A Door of Perception

or a door to happiness.

by Akihito Okamura, 1969.

Sauve qui peut.

It's always
too late to panic –
on Earth as on
the Titanic.

'DESIRE'

typed into the Google box brought me this:

eBay Official Site | Huge Selection & Great Prices 

Everything You Love On eBay. Check Out Great Products On eBay. Check Out Women And Desire On eBay. Find It On eBay...

               or Etsy or Temu...as a capsule or a lotion...

Soon, Chinese factories will be manufacturing the emotion.

I have the (presumably) geriatric problem

of what I call "thought torrent"
where thoughts and ideas come rushing
and thought eclipses thought,

idea erases idea, thoughts and ideas
turning and turning
in my cloudy cerebral gyre
and I feel somewhat exhausted.

And the artichoke has boiled dry
and is actually burning.

A rare picture from Sakhalin,

 the Russian part of the Japanese archipelago.

photo by Aleksandr Semenov on FlickR

Lovely, maybe affectionate, rhinoceros,

and less lovely/affectionate
Salvador Dali.

photo by Philippe Halsman                   

Essential Reading

for Œnophiles:

Wine for Health –
The Universal Healer
by Dr E Maury

“America is an idea, "

quoth President Biden on renouncing his bid for a second term in office,
"An idea stronger than any army,
bigger than any ocean,
more powerful than any dictator or tyrant."

This pretty well sums up the arrogance and vainglory
of a nation-state which has been the greatest tyrant
and most successful and murderous thought-dictator
and regime-imposer the world has ever known.

Multi-tasking !?

I don't understand how anyone can
read a book and listen to music at the same time.

My whole attention goes on the book
or the Sibelius playing on France-Musique,
but not both together.

On the other hand I can do either
and, at the same time,
pick my nose or
clean my ears with a hairpin. 

It's best not to want

people to agree with you.
The most false
are often the most agreeable. 

Muted colour co-ordination of a feudal kind.

 

The recent Coronation of the grave Sultan and demure Sultana of Malaysia.

How to improve

the décor of rented accommodation.

"Ron's Place", London.

"In my family we didn’t talk much about the past

– and I didn’t ask questions.
I was not forbidden to ask,
I just didn’t ask. That was it."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/23/my-family-and-other-nazis

In my family I don't remember
talk about the past – or about anything much.
I don't think we were unusual.
I didn't ask questions, either,
except once about who my father might have been,
and was content with a vague and brief reply.

I next asked when I was 40
but didn't find out until I was over 80.
He was just a conscript airman
in a war against the Nazis –
that's all I know.

Other animals

are better at decision-making
than we are.  Humans mostly
defer to other humans, do what they're told,
follow the leader.  In other words
our superior intelligence
seems to make most of us reluctant
to use our intelligence. 

A Nihilistic Review on Goodreads

of a book I haven't read
has gone viral.

The likes are (apart from
one guy in Slovakia) mostly from 
female American Millennials.

Similarly, it has been
young women who most appreciated
(but never bought) my paintings...

THE PATH LESS TAKEN

I'm glad that I'm a socio
not a psycho.

There's a good blog coming

on the thirteenth of November

whether I'm alive or not,
or in a coma :
(many of those who registered
blogs and vlogs and websites
and broadcast True Wisdom or Real Trash
have subsequently 'passed away'
to earth or ash).

I wrote and scheduled it today.

To 'pull someone's leg'

means much the same as
'take the piss out of', formerly
pull someone's pisser, pecker, peg
peter, pizzle, prick, pillicock
or middle leg...

'They'

(meaning most people with homes
including lavatories)
would rather re-build ugly
Notre-Dame de Paris than build ugly
houses for the destitute –

just as in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Gender Bias.

Only recently I realised
that when Normal Men
look at lamentable sex-scenes
(now obligatory on screens)
they look only at the Normal Women
writhing and moaning breathily,
and never register how repulsive
the male may be.

I don't think the bus will ever come !

 We've been here for centuries...

The Yoga pose

 known as Downward-facing Dog.

Thinking of Pentti Linkola.

Although I am, as is well-known,
ashamed to be even a tree-loving human
and decry the cowardice of hope,
I am, mostly, a fun and friendly misanthrope.

Why did he stop shaving ?

Poppycock.

Curious as to the origin of the word,
certain that it had nothing to do with opium,
chicken-rearing or flower-arranging –
but might possibly be genital –
I was surprised to learn that it
had no ancient heritage,
such as (the unlikely) pop-a-cock,
but came via America from Holland
as recently as mid-19th century.

