Smiles.

If you can't tell a false smile
from a true one

it's probably best to assume
that they're all false,
pre-transactional.

Which is probably the case.

That's what the bad guys do. 

The moment

that even a little power is gained,
yet another crime is covered up. 

Might this be an April Fool ?
Or just a blob of senile drool ?

Municipal

Elections in Turkey Türkiye.

Voters in Sinop:
forget your ignominies
think of your progenies:  

remember Diogenes !

*originally the Black Sea Greek colony of Sinopè
where Diogenes was born.

Special Easter Offer (online purchasers only)

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Home Insurance

(compulsory in France)
sounds sort-of sleazy.
Why do the words
Your Property
make me feel queasy ? 

Apart from sickly-sticky pastries

or a dead animal (and the products from it),
few things are more vulgar and disgusting
than a chocolate Easter egg.

I'd almost rather eat dog's vomit.

Not the ceiling of feeling.

The nearest
that a certain old man
gets towards orgasm is peeling
the price-stickers off books –
in the privacy of his home, of course
– which is a slightly less
satisfying feeling. 

Another might then attach them to the ceiling.

Recyclable

crucifixion-crosses,
of the Crux immissa type
*now available*.
Ideal further use
as skeletons for scarecrows.
Free delivery for orders more than five.

Today's photo.

The Caylus Waterfall in spring,
a couple of kilometres from the village,
taken yesterday by my friend, Clive Russell.

Ps and Qs.

Dismiss your fears.
There are far fewer

pansies than queers.

In music,

time is instruction.
In time, life is destruction.
My heart is the size of a handful of spoil.

Memories are made of this.*

 

and this:

*a popular song about nostalgia, written in 1955
by Terry Gilkyson, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller,
and sung by Dean Martin.

Thinking of famine

in the supermarket
I wondered: Does anybody here
appreciate the value
of a single potato, raisin or asparagus spear ?

I don't think the converse is true.

There is a (perhaps misogynist) saying
in this part of France, that
the more that you gaze at yourself in a mirror
the uglier you'll get.

I rarely look in the mirror,
and I'm definitely not getting uglier.

Do you ever get the sudden feeling

(it's almost a shock)
that your life is a series of discrete quanta
like nuts falling off a tree
rather than a flow from birth to death ?

and that the nut (or bubble) of time which you're in
is the only time that has ever been ?

 

Well, whaddaya know !

 

The boys who bullied me went on
to be revered surgeons, rugby captains for Ireland
and university professors...
while I failed my finals
and went happily and unobtrusively
and aspirationlessly on the dole.

My uncelebrated grandfather

(I'm told) kept saying
as he got older and more complaining:
Just one more clean shirt will do me.

This was when shirts had detachable collars
and were worn for a week or two.
Perhaps my grandmother,
hopefully washing and ironing,
gave him a clean shirt each day.

'The Angry Grammarian'

is a new musical (!)
staged in Philadelphia.

I wonder if the eponymous hero
tackles the strange, defective*
American auxiliary verbs to wanna and to gonna
(maybe modelled on Scots dinna[e] )
which have already crossed the Atlantic.

*in the grammatical sense
Dinna[e] is Scots for do not or don't

Example: I gonna wanna goanna for Joanna.

Petite mort, grande mort.

Hand or gun;
bedroom or battlefield:

there is an interesting ambiguity
in the pronouncement
'I finished him off'.

Probably not an original observation.

Friday Photo.

         

          YOU LOOKIN' AT ME ???

Grey Crowned Crane by Phil Wilkinson

MEN, jocularly/bitterly

used to declare, tell
how they had been educated
at The University of Life.

Life, for millions, especially
women and children,
is The University of Hell.

I'm sure you're not

(all five of you) reading this
on a smartphone.  A recent summary
of 'all the best scientific evidence' –
82 studies involving 150,000 participants –
estimated that over 25% of people worldwide
(two billion)
had “smartphone addiction”.

In the USA, Republican senator Tommy Tuberville
called smartphones “the biggest drug we've got”,
worse even than fentanyl."

Perhaps antinatalists

felt their mothers'
as well as their own
birth-pain ?

Or perhaps not.

Why are there so few Black sperm-donors in the US ?

And black-sperm donors ?

‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’
King Lear to Gloucester.

‘I photograph to find out

what something will look like when photographed’

– Gary Winogrand

But don't we all ?

And so on...

A Lesson of (Civil) War.

The innocent bystander
who helps build a barricade
will lend a hand to dismantle it.

Trendy Gay Ex-Priest Pop-singer Condones Mindless Violence

 "The first proper book I ever got when I was a boy was the Sherlock   Holmes short stories from my grandfather. I actually made my parents   buy me a deerstalker and I used to wear it around Kettering, and was   obviously beaten up daily – and rightly so."     [my underlining]

– Richard Coles, English broadcaster and author, in The Observer. 

What if

Adam was an apple-tree,
and Eve a cutting from his rib
(or something)
– which was why she was
so fond of apples ?

