'Knowledge is irreversible,'

نوال السعداوى‎


said Nawal al-Saadawi
on the BBC this morning.

(If only!)

What thoughtless optimism!
What ignorance of history!

Each of us

enters the world
as a key enters a lock
whether it fits or not.

Abstract Nouns

Whatever 'mental health' may be
it's certain that there's much insanity
uniquely in our species.
And whether 'society' exists or not,
there's no such thing as 'humanity'.

If

there is such a thing as
'Simple Happiness',

beyond the oppression of aspiration
and the bleakness of prosperity

it is the absence of misery
hiding in a little crack
in the wall of false reality.

The safest medical procedure

is masturbation.
Though a small percentage of men
have not survived it,
there are no recorded cases
of female fatalities.

Capitalism ensures

that, as a species,
we live on credit
that can never be repaid.
Sacred cows
inevitably butchered,
holy rivers
horribly polluted:

humans soon become extinct
through Total Trade.

No, John, no!

The truth does not set us free.
It diminishes our inflated egos -
that we keep pumping up with every breath
- and in any case we're terrified
of the only freedom: not negative existence
but the positive release of death.

How ironic

that Christianity
- which claims to conquer death -
destroyed the idea of
'a good death'.
Logically, all Christians' death
should be liberatingly good.

Now we die in hospitals
drugged chunks of rotting wood.

Possession of a dangerous weapon

Language was our first possession.
In language are both our having and our being.
Language remains our most powerful
weapon against the world - and ourselves.

Dogs also pray to Dog

click for more

It is good
to make people
feel bad
because we humans all
are bad -
though not all-bad.


(with more thanks to my friend Jindra)

The Subtle Art of Translation

'Die Dichtung, meine Damen und Herren :
diese Unendlichsprechung von lauter
Sterblichkeit und Umsonst !' - Paul Celan

Poetry, ladies and gentlemen:

- what an externalization of nothing but mortality, and in vain. (Waldrop)

- this endless speaking of nothing but mortality and gratuitousness. (Lyon)

- this infinity-speaking full of mortality and to no purpose! (Joris)

- this speaking endlessly of mere mortality and uselessness! (Felstiner)

- an expression of infinitude, an expression of vain death and of mere Nothing. (Blanchot)

- just endless and vain twittering about mortality. (Weir)


Don't poets just love wittering on about
the futility of of poetry ?
It doesn't even make us feel less futile.


(with thanks to Almina Kaselis)

Prostitutes,

like actors,
are paid half
for performing,
and half
for absenting themselves
to safety
soon after
the repeatable finale.

The brain :

a tiresome organ
that keeps me awake.

We know

only our own
worst nightmares
- if even them -
not those of others.

My brain twists into knots
coping with other people's
ordinary thoughts.

I couldn't resist 'borrowing' this from my friend Jindřich.

click picture to enlarge

Majorities

are now Vast or Overwhelming.
The Vast Majority of folk
would not believe that a distinguished
uro-genital surgeon
would collect his male patients' anal and scrotal hair
as a necessary contribution
to the construction of his unexhibited artworks.

The Overwhelming Majority of people think
that we're the acme of evolution.

The Snake

in the Garden of Ease
was an Aspiration.
If humans ever had
such unlikely things as souls,
they mutated into locks and keys.

In spite of the Gospels

The True and Only Son
of Christianity is
Capitalism,
which is Monopolism
pretending to
'Democracy'
(whatever that might be).

The 'work ethic'

is not a morality,
but a prescription for
totalitarian wage-slavery.

If I were offered the choice

of possessing a soul
or a tail,
I would devote
the rest of my life
to the practice
of wagging.

War

is more than capitalism's
collateral damage
- it is its power-source.

Good Samaritans

are rarely friends.

Terrorism

is as near as the devout can get
to Enactive Surrealism.

Two Definitions

EDGY: the men are unpleasant,
violent - and swear a lot.

FEISTY: the women are unpleasant,
slightly less violent, and swear a lot.

Good behaviour

requires effort
- unlike belief.

A habit

is a tool for living
which controls us.

The individual

is one who is held in the balance
between pleasure and productivity
- and found wanting.

Immortality

could only be
a tired eternity
of numb banality.

All you need to know

about the Human Spirit
is that war has proved to be
its truest expression.

Enlightenment

leads to insanity.

(Expand and discuss...)

The planet groans

at the millions and millions of man-hours,
animals, vegetables and minerals wasted
on the making of the gew-gaws
which engulf us - including mobile phones.

It's not sexual

encounters
that are soul-destroying
(however bleak they may be)
but waiting for them to show up
- or not.

Is it slavery to the superlative

or a paranoid fear of 'failure'
which transfixes Americans ?

