I hear that men are spending

large sums of money
on 'masculine fragrances'.

I simply (and inexpenisvely)
shake a few drops of pure fennel
or camomile oil
down my trousers on Tuesdays.

A Rainbow Tripod-fish

just five metres below the surface.

photographed by Robert Stansfield

"Poems tell you

what you know already."
wrote the splendid Alan Bennett
in a review of a Philip Larkin Festschrift.

I think that if they tell you anything,
they more often tell you
what you half-know already.

'Quote of the Week'

(for a misanthrope) :

"when the situation demands, it I can be gratingly outgoing,
but it takes a lot out of me." 

– Tom Dowling

Better in than out ?

Wilde, Whitman and Carpenter.

Oscar Wilde visited Walt Whitman in Philadelphia –
perhaps "finding the whole family
(a general custom in Philadelphia on those warm evenings)
sitting out on the doorsteps—Whitman in the midst,
in an armchair, his white beard and hair glistening
in the young moonlight, looking like some old god –
the others grouped around him or at his feet,"
as recounted by Edward Carpenter.

The 21 unwritten rules...

...that non-white people in the USA
should adhere to every day
(and pale pinko-grey people
that are not shoplifters will be amazed by)

can be read here.

INCREDULITY.

Sometimes, maybe once or twice a year,
when I am surrounded by trees,

I suddenly, for an hour or so,
feel extraordinarily happy.

Political revolutions

always attract the wrong people.
They are often started by the wrong people.

Endemic Racism ?

Eurovision Song Contest

Tickets to be allocated to displaced Ukrainians in UK 

I don't remember tickets ever being allotted
to displaced Afghans who worked for the British,
or Syrians (who didn't)...

But of course, no Afghans or Syrians were performing –
and might well have wondered what insanity they were attending.

Have they no shame ?

 

Interchange, Guangzhou, China
– Chek Poh Wong

Viewed from my balcony

this evening, at 18.31 hours GMT
(19h31 here in south-west France)
the crescent Moon, Jupiter and Venus
were in diagonal alignment
in the western sky.

(No photo available; just imagine it.)

One Year On...

...and the British Finance Minister
who funded the Iraq outrage
is bleating about indicting Vladimir Putin
for War Crimes.  Will Mr Putin be kidnapped
from the Kremlin, or will he be hiding in a hole
like Saddam Hussain ?

There can be no justification in puffing this pipe-dream
until Messrs. Blair, Bush and Brown himself
are indicted for war crimes against the people of Iraq
in defiance of the United Nations

– or are committed to a safe and windowless institution
for the criminally insane. 

Many (in fact most) 'democracies' have been
and continue to be criminal.
The War Crimes, Genocides, Crimes Against Humanity,
and Crimes against the Planet
wrought by Britain and the USA alone
would fill a page the size of a large national flag.

On the term 'Brit' as a term of abuse,

but now, characteristically, a smugly favourite term
used by the English in reference to themselves :

I first heard the word used contemptuously
by Irish Republicans in Belfast in 1970.
It was probably originally imported
during the Irish liberation movement
from the U.S.A.,
where it was apparently first recorded in 1901, and
was considered offensive by Englishmen travelling in the States, who regarded it as another instance of the "odious vulgarism" of the Americans. 
But Bret and Bryt were common Old English words for the (Celtic) Britons and survived until c. 1300. In Old French, Bret as an adjective meant "British, Breton; cunning, crafty; simple-minded, stupid." [from the online Etymological Dictionary]

* * *

In recent years, unfortunately, the word Britain 
has largely been replaced by the awkward and ugly U.K.
– even as far as changing the international vehicle plate
(after Brexit) from GB to UK. But an F can easily be added.

 

Over a third of the world’s rivers

likely contain harmful levels of drugs
of all kinds, legal, illegal and unidentified.
For example,  a 2021 study  found cocaine
from the urine of Glastonbury festival-goers
in the eels in a nearby river

Eels on coke? Sounds slippery.
 Just wait until you hear about
all the wild brown trout in the Czech Republic
'on' methamphetamine.

The Autocratic, Demagogic Trick

is the ability to win elections
by encouraging people
to mistake their fear for love.

