots
and Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and French...

Those greedy civilising hypocrites
and murderous moral cretins
now indulge in outrage at China's
'pacification' of Uighurs and Tibetans.

Too many voices,

too few ears,
too little vision,
too many people,
too little reason,
too many fears... 

Food for thought for a loner.

 "Let me tell you this:
if you meet a loner,
no matter what they tell you,
it's not because they enjoy solitude.
It's because they have tried before to blend into the world,
and people continue to disappoint them."

Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper.

But aloners enjoy solitude.
It mitigates the disappointment.

Education.

Having had measles and chicken-pox
(but not scarlet fever) and had the opportunity
to escape from school for a week or so
to read Conan Doyle and E.A. Poe
and The Wind in the Willows while  I was recuperating,
I'm glad there was no vaccine when I was young.

What we (and the planet) really need
and will never get, is MMM inoculation.

There are even worse outrages than Vaginal Infibulation -
such as repeated gang-rape, massacres, genocide,
compulsory religion, slavery, misogyny, racism
- and war.  To these I would add Mass Mental Mutilation.

A painful but piffling Extinction.

On this freaky and paltry planet
wandering round a trifling star
in a middling sort of galaxy

a freaky species - the first with intentionality -
is well on its way to achieving
a minor episode of extinction.

The last (major) extinction
millions and millions of years ago
took millions of years of tectonic upheavals
and slidings, vast volcanic eruptions, meteor-impact,
dramatic (but slow) global warming and cooling,

but the current little extinction didn't get going
until about 200 years ago and might take
less than 100 years more of wanton pollution,
pandemics, bio-breakdown and war.

Is this a record ? I ask
my young friend, the plesiosaur.

A Happy Couple

should be the icing on each other's cake,
not the cake itself.

The Food of Fools.

Bread, with its intensive, uncertain,
back-breaking cultivation, came a very long time ago,
when and where there were no bananas, broccoli,
asparagus, artichokes, cabbages, leeks, brussels sprouts,
courgettes, squashes, tomatoes, avocados, goji, oranges,
nectarines, apricots, plums, apples, cherries, pears...
rice or maize or quinoa, seaweed, seakale, spinach...
And yet people insist on eating bread, which now depends
on vast industries of seed-hybridisation (and patenting),
of machinery devoted to ploughing, planting, harrowing,
spraying, cutting, separating, winnowing, milling,
marketing, baking, marketing, transporting,
when they and the planet would be better off -
if we would only tell each other and our children to eat
all those fruits and vegetables which have been
developed since the start of the malign
and divisive dictatorship of wheat.
Bread is a complicated cultural artefact like language or religion
- and is just as toxic to the biosphere as the industry of meat.

Sic transit stultitia humana.

Leavened bread and alcohol both depend on yeast.
Bread and alcohol together constitute a feast.

Democracy will not tackle climate change,

because democracy created capitalism,
then consumerism, and nobody wants
to reduce their standard of living
(which they think is quality of life)
and dependence on things,
even on swindles like bottled water.

Only enlightened dictators can possibly
avert the holocaust to come. Unfortunately
there have never been any Philosopher Kings.
And so Planet Earth limps on
like a lamb to the slaughter.

As a tree-lover I have always worried about paper and its consumption.

I am always saving paper, writing on the backs of scraps and cut-up cardboard packaging.  Thanks to Google and Duck-Duck-Go I found this statistic :

 Top 5 Paper & Paperboard Importing Countries   (Million Metric Tonnes in 2017) 

Click to enlarge.  If it doesn't show properly, click here
and scroll down.

 Where does it all come from ?  How ?  

According to research conducted by Kyocera,
the average office worker in the UK uses up to
45 pieces of paper per day, and a staggering two-thirds of that is considered to be waste.

I feel that I have been favoured

by life - even though I regret my birth.
I never had much motivation
to search for love in bars or plazas
social gatherings or nooks
upon this sorry earth.
What I sought was inspiration,
.
  .
    .
       which I found in books 

My wicked uncle in Coventry

was wicked only to me
(his sister's awkward bastard)
because he did not like shy,
wussy, left-handed little boys.
He was a medical practitioner,
a family doctor who used to make tea
for his elderly patients,
light their fires in winter
and take an interest in them.
He or his practice-partner often knew
other family members 
and the family history.

But he frightened me.
It was he who prevailed
upon my mother to send me to a school
which would 'toughen me up'.
In this (I'm glad to say) he failed.

 

Friedrich von Schiller

declared that there were
just two classes in the civilised world :
the naïve (or natural, spontaneous, uncorrupted)
and the sentimental (or filled with false sentiment,
hypocritical, corrupt).  He was discussing poets
(presumably male), but the idea is worth expanding.
I know from experience that sentimental hearts
are mean, rococo, and that naivety in men
deprives them happily of all standing.

 

No good hermit

is monotheistic.

Vanilla-flavoured everything.

Today's news:

"Scientists have developed a technique to turn waste plastic bottles into the synthetic vanilla flavouring vanillin."

What then happens to the millions of litres
of unused (unusable ?) vanillin ?
And what about the millions of plastic bottles
in the middle of the Pacific.
Who will fish them out ?

Every psycho-quack that I was ever sent to

could have done with some help from me
to 'loosen up'.

