Come as you like!

 

At the International University

of Sensual Liberation :
Scrotum-nuzzling for men and women.
Weekend Courses.
Negligible Prices.

A State of Grace :

Radiant Pessimism.

Nice flippers, nice little horns, no willy -

but Triton plays the flute very nicely...
to an important Why-don't-you-stop-now? 
sea-nymph.

Musée Raimond, Toulouse.

The horrible banality of....

The U.S. Ambassador to Greece

 

Not quite à-propos,
Hannah Arendt's tired and superficial phrase
should have read:
The apparent banality of evil.

Krispy Kreme Doughnut

'Please rescue me from my grotesque and
cruel metamorphosis by a wicked wizard.'

Generally speaking,

Man does not appreciate the dark,
and thus produced the Hydrogen Bomb.

'Ahead of the Game' and 'In the Vanguard',

I am in the front row of social breakdown
(and mixed metaphor), indulging in the lunacy
of "personal journalling" for 17 years. 

'The sale of video doorbells
is one of the few consumer growth areas.'
But not for me. There are no calls at my door
apart from the occasional delivery
of books and plants, and, last week,
some warm and inexpensive
Chinese hosiery.

Don McCullin : NEPTUNE

"This man slept by a fire in Spitalfields market,
very close to the City of London,
which generates billions and billions of pounds f
or the people who own it.
You couldn’t have more of a contrast.
One side is everything, and the other side is nothing.

"I call this picture Neptune, because he looks like the sea god.
I thought he was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen."

He also looks like a Western Islander.
This portrait is now famous.

for comparison and contrast:

a photo by Jake Lee Green

Overcrowding.

Gap Im Hong
goldfish in a pond in Ottawa.

TWO NOVEMBER HAIKAI

1. After Basho

November night has paled,

slowly disintegrating

into dawn, dank and cold.

2. Inspired by Issa

Another daybrrrreak.

Fog from the Aveyron slinks up

over my breakfast-cake.

On a frosty November morning, I wondered

what were The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
that was the title of T.E. Lawrence's famous book.

And it may be that they were the supports
of the godly, heavenly house full of goodies
lived in by The Righteous.

The uncountably-more
pillars of stupidity
are not mentioned.

Electronic Ozymandias.

Of course it can't last.
The real doomsday event internet experts still worry about is a sudden, snowballing error in the decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet.   -|-   Photo by Sergio Azenha

Guerrilla mosaic

in a bomb-crater,
Mostar, Bosnia.

 

A doctor was brought forward in court

to state that Young was genetically predisposed to being abused.

Doctors are no more trustworthy than police.

possibly-the-most-prolific-sex-offender-in-british-history

I have been 'dipping into'

the edited letters of Evelyn Waugh,
stylish and amusing English novelist...

came across this from 1948 :
'I am reading Proust for the first time.
Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.'

In another letter he pities Americans
for their 'superstitious belief in democracy',
an ancient intellectual caprice
which, in its mad modern developments,
indeed has proved to be as much
a mere three-witches-smoke-and-mirrors doctrine
as those of progress, the Brotherhood of Man,
the robustness of the dying biosphere
and World Peace.

"The Temple of Vaccinia".

Edward Jenner's laboratory/shed
where he demonstrated and proved (1796)
that inoculation with the blister-pus of cowpox
'vaccinated' successfully against smallpox.

For at least hundreds of years before that,
within the Turkish Empire
smallpox pus was used with considerable risk
and mixed results. In the 18th century 
observations on the link between cowpox
and subsequent smallpox immunity had been made.

Life's changes.

I guess it's at least ten years
since I was invited to dinner,
maybe five since I entertained
anyone here.

Before that, I received or was invited
at least once a week.

Life changes. Apparently
I'm an old man
with two short arms and a Pacemaker.
(I have to cut off the cuffs of my shirts.)

Next week I could be ashes
in a crematorium
in south-western France, not
southern Poland.

Changes, Switches.
One-zero, one-zero.

To kill certain people or certain
types of people is Obligatory
for certain people during a war.
Then, suddenly, it is forbidden
War is the pride of religion.

Millions are never invited
to share food with others.

I have a new doctor.

Who types with one finger
not two, just one finger.
His skin has the beautiful hue
of dark chocolate.
He is even less competent
than the last one, but his radiant smile
(as much as the drugs he signs off on)
keeps me bright and buoyant* –
at least for a while.