The Fourth (World-wide) Reich.

 'Do you really believe
that American capitalism
will make the world a safe, sweet place ?
It will pick it dry.'

– John le Carré: Absolute Friends, 2003.

The chicken

'who sailed the world.'

When I was young

I could not imagine a career
or being under someone's thumb
from nine to five.
I just wanted to be wise.

And so I read philosophy
(for a while) at university.

This was silly  –
mere escapism.

Wisdom is not knowledge –
not even knowledge of philosophy.
It consists, as Joseph Heller almost suggested
in the suspicion that there is no such thing,

*  *  *  *  *

Amongst the many things that destroy the pursuit (even the idea) of wisdom are "issues of identity".

In 'The Closing of the American Mind' (1987), for example, the American philosopher Allan Bloom argued that the point of an education should be to explore ‘what is accessible to all men as men [we will now include women and trans-people] through their common and distinctive faculty, reason.’ 

He found, however, that universities were more likely to teach a cultural relativism focused on how different cultures approached truth. 

According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested on an individual level, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender or race – not their common concern for what it meant to be wise. Moreover, no one was encouraging them to do otherwise: ‘[F]athers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise.’

from my Transatlantic Dictionary.

American: Ticked off
= BritIish: Pissed off, annoyed

BritIrish: Piss off! (also Bugger off!
(cf French: Fous le camp!)
= American: Buzz off! Get lost! (arch.)Vamoose!

BritIrish: He pissed off and left us in the lurch*.

BritIrish: Ticked off
= American: Reprimanded, bawled out

American: I could care less
= BritIrish: I couldn't care less

*a 16th-century French dice game, lourche, where to incur a lurch meant to be far behind the other players.

The full title of the last Austrian emperor was:

His Majesty Franz Josef,
Emperor of Austria,
King of Hungary and Bohemia,
King of Lombardy-Venetia,
King of Dalmatia, Croatia,
Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomiria and Illyria,
Grand Duke of Tuscany,
King of Jerusalem and Duke of Auschwitz.

He waged war on Serbia,
and his empire fell to bits.

A very demure 'Satanic Idol',

Baphomet* greets demure
and well-dressed
middle-class white children
in the Satanic Temple, 
Salem, Massachusetts.

I weep for Satanism.

*a mediæval corruption of Mahomet (M'hamed).

Vladimir Putin is waging war against it.

On the 30th of September, 2022, he spoke of the “dictatorship of the Western elites” and how the “complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a ‘religion in reverse’ – pure Satanism.”
Invocations of Satanism are now routine. Dmitry Medvedev, the former prime minister of Russia, spoke in November  of a sacred fight against Satanism. The aim of the war was to “stop the supreme ruler of Hell, whatever name he uses – Satan, Lucifer or Iblis [Iblis is the Islamic counterpart of Satan]”,  adding that the fight was against “crazy Nazi drug addicts” in Ukraine backed by Westerners who had “saliva running down their chins from degeneracy”.

Russian media has stories of “misanthropic cults, who make sacrifices and commit ritual murders” and Ukrainian soldiers in occult goat masks!
 
The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, picking up a common theme, links Satanism with gay marriage: “Satanic democracy is when children are taken from traditional families and transferred to same-sex families… I see degradation and Satanism in this.”

            from Comment is Freed

Today's other news.

Syria: at least 53 people killed while truffle-hunting in suspected 'Islamic State' attack.

My Pleiospilos nelii

is flowering every day
between 3.30 and 5 p.m.,
which is Afternoon Tea time
in the Karoo Desert.

Photo of Very Civilised Succulent by Anthony Weir

"Easy to do justice;

very hard to do right."

– Terence Rattigan, The Winslow Boy.

A Nobody in Oppressive Light.

"No one who's content with himself ever needed help,
unless he happened to be in an accident
and was brought to the hospital".

– Robert Walser

Because they wanted me to be respectable
I stole books from booksellers

Because they wanted me to be a doctor
I became permanently unemployed

Because they wanted me to be normal
I questioned every facet of normality

and became a nobody.

"Pigs in Blankets".

Guys - if you're missing
your foreskins, here's
what we can do.

