Freedom, for a man,

is primarily spatial
and, secondarily, sexual.
Which is why we have spread over the globe
in our billions,
and have made so little emotional progress.

Deep Communication.

I wiggle my toes.
He wags his tail.

Language cannot do better.

No sacred texts required.

My "religion"
is tree-worship.

Trees are "the soul of the world"
and grow through deep sorrow.
We are still cutting them down
so that there'll be no tomorrow.

My dog's favourite place to lie

is on my Immortality gabbeh.
which depicts a peacock on the Tree of Life.

This might be symbolic
but, more likely, is because
(apart from my bed) it is
the softest place in my sweet house to be
and close to me when I am tapping quietly
(as now) on my computer.

On Politics.

One should not ascribe to malice
that which can be explained by stupidity.
But, on the other hand,
one should hesitate to ascribe to stupidity or ignorance
that which can be explained by malice.
And never attribute to coincidence
that which can be explained by corruption.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

 ὁ ... ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ
To examine one’s life one has to be informed.
To be informed one has to take trouble.
To take trouble one has to take life seriously.
To take life seriously one has definitely not to take oneself seriously.
Our civilisation is horribly crammed with people who take themselves seriously.

Dating from September 1960

my address-book is entitled
The Roll of Disconnections.

Premature births

often occur.
But premature deaths ?
No-one is informed enough to tell.

Wolves are wise enough

to advance at the pace of the slowest of the pack.
Humans, on the other hand...

When I was a little boy

in the 1940s,
I took an interest in
bizarre things such as asteroids,
beetles and dinosaurs.
This was partly - no, largely - to emphasise
my difference, and was not unconnected
to my love of spiders, ogres,
and the dark that other children feared -
and my understanding
that it was not Rapunzel's hair
that Rumpelstiltskin climbed up -
but her beard.

The huge problematic of Christianity

is the belief that humans are perfectible.
From this, and the fatal Neolithic fantasy
that Nature is improvable,
arise most of the evils of our time.

"The mind

has no inherent capacity for joy...
It only imagines joy."

- Osho (Rajneesh; born Chandra Mohan Jain)

Virgil on happy, exciting moments (neatly put):

Forsan et haec olim
meminisse iuvabit.

Perhaps one day
we will be cheered up
by remembering them.

(Aeneid, Book I)

A Suicide

is perfectly able to take an interest
in the future in which he (or she) has no
intention of inhabiting.

"Real Men" suck

both pricks and pussies,
cocks as well as cunts.

More or less stuck

at a happy emotional age of about six or seven
I am very fortunate not to be stuck, as most men are,
at a dark emotional age of twelve to sixteen.

Clothes can be beautiful

and interesting, even stimulating
in different ways -
though when you are even slightly aware
you tend to see only their majesties'
fake tan underneath.

Yet another definition of capitalism:

the selling
of complicity.

'Banter,'

like mindlessly-repeated teasing,
is rarely less than verbal aggression -
which is why I always avoided
men in groups
and the intimidating pubs of Britain.

"The blood of martyrs

is the seed of the Church,"
wrote Tertullian, famously.
But not of the martyrs of fertility:
half the population of the world.

Human brains

smell sweet
but manufacture a foul bitterness
beyond all understanding.

Death

is too much reality for some
but the only reality for all of us.

There is something about

perfect and (often frighteningly expensive)
American teeth
which is more than a bit unwholesome.

My mind is now even more boggled :

https://aeon.co/ideas/there-are-more-microbial-species-on-earth-than-stars-in-the-sky

ObL ad phasmam.

You made the typically-male, typically-western mistake
of being too ambitious, over-reaching.
Instead of mere symbols of greed and power
and wage-slavery, you should have struck at the roots:
the prestigious private schools of the USA and England.

Not many people know

(certainly few of the French)
that France has one of the worst rural bus services in the world.
This is partly because of a national railway monopoly
(ironically and largely controlled by its
unbelievably-cosseted and often-hereditary or nepotic employees)
and partly to boost the car industry -
so that it is now extremely difficult to live in the countryside
without a car.  Second-hand cars are extremely expensive
and thus, often extremely old.
And so the rural economy and population
continue to decline
despite the (largely benign)
influx of foreigners.

The Capitalist Work-ethic

cannot tolerate leisure
unless, in its totalitarian scheme of things,
it "provides" people-cogs with jobs.

My blogs begin

as words on scraps of paper.
I refine them
and then "post" them
as virtual scraps of paper
in the vast gutter of the world-wide web.

Human sleaze.

How wonderful to learn
that our beds contain more parasites
than the nests of chimpanzees!

Almost as inquitous as the ubiquitous,

outrageous, Christian declaration that God is Love
is the Buddhist trope that All is Suffering.
The suffering of some (creatures) is a good deal
less apparent than others.

Clothes and emperors.

Some of the worst translators
are trite and celebrated poets.

