Today's photo.

Time is abstract of trauma.

Part for part: a kidney has been paid
for just part of his failed migration from Eritrea.

 

Skyscrapers

and, before them, banks
have been described, decried
as Cathedrals to Money,
Towers of Mammon.
But cathedrals and temples always
were the result of great endowment
by moral and spiritual famine.

Are they ignorant as well as stupid ?

The Israelis have announced
a General Plan for Gaza,
a zone of their most intense interest,

eerily reminding us of the Nazi
General Government of Poland (1939-1945)

administered by one of the worst war-criminals,
General Hans Frank.

'The Jews' (I term I hate to use)
are currently and perhaps henceforth
known more for their vengeance
than their suffering.

And maybe
sometime soon, some A.I. fake-news video
will show an Israeli soldier eating
a Palestinian baby.

Let us not bemoan

(the) loss of 'innocence',
but the lack (and fear) of intimacy
which has little to do with sex
(except tangentially)
and whose absence turns us into
reality-reducing wrecks.

The Age of Extinction

 

MEANWHILE...

Middle-class Meanness.

There was a lavatory (beyond the coalhouse)
in the gloomy back-yard
of our narrow, semi-detached victorian house :

for lower-status people,
the sort who came only to the back door.
It was probably not meant for men to piss in
unless they took their trousers down.

Although we had scratchy, unabsorbent
'medicated' toilet-roll
in our small bathroom-lavatory upstairs,

the outside installation
which I always thought was not too clean
had torn bits of The Radio Times
or The Northern Whig
(a rag as right-wing as The Daily Mail)

hanging from a loop of string
upon a rusty nail. 
As a child
it didn't cross my foggy mind that this was mean. 

It housed a yard-brush, a garden fork, a spade....
as well as spiders. earwigs and the occasional snail.

It was like this, with bench seat
and circular hole, (and a front panel)
but the walls were distempered yellow.

"In the International Arena,"
the same meanness
of Europe and NATO
in doling out proper assistance
in dribs and drabs
almost cost Europe's
outside lavatory (Ukraine)
its very existence.

Thylacine

is not a psychedelic substance
but the shy, nocturnal,
dog-like, marsupial, extinct
Tasmanian Tiger

which may soon
be 'resurrected'
– before the Trump of Doom.

last one, photographed in 1936.

From merely creating

disastrous monocultures
we have now become one.

Black Hole.

 

Messier-87

A tiny chunk of a neutron star,
the size of a sugar cube,
could weigh a billion tons. 

More challenging than
the mysteries of astrophysics
is the infinitesimal question of how
the animal minds that can approach
(and indeed photograph) them

can wage senseless, bloody
wars for ownership of bits
of the tiny, ultimately ownerless Earth.

The nearest that Nature

gets to Everlasting Life upon this planet
is the eternal, equal fight
between its two smallest, most basic critters:
bacteria and viral bacteria-eaters.

One day's headlines from one newspaper.

 

Why is it so rare ?
It is such wonderful
and justified revenge.
I love Lorena Bobbitt –
and the brave few others.

Unfortunately, it is
an extremely slow method
of population- and hence
of CO₂- reduction.

I'm quite sure that
over the millennia
quite a lot of men (millions, maybe ?)
have savaged women's breasts
and nipples...

Elektric Kundalini!
especially when accompanied by Rachmaninov.

Ashamed to be Queer.

When I decided that I was not bisexual,
or confused, but queer, I assumed
like a typical Aspy that all other queers
would be lovely, sweet. liberal, gentle men.
I was taken to Heaven on Leicester Square, London:
horribly noisy but wonderful, colourful fun.

However, I read today,
at the same time, 'from 1974 until 1993,
9pm to 2am, seven nights a week, men
packed the dance-floor of Studio One,
West Hollywood, California.'
“It was the happiest place on Earth,”
remembers one patron, who, of course,
had not been pushed out of the door
for being a Person of Color.

Studio One, West Hollywood, 1980s

God is Grape!

 عنب أكبر
Wine
is the Blood of the Tortured Vine

and Art
the pressings of the hardening heart.

