Monogamy

is terribly

unnatural

and has

inexorably

led to the

world-beating

catastrophe

of the

nuclear family.

"It is in the nature of betrayal...

"that it not only changes the present,
but that it reaches back with its dirty hands
and changes the past."

– Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate, 1994

Auden (Wystan Hugh) wrote:

Death is the sound
of thunder at a picnic.

For me, it is the silence
of lightning at a funeral.

Today's news, and probably tomorrow's.

Zionist Warmongers attack Terrorist Tyrants.

Temu offers cheap diapers for geese.

Discarded clothes dumped in protected Ghana wetlands.

CONSPIRITUALITY

A single conflated neologism
can say a great deal about
our self-obsessed and infantile
culture of 'individuality'.

Some cheerful news.

and some ordinary old
run-of-the-mill cheerless stuff. 

I'm not a fan of Leonard Cohen, but...

Everybody knows that the world's in trouble.
No-one cares what it's been through.
Everybody knows that the end is coming.
Let's fly to Iceland for the view.

Eighty years ago it was 'Now or Never'
and Never won for the profits it would bring.
Everybody knows that governments betray us
Deception's the most human thing.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking.
The smugglers and the coastguards lied.
Every time you hear a politician speaking
You know that another species died.

(to be improved/continued)

'POLICE STATE' EXHIBIT

CLOSED TODAY
DUE TO POLICE STATE.

 

Well, not exactly.

Three and a half days after Pussy Riot’s founder
occupied her "durational" installation,
entitled Police State,
the National Guard evacuated and closed
the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
The exhibit was a facsimile from memory
of a prison cell from her incarceration
for the group's tastelessly dissident
performances and anti-Russian behaviour.
She remained part of the installation.

Birds

don't just sing.

They also listen.

"Functioning autists"

probably don't suffer from
"impostor syndrome".

On Cushendall Beach

as a boy I carefully made
monastery ruins
and watched the incoming tide
wash them away,
no trace remaining.

What a grasp of things
I nearly had before
my painfully crude correction
from left-handedness,
the ugly start of my social training.

At school
we were encouraged to have
a Purpose In Life,
something worth attaining.
I never had one. Now knowing
that the best of Man is his ruins,
I would like to leave
life with no memory
of me remaining.

Co-operative inter-species art

from a Dordogne cave in France:
bear-scratching 'framed' by human engraving.

photo by Christophe Archambault

Just Two Words:

Ambition
Corrupts

'People are always saying'

that there are two kinds of people:
the These and the Those.

My contribution to the
painfully long list of such
simplistic contrasts is that

(apart from the primary distinction
between me and everyone else)
the most important division
is between those few
who have a sense of fairness
and 'existential balance',
and those multitudes who do not. 

As Armageddon advances

in the Middle East and Ukraine,
we can divert ourselves with the first photo
of the South Pole of the sun.

Hugger-mugger,

surprisingly,
has little to do
with rugby*
or with buggery,
but with complicity
and secrecy.

*also known as rugger.

Not quite the male gaze.

A very fine nude study of her lover
by Tamara de Lempicka, 1928.
It would have made a wonderful
sculpture, too.  Could it have influenced
Henry Moore ?

Rafaëla

Bogus photo

on Etsy, obviously generated by A.I.,
bears little resemblance to
what will arrive by dropshipping.

A Song for Those Who Know.

"something must be done right away
that much we know
but of course it's too soon to act
but of course it's too late in the day..."

read the rest >
of the poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

So much for our culture of individuality.

When I first checked my full name on Google
around 2002 (after uploading three websites,
but long beforeI had even heard of blogs)
I found only one other listed: a chap languishing
in Penal Servitude (Stateside).

But if I were to do it now, I would find that my name
is only slightly less common than John Smith,
Jean Martin or Kim Min-jun.

Beautiful Stalinist Architecture:

The main entrance of the Medea Sanatorium
in the Tskaltubo Sanatorium Complex, Georgia.

