I never did.
My third-hand, home-made teddy with two different button-eyes
and darned dungarees called Dandy,
was good enough for me - nearly as good as a dog.
He is upstairs in my bedroom, together with Siegfried the Snake
knitted and stuffed by my aunt (as a draught-excluder).
He has resisted the moths for nearly a century, is entirely without spite,
and he has graciously permitted me to feature him in several Nature-Mortes
(this one dating from 1982, where he is on the right).
of children are sex-trafficked world-wide every year.
Yet you could be imprisoned in 71 countries
(plus some of the United States) just for being queer.
has been deployed to wander around the ruins of ancient Pompeii,
identifying structural and safety issues
while delving underground to inspect tunnels dug by relic thieves.
are the filling in the social sandwich,
comfortably cushioned between
child-sex-traffickers and
'high-end' art-dealers.
Thank you for enabling an octogenarian
to define himself (!) retrospectively
as Sapio-scolio-homo-sensual.
But for me,
the whole point of not being heterosexual
(with its misogynies, hierarchies
and competitiveness) was:
not being heterosexual.
But once the queers liberated themselves,
a lot of them abandoned the cruising-spots
(though maybe not their self-loathing)
to blend with 'normal' bigoted nasties,
like sheep in wolves' clothing.
Some even went on to become neo-nazis.
and for time past,
and for what little remains of our future.
 |
| Anselm Kiefer |
to a degree of which
humans are not capable."
- Matthew Parris in his autobiography Chance Witness.
says that being human is a distraction from being.
My beloved Electra
(photographed in 1969 in front of my house in Caledon)
once told me that
humans are unbalanced animals.
Despite its claims to Blue Sky Thinking
human understanding is inevitably
a tightly closed system.
a branch of the planet-destroying
U.S. Department of Agriculture kills
over 1.75 million wild animals a year.
by traps, snares, poison, gassing,
'cyanide-bombs' and by shooting from helicopters.
Meanwhile, millions of domestic pets
are obese and suffering from inappropriate diets
of slaughtered domestic animals, toxic carbohydrates
and trawler-factory fish.
didn't want to be wise
- at least not in 1940.
But he was wise enough.
Mao-Zedong
was not wrong in writing
the commonplace observation
that a change in your condition
will likely bring some change in your thinking.
He had no humility.
He even claimed to know the thought-processes of frogs.
The frog at the bottom of the well thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well.
If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view." -- Mao Zedong.
And millions were killed and starved because of his stupidity.
I can discern the difference between
Homophonic and Homophobic
only by watching your lips.
The advantage of being
'a little hard of hearing'
is that I can tell people
that I'm more than a bit deaf,
and thus avoid chit-chat
(which I find very wearing)
and being talked at
and talked at.
Some bears have died after unwittingly eating poison
laid down by truffle hunters intended for their rivals’ dogs.
Probably. It hardly matters.
There are a thousand more weapons
than crutches or false legs,
and all nation-states consider spending
on climate-change to be secondary
to the buying of arms and the upkeep
of the climate-changing military.
is that we can experience only one version of reality at a time,
and are mostly incapable even of imagining another version.
Dogs, however (liminal and superior beings)
can experience at least two versions simultaneously —
one of them through their noses.
Compared with dogs, the greatest scientists are stupid.
see also: https://aeon.co/essays/who-could-dogs-become-without-humans-in-their-lives
Moneymore in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with money:
it means Big Bog. But Richhill was named by Scottish
Presbyterian 'planters' who, replacing expelled Catholics,
couldn't believe their luck. Similarly here in south-west France
there is a place called Good Fortune (Fortounas),
and one called Paradis. Today I passed by Camelot.
In my village there is a Chemin de Paradis
which leads up to sweet air where the rich folk used to live,
and a Chemin de Lifernet which leads down to the bottom of the glen:
L'Infernet, or Little Hell. I live at the top of the Rue de Lifernet,
near the defensive castle built for aggressive gentlemen.
The more refined and processed food we eat
the narrower our faces
and the smaller our jaws become.
Our sinuses shrink
and we breathe through our mouths
so that we're prone to more airborne pandemics
and are even less adaptable than we think.
will not get rid of itself, for sure -
not even by nuclear war.
Too late to state that, as with any disease,
prevention is better than cure.
For example -
crocodiles are (or have been) revered (or worshipped)
in southern Asia, west Africa, and ancient Egypt.
This animal of chthonic and æonical distinction
has inhabited our active earth for 250 million years
through serious climate changes, geological upheavals,
pole-reversal and at least two mass-extinctions.
Let us pray -
that they survive the present one contrived by Man,
who, compared with the Venerable Crocodile,
is a momentary flash (or turd) in the evolutionary pan.
the self-aggrandising and pernicious myth
of Human Adaptability, I observe that
we adapt to each other - when it suits us.
But, as for our immediate environment
and the world, we adapt them
according to our demands.
our ever-increasing desires, destroying forests,
creating deserts...polluting everything
and making millions of animals captive.
Indeed, ours may be
the species that is least adaptive.
A southerly air stream
stretching from Mauretania to Lapland
is warming up the Arctic.
Clear skies in Ukraine.
Then there was the Truth Delusion,
each an infantile attempt at 'understanding'
(describing, categorising, controlling)
Life, The World and Everything.
Both are based on faith, each has its theology.
