The only irrational animal

uses its intelligence mainly
to create hierarchies
in order to conquer and control
its surroundings, 

and now to create
and control more powerful
and competitive intelligences
which it will inevitably,

at last powerlessly, hate.

*

'A man walks on the Kolyma highway, nicknamed “the road of bones”. It was built in the 1930s by political prisoners held in the gulags, and links the port town of Magadan to the town of Nizhny Bestiakh.
The construction, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, claimed between 250,000 and 1 million lives.
They are buried next to or directly under the 1,219-mile (1,961 km) road, part of which is still not finished as it is an extremely difficult project despite modern equipment.'

Well, well -

isn't that just great ?

Sounds to me a bit like
fiddling while Rome burns.

Poets

are people whom posh people
choose to make them
feel acceptably exceptional.

The Museum of Empathy

One of these photos
disgusts me and makes my flesh creep.
Both were published on the same day
in the same article
in the same newspaper.

Adam Pearson.

Kim Kardashian

Crunch Time.

This insane clock
(here photographed on my 1960 tiled floor)
was free-on-the-street
in Caylus yesterday.
I couldn't resist it.
Note the squiggly second hand.

"And what do you want

to be when you grow up ?"

I wanted to be an Oracle.

Unfortunately

I became a barnacle.

A lovely photo

which reminds me of my previous home.

One of Banksy's

less adolescent efforts.

Banksy Museum (!) Madrid

Stigmata –

Jesus probably had no more than four
(maybe only two)
(plus a nasty spear-wound)

while women in their millions
from Alaska to China
since the beginning of time
have suffered the pains and the stigma
of the bleeding vagina.

No more-appropriate picture available 
from Google.

Texas, 1987

by Wim Wenders

 

The Hookworms of Hope.

We are the only earthly animal
which can 'take the long view'
with our lazy brains and simple eyes.

[and also, or consequently]

we are the only earthly animal
to direct itself towards its own demise.

Shock and Awe.

Diogenes (reputedly and probably) did,
but he eschewed all property,
and would have considered 'selfies'
(and cameras) obscenely vulgar.

In 1788,

in Paris, under cover of night,
there began a huge operation
to remove millions of buried bodies,
dug up and loaded on to ox carts
that rumbled across the city,
each accompanied by a priest
to what were then the suburbs,
to what are now The Catacombs.

Might this have contributed to the quasi-Revolution a year later ?

Little café, big ice stupa

storing water for the dry months,
Gya, Ladakh.

Some human brains

have survived longer than Stonehenge.
the Pyramids, etc., that is to say,
no longer than the twinkling
of a crocodile eye.

Quote of the Day :

 "I'm not a macho film-maker."

- Mike Leigh

And so he is one of the best...ever,
along with Kiarostami, Bergman,
Tarkovsky, Fassbinder...

Not only Europe.

"Europe has chosen false prophets at every opportunity."  

Jens Bjørneboe

Today, I stumbled

(indeed I fell)
upon another hero:
a pub-haunting
grungy 'common labourer'
who painted in his sitting-room
and never sought to sell.

Only his immediate family knew.
So, after he died and his house
was open to visitors, there was a queue.

This is his jacket...

This is his bedroom...

.

..and these are some of his paintings :

I admire his modesty 

at least as much as
his ability, his sheer
and sympathetic honesty.

He was once a boxer.

Read more in the Manchester Evening News
and the Guardian.

It's Chinese New Year.

Everyone has yet another face.
Everybody has a phone.
Not everybody has a place.

Holocaust Day, 2025

As Kings and other heads of state
gather to remember the liberation
of Auschwitz 80 years ago,

'

Internally displaced'  Palestinians
stream along Al Rashid road in central Gaza
towards their bombed-out houses
in the ruined north.

Meanwhile across the Atlantic...>

End of small, peculiar episode.

If environmental collapse doesn't destroy us
algorithms will,
'to punish our arrogance' super-Biblically.
Maybe Sisyphus and his as yet
unnamed bomb get up the hill
and explode in super-volcanic effulgence.
Maybe, from Pandora's box
Prometheus pulls out
not Hope, not frankincense, 
but Artificial Intelligence.

17-10-2024

The good art

of making friends.
The bad art
of making bad friends.
The poor art
of making 'useful' friends.
The sad art
of losing friends constantly.

I never had imaginary friends,
for I had books and a teddy
and no imagination.

Old friends are like old
or fading enthusiasms.
Most of my few friends
are dead - some twenty years ago.

Of friendship
I always had too-high an expectation.

And now to the Vomitorium.

