The Nose

 

'Neurodivergence'

Minorities have mushroomed
in my lifetime. Only in my eighties
did I realise that I am an untypically
eye-contacting poly-æsthetic Aspy.
Like many Aspies
I don't like groups
or ceremonies. 

*

Now I learn
that I'm not just different and dissident
but also limerent.  

I still remember my first and only girlfriend
of sixty years ago, at least twice a week
with pangs. I've seen her Bornholmian house
on Google Earth, maybe even her car -
though I don't know if she can drive
or indeed if she's still alive.

It was another fifteen years before
I found my next voluptuous
(though not heartfelt)
sweet lover - queer
(not capable of repression or guilt
I cruised him in a WC)
but now barely remembered. 

Then, resultantly, sometimes exultantly
came another...and another...and another.
Some have faded utterly.

I am maybe more encumbered
by pangs of memory
for my second, final, comparatively-recent
fleshly passion (just as brief)
of twenty years ago
and our delicious, ultra-pleasant,
multi-sensual lechery...

Strange, serial monogamy !

Tim Berners-Lee,

inventor of the Word-wide Web,
asked recently on the BBC
how he'd manage,
if he were to be
permanently off-line
said: I'd be fine.

The name means "no water"

because the Koala gets all it needs
from eucalyptus leaves. It sleeps much of the time
because so much energy is required
to digest and detoxify the leaves. 

Moreover, can eat only a few of the hundred species of eucalyptus that grow in Australia, so its habitats, always very limited, are now extremely vulnerable, due to ever-encroaching destruction.

Weakly-interacting Massive Particles.

When two wimps collide, they can annihilate one another.

read more >

Beauty is not Truth.

 I have been a victim
of the æsthetic fallacy
and a pathetic policy
of trusting people
I think are beautiful.

This is my inspiration

for my next self-portrait.
It is by my favourite portrait-painter.

Hans Holbein the Younger.

My very different prostrate subject from 1985.

Self, by photocopier.

Ça va ? Wie geht's ?

Actually, I'm feeling pretty good
but we're not intimate and you don't
want to hear about my current stage
of joyful solitude in old age –
so I ignore your question. 
                                        I much prefer
Hello (Hail-oh! from 1830) or Wotcher (What cheer!).
Informal French has a good solution: Salut!
which means Good health! with overtones
of simple salutation, like Hi! in English
which comes from Nordic Hej! 
which also produced the slightly butch
abrasive Hey!
Dutch Hoi gave us the maritime Ahoy!
and Hallo! comes from Frisian as well as Dutch.

If there is to be no actual conversation
(God save us from that in the middle of a street!)
I think that the best greeting
 is an elegant, friendly wave,
though prissy people don't think that it's
a proper way to behave.
If you're Irish, beannachtaí! (blessings)
is elegant, respectful, unintrusive and discreet,
unlike [How's) about ye ? from Belfast.
God be with you was once common in believers' English,
like Ireland's ancient Dia duit.

How's the crack ?
was a phrase borrowed by Ulster folk from Northern English.
Crack (the word for a good bout of conversation rather than passive-aggressive 'banter') was 'culturally appropriated'
and had its spelling Oirishised,

rather as the English Julie-the-Jig
dressed in her birthday rig,
showing her thingumajig

was mumbled into sheela-na-gig.

Mike White's most countercultural belief

(apparently)
is that the current focus on
(not to say obsession with)
identity is imprisoning,
not liberating.

Unlike dogs, we are so blocked
by our inner questioning
that we rarely have an idea
of how others are thinking.

*writer, director...
creator of The White Lotus, a TV series,
apparently.

Gewürztraminer

My second-favourite white wine (from Alsace)
costs twice as much as my favourite (which is local).
But as the old saw says, Variety is the Spice of Life.

Gewürz is German for Spice.
Traminer is German for from Taormina, part of Italy since 1921.

'They’re selling everything as trauma :

how our emotional pain became a product.'

Emotional pain is not only encouraged,
but actually 'whipped up'
where it is seen by the Associated Psycho-industries
to be lacking.

Though obviously not in Gaza, West Sudan,
Ukraine, et cetera.

Time is less

a Great Healer,
more a sticking-plaster.

Frida Kahlo Dreaming.

El Sueño (In Bed).

Hilda Trujillo, guardian,
at a window of the Casa Azul, Coyoacán,
where Frida lived. 

In thirty years' time, perhaps,

people will have forgotten Gaza
as I forgot Goražde,
Bosnian enclave on the Drina.