It's all Social Anthropology.
by Gustave-Henri Jossot,
a French-Tunisian convert to Islam.
OUTSIDE THE HERD
I live outside the herd; I keep away from all of you, your shepherds and your dogs.
I have renounced everything that takes up all your attention; I have broken with your traditions; I want nothing to do with your deranged society; its lies and hypocrisy disgust me. Inside your civilisation of falsehood I isolate myself, I take refuge within myself; I find peace only in solitude.
I don't want to be around you any more; I'm avoiding you because you are all mad: you rush to live faster; you hurry, you run, you jostle each other. Your fevered existence prevents you from thinking, dreaming, feeling. And all this frenzy has no other cause than your greed for gain: making money is for you the supreme law; getting rich is your sole aim. You only know how to work, sweat and vote.
It is for Filthy Lucre, this god of our filthy age, that you declare war; it is for it that you kill or have killed. You make yourself miserable for it; you exhaust yourself, you commit suicide for it. It does not occur to you to restrict your needs, to suppress your desires, to pacify your hearts. Not one of you has the intention of breaking out of your infernal comfort.
Of course, it is all because you have been thrown into the vicious cycle since birth. Before you came into the world, your fate was already decided, your life mapped out, and as soon as you appeared, you were subjected to all sorts of influences, first Family, then Education, then Military Service, and finally Normality.
You have been taught to model your existence on that of your parents; your feelings have been reduced to culverts; your natural aspirations have been choked; you have had 'morality' pumped into you; you have been smeared with religious beliefs; you have been prescribed civic duties and mundane obligations; you have been pounded and shredded; you have been crushed by conventions and prejudices.
They have imposed rules on you; they have surrounded you with constraints; they have erected barriers before you and around you; they have put you in chains.
Your individuality has been so squashed that you have lost even your sense of self. And when a non-conformist, wiping the false values away, seeks to explain to you the sublime poem of life, to reveal the truth to you, to denounce the artificialities that distort it, the conventions that mutilate it, the lies that disfigure it, you refuse to listen. If he tries to purify your mind by raising it above the morbid materialist miasma, if he tells you about the inner life, the only one worth living, you sneer and call him crazy - you moral defectives!
Sheeple all, you all share the same herd mentality; you all bleat the same banalities. That is why I avoid you all, your shepherds and your dogs.
JOSSOT, 1939, translated by वृक
the acquired obsession with labelling, dividing,
excluding, rejecting - instead of accepting
the multi-mega-micro-muchness of everything.
the current - sixth - mass extinction
of life upon the planet, which we
are mindlessly engineering and only
pretending to try to prevent,
is (so far) one of the lesser wipe-outs,
and it will be only a couple of hundreds
of thousands of years before animals
and plants and fungi old and new
will repopulate the world (without us)
and without too much ado.
was à la mode,
almost de rigueur
until very, very recently.
Suddenly, it's impossible
to do it decently.
I have never seen
a universe in a grain of sand,
but I see a desert in a piece of meat,
a holocaust in a baby's hand.
The writing beneath quotes Volodomyr Zelenskiy:
"I really don't want photos of me in your offices,
because I am neither a god nor an icon,
but rather a
servant of the Nation.
Instead, put up pictures of your children
and look at
them whenever you need to make a decision."
from chit-chat conversation
and its banalities
pretensions
insinuations
stupidities
denials
evasions
accusations
misinformation
and lies.
And death has dominion!
because we who demand
and impose it are death,
entropy's impatient minion.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin:
We have introduced the death penalty
for Journalists.
Journalist:
For what offence ?
V.V. Putin:
The offence of Journalism, of course.
 |
| 'Russia does not start wars : it ends them.' |
Recent revelations suggest
that religions exist partly
to privilege sexual access
by a chosen priestly few
to children and young adults,
and this is perhaps the reason
why solitary, voluntary, pleasurable
masturbation has been so widely made taboo.
The Not So Bad
The Sometimes-Bad
The Bad
The Very Bad
The Evil
and The Satanic.
because it is the poor who make them rich
(and not just relatively) which
for sure is why the rich despise and fear the poor.
it is common to exaggerate the opponent's position
so that a comparison can be made between the opponent and Hitler."
— from A List of Fallacious Arguments.
remembering mainly the sadnesses
because the pleasures were shared
with the lamented dead.
Neither plastic nor plutonium can be recycled into nothing.
I will probably not be abandoning electricity before I die.
I am helping in my inevitably small way
to heat up the planet merely by writing this and breathing.
Better the shootin'
and destruction and lootin'
and millions of refugees
than Putin ?
Unimaginable roads are paved with good and terrible intentions.
Francisco Franco, the Spanish Fascist dictator,
ruled almost 3 times longer than Adolf Hitler.
But he murdered only Spaniards
(especially Catalans and Basques),
few Roma and fewer Jews.
So, after World War 2, his reign of terror
hardly featured in The News.
“Have you captured a Russian tank or armoured personnel carrier,
and are you worried about how to declare it ? No need.
Keep calm and continue to defend the Motherland!”
- Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Agency
(via Interfax news service.)
the patriotic myths of modern nations
are (at best) perversions of the truth
is that 'the nation state'
is itself an uncomfortable lie.
How to be as Tagore says,
"at home in the everything" ?
How to be at home in anything ?
How to be at home in the pullulating
nothing ?
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