Few things give me more pleasure

than giving pleasure to pleasant people
- even humans.

Somehow, I was untouched

by the terrible necromancy

that turns children into Adults,

and so, aged seventy-six

I'm still nineteen.

Montaigne might have said

that

is not nearly as great as the misery of not being told anything.

A note from my live-in companion.

"I really don't understand why he is forever sweeping the floor and his precious rugs.
All that's on them is my lovely hair which falls out and floats about so naturally and continuously.
It is one of the beautiful things about my [main-constituent] breed.

"Maybe he has the Continual Sweeping Disorder that is...sweeping...the world ?

"Replies on a dog-ear, please."

Cultures of Achievement

and property
perish horribly.
Cultures of non-achievement
and generosity
last for dozens if not hundreds
of millennia.


(I am currently reading Peter Matthiessen's
1965 book "At Play in The Fields of the Lord"
a battered, tattered copy of which I found
in the Little Local Library in the Street.)

One of the benefits

for the older male
of living in south-west France
(& Spain & Italy and the southern rest)
is that he can piss behind any parked car
or in any corner
without risk of arrest.

My blog is 'going viral' in Algeria.

An e-mail.

From: Aeneas Dardanos <*****@gmail.com>
Subject: Bektashis

Dr Mr Weir,
I came across your website 'beyond the pale' sometime ago and I was wondering what connections
do you have with the Albanian Bektashis?
I'm an Albanian interested in Sufism.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Flamur

=======

Dear Flamur,

Many thanks for writing to me.  I’m sorry to say I have no connection with the Albanian Bektashis.  Albania always intrigued me, not just because of the unlamented Enver, but because it is a miracle it exists at all, even in its very reduced state.

As soon as it was possible to visit it – via cheap flight from Corfu – I went, but only twice, to Sarandë and Gjirokastër.  Subsequently I acquired an Internet Friend from Vlorë who had emigrated to the US in 1992 . I think she was vaguely connected to the Nomenklatura – she showed me pictures of her very beautiful family house…  Anyway, through her I deepened my interest in Albanian culture, especially poetry since World War 2.  I had read Kadarë, then Fatos Kongoli in translation to either French or English…and so on to the Bektashis, because I, like you, for a long time (like many atheists!)  have had an interest in Sufism.   You may have seen translations I have made of Rumi on my site, as well as a lot of translations of modern Albanian poetry.

I also read a very interesting little-known book from the 1920s called “Two Vagabonds in Albania”.  Their “Two Vagabonds in Languedoc” is equally interesting and original and full of forgotten history.

I never got far in learning Albanian, as you can see, but Zana sent me texts and literal translations, and I also had dictionaries.

I have always been an  outsider, and still live mostly alone, aged 76 – now in SW France.  (I had once considered Albania between Vlorë and Sarandë, but being an EU citizen and always having loved France and the very good connections by air between Ireland and France, made me choose the latter.)  Zana came to visit me in both Ireland and France, and I took her daughter out to dinner (in an Uzbek restaurant!) in Paris a few times when I travelled via Paris (which I don’t do now).  Zana, like a lot of immigrants, does not like the USA.  I have a Lithuanian friend who is selling up and coming to SW France with her dog, because she can’t stand America anymore.  Like many immigrants, including Zana, she divorced fairly soon after arriving in the USA, but “kept herself well above water”.  Zana, however, though originally a research chemist, had to live on low wages and so is still stuck in the US.  Though now she has a permanent, Palestinian boyfriend who conveniently lives in a nearby flat: the perfect arrangement !

Gjithë të mirat,

Anthony (alias Ujku)

Flāmur : flag or banner or standard

Also first-person plural present passive indicative of flō

I like your pseudonym!

Switching to Jesus.

Honor thy father...

... if nor thy mother.

Differences of Culture within a Culture.

The French for semi-detached
as in a house, is jumelée : twinned,
joined together side to side.
The English prefer detachment,
and if that is not possible,
then semi-detachment of some kind.

The French express their aggression with their driving.
The English (and Irish) express theirs with their drinking.

In France the hunters with dogs
are inferior to the middle class
who generally resent their outrageous rights
and behaviour (dating from the Revolution),
and often regard them as 'right-wing scum' .

In England the hunters on horseback with dogs
looked haughtily, expensively
down on the several classes below them.

Meanwhile, in America...

Jesus of the Sauna.

My very good friend
(who has never been a milkman)
puts on clean socks,
hitch-hikes for 30 miles
on half-price Wednesdays
to a convivial sauna
and sucks on friendly cocks.

Against 'Free Choice'.

Entering a public library
is nearly as bad entering a supermarket.
So many books, so much choice - paralysis.