What is the opposite of Hope ?

It's not despair,
nor terror of the future.
nor resignation...somewhere
in between, perhaps ?
Not hopelessness, but horror.

I am a prisoner of hope, said
Olafur Eliasson, uninspired
and depressing painter.

If hope is a gaoler
what hope of freedom ?

Ironic

Débris from WW2 weapons meant to kill
provide rare safe havens for once-thriving,
now-threatened species
in the over-fished Baltic.

Modern Medicine and Technology.

The problem
with and for General Practitioners
is that they know far more about drugs
than about their patients
or people in general.

The Great Irish Famine, 1850 – an aside.

Irish emigrants to the USA, 1850

Contrary to nurtured assumptions
few female Irish emigrants became domestic servants,
cooks, wives and mothers with reputations
for diligence and rectitude.

In the 1860s,
Irish people made up about a quarter of New York’s population
but Irish men comprised half of the male prison population
and Irish women 86% of imprisoned females.
A survey of 1,238 foreign-born sex workers in the city
found that 706, just over half, were Irish.

On the subject of women and prison,

Penal colony for women, Perm, Russia, 1990

An inmate serves boiled water
instead of tea or coffee to a prisoner in solitary confinement. 

World Wide Web

 I welcome my
dehumanisation.
Point me to
lone-lupinisation.

We should acknowledge

that Israeli soldiers did not
make Palestinians dig
their own mass graves
in which the dying lay in neat rows
on top of
the dying and the dead...

nor was there mass-rape,
though for Palestinians
there was no escape.

But Gaza has been, nevertheless,
one of the world's great ghettoes
where 'from time immemorial
much tribal blood has been shed.

Serial-killers.

Our fascination with rare violence,
tiger-hunters
and serial murderers

reflects and distracts us from
our daily eco-crimes
of drinking tea and coffee
(not to mention
monocultural wine)

eating avocados from Peru
sweetcorn from Senegal
parsnips from Australia...

and driving cars.
Naturally, no oil-executive
or mass-logging company CEO
ends up behind bars.

www restriction

and, by the way, on the www
nothing is unrepeatable.

Good tidings.

Very soon, we will no longer
have to descend into Hell: 
we have diabolically
arranged for it
to rise up and enfold us.

For the North American reader.

Do fiends enjoy themselves
in Hell,
or only out of it
(at leisure)
or both,
or neither ?

'State Capture'

is on the march –

not corruption of the system

but corruption as the system.

Compassion.

Rescued fruit-bats in an Australian hospital.

 

Vivat!

Long live 
Pathological Apathy!

Its absence is
human insanity

does-laziness-start-in-the-brain ?

'Free Press'

“What we have here in America 
is not so much censorship
as self-censorship by the press.”

– Journalist Seymour Hersh, 'Lone-wolf trouble-maker'. 

see also >

Thinking of Émile Cioran,

(about whom my ?friend Karl has written an impressive tome)
I scribbled:
When you understand that your birth was a defeat, the numbing strangeness of existence can become tolerable, and death...will undo the numbing.

Cioran wrote a lot of aphoristic tosh, such as:

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

~ They might simply be bored with living, rather than reactivate their curiosity and sense of adventure.
He is a victim of a false binary (pessimist/optimist). Suicide can be a neutral act - as mine (if it happens) will be.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

It depends on your sense of curiosity. 
My old age (since the insertion of a long-overdue Pacemaker)
is (so-far) one of the best times of my life. 
It is great fun observing the various forms of decline from ever-increasing deafness and dimness of vision to senile psoriasis,
a tendency to mislay things,
a certain totteriness, and lactose intolerance.. 

It is also enhanced by solitude, with no friends, no visitors,
just polite waves and bonjours at the market.

Like EMC, however, I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.

which is wonderfully liberating. Until the doctors get me.

My simple, cheap solution.

Climate change + Artifical Intelligence
 = mass unemployment

and massive social unrest.

I have a solution:
re-activate and build
coal-fired power stations
designed to deposit
tar on their chimneys,
and employ
millions to scrape it
away and dig holes
to bury it.

I would give-all-for-my brother--this-is-climate-breakdown

If it is not arrogance

it is at least
unsubstantiated assumption :
the insistence
that life is better than death,
or that death is a ceasing, a closure
rather than an overture
to a state beyond existence.

Sick!

