"Why thou shalt not kill ?
Killing someone is doing them a favour
and God hates that sort of thing."
– Our Lady of the Assassins (El Virgen de los Sicarios),
Colombia, 2000.
Jesus (or maybe it was Judas) said
There is too much patriarchy.
Peter had him crucified.
Breathing is madness.
It is hard to stop.
But, unlike the rain,
once stopped
it doesn't start again.
so many songs:
the same banal melody,
hackneyed (knock-kneed) lyrics,
hothouse emotions
of childish girls and boys,
a parasitic industry
and much empty noise.
is a statue shat on by birds.
– Our Lady of the Assassins (El Virgen de los Sicarios),
Colombia, 2000.
that some of what I write
is hard to take.
But if I wrote acceptably
it and I would just be fake.
and the English and the French of 150 years ago,
Americans fearfully believe (and promulgate
to all Barbarians and Lesser Breeds)
that they are the world they dominate.
A chap wrote to me
asking if I would send him a signed copy
of one of my books, published in 1985.
I don't have spare copies, of course,
but I looked online to check on prices, and found
this picture of a $60 first edition (unsigned).
Below this curious and awkward image, however,
was a neat synopsis, which I have copied 'for the record':
Sexually explicit sculptures may be found on a number of medieval churches in France and Spain. This fascinating study examines the origins and purposes of these sculptures, viewing them not as magical fertility symbols, nor even as idols of ancient pre-Christian religions, but as serious works that dealt with the sexual customs and salvation of medieval folk, and thus gave support to the Church's moral teachings.
A county Donegal cottage 1978 by Le Garsmeur.
According to my memory around the same time
an authentic photo, but the dog is missing.
No animal knows
how limited it is.
But most animals know
their limits,
unlike humans
who become more limited
as they become more powerful.
I languish in the no-mans-land
between language, feeling and the world.
My mother was not a country
but a 'fallen woman'.
Ireland, at best, was a distant
disapproving cousin.
in 1976, on a Romanesque church in the west of France.
I thought it was a representation of drunkenness
amongst other depictions of sins particularly condemned
by the moralists of the 11th and 12th centuries.
I was (of course) wrong. It shows a sinful man,
but he is not a drunkard. He is a musician, a category
loathed by the Christian Moralists because, to them,
music meant dancing, and dancing meant sex.
Corbels on the outside of churches often showed
Unchristian Behaviour and Spectacle,
and featured acrobats, contortionists, dancing bears,
exhibitionists, mummers and actors, lascivious animals
(pigs and dogs being the most common).
This corbel*, on the parish church at Givrezac
in western France, shows a Dolio-player,
not a man drinking straight from a barrel.
Because non-religious music led to sexual immorality
he is shown with diabolical (pointy) genitals.
He is also wearing a horned cap, such as an actor
or jongleur might wear,
to emphasise his devilish unacceptabliity.
Hundreds of such corbels can be seen on French and Spanish churches.
The consumption of alcohol was not discouraged
because weak beers and wines were the only liquids
(apart from milk)
that could be drunk safely, especially on the busy Pilgrim (Religious-tourist)
Roads to Rome and Compostela, along which monasteries
(mostly Benedictine) ran canteens and dormitories
and hospices and mortuary (and probably insurance) services.
In the twelfth century over a million Pilgrims (Religious Tourists)
crossed the Pyrenees on their way to Santiago de Compostela.
and so it goes
*a corbel is a bracket support for an architectural weight,
in this case the weight of a barrel-vaulted roof
resting on a beam of stone or wood laid along the wall of the nave of a church.
The word derives from the French for Raven (corbeau, corbie in vernacular English)
– don't ask me why! Perversely, the French for this type of figurative corbel is modillon.
Let the hypocrites,
the voluptuous ascetics,
drone on about the Paradise Garden,
victim of the spade
and heavenly herbicide.
"Journey's End.
How hard we try to reach death safely,
luggage intact, each child accounted for..."
– Linda Pastan, from Selected Poems, London 1979.