Today I heard one say
on the radio that he was
"the world's greatest under-achiever"!

Yesterday's picnic -

only a bite away
from the grave.

Lourdes:

God's very own
and vast
and profitable
Casino.

The Future

is a not-so-distant shore.
We know, of course, nothing
about what we expend
so much energy to ignore.

On the seventieth anniversary *

of my untimely birth I reflect on
those poor "White Trash",
ghetto "Negroes", homeless Hispanics,
Filipina slaves, and others of the
Necessary Underclass
who died in squalor, pain and misery
on the eleventh of September
in the two thousand and first year
of the "Christian Era" (or Papal Caliphate)
- and whose deaths were hardly noticed by
a heartless, mechanistic
jingoistic nation-state.

(* today)

Maybe it's not so strange

that
THE MORALITY OF GOVERNMENT
is not an academic subject.

I wonder

if that stupendous attack
on the antennæ of capitalism
was the equivalent for the American Empire
of the Spartacus Revolt in Roman times ?

(just an idle thought...)

On the 10th Anniversary of Nurtured American Victimhood

The Anniversary Card industry's great opportunity.

Yes, you had it coming.
But 'it' did not come from the Laotians,
nor the Native American victims of your genocide.

Laos is the most heavily bombed country ever,
and, 35 years after the Vietnam war ended,
an average of one person every two days
is killed by late-exploding American bombs
- 'collateral damage'.

Laos did not declare war on the USA.
America did not deign to declare war on Laos.
It just bombed, and bombed, and bombed,
and bombed, the Plain of Jars -
in the name of Freedom, Christian (or American) values.
The USA declared a War on Terror - with Terror.
It is estimated that it will take another 100 years
before all the unexploded American ordnance
is removed - or explodes - in Laos.

Capitalism thrives on war, military industries
and the threat of war.















You even claim to have "won WW2" for us in Europe,
failing to mention the deaths of just 20,000,000 Russians,
mostly on Russian soil.
No Americans were killed on American soil in WW2,
though a few died at Pearl Harbor, which was then in an American ‘territory’ or colony or ‘protectorate’ or whatever slimy word they used for missionaried-prudified-raped-annexed-and-commodified Hawaii.

And how 'freedom' has diminished in my lifetime!
(I was born in 1941.)
Children can no longer go off on their own
to climb trees or bivouac - or
compare and touch the interesting crevices
and dangly bits between their legs -
or run away for a day or two
as all kids want - and need - to do.

Yes, you had it - that just-a-little-bit -
coming - out of the blue.
And you celebrate it as a 'catastrophe' like the Serbs
celebrate 'their' Kosovo Polje,
'their' Plain of Crows - the birds that fed upon the stacks
of corpses not just of Serbs, but also of Albanians, Macedonians,
Hungarians, Croatians, Romanians and Vlachs.

Those who live by the sword should die by the sword.

Mao Ze-Dong's brilliant successors

realised they could not fight
capitalism with Marxist rhetoric,
or by arming African dictators -
so, to beat it they joined it
and became a Yellow-Peril Trojan Horse
which the Lords of Globalisation
greedily wheeled in -
thus slowly, cancerously
destroying capitalism from within.

'Let those who build houses lament their destruction.'

The fewer
the merrier.

"Making the desert bloom"

The river Jordan
(Crossing Prohibited
on Pain of Death)
flows into Israel -
diminished without a doubt.
Only an open
herbicidal sewer trickles out.

"Why do you abhor pop-music so much ?"

she asked me.
"Because of its vapidity
its triteness,
its insincerity
its sentimentality,"
I explained.
"But those are what make it
universal!" came the exclamation.

"That merely reinforces my duty," I rejoined,
"to remove myself from fake universality
which is the embalming of banality."

Chalk and Cheese

There is a difference between
an individual and a solipsist.

The former are becoming rare.

The 20th century

began with
war, bottled water and
great empires.
The 21st century began with
war, bottled water and
genetic engineering.

The vast toll-road to Hell
is asphalted with economics,
a grotesquely mutant form
of mathematics.

Vegetarian"ism"

is certainly a religion
when not embraced
for mere reasons of health.
All religions are sectarian
and have holy scriptures.
But my sect, that of
the Vegetarian Frugalists,
has no sacred texts
to corrupt it,
and may be the least assertive,
least destructive
of religious sects.

Money:

a mere tool
which controls our lives.

It is easy to sneer at Americans

for their arrogant ignorance -
but at least they do not have
the wilful provincialism of the English.

I am a Rock...

If, as 'Tennessee' Williams said,
happiness is insensitivity,
rocks are unbelievably happy.