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 ?

The 'opium of the masses'

was never religion
but entertainment,
which, for most of human history,
religions supplied and controlled.

Donald Trump

 (with apologies to the late Norman Cameron)

He calls for worship and amaze;
he lines up his yes-men in a row,
reverberating that self-praise
found insufficient years ago.

He casts around for some new whim,
something preposterously more.
He orders Denmark to give him
Greenland, which he'll re-name as Magador.

Karl Marx never imagined

that the Bosses
would be algorithms.

The Can-can - what you didn't know.

'It started out as a dance for men
who risked arrest for indecency –
and grew into a legs-flying,
bloomers-revealing sensation.'

read more >

Considering Merleau-Ponty

(and Jawlensky).

Unlike speech and language,
the expressions and signals
of our faces, mouths and eyes
are limited to a small, personal
repertoire of masks,
or frozen lies.

Ceratoserolis trilobitoides

 

"Gone, but not forgotten"

used to be inscribed on tombstones,
a failed poem.

How I should hate to haunt
other people's memories
as the memories of other people
haunt me.

 

Magic Numbers

Seven is the most familiar,
but three is the most mythological.
However, we tend not to remember
forty, which in Middle Eastern cultures
meant 'many'.  Forty days and forty nights
in Biblical wilderness... forty thieves 
which reminds me of delightfully-simple
counting-systems which ran : one, two, three,
four, five, many (or a lot).
No need to get your head
round megawatt.

Poor Self-awareness.

Even though I see myself sometimes
accidentally in mirrors,
I have to keep reminding myself
that others see (or see through) me
as an old man, whereas my self-image
is frozen somewhere in my thirties.

The prime

quality needed
for the sublime
old age of a baby-boomer
is a sense of humour.

Stunning wallpaper

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An 'Artificial Intelligence',

using many megawatts
of electricity, is pathetically
crude and wasteful compared
with the pin-head-sized, amazingly
refined intelligence of a bee.

Today's photograph : very painterly.

 

In Golden Water by Rania Matar

The demon semen.

Not knowing or caring who my father was
until I was in my eighties,
I am glad to say that when I was young
there was no oppressive obscenity of
Fathers' Day to make me squirm ;
and springtime Mothering Sunday* had not been
so profitably raped and vulgarised by Hallmark. 
Now, as a happy three-times-failed abortion, I re-affirm
that while the celebration of fatherhood repels me,
there was no point in my crying over spilt sperm.

*The one day in the year, apart from Christmas,
 when an agricultural worker or a girl 'in service' could go home,
 with some of the money earned, and fond regards,
 if their mother was still alive and not far away.
 I now propose a 'Failed Abortion Day'
 with pretty pop-up cards.

AWOL

President Trump,
known to his friend Putin
as Agent Orange,
has proposed a 100% import duty
on foreign films
- which few Americans watch
because subtitles are too onerous for them.

It is over 100 years since Hollywood
started glitz-and-plush-bombing the world
with the American Way Of Life.

50 years  have passed since the end
of the American 'presence' in Viêt-Nam,
and of the 'carpet bombing', and the spraying
across great swathes of countryside of
dioxin-rich herbicide Agent Orange*,
whose toxic effects
will last at least another 50 years.

*Agent Orange was first used as a weapon of war in the 1950s
by the British in Malaya.

Pufuleti.

 

This is how your Temu sex-toy

comes to you.
Sometimes explosively.

A beautifully humble church,

suitable for the likes of Jesus.

St Pelagia's church, Pachia Ammos, Crete.

"Five a Day".

Today, for my main (evening) meal:

Radishes and Olives
Spinach and Quince
Smoked paprika, Guacamole.
Banana andCashews.
Plus Quinoa and Rice.

Local red wine.

From two different newspapers on the same day.

 

Mystery.

Modern standard English and French
owe their pronunciations to lisps,
speech defects and mannerisms of royalty.
English was also affected by a Dutch king
and courtiers who didn't pronounce 
final Rs.  Modern American* English is
highly gendered, with women in recent years
adopting a loud nasal whine which renders
their speech both unintelligible
and hard on the ears.

I relate to things

better than to people.
Their attractions never fade.
There are stones
I have treasured for half my life,
and a rug that my mother made.