I'm sort-of-ashamed to admit
that, still feeling young in my head
and as lithe as I was at eighteen
(though tiring rather more quickly)
I'm quite enjoying my time at
The End of the World.

But I don't have a dog any more.

Attending a wedding

in Gaza.

Photo: Majdi Fathi

French Guiana, a sidelight on slavery.

 

It is now an enthusiastic département of France.
Haiti has had a very different history...

There is a degree

 of sadness
(I'm sure Rumi would agree)
which is a kind of ecstasy

beyond the superficiality
(and often brevity)
of joy and gladness.

Happy Recollection.

Howls
as from a prison

anywhere between
the Atlantic Ocean
and the South China Sea,

the Atlas Mountains
and the Hindu Kush.

Our dog got
his ball stuck in a bush.

It's getting less and less

 due to destruction of the forests
but there's still
for millions of uncaring adults
'an awful lot of coffee in Brazil'.

Pay no heed to Dante.

Apart from all the greater criminals
Hell's corners are largely filled
by hypocrites like us.

Albi Cathedral:
 the punishment of the smug.

Brief encounter

with Brief Encounter –
I turned it off
It so reduced, traduced
Rachmaninoff.

What was wrong with the word

 Transvestites ?
for humans who liked to
or did dress as the opposite sex ?

Now we are saddled with the word
 Trans-sexuals for biological men
(who seem never to wear burqas
or anything that occludes their faces*)
demanding to use women-only toilet-rooms
even though women (at least half of whom suffer
abuse of one kind or another by men)
thus lose their only safe, feminine spaces.

*Except when carrying weapons or bombs.

See also : 
intersex-campaigners-fighting-to-limit-surgery-on-children

After why

is it ? and how is it ?
We should ask where
has it come from ?
and where it is going to ?

If only we had The Freedom of Choice !

But that would require pre-natal consciousness
at the very least.

 

Coyote Creates Humans.

 Coyote stopped to drink at a big lake and saw his reflection. 
“Now there’s a really good-looking coyote,” 
he said, leaning farther over.

And of course he fell in.  And of course
you will think this is a take-off on an old theme.

But what happened was,
he drank up the whole lake to keep from drowning. 
And because he didn’t really like the taste of certain fish,
he spat them out. 
And because he felt sorry when he saw them flopping around,
he sang a song to give them legs.

“Maybe they’ll become the first people,” Coyote mused aloud.

“Oh no you don’t,” said the headman of that tribe of fish,
“if it’s all the same with you,
could you just put us back where we were? 
And could you please take away these stupid legs?”

So Coyote regurgitated the lake
and put everything back the way it was.

Again he saw his reflection and said,
“Okay, you’re pretty good-looking, but are you smart? 
I’ve been trying to make the first people for a long time now,
but nothing wants to be people.
So, what do I do – huh – can you tell me?”

His reflection studied him for a long time,
then it squatted and dropped a big turd.

“Okay,” said Coyote,
“I guess that’s as good an answer as any.”

Then he himself squatted
and began to fashion the first people…

~ Peter Blue Cloud

Coyote, Coyote, please tell me who you belong to?

According to the latest

survey, there are certain

persons who, in poetic

or scholarly guise,

have claimed me like

a conqueror’s prize.

Let me just say

once and for all,

just to be done:

Coyote, he belongs to none.

from the Peruvian Andes

my Alstrœmeria psittacina,
or Parrot Lily, now in bloom and spreading.

The irrepressible Yanis Varoufakis

uses a great new term
to describe outrageous,
unstoppable, monopolistic
economic warlordism:

Technofeudal.

The Bhagavad Gita suggests

that Man is made of belief.

Henry Ford didn't believe in history.

Some people's beliefs are very precise,

bizarre, their origins a mystery.

Thinking people progress towards

believing in nothing

except that belief is a vise and a vice. 

Female Peacock Mantis Shrimp

with cluster of eggs.

photo by Peter McGee

I don't need it. But thanks for the thought..

 

Figures to consider.

A piece of ancient advice

suggests that
We should live each day
as if it were the last,

'without frenzy, without apathy,
without pretence.'

But how about trying
to live each day as if
it were the first ? 

Come as you like!

 

At the International University

of Sensual Liberation :
Scrotum-nuzzling for Beginners.
Weekend Courses
for all sexes.
Redolent 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). 

The Tree of Life, however, is the drought-resistant date-palm, whose fruits never rot (due to their sugar content) and is the earliest cultivated tree.  Thousands of years ago there were date-orchards, where also garlic and leeks were grown.

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.