Power is always an orgy

of self-justification.

Just look at the U.S. of A.

Le Creuset

is the name of a snobby and totally impractical,
expensive cookware, made of enamelled iron.
I bought a saucepan in 1969 after reading
French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David.
The enamel stains and scratches easily, and chips
at the edges.  The handle is necessarily
short and stubby. A good-sized LC saucepan
or casserole is very hard to lift:

Their most practical item (which I bought for a euro
second-hand) is a frying-pan for a single egg.

Yesterday

he said to me:
I'm just not strong enough
to be as vulnerable as you.

 

Where are the hams, chops and sausages ?

Martin M. Miles: Noses & tails, Athens.

Myself: Shadows and stove,
two evenings ago.

Jaime Saldarriaga, Plaza Botero, Medellín.

Great first line:

The world is what it is; men who are nothing,
who allow themselves to become nothing,
have no place in it.

Pretty good cover, too.

Yeats was wrong;

there is now no widening gyre,
no falcon - just Munch's Scream
galloping along the burning, 
pavements irradiated by the ire
of the perfumed emperor of ice-cream,
and an ever-shrinking planet
consumed by thirst and fear and fire.

Solitude, not loneliness.

The blackbirds sing full-heartedly
in the dell below my balcony,
and I'm pretty sure that I'm the only
non-blackbird who listens. 

My ignorant attitude

to French Drama.

I do not care for Molière
but am quite keen on Racine. 

The Name of the Meme

is God, a swollen, totalitarian dream
– residing not in the sky,
but in the small eye of humanity. 
Stars are not what they seem.
Word is embedded in sword.
We are imprisoned by gleam.

We should listen.

Deeply
ascending
to the dark enfolding
by the stark unwoven tissue
of a near-infinity of
silently-absorbing roots,

we should listen to the news
that constantly emanates from silence. 

Silence is subtle
pure communication.
The beginning of deafness was Word.

The louder we get,
the smaller
becomes our awareness,
language turns to shards of regret
and false hope
and the forests
fall below silence.

Pictures I found this week.

Derek Jarman: Strange Meeting

Dog and Oarfish, Aotearoa

by Ralph Gibson, 1961

Not an eye-test! photo by Nick Bull.

 

Angry

is how you become
when you lack a sense of humour,

which would enable you
to inhabit an envelope of irony.

Inconceivably Dark Matters

lie between my micro-insignificant concerns
and the multi-universe of thousands of galaxies
and hundreds of thousands of planets
each, perhaps, with its own all-powerful supervising being.

Dark matter (we are told, as if by Moses
or Kim Il-sung) occupies 95%m (nice round figure)
of all the universes.  

Astrophysics (I don't think we have been told)
has a 50% chance of being a very
particular conspiracy theory.

But if it is true, does it matter a neutron whether or not
Fusarium graminearum is a rather slow Gaian solution
to the unbelievably tiny 'climate problem'
on our inconceivably insignificant planet ?

Fusarium graminearum

It causes “head blight,” a disease
of wheat, barley, maize, and rice;

is classified in scientific literature
as a “potential agroterrorism weapon,”
and already causes billions of dollars
in losses each year. 

It is, allegedly, being smuggled
from China into the USA (where else).
And could 'go back to bite them'.

It causes vomiting, liver damage,
and reproductive defects 
in humans and livestock,
said a spokesperson for the FBI.

Eaters of oats, rye and other staples are not affected

Do I care ?  The great, dear Leaders of Astrophysics
do not care whether or not I care. 
Nor does the indestructible water-bear.
And certainly not the Universes.
Nor if I (somehow, magically) distribute the ebola virus
throughout this petty race of primates; kill, disembowel,
and eat the raw livers of everyone around me;

nor even if I tread upon an ant or blewit.
Even if the earth were erased tomorrow
to make an inter-galactic by-pass,
it is unlikely that any other kind of being
in any of the Universes would notice
or be able to intuit.

Perhaps

life is
brother death
ejaculating

and dying
is when everything has gone
except the feeling of going.

