A Diogenean Thought.

Since human beings have
negative environmental impact
alongside infinitesimal
cosmic significance,
it is 'criminal' to save them
from their own catastrophe
or dissuade them from suicide.

We are less and less surprised.

Many boys were sadistically beaten
in Catholic-run Irish schools
until the end of the 20th century.
But only those who were groped, raped or forced
to suck cocks are considered to be victims.

Now, 'in a different part of the wood',

*  *  *

I was born allergic

to banality.  Hence my dislike
of garish lipstick (someone must have
- perhaps with stealth -
thrust their mouth at me in my
first year unaccounted for).
The ultimate banality (far beyond
comfortable complacency)
is hideous wealth. 

Two Cities.

Warsaw:
perhaps not quite Europe's most hideous architecture.

 

Oslo:
McDonald's, Burger King - and a protesting tram.

"I've got plenty of Nothing..."

I wonder what black people felt
on hearing this offensive song 
from the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,
at a time of vicious segregation 
(mostly) in the southern US, where lynchings
and punishments by murder were common,

and quite a few million in the Land of the Free
were dying of plenty of nothing.

Sex and Celebrity.

I have long known of the existence
of tear-bottles in antique society, 

but I have only recently discovered
that gladiator-sweat was widely
(and unsurprisingly) valued
as one a most powerful aphrodisiac.
(No mention has survived
of the rarer foreskin cheese.)

Could it have been collected in tiny bottles
for consumption by the super-rich ?
Or in handkerchieves ?
Or was it mixed with flour,
patted into raw mini-baps
for them to sniff
and lick and savour in erotic ease ?

Or was it sold (or even auctioned)
like modern wrestlers' jock-straps ?

Fateful.

Some may remember The Millennium Bug
and the digital-numerological panic
surrounding the year 2000.

It was also the year that the
(U.S.A. presidential) election defeat
of environmentalist Al Gore
turbo-charged already-irreversible
climate change, amongst other
oilygarchic and militaristic evils. 

2024 may bring a similar speeding-up
of our super-Wagnerian rush to Ragnarók.

It's not that

we are the only thuggish species
but that the worst of us are
so good at organisation
that we would organise the galaxy
into a black hole, if we only could.

Due partly to the Internet,

 English is the widest-spread lingua franca
there has ever been.  It is unfortunate
that it is a nuts-and-bolts, anti-abstract language
with little of the metaphysical subtlety
of Farsi or Pali. (Not to mention, thanks to Gutenberg
 + pronunciation-shift, a crazy orthography). 

But hey!
Things could be worse. The last lingua franca
was French, with much emotional subtlety
but little innovative plasticity,
or cut-and-paste opportunity
for verbal re-arrangement.

French could never come up with such
a brilliant word as 'infotainment'.

Regarding climate-change,

will the climate actually get worse
in Saudi and southern Arabia ?

'Social Media'

are Sowers of Discord.

People prefer oracles to experts:

an oracle cannot be wrong.
People pay less heed to 

poetry than to song.

Experts decreed that places like this

should house millions..

Today's good news from experts:

cooking with gas
(as I have done since 1970)
has shortened my life by two years.

Perpetual Pandemic.

There is one terrible disease
for which no cure will ever
be possible:
human greed.

 

Art and the Spider.

Maratus lobatus

by Maria Fernanda Cardosa

The Ethiopian proverb

'The stronger the coffee
the softer the shit'
is true indeed.

And also (rhymelessly)
the harder the hit
the lighter the head.

'The Light of the World'

 

attracts millions of moths.

(This was not a quip by Wilde about Holman Hunt's schmalzy painting, but I cannot be the first to have made it.
The window above, in the same vein, is in St Brendan's church, Bantry, SW Ireland, at least partly financed by the misery of its parishioners.)

Compare the above with Zanchi's depiction of Diogenes
ironically holding a lamp to find an honest man
or someone who was not a hypocrite.
The owl represents the power of the goddess Athenë
to see through human murk.

How many of these men

 are not rapists ?

The accused in the Gisèle Pelicot multi-rape trial in France.

Let today

be World Nobodies Day,

the Day of the Powerless

and Uncelebrity.

Ismail Kadarë,

not the best but the most
famous Albanian novelist,
recently deceased,
stated the obvious:

Dictatorships breed untruth,
selfishness, distrust,
fear and irrationality. 

He did not add that
the internet has done the same,
and very probably
makes new kinds of dictatorship
more likely.

Body Language.

 

by Jamal Shabazz

Cleaners of the world, unite!

You have nothing to lose
but our trash...our contempt,
and your derisive pay.

After inhaling Nitrous oxide,

Humphry Davy, chemist and inventor
of the miners' lamp, declared:

Nothing exists but thoughts.

"Not for Sale"

As Luis Buñuel declared many years ago,
there are already more than enough
museums and art galleries in the world
to worship property in,
without having another Guggenheim
take over Urdaibai,
an 'Environmentally Protected Area'
of North-western Spain.

Save Nature from the Art Industry

Most hide behind a mask

Many hide behind a one-way window

Billions can manage only by using
both means of blotting out reality.

On the radio I heard

a depression-sufferer complain
about not wanting to do more
than just exist. How depressing
that so many billions of us
do not consider just existing
as a blessing!

                   Put another way:
Existential misery
and plummetings of mood
derive at least partly
from our refusal
to be simply content
to merely be (and enjoy
good food).

 

Peruvian Immigrant gets Specimen

PASSPORT.

 

Typical and typically-enduring

mistranslation of Heraclitus:

You cannot step into the same river twice.  

Instead of:
You cannot step twice into the same flow of water.  

Especially under a bridge.

Was he homeless ?

Did he survive ?

 

Life Support.

At the end
what most of us –
     if conscious behind
     the tubes, the wires and the screen
– what most of us want
is a hug or a hand-squeeze,
or just a smile,
not a hook-up to another machine.

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.

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...