"trivial talk, nonsense," 1865, American English, probably from Dutch dialect pappekak, from Middle Dutch pappe "soft food" (see pap) + kak "dung," from Latin cacare "to excrete" (from PIE root *kakka- "to defecate").

I have, alas! been unable to find the origin
of cock-a-hoop...
and haven't yet looked up nincompoop.

Remember the great 'Save The Whale' movement

- an early opportunity for virtue-signalling ?

Religions of Personal Salvation

are essentially
religions of selfishness
(have I said this before ?)
which may be why they preach
but minimally practise
alms-giving, 'charity'.

Instead of churches and mosques and temples
may there be spinneys and copses

Instead of banks and museums
may there be marshes and meadows

Instead of malls and halls
may there be thickets

Instead of government
may there be fastness of forest

'The Enemy' is not a nation nor a state
but Religion.

(Idolatry, of one kind or another,
is now the commonest human condition.)

*

from The Gospel According to Pertti Linkola,
possibly edited by George Monbiot :

Heal not the sick
for the sick are exhausting the earth.

A painting can also be useful...

 

as an Elastic Band Storage Unit.

(fuzzy photo in poor light)

In the sky drably.

Yesterday's luxuries
are today's necessities
hence inflation Yet
in much of Europe
(especially in rural areas)
people dress ever
more samely
more drably

especially
(as ever) the elderly
few of whom
rejoice in their old age

I have rarely felt better
I wear bright clothes
and criminally
go on cheap flights
to Morocco
where many people
including the poor and the old,
dress joyfully.

For many years (perhaps still)

I liked to think
I would have liked
to have been raised by bears.

Of course I remember
the Northern Irish 'Hen-house Boy'
'hitting the headlines' in 1952.
I fantasised about him.

I wanted to be his brother.

(I don't know what's the matter
with you, said my mother
after every minor punishment
and censure I received at school.)

A long time later,
I read a poem about him
by a worshipped Northern Irish poet.
Its second line is 'A yolk of light'.

Oh no!  I shouted, hurling down the book
with its razorly-crafted lines about a boy
'sharp-faced as new moons'. Aaaaargh!

Predation!

A humdrum book about 'Wild' children that I read
yesterday praises this poem for its sensitivity.
Goodreads
(where you can read my outrageous outrage)
is full of praise for many others, too.

All I find in it is poetic
exquisitely-literary exploitation.

Globalism.

A hundred years ago, great pianists
were French, Polish, Russian, German
(often Jewish). Fifty years ago 
great British pianists appeared. Last night
I listened to a splendid live performance
of Debussy Images and Chopin Etudes
by the Kazakh pianist, Alim Beisembayev.

And how amazing that Nicolas Chopin,
a Frenchman from Lorraine,
happened to marry a Pole,
went with her to live in Żelazowa Wola,
and sired Poland's most famous son !

The Extinction Cabinet.

 

The Australian Museum.

Pig-footed Bandicoot

Not one of the Seven Deadly Sins,

and yet one of the chief causes
of conflict and world war:

RESENTMENT.

(The Seven Deadly sins were originally Nine, then Eight...
but never included Resentment, which, in recent times has been thee main reason for perpetual war in Palestine-Israel and for the Second World War as reprisal for Germany's humiliation in 1919-21.)

I know very well

that having no shoulders, 
pectorals or biceps
is only slightly
better than having a hump.

"He was bullied almost every day."
And failed to murder Trump.

Insofar that I can judge,

'grief' is largely
regret.

Language exports.

England has exported
the exclamation Fuck! (and fucking)
to Belgium, Denmark, Holland,
Luxembourg - to name a few.

Because of its language wars
(Walloon v. Flemish) Belgium
has borrowed many English words
to use where emotions might be inflamed.

Through films and World War Two
the USA exported Okay to the whole world –
ironically an inverted verlan*
borrowing from Louisiana French
d'accor' (gacco goka gokay).
that follows the linguistic rules.
Note also the now rare form Okey-Dokey.

*Verlan is a modern back-slang (an inversion of l'envers, meaning  the other way round) which (like cant and local dialect) is commonly used world-wide in many languages for private communication.
A well-known example in English is yob meaning boy.

I used to think that I was at fault

and intolerant
when (as often)
I found people intrusive.

Now I know that Homo sapiens 

(unlike Bradypus, Cholœpus and Nycticebus –
sloths and slow lorises – to name but few)

is an intrusive species
that favours millions
of intrusive people.

https://slothconservation.org/

Le Temps des Taons

The French do not appreciate puns
as English-speakers do
because the language is so homophonous.