A peasant's kimono,

 Meiji Period (late 19th century)

A Book at Noon-tide

SILENCE 

by Anthony Weir

read by the author

LISTEN

  NOW  

It has been known for centuries...millennia

that is not possible to have
freedom of expression
without freedom of incitement.

Keeping him down.

Two healthy boys making sure
the sick one does not rise to infect others.
read article in Aeon >

Triple burial at Dolní Věstonice, Moravia - 26,000 BCE

Some time ago

I joined
The Defeatist Party of No-Man's-Land

from which Diogenes of Sinope resigned
a very long time ago.

Mr Beast

50 youTubers fight for $1,000,000

The politics of the near future ?

The apogee of civilisation ?

The heart of 'charity' ?

The intelligence of randomness ?

The innocent evil of the Rights of Man ?

What do you think ?

Stupid TV :

A 7-hour film
of a railway journey
with no sensation
of a train in motion.

I have no comment to make on a continuous
slow movie of a month-long moose-migration.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

 BITCOIN:  THE FUTURE.

Ultra-machismo -:

Outrageous self-advertisement
found under the flap.

Parasites

It's quite lonely inside a human brain
– which is why we welcome parasites
to suck away the pain.

Socotra Desert Rose-trees

(whose flowers are pink);
(Socotra is a Yemeni island in the Arabian Sea)
or Bottle-tree, Adenium obesum socotranum,
the Milky Way in the sky behind.

In the Warren of the World-wide Web.

Two of the few strong opponents
of the fledgling 'soft' dictatorship in Hungary
are Mr Hungarian and Mr Goulash,
Magyar & Gulyás respectively.

I had hoped that Orbán
might mean something scary
like Bluebeard, or Jackal

(but, reading from an insert to the LP record sleeve
of Bartók's opera Kék szakáll we can assume that
szakáll is not Hungarian for Jackal, 

and Wolf (a not uncommon surname
in many languages, e.g. McIntyre)
in Magyar being Farkas, a Hungarian form
of the Germanic Warg...  Orbán
is just a surname. Mumus = Ogre, Bogeyman
is not.
But enough! I'll exit from this A.I.
rabbit-hole and admire the view. 

The word for Shitface seems to be szararcú.

Welcome to Calais

if you have a home to go to.

Silly question!

Why
are we the only species
to be expelled
from the womb
apparently bereft

and raging to
impose desert
and disorder,
make every distance
between two points
into a border,

and impelled
to concoct
grand myths
of origin and theft ?

The Future of BBC Radio.

 

In just a few years, BBC Radio 4 will consist of
nose-to-tail trailers for aspirational, imaginary programmes
merely presented by real Americans.

The corporation, which is facing fierce competition from streamers and falling licence fee income, has been targeting US audiences as it attempts to increase its commercial revenues outside the UK.

Kuwait Oilfield

by the late Sebastião Salgado.

 

More available than Jesus !

Lo! I was able to walk again
after a week of painful hirpling –
by swallowing Ibuprofen.

Latest Word-horror

in today's Guardian:

     allyship

Osho on Solitude.

"To be alone is the only real revolution.
To accept that you're alone
is the greatest transformation
that can happen to you."

And, less philosophically,
from the normal crass perspective,
'company' in old age
may be of no use to you,
even if you were once a film star.

Well, whaddayaknow!

Nobody would have thought it possible
in their most ethnically-destructive dreams...

What a surprise !

Who would have thought it !
Armageddon, Ahoy!

Meanwhile in neutral Switzerland,
the Land of Nuclear Bunkers
and bunkered banks...

For Christian centuries

the two most serious crimes were
the crime against the Holy Spirit
(suicide, committed by few).
and the crime against Nature
(anal penetration, practised by some
for preference and by many
as a means of birth control).

Now we realise that we are the crime against Nature
and the Sacred Spirit is a spiritual hole. 