The popularity of Carl Bloch's
'masterpiece',
Prometheus Unbound
would make you
more than weep.

People are fascinating –

more for their pathologies
than for their lamentably
few interesting interests.

Unfortunately, you need
to know them for a long time,
or too intimately, to discover
their fascinating pathologies.

Branding.

All dreams
are henceforth
American.

Jesus said

Leave your job, your restricting family,
get up (if necessary from your bed)
and follow me.  A long time later
Paul came, turned Jesus on his head
(he of the thorny crown)
and invented Christianity.

Allegedly,
Peter was crucified upside down.

Jottings of the Day.

If you have pretensions,
ambitions to be phatic,
you need to be more than
slightly charismatic

*

Deft I never was
in anything.
Deaf I am
becoming.

*

Inner-auditory
involuntary
creativity:
when you have earworms
all the time
occasionally they
get confused.
(Apologies, no rhyme.)

*

Money
demeans us
and makes us
(even if we weren't already)
mean.

*

If novels and newspapers
are not total rot,
the richer you are
the more nervy you get.

*

To call a Spade a Spade
has less to do with horticulture
than with skin-colour;
and Clubs are often
bruisingly exclusive.
(It was only today that I learned
the composition of a Club Sandwich.)

*

With only a little weed, a sneeze
becomes an orgasm in the nose.

*

We didn't need 'science' to tell us
that we are an environmental curse;
on the contrary, science ensured
that our damage gets worse and worse.

*

Did I hear correctly ?  'They' of the Israeli nation
were vaccinating Palestinians against polio
so that they can better endure
stinking-camp starvation.

*

The problem, Senator Yeats
(Ireland's supremely-phatic scrawler),
is that the Gyres don't widen;
but get smaller.

Probably because young males

have been fed better, and with more meat,

and women may well like that.

Parent, Peer, Pædophile...

To feel shame
you have to be made
to feel ashamed.

Or are we all born
with the shame that Jehovah
put into Adam
who passed it on to Eve 
– or is that merely guilt ?

I have started painting again.

This is the second of a series
of calligraphic paintings.

Solitude, January 2025.

Too many thoughts.

Pensive, inexpensive, I write down 

two or three ideas every day.  

A few weeks later

I throw most of them away.

I am not a good communicator.

The constriction of Luxury.

How limiting to have been born
into a family and a home with
running water, indoor water-closet,
bath or shower, electric light and power,
the telephone...the internet and to
take them all for granted,
not to know frugality !  Since 1965
I have acquired all these things,
and now wonder at the cost
to the environment.

 

Be careful what you read

in Medical Journals and the 'Yellow Press'.

In 1914, The Lancet and various popular newspapers in the UK republished an article by the doctor Edward Huntington Williams on cocaine in the southern United States. Williams claimed that any Black man who took up the Cocaine Habit was ‘absolutely beyond redemption. His whole nature is changed by the habit. Sexual desires are increased and perverted; peaceful men become quarrelsome and timid ones courageous.’

Sidney Felstead, author of The Underworld of London (1923), claimed to be similarly appalled by how often ‘some pleasure-sated girl dies from an overdose of cocaine or morphia, supplied to her by some black or yellow parasite.’

And so it continued...and, presumably, continues.

Linguistic coincidences

are legion, some felicitous,
some unfortunate, many 
misleading or confusing.
Famously, Gift is German for poison.
More to the point, Fear in English
spells in Irish (a different
pronunciation of) man.

My new E-friend

and her human friend.

 

I still don't quite know what they meant

when they told me that I was
letting myself down. I felt
middling. Nor could I think
of what to be (other than myself)
when I grew up. I never grew up.
They wanted me to
do something with my life.
This meant getting a degree in medicine
(I didn't get any degree at all)
and, presumably, a classy and comely wife.
What I mostly did was to appal.

Counter-intelligence.

Because of Hollywood,
intelligent films lie in a basement
underworld of 'eggheads' and 'aesthetes'
lest they infect the general stupidity.

Socrates Wept.

 from The Guardian today:

  How Europeans see the world has for centuries been shaped and controlled by mega-influencers: not least by the churches and their monastic schools; more recently by 'Enlightenment' educators and their successors, whose practitioners ignored Greek philosophy almost entirely.

   Where you get religion you get brainwashing.
Capitalism is a much less divided religion than Christianity or Islam.

Eyes squeezed into the banal gaze,

there's just a hair's breadth where 'humanity' exists
between the trivial and the terrible.
We act relentlessly in an educated daze.

The Conspiracy-

-theory of everything:
ownership of land.