In a nearby French village there is a little bookcase
mounted on a wall - just a small cupboard, really,
with glazed doors - in which people
(English, Dutch, French - even German, Danish and Finnish readers)
leave books - maybe taking others out, or not.
Because of the limited choice
I have found by chance dozens of great books there
that I would never have noticed,
found or chosen in a 'proper' public library.

Dogs have been doomed

Since Time Began
(when they were wolves)
to watch humans eat.
I have always been attracted
to the despised.

I sniff their feet.

Not surprising, really.

"Apart from the colonisation of other planets in our galaxy,
Elon Musk's other ambitions include:
converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy;
implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube;
relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters;
creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower;
and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

"So far, Mr Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals."

from The Times, London, November 25th, 2017.

The Earning of Leisure by Labour

is one of the driving forces
behind turbo-capitalism.
Another is the continuous creation
of an unemployed (but unleisured) underclass
through technological innovation.

And what are the common Leisure-dreams ?
Donning expensive gear
to do silly things in groups and troops and teams...

I can't see much pleasure
in their Leisure.

*  *  *

Capitalism also depends on private property.

Marvellous Murmuration

of  Starlings.

click for a video 

Just admiring her tail.

Self-portrait with Stylite Sphinx.

Can I put in a word ?

I am a Dog
- whatever that might mean.
I haven't a clue
what's going on most of the time
- except Food, Outings
and the boredom in between.

My definition of a 'Good Novel' :

one that illuminates yet another
grim corner of the polymorphous
human psyche
while entrancing you.
Not much biography does this -
nor history, either.

I don't understand

why people want to get drunk.
I don't understand jealousy.
I don't understand rape:
sex without complicity is bad enough,
but without consent
seems to me quite horrible.
(But then, despite being male and bent,
- an old term, not used now -
I was never interested in sex for its own sake.)
Masturbation is All about Consent.

To a large extent,

language is the
emasculation
of imagination.

Christianity and Capitalism become one

through the near-congruence of the "stable to throne of Heaven" myth
and the several "rags to riches" stories,

though in the case of Capitalism
martyrdom just before ascending to the sky
has largely been discarded, and Heaven itself
is real-estate in Manhattan, London or Dubai.

The Dissident Blogger's Christmas Office Party

was a great success.  Unfortunately, however...

...it turned into a Rave, and Wing-Commander Gabriel
of Paradise Precinct had to come and close it down -
with a tombstone !

Police tactics have always been dangerously extreme.
Especially around Saturnalia-time.

Dundonald, county Down.

Where a jerry-built hospital sags now
my mother would take me to visit
a one-woman farm : hens in the kitchen,
a pot on the fire, pale yellow cream in a churn.
Outside the half-door was a pile of muck.
I played with her Border Collie and her son
who was illegitimate like me.
We gave the calves our willies to suck.

Accident

is almost infinite.
After all,
everything about us
and our brains
and how we fall
are accident.

An Ancient Phenomenon.

On hearing a nightingale last summer

while walking my dog
past a leafy, riverine cruising-spot
where sad men lurk.

There is no heaven, no hell,
no gods, no demons,
only Landscape and its inner
etherereals
which desire, money, religion,
fear and property destroy.
Alas, the stupid dead,
the even stupider survivors
they have bred!

Family

is just one aspect
of our dread
of the dead.

Odysseus said

Most Greeks would rather die
than have to eat Hummous pie.
I say: if I had been an alpha-male
I'd have killed myself.

Keep up Appearances.

Play the Game
according to the Rules
(come from On High).
Don't let the side down.
Pull together...
Team Spirit...
Them and Us, Black and White,
Saints and Sinners...
All that crap which turned me not just anti-British
(tore up the passport)
but anti-bourgeois.
But I played such eminently bourgeois games
as Monopoly, Bézique, Canasta,
and Mah Jongg for the fun of company and conversation.
I remember Whist- and Beetle-Drives,
and the frequent exhilaration of the only Sport
I ever played : Cruising,
a form of gambling
in which there are few winners.

Ego

is a construction of civilisation
and can exist only when accompanied
by its strange cardboard cut-out supporters
(as in an armorial achievement) Id, Libido
and Super-ego - all fed by artifacts, property,
patriotism, manufactured moralities and 'family values'.
Our egos sit on us like
conquerors' buttocks on our faces.

Misogyny

(when not a mirror of self-contempt)
is mostly - probably - a form of misanthropy.
The greatest misogynists are 'womanisers'.

Tourism

is the Emperor's New Clothes.

I have just read

in a thriller
that mouse-droppings soon sink
in a bowl or jar of the ubiquitous,
white, crystalline poison called sugar.
But dog-hairs stay on top.

Time is mostly blood and shit -

don't stab it -
strangle it gently and well.
Rinse your hands in piss.
Escape from the miasma
of being and being human.
Close your eyes while doing so:

we do too much looking
and not enough considering
we do too much hearing
and not enough listening
too much feeling
and not enough fellow-feeling
especially not for 'animals'
not for the downtrodden spirits.