It's not surprising

that an American pick-up truck company
is called RAM,  as in the verb, though
its logo is, misdirectingly a male sheep. 

A recent model is a 'mini-tank' that anyone can drive –
requiring no special aptitude, no life-or-death decision –
into the Capitol or down Mexico way.

The RAM 1500 is 'lethal in a collision'.

“A truck is a tool*, but a Ram – a Ram is life.”

 

*Old slang for penis.

The principle of totalitarianism:

everyone you don't know is the enemy
and also some of those you do.

Even so, it sometimes seems to me
that to plant a tree might be more
beneficial than to support democracy,

one of whose main problems is the
induced and wilful ignorance
of the electorate.

The other may be the parliamentary absence
of the secret ballot.

If the starry sky

is not the Creator's memoir,
perhaps it is Their
astral appointments-diary ?

'Smoking Kills'

and

 

Optimism,

said Salman Rushdie
(not my favourite writer)
in an interview,
is a disease,
perhaps an infection.

I think that it's more
of an addiction.

"I hang my pyjamas in the forest

so the animals get used to my scent."

Hamza Yassin

After birth

the truest intimacy
is with death.

About Japan

most people know
little more than sushi;
certainly not
孤独死  kodokushi
which can be translated as 
just left to rot.

Eighteen treated for severe nausea

in Stuttgart after opera of live sex and piercing.

“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” said choreographer Florentina Holzinger.

Psychedelic.

I don't think we want to expand
our oppressive minds so much as
to escape them
by means of liquids, powders, work,
day-dreaming, games, gaming, books,
sport, sex, pornography, risk, war...

Hurrah! Hooray!

The tenth of October
is World Porridge Day.

It comes in many forms
and can be made from any grain,
but for me the quintessential
epicentral sludge has to be made
from pin-head oatmeal (not sissy flakes)
soaked overnight (or at least an hour)
and served with sour milk, sour cream,
fromage blanc, curds or even kefir,
with a sprinkling of brown cane-sugar
(maybe with cinnamon for kids ?)
on the top for crunch.

It can also be made with full-cream milk
instead of water, but is then a tad too rich.

Depression

has a hard shell
protecting it
from grief.

Foretelling the Near Future.

Trouble (I'm Evil) 
Donald Trump's Victory Song, November 2024.

because...

Teeth, to many of us,
are a disturbing glimpse of madness, mindlessness
or death in a living human face.

'The grief of losing 20 relatives in Gaza.'

Imagine having 20 relatives to lose
(or even a father) ...
I'm glad that I have none.

In another newspaper article 
I read that people's lives collapse
if their mobile phones are snatched. 
Leave the totalitarian things at home !

A.H. - the disease

unrecognised
and most prevalent
in the USA :
Aggressive Hedonism.
Now let us pray.

If only more commercial premises

advertised themselves so subtly!

 

Bathroom furniture.

A famous person is doubly so
for having a urinal in his house
because of the inconvenient height
of water-closets which are too tall 
for the health of our bowels
(bidets – good also for feet – are just about right),
and  too low for standing-up men
& 'the handicapped'.

Perhaps it is utilitarian like this:

or verging on the obscene like al-Fayed's:

Washbasins, good for hands and torsos,
are too low for washing the face,
and slightly too high for many men
(and adolescents) to piss in,
though easy to rinse with taps
and even wash the willy afterwards.

Emotional ambiguity.

Petty pleasurable guilt I had,
and guilty pleasure on learning

that the domineering neighbour
I had come to dislike
had had a massive stroke. It will be fine
to see no more the weekly row
of six black underpants upon his washing-line.

Peculiarly,
instead of resentment that he had
succeeded in expiring before me
and (painlessly, swiftly as I hope
to exit) had 'pipped me at the post' –  I felt
a horrible triumph at outliving him.

I am as muddledly
mean-minded as anybody else.

One of his contemptuous autumn paintings.

Barbara Kingsolver

succinctly on Trump:

He's not even interested in the Presidency.
He's only interested in Winning.

Word of the Day:

Degrowth

 ? ? ? 