I discovered that most conversations contained
small, almost unnoticeable lies.
— Henning Mankell
gradually diminished human consciousness,
by shifting it from an internal
location in sound
to external artefacts
which we had, expensively,
to learn to read –
a process which sucked out and reduced our minds
while we were being programmed to depend upon it.
Printing, cinema, television and smartphones
have all contributed to the Great Diminishing
of human consciousness,
which has been so restricted and enfeebled
that it can now be encompassed and expressed by robots.
don't seem to realise
that all the Aliens in this galaxy
were deported – or perhaps they flocked –
to Planet Earth
to miscegenate and multiply
in regenerating misery.
male African elephants were generally left to rot,
though their ears were sometimes used as plates.
in the theomanic USA – where there are so many churches,
and so many tax-exempt businesses
calling themselves churches –
that there is no Church of the Cosmic Antichrist ?
All contributions gratefully accepted
in the Holy and Cosmic Campaign
for the establishment of the True Religion
of the Future and Infinite Zeitgeist.
As empires become larger, more transient
and more destructive, the miasmic empire
of the USA strangles and corrupts, pollutes
and dehydrates the planet
with its puritan, prurient consumerist morality
while it collapses bleakly into the category
Failed Experiment in Individualist
Majoritarian Democracy.
The reason why most Christians consider suicide
to be worse than murder, mass-murder or genocide
is that it is impossible to repent after killing yourself.
But if you tried,
mere verbal repentance before a priest
is enough to exonerate you – if you haven't died.
other than terror
that is not 'mixed' ?
I'm glad that I'm alone in my senescence.
I don't feel deprived.
Friends and family might only
keep me unwillingly alive.
I couldn’t identify bullies and traitors
amongst teachers and fellow-pupils
until they bullied and betrayed me.
(They were not many,
but they were disheartening.)
Even then,
I didn’t give them as wide a berth as I should have,
thinking that they might 'give over'
if I could (as a boy who could not fight,
but just curled up like a spineless hedgehog ?)
somehow win their favor.
I think that my ‘theory of mind’ must be defective.
Hitler's certainly was.
First ban, then burn for its profanity.
(Savonarola, Hitler...)
I always thought the Bible
was a grim and macho vanity.
has been made fluffy
and put in a
pet-hamster box.
No-one has considered
that Stalin or Hitler
might have been on the autistic spectrum.
If so, they have probably been silenced
and expelled from Club Global Psychobabble.
The world (obviously) belongs to
and is defined by the relentlessly normal,
whom I find shallow.
I had considerable fellow-feeling
(on writing this two months ago)
with the end-of-season, wrinkled, sallow
Brussels Sprouts that I was peeling.
means that you actually end up in situations where you won’t actually feel like you have a whole bunch of options.”
– Professor Timothy Snyder
according to the BBC and famous litter-picker David Sedaris,
is blighted by trash. This is certainly true of Ireland.
But in rural France I can drive for 20 miles
without seeing a speck of litter or an abandoned mattress,
though I once saw a rusty Citroën 2CV looking good
covered with ivy, vines and periwinkle in a wood.
Stopping the clocks
when somebody dies
is like not eating meat
while the world fries.
— a vegetarian.
Apart from individual degenerative
diseases of the brain and body,
growing old is itself a degeneration.
And humans are perhaps
a degenerative disease of evolution.
Solitary intellectual fools like me
can easily talk themselves
into incapable senility.
I had a friend whose armpits
smelled deliciously of moist pipe-tobacco
and cardamom.
I don't eat anything which has eyes,
but my pyjama-top this morning
had a pleasant odour of smoked ham.
Three of my paintings (dating from between 1967 and 2023), which I have hung 24/7 on the trafficless street outside my house. The few sheople who pass don't notice them. They are looking at their zombiphones.
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| Sunset, detail |
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| Lemminkäinen and the Old Woman of Pohja. |
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| Detail of hArtMonies/arTgent |
The older I get
the faster people seem to talk –
but maybe people really
are speaking ever more quickly.