The Local Government Magazine

arrived the other day
with headlines about saving energy.

It urged its readers
to use smaller fonts
in e-mails, and to print in grey rather than black.

It did suggest that people not keep on buying
or renting the latest smartphone – but

needless to say,
it did not advise the population of the
département of Tarn-et-Garonne
to wash themselves and their clothes a little less
(some people shower every day
and wear underclothes only once),
nor to stop buying bottled water,

nor to buy fewer (or second-hand)
world-throttling clothes...or
gadgets that they don't need –

much less to give up one-use diapers/nappies
and think long and deeply before adding
another mega-consumer to the population. 

Affection,

fondness,
intimate and mutual
appreciation,
best-friendship

all mean more than love
– especially when combined.

Certainly, I would rather be
appreciated than loved,
perhaps because I felt loved
rather than appreciated
as a child,

and would rather be
(and have been) treasured
than measured.

Snakes have a clitoris:

 "Scientists overcome 
 ‘a massive taboo 
 around female genitalia’." 

This painting

(by Leon Kossoff)
pretty well indicates what my school was like
in the 1950s, and how I felt about it.

 

The Group Therapist said:

Imagine yourself aged four or five...
Imagine that little boy coming into the room...
What would you say to him ?

I'd say: Let's get out of here fast –
or: Escape now – I'll hold the door open,
and hold them back
and trip them up, if necessary!

Mixed metaphor ?

Having for millennia
dammed and reduced the river of time,
we are still turds in life's sewer,
furious but mere 'complexities
of blood and mire'.

from The Neanderthal Times.

Hairless hominid, H. Sapiens, of no fixed abode,
pleads Not Guilty to historic sex-crime charges.

One of the less-mentioned tragedies

of the twentieth century
was that the word Communist
became completely (con)fused
with the word Soviet and
the vicious, hierarchical
Russian totalitarianism
which bore no relation to the two-month
Paris Commune of 1871.

For 1,500 years or more

pieces of The True Cross,
and other relics such as saints' bones
and Jesus' foreskin,
have been sold both to the naively pious
and to unscrupulous monastic developers. 

But now the trade in bogus relics has moved online,
 to the fury of traditional Catholics. 

The Publishing Sensation of the Year!

The book they're all talking about:

   Everybody is a Turd
     the delusion of being

  by Bodhisattv'anthony Weir.

Linguistic curiosity.

The first regular radio programmes
in the Welsh language
were not made by the BBC in Wales,
but by Radio Éireann from Ireland
in 1927.

Are there more kinds

of human misery than there are
of human happiness,

or is all misery the same,
and all happiness the one,
as apparently in dogs ?

(And is there Buddha-misery
as apparently in mice ?)

I regret to announce the Death

of a pathetic little smugness
killed by the discovery
that the burning in my glass-fronted stove
of local lopped and dead oak,
cut and dried for two years, 

is much more polluting
than the burning of coal or even peat,
and far more toxic
than expensive oil-fired
central heating which I hate
– and could not possibly afford.

'Art'

has become
the business of the charlatan

as 'sport' has become
the money-laundry of the obscenely rich.

Poetry and War.

'Supporting the war effort
has become a form of therapy,
if not a cure, for many Ukrainians.

Galina wants to write poetry about life and love,
but she stops herself. 

She is not sure that during a war
you can write about something other than war.
But if you write only about war, then it is, as it were, magnified.'

– Andrei Kurkov

Outraged

that 'homosexuality' is no longer
deliciously dissident, I shall start
a Facebook group of homo-asexual,
antinatalist, misanthropic autists
against Normality. 
But I'd have to join Facebook...

(in the LGBTQA to Z' community'
or 'community of communities'
the least buzz is made
by the happy Bs.)

Television destroyed

ceremony.

The internet destroyed
sensuality.

And thus, again, more subtly
through 'soft power'
'the ceremony of innocence is drowned.' 

Before – and after Rilke.

Darkness contains everything:

form, flame, being, beast and mind;

absorbs all panoply and might,

enfolds mankind. 

And the other animals don't realise

that we share one of our most striking
and destructive features
with only one of all the other creatures :

the axolotl.