The word quack is one of many Dutch words
(as well as pronunciation-changes)
that crossed over to Britain
with William III of Orange:
Kwacksalver = a healer-spieler.

Nothing to do with Quicksilver.

Word-association.

A couple of months ago I discovered
that flapdoodle meant not only 'nonsense'
but (originally) was a wonderful
word for the male member or pizzle.
Codswallop is another graphic term
for the same appendage..
Today I learned that baloney is a synonym
of Bologna, a kind of spam sausage, as well
as for hogwash, bullshit, and so on...

...and on to jiggery-pokery, presumably by weenies
- from Wiener[wurst], another kind of sausage.

ORPHEUS IN SOHO

My new web-page of poems by
ROSEMARY TONKS

can be read here.

I discovered her only yesterday.
She is as good as Sylvia Plath.

She had a Kurdish lover.

She reminds me of Jean Rhys.

She had a break-down,
subsequently became a Baptist
and was immersed in the river Jordan.

She disowned her poems
presumably because she thought them louche
and un-Christian.

But where did Jesus shit ?
There are no relics.

I love the word 'WISTFUL'

as I like the word WHOLESOME,
but there is a noxious miasma of a word
which I greatly dislike.

If only we could replace LOVE
(unstable, hormonal, irrational,
mephitic, glamorous)
with GENTLE FONDNESS
we might release each other
from the inane evils
of the soggily amorous. 

[see also a previous blog]

"Thank you for the love !" said ex-king Trump to his fans.

Name-day self-portraits.

            Old Man's Leg (details).

 

Today is my Name Day,

which occurs nine calendar months
after my birth day : the feast day
of St Anthony of Padua
who had a pet pig.

Name-days used to be celebrated,
especially in Russia, when everyone
was named after an archangel or a saint.

Now we are much more egotistical,
and allegedly more 'individual'.
This is not true. 
Sheeple breed in their billions,
individuals are very few. 

[Sant’Antonio da Padova, original name Fernando Martins de Bulhões, (born 1195, Lisbon, Portugal—died June 13, 1231, Arcella, Verona; canonized 1232; Franciscan friar, doctor of the church, and patron of the poor. Padua and Portugal claim him as their patron saint, and he is (bizarrely) invoked for the recovery or return of lost property.]

'Artificial Intelligence

is neither artificial nor intelligent,'
writes Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research.

It is made from rare natural resources (e.g. lithium mines),
uses vast amounts of electricity
and large numbers of people
(mostly badly paid and non-unionised)
who perform the (mostly menial)
tasks that make the systems seem
automatic and autonomous.

It is just a new kind of resource-devouring slavery.

Haiku ?

My belly buzzing ?
No - a small bee trapped
between the pages of my book.

From the beginning,

Christianity was what we would now call racist,
and was certainly divisive.
Civis romanus sum,
declared the controlling, micromanaging St Paul,
not Iudaeus sum, nor even Humanus sum.

(If you don't know basic Latin or basic Christian history,ignore this blog.)

(Incidentally, women were not virile Roman citizens, merely women,
even if they manipulated emperors, as did Agrippina and Helena.)

(Christianity was a disaster for the planet; it produced Islam and, much worse, modern science and technology which have reduced the Earth to short-term resource.)

(And so they, the white Christians, plan to migrate to another planet, create another desert without Desert Fathers.)

(Paul hoped to "save" himself [from what ?] by "saving" others. And so he and the cult that he founded doomed the planet and its dominant race to bleak sterility.)

A pity the Romans did not have TV.

The odious Marcus Aurelius
genocidal Roman Emperor
and fake-philosopher, tycoon,
financed spectacular
gladiatorial "games"
in which a hundred European lions
(now unsurprisingly extinct)
were slaughtered in one afternoon.

Good News !

Climate-change and the collapse
in both sexes of human fertility
(due to the spate
of industrial chemicals in the water
and the atmosphere)
may shortly combine
to Save the Planet
just a little late.

VIRtue

contains the Latin word for man,
as does VIRile.
Even worse, the same syllable
occurs, slightly transformed,
in WORLD.

But women will never
abandon virtue and give birth
to women who might rescue
the human-male-choked earth.

It turns out

that most psychological experiments
have been carried out on students
in euro-american universities and hospitals.
Many of the many conclusions drawn may well not be
applicable to people of other classes, cultures and times.
And there are no Universal Human Values,
just universal human crimes.

Three New Friends.

 

No technology can save us

from the destructive effects of technology
(especially of technology which was designed to
but did not reverse or even ameliorate
the destructive effects of technology)
any better than militarism can save us
from the evils of militarism.

[read about the infamous Reversal of the Chicago River]

Apart from its very limited and blandly-benign message,

the essence of orthodox Christianites
has been intolerance,
which is the cornerstone
of arrogant, European
'Universal Values'.

A Positive Step

towards alleviating Climate Change :

World Masturbation-Celebration Month for Men.

"It goes without saying" -
which is why no-one says - that
climate-change is a function of overpopulation.

The sun-tan industry shows

that the worst thing
about being a Whitey
is being white.

The Philanthropy of the Rich

 
is always phoney.

The morally blind

love the police.

The greatest luxury

for me and perhaps for unheard millions
is to live alone, without pain,
healthy and solitary.
                                Thus I
too am quietly, contentedly
waiting to die.

Still-lives.

My latest arty photos :