The Suicide Taboo

is, I think, mainly due
to the physical and moral claim
that some humans, like invaders
make on others
– as shared or private property

portrait by Aimée Walton

As you are well aware,

I bewail our terrible effect upon the world –
yet here I am experiencing a sort of ecstasy as I listen
via my electric and electronic sound-system,
the World Wide Web and the BBC,
to a performance 

(attended by hundreds of people,
and broadcast two weeks ago from a great hall
in the middle of a terrifying city)

of Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto
played on a state-of-the-art Steinway
by a Norwegian who has flown in specially,
with an orchestra of dozens of highly-skilled
players, each carefully dressed
and with a printed score...

I'll moan no more.

"Led By Donkeys*

has proved that it’s possible,
if you concentrate hard enough,
to think two things at once –
both that governments should be competent,
and that people, even business-people,
should be decent."

* a British political campaign group

The (so-far) earliest-known work of art

delights me, for I love,
collect, and even decorate
'artistic', art-inspiring pebbles,
thus following a tradition
far more ancient and mature
than painted representation.

Thrown away.

We can all be mown down,

blown up. We throw-away people

keep throw-away cultures going.

BOG*us

We act like gods

and our gods are

also frauds.

*Bog (Бог) is Russian and Slavonic for God.

To expect, or even want

'to leave the world a better place'
implies a certain arrogance
and considerable ignorance. 

Verbal Plethora ?

I am wondering
what is the difference between
an Epilogue,
a Postscript,
and an Afterword ?

A fundamental aspect of our humanity:

  the urge to destroy that from which you feel excluded.

            This urge, I think, is crucial to understanding politics.
            Yet hardly anyone seems to recognise it.
            Hardly anyone, that is, except the far right,
            who see it all too well.

~ George Monbiot.

Gaza: The Blame Game

 
     _______________________________

People don't seem to remember
that the Small Genocide in Gaza

(small compared with earlier Jewish,
Roma, Ukrainian, Tatar, Armenian
and Darfuri genocides)

would not be happening, if Hamas
(almost certainly pushed by Iran*)
had not carried out its ill-considered
and mis-targeted October attack;

nor would it be happening without the collusion
of European arms-manufacturing nations.

So, my answer to Arwa Mahdawi
is Nothing. What could I possibly do except
regret the long, inherent evil of mankind ?

more on genocide >

*Iran's current, long-lasting régime is the result of the overthrow of its democratic government by joint Anglo-American action in 1953.

"I sometimes think

that the only things worth talking about
are the things that people refuse to discuss."

~ Michel Faber, 'Under the Skin'.

– Things such as Innate Evil, The Nobility of Suicide,
Inherent Stupidity, The Obscenity of Abattoirs,
The Cruelty and Destructiveness of Abrahamic Religions,
The Lunacy of Language, The Silliness of Sex,
The Hallowedness of Hypocrisy, The Isness of Badness,
The Arrogance of Architecture, The Sanctity of Shit, and so on.

Mr Faber and I are fairly close together
on The Spectrum of Other.

And I, too, wonder
if We're all the same under the skin ?

It becomes ever "easier

to imagine the end of the world
than to imagine the end of capitalism."

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 1994
and re-iterated by Slavoj Žižek.

Like us,

all property is lost
in the divine
vacuum-cleaner
that is Time.

I am having damaged tiles replaced

and treatment of wear-and-tear on my roof
by a sweet Portuguese handyman. So I looked
at some rooves on the world-wide web. But first,
a glimpse of mine.

I remember him

like I remember a beautiful pullover
my mother knitted,
which got the moth of May;

and another one – like the socks
my mother knitted
and am wearing, darned, today.

Interestingly decorated

bit of bad sculpture with a broken nose
long since stolen from a Paris graveyard.

Grethe Risbjerg Thomsen

was a Danish poet,
with whom I had a brief correspondence in the 1970s.

She wrote one of the most simple and 'stunning' poems
ever written, which I have translated:

ONE NIGHT, PERHAPS A MARCH NIGHT

With every passing moment
I die a little bit;
I carry death within me
through every year I live.