Temps and Taons are pronounced identically.

The Time of the Horse-flies
is coming soon.

Finally, I finished my lengthy
brilliant novel. Queer Caliban,
and danced around the barbecue
as I watched it burn.

'To judge a book by its cover'

is not so foolish
when there is lots of writing
on the back. 

 

DIRT

(said the Duchess)
is what you want it to be.

You never see it in 'feature films'
where filth and squalor
and especially sordid people
are portrayed prettily.

 

Katauskas kartoon.

 

'In days of old'

miners of lead, tin, silver, gold
and coal (many were slaves)
wore leather hats with brims
on which lit candles could safely sit
while they hewed rock
in narrow excavated caves
and passages by pick
and wedge and hammer, lit
just by smoky, wavering glims...
I think that instead of trying to write poetry
I should restrict myself to hymns.

Little-known facts.

Today is the 29th anniversary
of the Srebrenica genocide.

The Prime Minister of Portugal is Luis Montenegro.

The Prime Minister of Montenegro is Milojko Spajić.

The Atacama desert is carpeted with purple flowers due to rare rain.

70% of Indian sewage is untreated.

Below:
Grotesque competitors warm up backstage
before the Mr Afghanistan bodybuilding competition...

No canon for old memes.*

 "In the digital [world], trust is fundamentally impossible."

– René Walter in a brilliant article on Cultural Memory.

“Social media reward extremes and obsessions"

*W. David Marx

Part of a letter from my Russian friend in exile.

"...I talk regularly with my father in Zaporizhia [Ukraine]  and he surprises me with his calm and dogged attitude in the middle of chaos. 

The last time we talked he told me that in his life he did everything as supposed to be done -
he built a house, planted an orchard and raised a son (my half-brother). 

His village was occupied [by the Russians] and the house was lost,
the orchard was abandoned, destroyed, and his son was killed. 

And inside the church that he helped to build, they made a morgue for dead Russian soldiers. But he's taking it quite philosophically :

'I had everything and at the end of life I have nothing'."

Anti-Labyrinth, no Minotaur.

“There is [a] destination

but no way to it;

what we call way

is hesitation.”  

– Franz K.

Hardly believable.

"Rubbish disposal is one of those baffling areas
in which the USA in general, but New York in particular,
is wildly behind Europe."

Wheelie-bins are only now beginning to appear.

The 'Great Religions'

of Redemption abolished true Remorse,
and hence, ultimately, Accountability.
So they trashed the world.

"If you are stuck between resentment and guilt, choose guilt."

Child Marriage*

is legal in 37 states of the USA.
There are no federal laws against it,
so minors can marry, with parental consent,
before they can vote, drink, or buy lottery tickets
in most of the country.
Some states have a minimum marriage age
ranging from 15 to 18. 

Four states –  California, New Mexico, Oklahoma,
and Mississippi – do not specify any minimum age at all.

* One or both parties entering a union while under the age of 18

It is no surprise

that suicide (and attempted suicide)
are crimes in the nasty feudal and stinking rich
United Arab Dictatorships.

Irish woman charged by Dubai court

with ‘attempting suicide’.

Failed suicide is also an offence in many other countries
including Kenya, Bangladesh, Malawi - and
in France* within living memory.

But the more 'tolerant' (I would say ignorant, condescending)
attitude that suicide is the result of mental illness
is just as odious, and flies in the face of several
ancient and modern (non-Abrahamic) cultures.  

The cosmic view
is that there are several billion humans
on this earth, and even if half of us
bravely killed ourselves tomorrow
global heating and its consequences
will cascade inexorably on.

* So it is ironic that the Great French Hero, Napoleon,
was also a (failed) Failed Suicide.

The small pleasures

afforded by the urge to pursue Truth
are crushed by depressing revelations

which can drive us insane
and from the bloody light
into the sweet hospitalities of night.

Aren't we truly wonderful ?

 We've managed to change the weather !

It wasn't stone circles that did it,
but Getting & Spending Inc.
(much easier, almost democratic).

Criminal Tendencies Unfulfilled.

(On Watching a Thriller)

I always wanted to be able to pick locks,
though I've no idea which locks I'd want to pick.

I have a master-key for French mail-boxes
(as do thousands of others, probably)
but there's not one I would want to open
or even put a bomb in

(if I could make a bomb).

In flight

from (at least) two tyrannies.

 

How many of us, how often

"...experience this feeling of having watched from the sidelines
as someone disguised as themselves
spoke their way through a bad script." ?

