was Throw meaning in the ditch.
They were cognitive nihilists
whose Conceptual Art
made anti-artists rich.
Dingo the Dissident
Monday 28 February 2022
The doctrine of the Dadaists
Sunday 27 February 2022
Eve said to Adam :
I've been thinking laterally
about that horrible old control-freak,
and I have realised that there is
only a serpentine S
between inane and insane.
'The anti-fascist protective measure'
was how the East German propaganda machine
referred to the 96-mile (160 km) Wall
which divided East from West Berlin
and the 'island' of West Berlin
from the surrounding East German countryside.
Behind that Wall lurked Vladimir Putin.
Saturday 26 February 2022
Friday 25 February 2022
They no longer say
It's for your own good,
which was often bad.
Now they say
It's for your financial
and/or social benefit,
and you are almost glad.
Thursday 24 February 2022
"They're no better than animals."
All wars are between
Sheeple and Sheople.
Wolves and Tigers
Bears and Hyenas
and herds of game
are not to blame.
Wednesday 23 February 2022
Nature and culture.
Evolution favoured hit-and-run sex
amongst humans. The less satisfied the male,
the more females he can impregnate
by rapid, disappointing, serial ejaculation -
which makes me think that enormous numbers
of men get much more joy from 'conquest'
than from copulation.
Tuesday 22 February 2022
One of the many big problems
of a culture which worships the ego
and compartmentalises the whole of existence
is that it creates self-loathing
in the palace of SELF,
and a morass of conflict in the refugee-camp
called SEX.
Monday 21 February 2022
"If you give it oxygen, a language starts to bark...
I've met Zionists. They are re-learning Hebrew.
The Jews will bark in Hebrew,
they'll bark in a language that's been safe
from barking for two thousand years...
"...They will kill, too. We'll have to get used to it.
They'll learn how to bark and to kill. If the Jews
are a people and have a land, a country, this war
[World War Two]
will have created yet another murderous nation."
- Soazig Aaron : Refusal [Le Non de Klara] 2002.
Sunday 20 February 2022
Saturday 19 February 2022
Thinking of Elizabeth Bishop.
The art of losing well is hard to master.
We're not losing the planet prettily;
its loss is our disaster.
We'll end up as Bukowski's cat, crying
in deep shit - or alabaster
ever incapable of fun or laughter.
Death is in love with dying.
Friday 18 February 2022
There he was, the old fraud,
in a dirty back room, sly
and slouching on filthy old cushions,
watching the half-shattered screen,
fumbling, forlorn -
nothing done : not the dishes,
the washing, the cooking,
the crossword - all undone :
his ridiculous plans for the planet, his fly.
He was gazing at horrible porn.
He was God.
Thursday 17 February 2022
Even if
only one-fifth of men
and one-fifteenth of women
are private bullies,
there's a hell of a lot
of private unpleasantness about.
Wednesday 16 February 2022
Another horrifying little detail of colonial history.
In the 1860s, throughout the islands of the Pacific,
tens of thousands of boys and young men
were kidnapped from beaches and put onto boats.
They were then taken thousands of kilometres away to Australia,
where they were made to work and die on sugar-cane plantations.
The male population of the tiny island of Tanna
in the Vanuatu archipelago
(formerly the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides),
almost died out completely.
Dear Doctors,
The maiming of death
is a waste of the breath
of the world.
Yours despairingly,
Enjoying Entropy.
Tuesday 15 February 2022
Time
is not 'an ever-flowing stream'
or a river with a source and mouth.
Might it be
an ocean,
a whirlpool
a well
a useful notion
a fantasy on which
our foaming minds can swell ?
Monday 14 February 2022
Gems from 'Mein Kampf'.
Surely, I thought, the dog-loving Adolf Hitler
must have said one or two good
(or at least interesting) things in his thick declaration.
And indeed he did...just a few.
• 'In certain circles honesty is taken as an index of stupidity.'
• 'There is a better chance of seeing a camel pass through the eye of a needle than of seeing a really great man 'discovered' through an election.'
• 'Whenever human activity is directed exclusively to the service of the instinct for self-preservation it is called theft or usury, robbery or burglary etc.'
• 'Those who have no understanding of the political world around them have no right to criticise or complain.'