One night, perhaps a March night,
mild with mist and rain,
I'll step into the twilight,
bring dying to an end.

Måske en Martsnat

Jeg dør en lille smule
for hvert sekund, der går.
Jeg bærer døden med mig
igennem livets år.

En nat, måske en martsnat,
så mild af regn og tø,
skal jeg gå bort i mørke
Og holde op at dø.

Her 'crucial' last line, literally translated, is
And stop dying.

Alternative rhyming translations could be:

And stop the dying then.
And let the dying end.
And make the dying end.

Or the second verse could be altered thus:

One night, perhaps a March night,
mild with rain and mist,
I'll walk into the darkness,
invite death to desist.

Nick Turpin:

On the Night Bus #29

One of the great cultural failures

of our overpowering and fragile
'Western Civilisation'

is the inseparable coupling
of its grotesque sexual obsession 

and its infantile infatuation with love.

In this extraordinary photograph

let us marvel at
Pope Leo XIV formally accepting the papacy
and looking as if he is reading out the football results to
the Monsignor on his right who is looking across at
the bored-looking (or petrified) Monsignor to his left;

the adolescent-looking Swiss Guards in their swell get-up;

the insignificance of the line of five humans below
the vast bronze sculpture (?) of a perfect adolescent male
rising out of a shrivelled, climate-changed Amazonian forest
(or a tangle of dried giant seaweed),
wearing a tastefully-arranged gauzy robe around his hips,
genitals and legs, and a bizarre piece of dinosaur
skull on one side of his coquettishly-cocked head.  

He is very definitely not physically damaged by his
Crucifixion Experience – and definitely not dead.

Non-porn in Pompeii

Do micro-willies do less damage ?

 

In Roman society, painting was one of the occupations assigned to freedmen, slaves, women, and people incapable of political or military life.

People's minds

are no longer changed by rational argument
but by friends, acquaintances,
'social media' and personal charisma.

read more >

Integrity of Consciousness

is the self in silence.

 

"Retarded" -

an out-of-date term
(I remember it from the 1950s)
which aptly describes
the stupefied condition of most humans -

implies a retarder or retardant :
the education system or
normal family upbringing... 

Fabulous Rhine-maidens ?

Unfortunately not.

A glimpse of the Latvian entry for
the European Song Contest, all that remains
of the castrated European Broadcasting Union.

Over the limit.

Mallard flying at 52kph in a 30kph zone, caught by a speed camera in Köniz, Switzerland.

Photograph: Gemeinde Köniz

Vanished painter ? Where is he ?

 I was re-arranging my bookcase the other day and (amongst other art books) found a joint publication from the Dublin and Belfast governments of Ireland, showing paintings from a travelling exhibition (Beyond Boundaries) of Northern and Southern artists, which was at Downpatrick in October 2005.  

Most of the paintings were uninspired and uninspiring, but one which particularly caught my eye was a lovely fuzzy-mizzly 'treatment' of an Irish hillside in the rain, by a certain John Conway, born in Dungannon in 1967 and reportedly resident in Belfast in 2005.   I went to the web to see what else he had done...and there was no mention of him, no paintings to see.  No mention of the exhibition.

There is a millennial John Conway resident in Dublin whose pics are depressingly commercial, and a John Conway who produces Photoshop images (mainly of dinosaurs)  – but the chap in the exhibition that I saw is without trace on the web.  So are others from the same exhibition.  Likewise his gallery, The Cavehill Gallery, which I remember from the 1970s...no trace.

So now I am pleased to give him Presence on the Web (if my blog counts).

Excellent Amateur Photo

from Wolf_SD111 on FlickR (trimmed)

I cannot decide

whether the declaration of a wish
to leave the world a better place
is hypocrisy or arrogance.

"Chimpanzees use leaves

to wipe their arses
and clean up after sex,"
study finds.
One was seen to wipe another's willy.
But do they wipe each other's arses ?