– Donna Leon: Doctored Evidence, 2004

In my case, the awareness of having been a bit peculiar
doesn't arrive until five – or thirty-five – minutes later.

Election Week

in Britain, Mauretania, France...

Today. polling-day in the French Republic,
I saw crude placards
which declared ¡No Pasarán! 
and do not bode well for the result.

The very fabric of our democracies is false.
Those who are voted for (or not) stand
as our representatives, which they are not
and cannot be. 

There will be more elections shortly
in Rwanda, Georgia, Venezuela, Syria (!) 

In autumn: Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Moldova,
Romania, Mozambique, Chad, Lithuania... 

¡No Pasarán! (They will not get through!)
was the futile slogan of the Republicans
in the Spanish civil war, which resulted in
a very nasty dictatorship that lasted 35 years.

Another banner (in my home village) declared:
Non à la R-Haine ! - pronounced the same as R.N. (the neo-sub-fascist party of Marine le Pen);
haine = hate

'Democracy'

Faceless
they wear masks,
and their faces grow to fit them

and they vote
and are voted for in their millions

to make evil more powerful
and they are not devils

but faceless and heartless
and aspirational.

Not sculptures...

...but happy caimans in Brazil.

 

Not a mud-fight...

...but happy rice-planters in Nepal.

photos from The Guardian

After Hafez and Akbar.

Fear is the most expensive
lodging in the hotel,
the paradise suite where dead
laboratory rats and vivisected dogs end up.

Love is the disused boiler room.

Corporeal friends are
spiritual enemies, said
Blake, masturbating naked
on the roses while his wife
copied his manuscripts and wept.

The ocean's getting saltier, not from
half-melted human glaciers of human tears
but from the weeping dwarves of Ragnarök.

The Book of Things & Hope is planet-thick
and we get more insubstantial every day.
We all know God is Dead.
Nietzsche was rather slow to realise
that God had become just a Black Hole
in the infinitesimal human consciousness.

Jesus just a legend, Mohamed a
testosteronal war-lord.
God was rumoured to be Love
but Love never existed, either.
Now it's rumoured
by the ultra-intelligent and rich
that Black Holes are also dead...

I guess it's time to take a pill and go to bed.

Akbar

When I was small

I wanted to wear pirate's ear-rings
and grow a beard
like an ogre or some similar fiction
such as Captain Hook
or Blue-Black-Redbeard
(I have always identified with outsiders)
and when I was 20 my ambitions
were realised....and normality
but not reality I finally forsook.

The guy on the left is my Very Best Friend.

Queer Question.

Are they going to kiss
or lock horns ?

Sitting on my sunny balcony,

I wonder if the first item
of human apparel
was the sun-hat.

Declaration by a Sort-of-Marxist.

The problem I find with Christianity

is that it has no philosophy

except for vague but limited do-goodism

tacked on to Judaic pseudo-history

and rejection of simple sexuality,

especially that of women.

These things it shares with Islam. 

I sort-of-believed the nonsense for almost a year

but have subsequently remained puzzled by,

fixated on why anyone believed, believes it.

I went on to study the finer forms of Buddhism...

but Marx won out, by his affirmation of fairness,

fair play, dislike of greed, acquisitiveness.

Now Marx has also been sent to the abattoir.

He's bloody dead.

We now have the world-wide 

religion-web of acquisition and envy instead.

Western Values.

 

Progress reversed.

Once upon a time, in 1945,
a shy Prime Minister of Britain
and its frayed empire drove himself
around in a battered little Morris 10
– at least when it wasn't his wife who did the driving.

He oversaw the greatest social revolution
in Europe since the beheadings
of 17th and 18th century kings,

He initiated the dismantling of the empire
(in unfortunate circumstances) and installed
the world's most advanced welfare state
and the only health service to offer
free consultation and treatment to everyone.

Despite the capitalist and American grip
on Britain, it became the most truly-socialist
country in the world has ever known,
and was not a failed experiment
(at least not until tower-block machines-
for-being-isolated-in were built). Since then
the turbo-capitalist, plutocratic and American
monopolistic jaws
(Thatcher-Reaganomics devised by evil men)
have hollowed out its Welfare State, and the rich
are many more times richer than the struggling poor,
more people are homeless and ill-nourished,
than in 1945, back when
the visionary, shy socialist Prime Minister
drove himself about in his battered Morris 10.

The Political and Social Outlook

in Europe and the USA
is not encouraging.