Another (unrelated) word:

(to) present (as in a film or other spectacle) 
seems to be much the same in all European languages
and comes from mediæval Latin præsentare, presumably from the presentation of the Host at Mass.  The modern French for a knick-knack or objets-d'art shelf or cabinet is présentoir. 

As for the noun: it came into English around 1200, from  Latin, 

The difference between present and gift is felt in the fact that one may be willing to accept as a present that which he would not be willing to accept as a gift : a gift is to help the one receiving it; a present does him honour, or expresses friendly feeling toward him. A present is therefore ordinarily to an individual; but in law gift is used, to the exclusion of present, as including all transfers of property without consideration and for the benefit of the receiver. [Century Dictionary]

Let us consider a new word and what it might mean: Depresent.
(After all, we have Degenerate.)

* * *

I recently bought a Stainless steel casserole with lid.

This description appeared on the packing in every official E.U.  language (plus Russian and Turkish) except Icelandic, Irish, Albanian, Catalan, Luxembourgeois, Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish.  

The following puzzled me: Dengta keptuvė su Dangčiu
(which I identified as Lithuanian because of the ė),  
Kastrolis ar Vāku (Latvian because of the ā) ... 
but Skirts Troškinimui and Karstumizturigs....might one of them be Maltese ?

It could be...as I read somewhere...

"The Bigger the Brains
The Tighter the Chains."

So much stuff, just stuff.

The over-washed people

in the museum :

are they there to gaze,

to worship or fill in time ?

The Individual (left)

and 'Social Media' (right)

Hymn of the American Republic

(to a familiar tune)

Amazing,
Gross

(indecency)

The breaking down

of gender barriers & stereotypes
would be a lovely and beneficial thing
if men became more womanly
and women stopped becoming
more and more like scary men.

Save the Soup : Just Stop Monocultures

of Sunflowers

and Rapeseed and Wheat and Maize...

The pipsqueak who sentenced the soup-throwers to many months in prison would not have acknowledged Van Gogh as a human being, much less bought one of his paintings. 
The sunflower series is the most popular and least interesting of his amazing output.  This action should make us think again about these paintings.

A writer in the Guardian points out that the great Vincent would not have wanted his paintings (other people thought of them as 'daubs') to be venerated, much less entombed in the terrifying concrete mausoleum of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

'During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty.'  

He wanted his pictures to hang on domestic walls, he wanted to share his uplifting and inspiring vision of landscape and people.
I think that he would have been appalled to learn where they have ended up.

Sad to relate,

where I live
in sterile Europe
there are no street-dogs.

Just passing...

Last here 5,000 years ago.

The comet C-023 A3
above a bank of cloud just before dawn.

 

Survivors.

Jews,
who have been persecuted only throughout
recorded history,
should spare a thought for wolves,
persecuted for at least ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, they spare few thoughts
for their nearest fellow-humans
who live their whole lives beset by howling fears.

Today's photo.

 Kathmandu, Nepal.

The Myth of Cerberus

Whereas we (mostly) can't 
tune into each other, dogs
can tune into shepherds,
sheep and other dogs
almost simultaneously.

Destruction before Discovery.

More than 100,000 plant species are thought to be undiscovered,
the majority of which are believed to be at risk of extinction...

Lying on the beach

on Easter Island.

The Moon and Dinosaurs.

Following my interest in little girls' groins,
long before Jurassic Park was dreamed up
and satellites were launched,
my earliest passions as a child

were Dinosaurs (1949, after seeing Brontosaurus
and, I think, Diplodocus
at London's National History Museum)

and Astronomy (1950, triggered by
an old book in the attic with a leather spine
about the solar system, written before
the discovery of non-planet Pluto).

So it was with some glee today
that I listened to a wonderfully insane
broadcast on the BBC World Service about 
Dinosaurs and the Moon.

A phone-stand:

something that you'll definitely
not be able to do without.

Write to Santa!

 

Muslims are taught

that the idea of Perfection
this side of Paradise
is blasphemy.