Not an Accident.

 

Behind

every policeman's narrow smile
lurks the Shadow of the State.

My New Facebook Friend

is going to take me swimming.

MIND-CONTROL (to sell you rubbish)

continued here >

Mille Regretz*.

I rather wish that there would be
some sort of brief hereafter
(not one full of floaty joy
and tedious laughter)
where I could say sorry
to my aunt and mother
for my egotistical, egregious,
distressing, semi-autistical, 
juvenile behaviour.

*The title of a famous song by Josquin des Prez.

see also: kurt gödel - his mother and the argument for life after death

Gödel's belief that he had proved the existence of an afterlife hung on his belief in the soul: an idea or fancy (of the visible and solid continuing forever invisible and immaterial) which has become belief. The further belief that humans are the only beings to have souls is even more unprovable and could be seen as mere (or desperate ?) religious (anthropocentric) arrogance.

Might a soul be acquired (like divine grace or the unearthing of a truffle) ?  Might some people/animals/trees have souls and others not.

Could a soul be lost (like a pair of glasses or a shoe) ?  Could one trade it in a pact as Faust did ?  Could it be shared ?  Could it become a tumour, or diseased and die independently of the person/animal/tree who housed it ? 

Is a soul conscious ?  Is it just another word for consciousness ?  Does it have feeling ?  It is hard to imagine an emotionless consciousness. 

If we don’t have souls, what could constitute an afterlife ?

Even if we do have souls, more questions are raised: how long would an afterlife last ? Might it simply be the persistence of a quantum of energy…or would it be an expansion like a galaxy ?

Could there be a half-afterlife ? Might there be more than one ?

If so, might they be a series of Russian dolls, or discrete existences ? What constitutes an existence in this context ?

Gödel moves from the belief in the existence of an afterlife to the assumption that he would have a particular afterlife wherein he would see his mother again? But an afterlife may be private, temporary, or simply full of too many people to locate particular loved ones!

The concept of the soul raises far more questions than it answers.

When we die, we don't even leave a space behind us.

Mariolatry.

The word Marry appears quite often
in Shakespeare's plays, prefacing a sentence
and meaning sometimes Indeed! but more often
just an attention-catching word like Look!

It is a short form of By the Virgin Mary!
and disappeared in Cromwell's Commonwealth,
if not before.

It is curious that the secular and proletarian,
tomboy-virginal, revolutionary symbol
of the French Republic since 1976, Marianne
(who appears in silhouette on stamps and on
official stationery and documents) is named
after the Virgin Mary and her mother,
and not the burned-by-the-English Jeanne.

Delacroix's painting of Marianne adapted as a mural
in support of the right-wing Gilets-Jaunes.

Mystery solved.

In my cellar I pulled out plant-protecting wrap
to use as a sieve for my water-and-lime kefir,
and found many of these.

What were they ?  The spent chrysalises of some 'pest' ?
Google lens could not help.
Then I realised:
I had used this wrap last year to protect
an oleander from frost. 
These are oleander seeds!

Remembering Stevie Smith.

When I was on the point of drowning
in a tide-rip, alone, in the Atlantic, in November,
with nothing around me but a grey-green ocean
and an empty strand,
I actually did, momentarily, remember
the splendid Stevie Smith.

And then I touched a sandbar with a foot,
turned round and crawled back hand over hand
against the current and the tide,
coming up for air as my lungs required.
For half an hour I lay panting
in perfect solitude upon the sand.

I would have drowned, not waving...
what would have been the point ?
And, anyway, what human life is worth saving ?

Hello, Sailor !

My deep-down soul-mate likes to be stroked.

 

The Acme

of ugly, dirty-pink vulgarity...
of Pizza-Hut EurAmericality. 

The Helpless in Gaza.

Since the Prophet (Blessed be His name)
was not as wise as His all-knowing God,
He was not wise or prophetic enough
to consider the possibility of carpet-bombing,
machine-gunning, missile-firing
and genocides 1400 years after
His nocturnal Ascension in Jerusalem.

The very idea of Ramadan in Gaza
is a sick joke in quite a different way
from our polyester Lent.

The least and perhaps best that the
helpless Faithless this side of the Dniester
can do in sympathy with Palestinians
is to observe Ramadan this year

especially during Easter.

The Perversion of History.

A Paris mural (after Delacroix) in support of the Gilets-Jaunes,
many of whom were right-wing and racist.

The French Revolution did not bring
liberty, equality or fraternity to France.

The police are still part of the army
and unaccountable.

Indeed, liberty has been granted only
since the EU was formed,
while equality and fraternity will probably never arrive.

"Contre nous de la tyrannie" runs the third line of the Marseillaise. But it doesn't take a Proudhon to observe that all governments are tyrants, not just militarist ones...

see the-persistence-of-the-old-regime and tolerate the mis-spelling of 'racked' in the blurb;

also my blog of 14th March.