Writing as a dog,

I don't believe
that there is such a thing as Time.
There is only The Moment.

TIME IS A PLASTIC (SQUEAKY) FISH.

The (liberal) Left,

loving to define people as winners, highly undeserving winners,
losers and victims -
then by minority status, ethnicity, colour, religion, and sexuality -
fails to see that they continually create division
by obsessive definition, addition and subtraction.

One of my most-persistent Earworms.

Until recently, I was slightly embarrassed
by frequently humming the catchy melody of
the Horst Wessel Lied, notorious anthem of the Nazis.

But I have discovered that the tune pre-dated Hitler,
accommodating World War I lyrics such as
Vorbei, vorbei, sind all die schönen Stunden (Gone are all the Lovely Moments)
and the Königsberg-Lied,
(Königsberg is now in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad
between Poland and Lithuania)
and, later adopted for a Communist marching-song,
was probably of Viennese origin.
So now I hum the tune - wondering what Johannes Brahms
would have done with it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD6oDnm43HA

To be humble

is to be unhumiliatable.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski's

horrible journey up the Congo River
took seven weeks in the boat named Roi des Belges -
(the appalling Leopold, King of the Belgians, who took the Congo
for its unlimited slave labour, rubber and ivory
as his lucrative private fiefdom).
Years later, Joseph Conrad (as he is now known)
took just seven weeks to write
Heart of Darkness.

In the 1920s The French Republic disposed of roughly 10,000 Africans
(mostly from Oubangi-Chari, now the Central African Republic)
to build the railway from Brazzaville (on the other side of the river
from Léopoldville, now Kinshasa) to the coast.
Ironically, Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà was a believer
in the equality of people and peoples, which is why the capital
of the People's Republic of the Congo is still called Brazzaville.

My Good Deed for the Day

was to send a staggering €15 to Jimmy Wales
to help keep Wikimedia afloat.
In my accompanying PayPal message I expressed amazement
that Google with its billions cannot subsidise one of its most popular
AND NON-PROFIT-MAKING SITES.

Apart from being one of the most atrocious butchers of all time,

all we need to know about the strutting megalomaniac Napoleon I
is his comment :

The greatest woman alive or dead
is the one who produces the most offspring.

The Code Napoléon oppressed and handicapped France
for 150 years.
Women didn't get the vote until 1945.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave : Alligator Bait

"A brief video on the use of black babies 
as live alligator bait in Florida in the early 1900s brought me here" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlTHvJBeP0

Itsenäisyyspäivä.

Happy Hundredth Birthday, Finland!

And all Hail, Sibelius !

The great François Couperin said:

 "J'aime mieux ce qui me touche que ce qui me surprend."
I'd rather be moved than be amazed. 

Worth pondering, in our age of great amazement and false emotions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxMCpiHhmP0

To be planted out.

Chrysanthemums
are flowers for the dead in France,
for they are in bloom on All Souls' - All Hallows - Day.
My mother loved chrysanthemums.
I too loved their russet colours and the mysterious
erotic smell that they don't have in France.
Every autumn there was a big cut
bunch of them in our narrow hallway, bought
from a seedsman, nurseryman who lived just 50 yards
from where she was born, and later taught
(and later still was buried),
and whom she'd taught when first he went to school.
Her birthday was on the third of November, 1907.

This past third of November I stole
one of hundreds of to-be-neglected
and wind-scattered pots
of gold-and-russet remembrance-chrysanthemums
from the pleasant little cemetery
where my periwinkle-covered grave awaits,

and placed it on my balcony.

« L'érotisme,

c'est donner au corps les prestiges de l'esprit.  »

Georges Perros

English: "Eroticism accords the body all the prestige of the mind."

Comment: Eroticism is not love, nor is it sex, but arousing sensuality.

“When we are headed the wrong way,

 the last thing we need is progress.”


Nick Bostrom, Swedish philosopher, in “Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept”, The European Magazine, 13.06.2011

"Stinking rich"

most likely refers to the smell
of the rotting teeth in their mouths,
from eating sugar, white bread and cake.
The silver spoons put into their mouths
as babies did not protect them.
The poor were reduced to selling
their teeth which were healthy
from eating rough bread and ....ation
(though their gums were destroyed by starvation).

The rich also stank in courtrooms.
They feverishly chewed garlic, caraway, cardamoms
to prevent infection from the breath of the poor
whom they sent off to New England
then to New South Wales
for petty larceny - for the jails
were even more crowded than they are today
in England and the U.S.A.

"Without fiction, we poison ourselves...

...on the lies of the first person."

Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
and First Person.

===========


(PS  Today I wrote the blog that will appear on the first of February)