They would do well
to avoid 'Western' and Eastern
ethics and æsthetics,

and to respect young women
much more than old men
with prosthetics.

Word of the Day:

retro-futurist,

as in a description of FF Coppola's Megalopolis as
A strident retro-futurist folly. 

Dear 'Health-care Professionals',

Lives are not saved
merely prolonged.

(Length versus quality,
mumbles Robert's ghost.

Why bother ?)

Some people say that
only Jesus saves.

And no other.

At work or school,

it's not so much the bullying
that does the damage,

as the perpetual, even life-long
anxiety that it engenders.

It often happens

to most of us
when we look up something in Google.

I started by typing Baltrušaitis...
                                                 and ended with

1. The Weighing of a Soul (where ?) to find out
if its weight of sin is great enough
to send it to Hell;

2. The soul in eternal hellish torment.

And lastly, another capital
from the 12th century church at Saint-Révérien, Nièvre.

Seriously, though.

 

Doggerel.

I have been to Norway and Albania
To Central Africa and Canada
and the middle of the Baltic Sea.
Like most people, I've never been to Paradise*
– I've been too much, too long, in me.

*But where I live is pretty close.

Early War Baby.

When I was growing up in royalist east Belfast,
to talk about The South of Ireland
(at the time, officially entitled The Irish Free State)
in polite society was like
mentioning a 'French Letter'
or Cancer, the Duke of Windsor or syphilis:

The less said (in polite society) the better.

Of the Civil War, and the Free State's
handy neutrality in World War Two,
my friends and I were decent in our ignorance.

Climate Change in leafy Suburbia.

From calm to calamity
From here to eternity

Small vocal difference, big result.

Ein fester Berg;
Ein' feste Burg.

Luther suggested that
Jehovah (a.k.a unser Gott,
the Lord of few pities)

moved from Mosaic mountain-top
to impregnable town.

People are always leaving
the countryside for overcrowded cities.

Near Toulouse, France.

Protesters at a house in the path
of a motorway/toll-road
considered by many to be unnecessary.

Almost all you need to know

about the cultural level
of the 'Free World'
in the medium of cinema.

Not in Japan.

Underlying the strong disapproval of suicide
in Abrahamic cultures
is (I suspect) the sense that it is desertion
from the human army.

A Sea-angel.

 

Clione limacina, by Alex. Semenov on FlickR

"A thing of beauty,"

declared John Keats,
"is a joy forever" (to some)
but not in the constipated
bowels of a museum.

Empty vessels, mobile phones.

The more that people talk
the less they have to say.

The Midas Phenomenon.

        In America
    everything is gold,
everything is worthless.

Poor Old Joe.

I hear the choir
of angels singing...

No,

I hear their angel voices calling*...

Oh, no

it's just my tinnitus
both serendipitous and duplicitous.

Ol' Black Joe, retitled Poor Old Joe is one of (white sentimentalist) Stephen Foster's very popular, badly-written, and nauseating songs about black people. This one is probably the worst because it is a pseudo-Spiritual. They all, however, have great tunes, and include Way down upon the Suwanee River (Southern Georgia) and Old Folks at Home ..... I seem to remember also from my childhood Camptown Races, Old Dog Tray (which I wept over), My Old Kentucky Home...  

Paul Robeson sang it rather creepily. 

Listen here to a rendering from the 1920s. 

One of Mr Foster's black servants was called Joe.

*I was sure that my childhood version in the Stephen Foster Songbook had in the chorus:
"I hear their angel voices calling"

but most sung versions have "I hear their gentle voices calling" because, of course, there can't be black angels!

The most famous angelic tinnitus was that of an Alsatian teenager who became known as Joan of Arc.

The devilish genius of Christianity is the promise,
at the very least, the hope of a gorgeous afterlife

(Jesus Saves)

which helps greatly to keep people 
'in their place', especially as slaves.

I would not have imagined

back when I was amongst
the 'pioneers' of investigation
into Irish sweathouses,
that forty years later
I would still be contacted
by people interested in them.

All gone.

Norwegian gannetry 1970
- and last year.

