Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Wednesday 30 November 2022

The problem of translation.

I have recently sold a portrait
of a German guy who visited me,
with his partner, in 1985.
He had Parkinson's Disease
and had a serious mobility problem.

Around him is a quotation from Rilke
which is perfectly comprehensible
but almost untranslatable:

Nur im Raum der Klage darf die Rühmung gehn.

Praise/glorification can only come/arise/emerge
from within lamentation/sorrow/mourning/grieving/grief...




Tuesday 29 November 2022

Descent into chaos.

I wonder
if the rise of inane and infantile music
as serious culture
led to the rise of divisive populism
as serious politics...


Sunday 27 November 2022

Thursday 24 November 2022

It is the ultimate anthropomorphism

to declare that Life on Earth
is a Huge Mistake.

But we are doing our best
to erase it.


Tuesday 22 November 2022

A great metaphor for life.

'The great thing about a walled town:

no matter how lost you get, 

you eventually come to a wall.'


– Tim Dowling


Well, actually...


 















...the world is indeed run by cabals, conspirators,
autocrats and criminals.
You just have to identify the true conspiracies
– such as conspiracies to disseminate
conspiracy theories


Monday 21 November 2022

'Original Sin'

is an obtuse way of saying
that we are intrinsically evil.
We are made even worse
by the wicked fiction
of redemption. 

'The only good human being is a dead one.'


Animal Lanterns to cheer us up !


Saturday 19 November 2022

So much art

is now self-advertisement.


How many delegates to COP-27

in sun-baked Southern Egypt
are reducing
their personal use of water ?



On the 100th anniversary of his death,

I still find him unreadable
in either French or English.

He showed, at mind-numbing length
how odious are they who live in luxury.

He was pretty odious himself.

The Dead Proust, by Man Ray.



Friday 18 November 2022

Some of the 40,000 Russian refugees

(including colonels and counts)
who fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution
drove taxis, just as Putin had to do to keep alive
seventy years later
when the Turbo-capitalist invasion
hung his country out to dry.

(The fabulously rich Russians were already there.)


Thursday 17 November 2022

Oscar Wilde did not remark

that the trouble with civilisation
is its brain-washing vulgarity.


This quiet medieval village

is a good place to be.
I never lock my house,
nor my car, which I park
on a very quiet street
100 metres from my house
along with a trailer
currently half-full of firewood.
Yesterday I left 60 euros
on the front passenger seat
where I discovered them this afternoon.




Wednesday 16 November 2022

'Even the dead can't escape climate change.'

 


Ericky Boniphace’s photographic project –
Even The Dead Can’t Escape Climate Change
– followed labourers disinterring the remains of those buried
in a cemetery near Dar-Es-Salaam’s Msimbazi River.
For several years in a row
rising water levels have eroded the land the cemetery sits on
and swept graves away.

An admonishment

to humans and literate pets.



Tuesday 15 November 2022

'New Liberal Economics' ensure

that the inevitable poor pay
proportionally more in taxes than anyone else,
because most tax-revenue comes
from 'goods and services', alcohol and energy.

In Ukraine,










CT215, a French street-artist,
is Doing His Bit for Democracy
with stencils.

"The Western News Media" are not mentioning
the inevitable (if small) Ukrainian atrocities...


Monday 14 November 2022

Sunday 13 November 2022

We all go through

The Almost-Universal Brainwash:

that we should Like Other Sheople
(except those whom we are taught
to dislike or to hate).


Light-show,

Salisbury cathedral
(twelfth century).

Ah, the music to accompany it!


Saturday 12 November 2022

Thursday 10 November 2022

Although human language is a disaster

for the planet, at least
it is possible to say so.
But numbers cannot ever indicate
the catastrophe of numbers.


A famous war-correspondent,

Independent Member of Parliament
and UNICEF Special Representative
for Humanitarian Emergencies,
wrote of the United States:

Of all the 90 countries that I worked in
[as foreign correspondent for the BBC]
it seemed to me. with the possible exception
of Equatorial Guinea, to be the most alien.

– Martin Bell, Through Gates of Fire, 2003, p.149.


Wednesday 9 November 2022

It is hard to be kind

and honest and transparent
because transparency is thought to be unkind.


Tuesday 8 November 2022

"What a misshapen and ridiculous

thing the penis was!  Half of them didn't even
work properly, and all of them looked pathetic
and detachable, like some wrinkled sea-creature
– like something you'd find goggling at you
and swaying in an aquarium." 

– Paul Theroux: Doctor Slaughter, 1984.


Winter's coming in Ukraine.

A man in Kyiv
shows how, in the event of no electricity or gas,
he would erect a tent in his flat
and pass the nights in a sleeping-bag inside it.

Breathing inside a small tent, he said,
will keep me warm.


Sunday 6 November 2022

So...why not cannibalism ?

Anthropologists don't talk about sins,
but they do make value-judgements
which are largely Abrahamic
(or should I say Abrahamist ?). 

If I were to consider flaws as sins
I'd say that the first sin was
to regard sex as other than fun;

and the second was
to view animals as other.

As for the third
and maybe subsequent sins
I'll need to ponder further.


Saturday 5 November 2022

The two ugliest mammals

are, surely, the tiny, harmless
naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber)










and the paler forms of naked human ape
(Homo sapiens amens var. pallidus). 


Friday 4 November 2022

It seems obvious,

after you reflect a little:

To know too much is not
to know everything.


Thursday 3 November 2022

Flesh of their flesh.

Only the very corrupt
(and politicians)
can even imagine the corruption
of the very rich. 


'Drop-box Babies'.

'Until women's constitutional right to abortion in the USA was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2922, no one gave much thought to Safe Haven laws

These allow a mother to give up her new-born baby for adoption, at a designated site, anonymously and without risk of prosecution. 'Safe Haven' legislation first appeared in the US in 1999 in Texas, in response to a rise in the number of abandoned babies. Now it exists in every state. These laws were never intended as an alternative to abortion. But as the options for unhappily-pregnant women diminish, some are anticipating an increase in the number of babies left by desperate mothers in hospitals and specially designed Baby Boxes at local fire stations.'

(report from The BBC)

In earlier times, such drop-boxes, baby-hatches or niches were organised informally (if not always anonymously) by the Catholic Church.  Here is one (no longer used) in my village of Caylus in SW France.



Tuesday 1 November 2022

If Russia

'is where idealists are sent to die',

America is where they are genetically modified.

 

Collins Dictionary 'Word of the Year' –

Permacrisis.

It should have been
the first word ever,
maybe even
the First Word of God.