Socialism

has been suppressed in the legendary Land of the Free

more successfully than it was in Nazi Germany

and more successfully than Christianity

was suppressed in the USSR.

House and Homeless.

House designed by Roger Walker, Aotearoa 1980.

 

Homeless in Mexico, 2024.

Polling Day in France.

Just as Hitler advanced through voters' collapse
of trust in politicians and their tired old parties,
so the early 1930s have come back to haunt us. 

The first Fascist-racist
regime in Europe after WW1 (lasting until 1944)
was that of "nationalist Christian" Hungary.

Simple Shoah Statistics

are rarely presented, because they implicate the inhabitants of the Nazis' victim countries.  Here are just a few.

                                            Contrary to what I thought,

Of the third of a million Jews in France at the start of the war. three-quarters survived, compared to just over half of Jews in Belgium  – and only a fifth in the Netherlands.

That striking statistic is due in significant part to the role of convents and other havens provided by the Catholic church, particularly in Vichy (semi-independent, very-fascist part of) France.

Over 90% of Jews survived in Denmark, due to various factors including the general acceptance of (small proportion of) Jews by Danes who helped them escape, mostly to neutral Sweden, easily reachable across the strait from Copenhagen. 
Denmark, which had no army to speak of, but was considered to be highly 'Aryan', managed to negotiate a lenient Occupation, and was self-governing until 1943, when the Nazis finally lost patience with Danish reluctance to collaborate, and debilitating resistance.

In Poland (the country with the highest Jewish population), a maximum of 0.3% of Jews (10,000) is estimated to have survived the war, many of whom, of course, fled to Israel...where some of their offspring enthusiastically persecuted Palestinians.

Good people are very few.

Arms Manufacturers

making billions in Europe, Russia,
Israel, USA, China, India, etc.
cannot be accused of genocide.

Dedication to reproduction.

It took Monet four years
to capture the exact tones
of a foggy moment in London.

And on the Web, bad digital
reproduction loses them.

This photograph is far too blue.

A cathedral AND a library.

"Her father had taught her about...a dog's paws.
Whenever her father was alone with a dog in his house
he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. 
This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter,
is the greatest smell in the world!  A bouquet! Great rumours of travel. She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder,
the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said – so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen – a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day."

 – Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 1992

Not so Gallant,

and not (yet) on trial for war-crimes
(though his face would have gone
unremarked at Nuremberg)

Yoav Gallant
Israeli Minister of Defence
warns tottering Lebanon
(neighbour to the north) that
he could 'blow it back into the Stone Age'.

Didn't we hear the same phrase from George W Bush
before the invasion of Iraq ?

Not Yet, Dear God, Not Yet.

 

[Nappy = Diaper, from French nappe
= tablecloth, hence napery.]

Almost everyone with the slightest

pretension to snobbery,
has a favourite hated neologism. 

Mine is already sixty years old,
and I still loathe the word: 

life-style/lifestyle

I have had (still have) a life,
not a fashion, not a presentation
nor an image, nor a style.

Tricky Moral Question from a Dole-receiver.

Is it better to send small amounts of money
to help protect animals and habitats
or to buy organic 'fair-trade' coffee ?

Coffee alleviates depression.

Fair trade must exist, but where ?

Toyless in Gaza.

 

Ourobolos.

Language is edited thought.
Thought is processed language.
Round and round we go
in the fairground talking-show.

The Fear of Solitaries.

 

No, social pressure puts it in our heads.

If we are alone or solitary
we are viewed as unusual
if not freaks.

On the other hand, the 'fragmented society'
greatly benefits deviators and those
who have the emotional strength
to heal-whole themselves
and choose solitude: those who don't need
'validation' from others.

Aristophanes' famous story in Plato's Symposium
that humans originally were whole hermaphrodites
bisected because of their arrogance
reinforces the idea that without our other half
we cannot be whole or, often, even acceptable.

This story acknowledges the usually-unmentioned
role of unavailable sex in the suffering of loneliness
and feeling of loss,
whereas solitude implies a voluntary state
and the possibility of something gained.

'The Lonely' are also 'highly vulnerable'
to conspiracy theories.

Dear Mr Netanyahu,

When People Who Count
in countries such as Britain, France, the USA
condemn your insane action in Gaza,
your criminal cleansing of the West Bank
of the ronce-holy river Jordan,

why don't you quietly remind them of the carpet-bombing
of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Viet-Nam...
the mass-murder by the Japanese in Manchuria and Java,
the atom-bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the barbaric 'police action' in Algeria...?

And then wise up.

Bananas!

There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana,
and we eat just two of them.