The 'World Happiness Report'

seems (to me) a pretty dodgy fake statistic.
No French person would freely admit to being happy.
That's just the contrary and suspicious French attitude.

Our culture wants to measure/quantify everything.
Perhaps another way of vaguely measuring 'happiness'
(which is a fluid abstract in the same class as 'wisdom')
would be to poll people on their feelings of gratitude.

Or maybe not.

 

Roman Values.

Why can't two men
love each other and a woman ?
two women love each other
and a man ? or two men ?

'Love' that is restrictive and restricting
is not affection but desire for ownership.

Restrictive love is meanly Abrahamic.
Open love is generous,
welcoming, shamanic.

Rocket in the Room.

not by Oksana Maksymchuk

what the rocket has in common
with the room full people with
Down's Syndrome
is its current location

somebody thought the rocket
belonged to the room with the handicapped
and now it’s here

in time
someone else will come
and collect the pieces

of the rocket and of the handicapped
weeping and shouting insults
at the sky

but for now
this rocket and these retards
are an unsorted matter

a puzzle
awaiting a solution

• 

for 'Universal Human Values'

read
Totalitarian thinking/morality.

'Western Values'
are two in number:
Conquest (of the 'self', 'problems', the 'world')
and Hypocrisy

for which Merriam-Webster's Rhyming Dictionary
offers no rhyme,
nor for Theocracy.

SHAME

Into Europe came the religions
which made their solipsistic gods unearthly

Out of greedy Europe came the persecuted refugees

The unforgiving everlasting light of Hollywood
chosen by diasporic Jews
and the false god of profit
captured the new-born art of cinema
(and all art, all authenticity, all immanence)

and Hollywood hijacked the world
turned the planet into scenery
behind which wars raged
its inhabitants to extras
and wonder into artificial intelligence

Shame, Shema Yisrael ! שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל

AND SO IT WILL
by a strange providence
COME TO PASS
in a manner of speaking
THAT

Every place your feet will tread will be yours: 

The Desert and the Lebanon,
the Euphrates River [Iraq]
and the Western Sea [Morocco],
will form your boundaries.

and way beyond, even to the Moon.

כָּל־הַמָּק֗וֹם אֲשֶׁ֨ר תִּדְרֹ֧ךְ כַּף־רַגְלְכֶ֛ם בּ֖וֹ לָכֶ֣ם יִֽהְיֶ֑ה מִן־הַמִּדְבָּ֨ר וְהַלְּבָנ֜וֹן מִן־הַנָּהָ֣ר נְהַר־פְּרָ֗ת וְעַד֙ הַיָּ֣ם הָאַֽחֲר֔וֹן יִֽהְיֶ֖ה גְּבֻֽלְכֶֽם:

No man will stand up before you; the Lord your God will cast the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land you tread on, as He [already] said to you.

לֹֽא־יִתְיַצֵּ֥ב אִ֖ישׁ בִּפְנֵיכֶ֑ם פַּחְדְּכֶ֨ם וּמוֹרַֽאֲכֶ֜ם יִתֵּ֣ן | יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֗ם עַל־פְּנֵ֤י כָל־הָאָ֨רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תִּדְרְכוּ־בָ֔הּ כַּֽאֲשֶׁ֖ר דִּבֶּ֥ר לָכֶֽם:

DEUTERONOMY, CHAPTER 11

90% of men,

and over 95% of women
suffer from O.N.D.
(Obsessive Normality Disorder)
a recent study* shows.

*by yours truly

My Anti-gangsta Rap.

From the least abrasive
of North America's soft-power
broadcasters*  I learned that rap
is the (inevitably) sad and sleazy revenge
of the children of children of children
of slaves, whose transport and labour
was the bone-crushed, bloody, flesh-soft, very
foundation of capitalism.

Rap 'artists' were financed by 'drug-money'
and profits from transport of immigrant
labour to the USA
from central and southern America,
and is now a multi-billion dollar industry
supporting the system which has enslaved
and devastated the whole world
as it did the African continent.

*The BBC World Service, too self-promoting for me.