                             *Jung's Puer Æternus ?

It's funny

/not funny at all :
what people will rush or just bother
to do "for their country"
- things they would never do for each other. 

And there are the commands
like light-switches.
You are required to kill certain people.
Then required not to.
And millions of corpses
in mass graves and ditches.

'Small' languages seriously threatened,

even when they have a literature
which is a thousand years old.

She complains

about men not wearing underpants. 

Long-johns are, of course, essential in winter.
But if men wore sensible clothing,
such as a djellaba,
underpants would not be useful,
especially when squatting
for pissing or shitting.

Self-portrait in djellaba.

.

Red Lightning, New Zealand.

 

Timeless in Balkh,

the Afghan birth-place of 
Mawlānā Jalal ad-Din Rūmī Balkhi,
known more widely as Rumi.

photo by Atif Ariyan

Reading, not Walking

Walking just 4,000 daily steps once a week
cuts risk of early death in older people,
study suggests...

Which is why I (always seceding
and being already too old)
sit quietly, pacemaker-implanted,
painlessly at home, reading.

Parked in the market square

 250 metres from my house.

Poor Haiku

 November house-fly
delights in home-made yogurt
just as much as I.

'A moment that changed me' :

 "I gave up small talk for a month – and the world came alive."

Being somewhere 'on the A-Spectrum', I am incapable of small talk.

If weather is mentioned, I sometimes voice my and my mother's interest in meteorology, and people mostly (mercifully) drift away.

The goats tune out, and no sheep stay.

Being 'hard of hearing' is an even better ploy...

But the world "comes alive" in a very private way.

Here is exactly the sort of snippet that I would call
Part of a Conversation.

Did you know that the famous Paisley print pattern has its origins in Persia ?  The teardrop/pear-shaped motif, known as boteh in Farsi, is probably a stylised almond or cypress cone (the cypress was sacred to Zoroastrians, and pineapple-ish cones have been much used in European sculptural decoration). 

When I show visitors my gabbeh representing a Peacock on the Tree of Life (symbol of immortality since Assyrian times) they glaze over, staying that way even when I show them my own paintings - also featuring the Tree of Life (or Immortality) without the peacock...

and so, with time, my few friends have
(like my few lovers), dwindled to nought.

My world is principally trees and thought.

People over 15 (or, sometimes, 25) may sometimes
like to learn, but generally don't like to be taught.

A waste-bin (dumpster) in Denmark.

This is probably typical of waste-bins in European cities,
but not in small towns and villages.
In my French village there are special compost bins
for non-animal food-waste, which are actually used;
I have never seen edible food in a dumpster.

Århus, Jutland.

« L'enfer, c'est les autres. » Hell is where we consign others - J-P Sartre.

Mais « l'enfer c'est les autres » a été toujours mal compris.

On a cru que je voulais dire par là
que nos rapports avec les autres étaient toujours empoisonnés,
que c'était toujours des rapports infernaux.
Or, c'est tout autre chose que je veux dire.
Je veux dire que si les rapports avec autrui sont tordus, viciés,
alors l'autre ne peut être que l'enfer." 

- J-P Sartre.

On the other hand, the common misinterpretation is, to my mind, true:
Hell is made by other people - plus, of course, oneself.

2025 Booker Prizewinner.

“Szalay has written a novel about The Big Question:
about the numbing strangeness of being alive,”
wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review of the novel.
“Stylistically, Flesh is all bone. "

Æsthetics and Extinction.

Beauty and Death:
between them
pain and its infliction.

Today's

Message in a bottle:

Composition.

The New Mayor of New York.

 

Oh dear,

I have had gas hobs since 1970
and a closed wood-burning stove
since 2006.
For sixty years before that,
I lived with had open coal fires
and paraffin [kerosene] heaters.
It's a miracle that I'm alive,
even with a PaceMaker.

The Chairs

Mr Hockney,
a celebrity painter
of moderate talent
and little originality,
despises his 'public'
and insults his hallowed
predecessors
with 'work' like this.
A Big Name can sell big
any cheap little joke.

Hockney: Gauguin's and van Gogh's chairs.

