Progress.

As we have moved out of a period
where International Law largely applied,
so the Law of Unintended Consequences
has become the Law of Totally-Predictable
and Dire Consequences.

Viscous consciousness.

It's not like switching websites
or TV channels
from regenerating an Irish bog
to porn-site
to Facebook to Brahms...not at all.

Nor does it happen in Baudelairean
listlessness or soupy brain-fog.

Some of my days
are elevator-days
I pass instantaneously between floors
from plane to plane
no keys, no doors.

Lean Lion Kills Strange Monster.

 

Romanesque tympanum at Skibet in Denmark.

Tehran billboard.

 

One of the saddest paintings

that I have ever seen:
an early van Gogh of 1884
so reminiscent of Millet
(The Gleaners, etc.)
and so unlike his outpourings
just six years later
when he was accidentally shot
by teenagers with guns
out 'for a lark' or 'for a caper'.

  

Thanks to the underfunded BBC

Mr Nobody was born.

“When a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we could produce it and consume it – we all face a moral choice. But luckily, even a nobody is more powerful than you think...”

...if he gets backing and fights his long way through.

https://www.catchupplayer.co.uk/episode/211129/Storyville.html

“In questo interregno...

 ..si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

- Antonio Gramsci

But that Goya should number owls amongst his monstrous
fenomeni morbosi or monstrosi makes his reason seem
somewhat somnolent.

Bargain of the Month

on Etsy: genuine Muammar Gaddafi wristwatch.

not in great demand

Meanwhile...

Nicolas Sarkozy appeared at the Paris court of appeal to face a fresh trial over allegations he conspired to receive illegal election campaign funding from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

To brighten us up...

...a Capetown street.

photo by Robby Ogilvie

Call me Hammurabi.

In his Code of Fairness, he declares that
the rich should pay twice as much
as the poor for medical treatment. 

So why is Hammurabi, priest and worshipper of Justice,
celebrated in the United States' Capitol in Washington,
bastion of acquisition and unfairness ?

After Camus

the ancient philosopher said
that the essence of senescence
is the little blobs of fæces
you find hardening
in your long-johns and arse-hairs
as you get ready for bed.

The philosopher heaved a sweet
sigh and said
there won't be any more
of that shit when your dead.

Without stillness

and simplicity of self,
we can no longer be
an adaptable species.

On 'Populism'.

"It’s against elites, but led and funded by the rich. 
It presents itself as a mass uprising,
but relies on low turnouts for much of its electoral success.
It talks a lot about freedom, but its policies are authoritarian.
It promises a glorious future,
but its social vision is “soaked in the brandy of nostalgia.”

– Liam Byrne, MP.

A statement of the unrealised obvious.

‘Deaf people can’t hide behind words!’ 

But they can hide behind and away from people,
which gives them great inner resources.

Satan's wet dream :

The erection
of Perfection.

Chant of the Minotaur.

In the maze
of existence no centre
of consciousness can hold,
much less endure
to the end of all days.

My mind is my coffin

is a hide-
covered currach
drifting out
with the tide

As the world seems to enter 'the beginning of the end time'

I'm not entirely ashamed to say
that I found this interesting
and helpful.

Around the Second Millennium

we thought that the World-Wide Web
was the best thing since electricity:
an exciting, liberating, egalitarian
empowering invention. 
But now, for millions,
it's like a slow, seductive garrotte
round the brain,
which, day by day, increases
its and our tension.

My aunt used to say

that life was
one disappointment
after another. 
Many were caused by me.
I remember her tears.
She lived brightly
and sprightly
in excellent health
with all her teeth
for over 90 years.

This blog is not a journal.

Nor is it a commonplace-book.
It's somewhere in between...
an outlet for a chap who has been
an aspergerish over-sharer/communicator 
and almost obsessive truth-teller
since he left school and no longer
had to tell pathetically-transparent lies
about his punishments
to his long-suffering mother.

Today's blog, however, reports on my reading
of a few pages of a poor novel
set in pre-independence,
pearl-of-the-East Ceylon,
re-named in 1972 Sri Lanka: Isle of Splendour
(overtones of Shakespeare). 

Before that
it was called, by some, Sarandib, which
by a curious route gave us the word
Serendipity – which I thought was American
because I came across it first in a Deep-South novel.

Arabic Sarandib comes from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa:
Lion Island. And behold Sri Lanka's National Flag.

Berthold alias Bert Brecht,

was a pretty important 20th century playwright,
very political. He wrote great songs, fine poems and
(my favourite) The Threepenny Novel.

He is still pretty important, since his 
Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
is pretty relevant just now. And has been
much performed in recent years.

The play is about a Chicago mobster
who gets control of the city’s wholesale
vegetable trade through corruption,
intimidation and violence and murder:
a clear allegory of how a certain nondescript Austrian
had climbed to power during the 1920s and 1930s,
and founded a Thousand-Year Empire
on sand and hate and submission.

It was not staged until 1958, after Brecht's death.
But Mother Courage and Her Children, about
an enterprising, child-collecting refugee/
asylum-seeker during the Thirty Years' War.
was frequently performed during his lifetime and since.

For me, however, Brecht is like Shakespeare:

better on the page than on the stage.
Unlike Ibsen.

Here is his poem on Hell (from a page of my translations)

Considering Hell,
my brother Shelley thought
it must be much like London.
Since I live in Los Angeles and not London
I think Hell is more like
Los Angeles.

In Hell, too, there must be luxuriant gardens
with flowers big as trees
which of course wither at once
if not fed
with rich people's water.

And fruit-markets where great piles of fruit*
have no smell, have no taste.
And endless convoys of cars
as light as their shadows, faster than impulses -
gleaming conveyances in which well-fed people
go nowhere from nowhere.

And houses
built for the happy, thus standing empty
even when lived in.

The houses in Hell, too, aren't
all of them ugly,
but the fear of being dumped on the street
oppresses the suburbanites
no less than the shanty-town squatters.

*Cultivated by semi-slaves in Guatemala and Honduras.

Which reminds me of this poem by MTC Cronin
about Hitler in Hell:

In hell, Hitler is forced
to protect his anonymity.

He paints walls and cadavers
and sniffs fumes of the dead;

he eats the ashes of children
and drinks blood from a funnel;

hammered into his mouth
are many pulled gold teeth; but mostly
he sits forgotten on the chair
just inside hell's door.

*

An illustrated note on Hell.

Thus end today's commonplaces.

The Irrefutable Truth.

Technology
creates far more waste
than it can ever reduce.

Ever the aphorismic practitioner, I wrote this after reflecting on all the 'Mixtapes'
that I made on cassettes in the nineteen eighties and nineties, and then all the Compilation CDs
(tapes and CDs that I can't throw away)
and now never listen to because the radio/internet waves support dozens of compilation channels which
are surprisingly good.

The phallic African banana

was, in medieval times,

sometimes called the Fruit of Paradise

...long before United Fruit

established plantations & régimes

in Guatemala and Honduras.

Reflections

by Richard Baker

 

'Those who restrain desire

do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained*;
and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place
& governs the unwilling.'

William Blake did not do much to restrain
his own libido. Moreover, he...

'...always found that the angels have the vanity
to speak of themselves as the only wise.
This they do with a confident insolence
sprouting from systematic reasoning.'

(from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell')

*Perhaps due to low testosterone levels.