• 'His own fight for existence kills his sensibility for the misery of those who have been left behind.'
• 'I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only what I respect. And in order to respect a thing I must at least have some knowledge of it.'
• 'In this world is not the creative act of the genius always a protest against the inertia of the mass?'
• 'I wanted to become a painter and no power in the world could force me to become a civil servant.'
• 'Be proud of your compatriots when you don't have to be ashamed of any of its social classes.
[I guess the best way to achieve that is to eliminate the social class(es) which engender your shame.]
Sunday 13 February 2022
Words.
The fewer the better.
Give comes before My
Take comes before Away
Refuse comes before Please
I didn't know before I could talk
that the greatest privilege is
the right to be silent.
Rigidly Binary.
The philosopher Mary Midgley compiled a list
of cultural opposites in 1985,
reminiscent of the Pythagoreans’ idea of opposing principles,
which included:
Hard / Soft
Reason / Feeling, Emotion
Objective / Subjective
Quantity / Quality
Male / Female
Clarity / Mystery...
Midgley commented that the list served for scientists as a ‘mental map …
marked firmly with the general direction “keep to the left”’.
Saturday 12 February 2022
Friday 11 February 2022
Maybe
Jesus was fat like the Buddha
and the Buddha was Jesus-thin.
What a change of perception
by iconographic whim !
Thursday 10 February 2022
The Genius of Tyrants and Dictators
lies in realising just how stupid and servile
most people are. Mass-democracy is blighted
by the failure to create populations cleverer and more aware,
less fissile, self-serving and short-sighted.
Wednesday 9 February 2022
There is an old joke about
people in the Middle Ages being so backward that they didn't realise they were living in the Middle Ages
and men in the trenches of 1916 not knowing they were in the middle of the First World War
and us blissfully unaware that we are living at the end of the world.
what world ? which we ? what end ?
Tuesday 8 February 2022
Monday 7 February 2022
Sunday 6 February 2022
Beyond the pain
of consciousness I have glimpsed
a temporary Heaven
in gooseberry fool and biscuity champagne.
Saturday 5 February 2022
A Nietzschean Pronouncement.
So as to suffer comfort
beyond the dreams of Titus Andronicus,
Haroun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent,
we have to fight every waking hour
against a genial human nature,
and Nature in general - and are driven mad
by our ravages. Civilisation is
a diabolical conspiracy of savages.
Good news.
Since the 1970s, the problem for suiciders
has been in finding a quick and painless pill
to bring on The End.
Nembutal (Sodium pentobarbital,
which once gave me wonderful dreams)
is now available only to ancient addicts,
veterinarians (for supplying a kind exit
for animals) - or in Mexico.
So you need to be rich (and aware of scams)
or to have a friend who is a suicide-friendly
animal doctor in order to get it.
But help is at hand! Fentanyl
is here. A few grains are enough to kill
you quickly, efficiently and painlessly.
You only have to slum it for a bit
take a brief walk on the dark side -
though that might be as difficult
as getting to a pharmacy in Mexico.
Friday 4 February 2022
For centuries
people (mainly men) have played
intelligent games (backgammon,
chess and checkers, senet, go, oware/mancala...)
More recently, bridge, mah jongg and scrabble
became popular. But if further evidence
were needed of the infantilisation of the species,
it is supplied by the sudden popularity
of Wordle, a pointless puzzle-game
of chance much sillier than crosswords.
Thursday 3 February 2022
In the beginning
was begetting
and then the idea
of beginning
which presaged the end.
And 'beginning' became a word,
and words became lies,
and the lies were beguiling,
and the lie became divine.
Wednesday 2 February 2022
Even as Thomas Hardy
was composing his poem
the men harrowing clods in all weathers
were being replaced by machinery,
which would make European nations
ever more powerful and arrogant.
Tuesday 1 February 2022
Success
is mostly a matter of expectation.
(The greatest success is muddling through.)
Pity those poor failures
who had hoped
to go through life
unnoticed!
So neatly put !
after ten or so years of a proliferative mode in the online idiom -
there is a craving to return to an earlier, slower internet."
'Primitive People'
did not, I think, 'believe in spirits',
but rather, respected the numinosity
of nature, and its lack
of human ugliness.