Thinking about Tunisia

(where I was for three months
in 1960, while the Algerian
war of independence was raging)

China, Viêt-Nam, and Prague :

protesters who set themselves on fire
make a country's situation no less dire,
just busier.

The Generosity of the Human Male (to other males).

"Epstein and Maxwell began lending me out to their friends."

– Virginia Giuffre 

 "As I left that night, I felt that familiar scooped-out, empty feeling."

At around the same time, 
Dominique Pelicot hired his unconscious wife out
to friends and friends of friends (often several at a time)
at very reasonable rates...

Not all pessimism has been suppressed.

'It's not the despair, Laura.
I can stand the despair.
It's the hope.'

John Cleese in Clockwise, 1986.

Well, that's a relief !

'First, you invent yourself,

then you get to believe your invention,'
wrote John le Carré. But most of us
are at least partly invented
by at least one other's wish and intention,
whether accepted or resented.

When is a civil war 'within control' ?

Only when one side is winning.

 

The Future

near you.

Surtsey

I remember the awe and wonder
when Surtsey arose
from the deep blue yonder,
amongst the Vestmannaeyjar

off the Icelandic coast.

I even bought (or stole) a book
of chronological photographs.

Surtsey erupting from the sea-bed.

read more >

Surtsey now.

Full of Healthy Goodness

Lemon Blueberry Oat Boosts
(always remember to read the packet)

I think I'll stick with plum crumble plus cinnamon.

The future. The face

 of the planet.

La France Profonde.

 

The clever

fools who want
to live forever
(maybe on the moon)
will harbour
in their blood and guts
and brains
more and more dementifying
microplastic
unless somehow
in their perverse ardour
they (pretty soon)
take steps and pains
to make themselves immune
and able to trip eternal light fantastic.

Sea, rock, sky.

 

Northumbria.

Costa Brava.

Thoughts

are mind-farts that can
too easily become
incontinence/deep shit.

Samhain de-hallowed.

The nearest that kooky
Cocacolons can get to the numinous :
 'spooky'.

Ghost-turnips,-pucas,-fortune-telling-and-evil...>

Missing the point.

'Indigenous' peoples,
whether in Australia or North America,
had no concept of ownership,
especially of land.

Which is why it wasn't desecrated,
pillaged and destroyed.

Thucydides.

Being somewhat deaf,
I may have mis-heard,
but I think

to anthropion 
τό ανθρώπιόν
was a word he coined
to encompass human
-ness, the human condition,
and human behaviour,

but definitely not
Roman-Christian
humanity/humanitas 
in its religiously
self-congratulatory
sense, which arose much later.

In these blogs

is ineptly outlined
my woolly anti-doctrine of
Ineffective Nihilism,
which does nothing
to combat or resist
or even recognise
Effective Altruism.

On the opposite side of my street.

 

Still-life.

photo by Yamazawa Eikoeiko

 

Still-Life

by Don McCullin.

Unicorns,

I am led to suppose,
don't have dilemmas. 

Such fortunate creatures !

The Central Hospital, Montauban.

My recent experiences
reminded me of lines by world-famous
Seamus Heaney, whose poetry
I have never liked. This mediocre poem,
for example, is ruined
by the jarring, laboured
'eyebeams threaded laser-fast'.

For me, the only good experiences
were the jolly, jolty trundlings 

by ambulance and trolley,
flat on my back as a dozen
cheerless ceilings passed.

The the operation itself, 

during which I was conscious and intrigued,
proceeded with blows and punches
to get the pacemaker in position, flesh-fast...

As usual,

after the clocks go back,
I forget to turn lights off when going to bed,
and start lighting the wood-stove
to micro-add more to the wholesale
collapse of the world.

Two glasses of wine

with my evening meal
give me a pounding headache
within sixty minutes.
It's not unusual, but
it's more common for old people
to have a next-morning hang-over.
So I've reduced to one,
followed by two glasses of water.

Recently deceased,

 "The most beautiful boy in the world"
sixteen years old,
(white, characterless, passive
and, to me, fairly repulsive
in the celebrated film of Death in Venice)

claimed that Luchino Visconti “
didn’t give a fuck” about his feelings.  

“I’ve never seen so many fascists and assholes
as there are in film and theatre,” said Björn Andrésen.
“Luchino was the sort of cultural predator
who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
And, one should add, for his desire and ambition.

Much older is much more beautiful.