That's Life - Celebrated Failed Experiment of Earth.

The world is not, as MacNeice declared,
'incorrigibly plural' 

but the unimaginably complicated
single tortured victim
of irredeemably Totalitarian Man.

Billions of components
Trillions of connections in the head of every one
of 8 billion specimens of astonishingly
cunning stupidity...cupidity.

Now, Neo-Proustian Collective Intelligence
(Euro-American Inform)
combined with Climate Breakdown/
Restructuring/Interference

pushes little planet into Perfect Storm.

The Wandering 'With'.

When I was younger people met each other.
They only met with an accident.
Now they meet with each other
as well as accidents.

When I was younger, people debated with each other
or others.  Now they debate each other or others.

Today I heard an American say that
she taught with her pupils, which seems to me
impossible.

There are other examples. This is not a grump.
Language-change and evolution are inevitable,
but I think the 'freedom of prepositions'
peculiar to the USA is due to immigration –
a dastardly consequence not yet called out
(or up) by Donald Trump.

Untermenschen

The English used to view the Irish
and the Scots as sub-human,
and treated them accordingly.
Duns Scotus was a theologian from Duns
in the Scottish Border county of Berwick. Hence Dunce.
He has been claimed by the Gaels and once
appeared on a beautiful Irish five-pound note.
Duncan is a common Scottish name
which, mixed up with monkey
replaced ass with donkey.

Jews have also been labelled sub-human,
but consider themselves Chosen People
who have (long before Germans existed)
seen themselves as more blest than all
other people in the world,
especially Palestinians
whom they once called Philistines
and who still try to live in الفلسطينيون 
al-Filasṭīniyyūn.

God is such a dispiriting name for a god.

Ashtaroth is a lovely name for a Syrian city.
It's included in an American website
of suitable names for a girl.
It is also the Hebrew name for Phœnician
and Philistine, after the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Astarte
goddess of sexuality and war. 

The Lord Ba'al was, on the other hand, Cloud-rider,
like Yahweh, fierce god of storms, Cumulus-fucker.  
Presumably worshipped in Baalbek
as well as great Babylon,
he was brought into Europe much later
as Beelzebub, one of three Lords of Hell;

another was Astaroth...

Báʿal (בַּעַל) and Baʿl (بعل) are words for 'husband'
in present-day Palestine, once called Pelesheth.

The Jews gave the Philistines a Bad Name
which still persists one way or other
in various quarters.  
They (the people of Pelesheth)
now worship the same moody, invisible god, 
but he lives far away in another container.

Hebrews, Jews and Israelis,
despised as dirt poor ... or as rich moneylenders,
may soon gain another name :
Nekamites – Zion's Avengers.

Temple of Bacchus/Ba'al, Baalbek.

My Inner Animal.

I never looked for meaning
in my life, nor purpose. I have no
idea why people might or do so.
There seems to me no 'point'
in anything, except appreciation
and enjoyment of what I like,
and gratitude for kindness.

Keen Christians often talk
unhumbly about humility.
Perhaps not wanting meaning
or purpose in life
is its free, irreligious form ?

For me there is no need of faith,
no god nor soul nor immortality,
no blessedness, no art, no meaning,
no progress but the flux and the slipping
or the crashing into death.

I sought a simile for Money

unsuccessfully.
It is not at all like shit
which all of us, except the hungriest,
produce.
Nor like polluted air
that everyone must breathe.

As Latin-speakers testified
it is more like testosterone
produced by little nuts
inside a little wrinkly purse.
All men need some
and those who have too much
produce yet more

and become Lords of our Scrotal Universe.

Daylight Robbery.

This stolen satellite-dish
embellished by Banksy
has not been seen again.

A word I learned today

which rhymes with barricade :

reality-laundering,

the oldest trade.

Speaking honestly rather than 'properly' :

'The rain
in Spain
goes mainly
down the drain.'

Social formulæ

for living, whether religious
or secular,
are usually devastating
in one way or another.

There are always anomalies, just as we
as a species are anomalous.

Algorithms have proved to be
the latest kind of
social formulæ.