Asexual human power.

 

This man by any name

 

would smell as sweet.
The first part means “land of wood and water”
and was the name given to modern-day Jamaica
by the Taino people, early inhabitants of the island.
The second part is Yoruba.
I always wanted to have an exotic name,
and this would have perfectly expressed
the pride in my feeling of no-kin
difference at any time of my life...
not to mention
the delicious colour of his skin.

Two photos

by Pau Buscatós,
both taken in Kolkata.

Urban bovine

 

.

A good line from a bad thriller.

 "People will spend whether they have money or not. 
That is the basis of consumer capitalism."

There is also the economic requirement for inequality
in a post-feudal system.

Content but complaining!

It's all very well for people like me
to condemn aspiration and ambition
for their destructiveness, but millions
of people from Gaza to Haiti,
Burma to Sudan, quite reasonably
want to improve their lives,
have somewhere to shit
(nothing posh)
even somewhere to wash.

Basically, what drives humans
more other animals, is the imagined need
or aggravated desire for comfort, not greed.

Before Adam

there was Play
amongst fish and wolves
and octopi and gulls

which God disapproved of
and so created Man to stop
animals from enjoying themselves.

(for Peter Godfrey-Smith)

'Education, Education, Education...'

that is merely a means to an end is soulless
if not soul-destroying – for teachers especially.

In the forthcoming production of King Lear

 

in Washington DC (January 21, at dusk)
both Regan and Goneril, his majesty's daughters,
will be played by acting sensation of the year,
Elon Musk.

Ceiling of the Month,

intricately jointed and decorated
using Arab techniques then unknown in Europe,
Peterborough (Cambridgeshire, England,
twelfth century.

More on My Criminal Tendencies (09/07/2024)

When at 40 I was finally and demonstrably persuaded
by a sexy Mexican that I was queer,
I had yet another thrill in the pure realisation
that it was a crime in both parts of the Hibernosphere.

Bad graffiti.

 

National Dress is a Wonderful Thing.

There should be more of it about.

To cheer us up in winter,

Montenegro in summer.

Epiphany.

I am a smooth beast ambling
waywardly
towards death's infinite understanding.

 

The past week's "viral tweet"

amongst Iranians:

"The Islamic Republic was born with Carter.
Let it end with Carter's death."

Unchanging humanity

The evil corporations are satanic,
the few good people are deranged.
There's no way that the climate
can ever be unchanged.

More love than hope.

Planting acorns in Kharkiv's bomb-battered forest.

Literature,

whatever transcendental claims are made for it,
is just part of the entertainment industry
like music and drama, painting and ballet,
except that words don't admit to being
barriers against communication and sympathy.

The Great Democratic Ideal

was manipulated by the British and French empires*
to engineer racial difference
and rationalise colonial domination...
thus helping to civilise many peoples
through legal systems no better
than the one that now operates in Russia.

*and within the USA

Equality before the Law ?

"Uselessness

is what makes human life
so exciting to live."

– Paul Auster (author, on BBC)

One reason why I prefer

to kiss a mouth surrounded by hair
is that I can be pretty certain
that there isn't a slick cosmetic curtain.

Maybe that is why more than just some
straight men like to kiss cunt or bum ?

Maybe that is why they're not rare or sparse,
the straight men who like to kiss cunt or arse.

Bach: my New Year Treat.

I saw these two small menhirs first about 10 days ago when I went to collect plants from a specialist and inexpensive nursery (dry stony soils).
I didn’t have camera or phone with me, so I went back yesterday, the first of January, a beautiful day. The area is a whole département (Lot) of limestone karst, as in Dalmatia or (in miniature) the Irish Burren. There are chasms and splits and pavements and lots of perforated boulders. I live just where the southern edge ends.

A pair of pillar-stones, male and female, stand 2.5 metres apart, the female with large (and largely-natural solution-pit/cup-mark + groove (artificially enlarged ?).

Male and female paired stones are rare in France if they exist at all (in Brittany ?) though there are several in Ireland. The name of the commune is Bach, pronounced Bash. 

The stones are 250 cm apart, and 120, 130 high. and never seem to have formed a gateway. Rubble has been piled behind them, so there is a faint chance that there might be a chamber.

I have marked them on Google Earth.

On my way, I found the marvellous perforated Spoon Stone which I posted yesterday.

Cacti in a Storm,

southern Mexico.

A Good Day was had by One.

New Year's Day, 2025:
Bent Spoon Day.
On the roadside near Mouillac
(Tarn-&-Garonne, Occitania)
as found.