When you feel that you're starting to decay,

there is some satisfaction
in getting to the end of the day.

And writing a blog
(even if nobody reads it)
is an excellent way
of collecting some thoughts
- and throwing them away.

Are plants rather 'cleverer' than we think ?

Scientists from around the world are claiming that plants cannot just sense,
but communicate, learn and remember.

In an experiment in Australia, plants appeared to learn to associate a sound with a food source,
just as Pavlov's dogs linked the sound of a bell with dinner.

In Israel they've found that plants communicated a message from one to another,
and that the information was then used to survive drought.

In British Columbia and the UK researchers have shown that trees pass information
and nutrients to each other through an underground fungal network.
This happens more with closely related trees or seedlings than with strangers.

And in California it turns out that sagebrush shrubs have 'regional dialects' in communicating...

(Food for thought, from the BBC website.)

I have the unoriginal - yet visceral - feeling

that we humans, all of us,
are zombies, the living dead
punishing the Earth
for its beauty and exquisite
(but temporary) balance.

Rimbaud's account of his gang-rape (aged 16) by sailors (?) on the road from Charleroi to Paris. Or else a masturbation fantasy.

THE PLUNDERED HEART

My poor heart's dribbling at the stern,
my heart covered in nicotine:
they squirt soup onto it in turn,
my poor heart's dribbling at the stern:
beneath the quipping unconcern
of sailors raucously obscene,
my poor heart's dribbling at the stern,
my heart covered in nicotine.

Ithyphallic, loutish, crude,
they and their jokes have tainted it.
In the wheelhouse there are lewd
graffiti - ithyphallic, crude.
O let my heart be cleaned, renewed
By wondrous waves immersing it!
Ithyphallic, yobbish, crude,
they and their jokes have tainted it.

When they have chewed their quids to pulp,
O plundered heart, what shall I do ?
Drunken hiccups, sniggers, yelps.
When they have chewed their quids to pulp -
my guts (if I can only gulp
my heart back) will be churning, too.
When they have chewed their quids to pulp,
O plundered heart, what shall I do ?

translated by Anthony Weir.

Belief is not feeling,

and none of us
leaves the world
undamaged.

We members of the comfortable bourgeoisie

barricade ourselves
(as Baudelaire said) into
"an oasis of horror
in a desert of ennui"
or, indeed, anomie.

"Non, je ne regrette rien."

How could anyone regret nothing ?
Not even a broken toy, or telephone
relationship, marriage,
broken health...or a sudden decision,
reaction, temptation, caprice ?

All the same,
regret is hostage to blame.
We blame both ourselves and others.
I blame my existence.

I regret my regrets.
Though they are few,
I would like to dump their slight drag,
their slightly depressing effect.

I don't want to push my regretting
out of proportion,
but I chiefly regret having been the result
of an unpleasant coupling
and an unsuccessful abortion.

We are not our faces

or names, or bodies, or souls -
just presences, briefly,
consumers, chiefly.

Incompetence.

When I was young
girls and women had to prove that they were not incompetent,
by becoming teachers or nurses or excellent secretaries.
Men and boys, on the other hand,
had to prove they were incompetent.
My mother must have been disappointed to discover
that I was incompetent at an early age,
compared with my mechanically-minded, mathematical
well-behaved cousins.

Like my mother,
I find that as I get older
and tireder
life gets colder.

In the past

 people asked each other
(and children) for permission to take a photograph.
Now, the endlessly-photographed
complain about lack of identity.

Capitalism, the global swindle,

depends on hierarchy,
which is much, much older.

There is no "app." for equality,
and those for "generosity"
are as self-serving as The Lord's Prayer.

Enterprise

is the degenerate state
of being prepared to junk all decent feeling
for the Greater Good of making money
or acquiring power.

The difference between French and Irish history

 is that the French collude to agree on a version as solid as a Gruyere cheese,
while no two Irishmen can agree on any version of any event in the island's past.

Somebody must already have said

that what makes us human is
our inhumanity.

Most of my life

I have felt, in the words
of the late, splendid Philip Kerr
"like a goldfish in a toilet-bowl"
- relatively safe from predators
if not from the onslaught of turds.

One of the least-mentioned of our many addictions

is Trading: buying and selling on
(usually) the same stuff, items,
commodities, information,
animals, people...
It is safer than gambling,
but for that very reason
'has reached epidemic proportions'.

Having only recently even heard of him,

my favourite hero is now
Benjamin Lay,
one of the few true followers of Diogenes
 - a man of conscience who ended up in the Pennsylvania colony
and is surely the 'greatest American' known
(but largely unknown) to History.
He hasn't even been celebrated with a postage-stamp,
much less a national holiday.

(read here his book condemning slavery)

My future

(if any)
lies not, I hope, in old
but in deep age,
the result of contextual
rather than linear thinking.

But even Old Age
is better than New Age:
now that really is mind-shrinking!

RELINQUISH

- such a beautiful
and difficult word !