Today's poem:

an eight-
syllable
senryū

The only way

to 'live in the moment'

is to abandon human society

     and lying, denying.

If you abandon it

for more than a bit

you'll find Enlightenment

by dying.

No bat

in fifteen years
has ever flown
into my bat-box.
I should have known.

Kweir Lear

would have given Cordelia
the whole kingdom
had she told me that
she loved me as much
as bananas love fennel,
aniseed or absinthe.

Anti-semitic is a racist term

much used (if not invented)
by those (many) Jews
who refuse to admit
that the Biblical Semites
('sons of Shem') included
all those who spoke a 'semitic', afro-asiatic
language such as Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic. Amharic...
and used similar right to left, phonetic scripts.

Thus an 'anti-semite' is simply
a non-Jewish racist seen from
a racist Jewish perspective.
We are all, Chief Rabbi, racists.

People who find Israeli policies unpleasant
are not necessarily anti-Jewish,
and certainly not anti-semitic,
since Palestinians (formerly known as Philistines)
are (unequally) semitic.

We don't say 'anti-hamite'
for those pale pigment-deprived racists
(including some Jews)
who identify 'the other' by pigmentation.

If people

Hadn't been so pathologically secretive

Especially about everything to do with sex

It and human life might have turned out to be

Less devastatingly penetrative.

Around 1812,

when Beethoven was going deaf,
top doctors prescribed
the insertion of radishes
in his ears.

 

 

 

The presence of olive oil in the picture,
however, suggests to me
that radishes were used as stoppers
before the invention of cotton wool.
Infection might have been impeded
by the addition of sage.

When I was a child, the only known use
for olive oil was for pouring into the ear
after warming,
to soften wax before syringing
by the unfriendly family doctor.

Thus I had ear-orgasms at an early age.

Now - you've guessed it - I have tinnitus.

The Ites : Not a History of Humanity

According to Isidore of Seville
and (long before him) Moses,

the Peoples of the World
were three: out of the wives
of the three sons of the nameless spouse
of bibulous navigator Noah:

sharp Semites in Asia,
Hamites with lovely hair in Africa,
and wan Japhetites in Europe,
some of them with frightening blue eyes. 

The descendants of Shem
included Arabs, Persians, Jews
and inhabitants of India, Afghanistan, Ceylon.

(No mention of the Berbers or the Basques.)

Arabs, incited by Islam, moved into Africa,
displacing many northern Hamites
and some of the Japhetites of Spain.

Jews were expelled (some having hurled
themselves from the battlements of Masada)

from Judæa, Galilee...
and (in due course) everywhere in Europe
except (it's said) Albania...

The Japhetites eventually took over
and destroyed the world.

Tissot:
Shem, Japheth and Ham making merry
while Noah 'sleeps it off'.

Worm-sperm in the Water.

Alittta virens by Alexander Semenov

 

Talking about Tavener, Tchaikovsky

or anyone, or anything, Patricia Hughes
was more than a mere
'continuity announcer'
on the BBC;
her voice was like a softly-squeezing
posh hand between the legs of my ears
even when she was reading
weather-reports or The News.

Listen to her here.

A certain kind of laughter

comes from the peals

of falling piles

of false smiles.

Morality and sexuality.

For prudes and patriarchs
(and their wives) every sexual
unconventionality is an abomination.

Thus: to rape a daughter,
son, sister or sister-in-law;

to force servants, employees
and au pairs to suck your cock,
and similarly hideous domination,

is not really worse than consensual
same-sex mutual celebration.

The most heroic are the quietest.

Mohamed Qomssan
grows vegetables in the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza.

'Hope, like gambling',

wrote Jonathan Freedland,
'is a hard habit to break'.

Worse – it is intravenous.

The Blind Eye of History.

No nice Bums*
No nice Dogs
Few nice Women
in the Bible
All is Trivia
saith the Preacher
Never follow
any teacher.

*in both the British and American senses

Positioning the Filters.

Upbringings of different
qualities and calibres,
aspects and intensities
place veils of different densities
in front of eager eyes.

The crocodile's eye.