Christian Evangelical Problems.

Many East Asian languages
"are barren in abstractions,
which provided the most appalling difficulties
when it came to translating Holy Writ.

"To give just one example,
he cited the text God is Love.
In Rhadés there is no word for God.
In fact, these people didn't get the idea [of God] at all
without a great deal of explanation.
And there is no word for Love.

"So the text came out in translation:
The Great Spirit is not angry."

- from Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent -

Travels in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, 1951.

This problem began conveniently to be solved
by the liquidation of "tribes" such as the Rhadés of Viêt-Nam
through slave labour for Michelin.
Then, after the French were expelled,
came the Americans
and carpet-bombing, Agent Orange,
total war...
now total capitalism
and slavery abroad.

Why are sloths not extinct ?

The pursuit of 'happiness'

ends in dissatisfaction.

And God divided the Light from the Dark

and was thrilled at having invented dualism.

On Your Birthday...

Art cannot be perfect

because Nature cannot be imperfect.

Words are

our most intimate enemy.

I don't understand

why people (as I read in novels)
need others (or another)
to need them -
because it precludes the necessarily-voluntary in relationships.

Deaf Worms

My brain is
an ear-wormery.

The problem I have with Literature

is that (like plants)
it is so much more interesting and relaxing
than actual people.

Today's Neologism.

Indigeneity.

Maybe better than Indigenousness and Autochthonicity,

but unfortunate all the same, being so tellingly close to Indignity...

Lateral thinking.

Or do I mean global thinking ?

Civilisation

photo by Graham OneStonedCrow (blogspot.com)

Street art, Paris (75014)

by 'Lady Bug'

The Glory of Western Medecine.

Though we live longer,
we may suffer longer
and more expensively from more.

According to an article in Aeon,
"...approximately a third of adults suffer from multiple chronic conditions,
wreaking untold havoc on healthcare systems and economies across the globe.
In developed countries, it might be closer to three in four older adults
who suffer from multiple conditions.
The proportion of patients with four or more diseases
is expected to almost double between 2015 and 2035 in the UK alone.
Frighteningly, these statistics don’t even account for chronic illnesses in children,
which are likewise on the rise."

A short lesson in Astrophysics.

His best poem.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
  club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
  with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
     on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
  to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
     in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
     my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
        my life when they murder by means of my
           hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
     frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
         waves call me to folly and the desert calls
           me to doom and the beggar refuses
              my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
  come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
  humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
     would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
        one face, a thing, and against all those
           who would dissipate my entirety, would
              blow me like thistledown hither and
                 thither or hither and thither
                    like water held in the
                       hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me

Louis MacNeice

.

"We all live in a..."

Reality Distortion Field.

I first heard this term in a broadcast discussion
about the President of the United States
and the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But it could describe all seven billion
bubbles of human consciousness.

One Stoned Crow

A Namibian blog with some splendid photos...
and a saved-from kidnap, saved-from-electrocution monkey.

http://onestonedcrow.blogspot.com/2009/08/soul-sister.html

Time.

Time was invented by railway companies
to keep trains running on it.

Religious art with a dazzling political overtone.

12th century altar-front from the Catalan church of Sant Martí de Gia
showing St Martin of Tours on his death-bed dismissing the Devil
who has appeared to the 81-year old saint in his final and fatal fever.
The unwrinkled blanket displays the colours of the Kingdom of Aragon,
whose patron saint is...St Martin.

Dilettantes are less and less acceptable.

I have an intelligent interest in
Trees and shrubs
Plants generally
Dogs
Middle Eastern and North African rugs
Middle Eastern and North African music
Middle Eastern (and any) vegetarian cuisine
Indian, European, Japanese, Middle Eastern and North African classical music
Irish slow airs
Balkan traditional musics
Folk-Fusion jazz (especially North African)
Ceramics (world-wide, non-industrial)
Pre-modern European diet
Landscape that is not flat
Painting, from Roman to contemporary
Iconography and the metamorphosis of motifs
Romanesque 'marginal' sculptures
Megaliths
Literary novels and political thrillers
Poetry of the exalted kind
Poetry of the honest kind
Fascinating facts (such as that the Prague-Vienna express train has a fresh orchid in each of its toilets)
Corkscrews (I have reduced my collection to around 50)
Linguistics and toponymy (place-names)
Experimental photography
'Vernacular' architecture from corbelled hen-houses to substantial farmhouses
Distilled fruit alcohols such as those made from quinces, sorb-apples, blackberries, holly-berries...

       ...and so on.

But few people that I meet are interested in more than one of these -
which is why I am somewhat solitary.

But, my widowed neighbour Josette Porquelette has feelings of the same order.
She even understands some of the complexities of the Irish Border!

Why do I remember

the botanical names of plants
and less than 5% of my life ?

Why was the vodka-and-tomato-juice drink called
Bloody Mary
and not Blood of the Lamb ?

A Long History of Time.

There was no beginning
and there will be no end,

I am only my passport.

Most people define themselves by an imposed (or, if they are lucky, chosen) identity -
something I never wanted or understood. I remain undefined,
except by the passport I would rather not have to have.
Am I 'socially blind' ?

My New Genetically-modified Internet Friend.

Luttrell Psalter, 1325-40

Adults are shallow and cold

like mass graves.  They need to be so
to make out of wrinkles
the half-born children
who, in asylums of words,
wash the world dry.
Schools are parers of ruins.

Water is Truth -

to drink and to drown in.
We are the only creatures
to know and deny the desiccating truth
that we are Death,
heart-wizened, face-painted
bedizened destroyers.

(Nor is truth a reversible raincoat.)

My comfort-thought :

I will be less than a shadow
on a Nagasaki wall.

The wabi-sabi of Google.

If you look up wabi-sabi in Google images
you will see a completely different
- and far better - set of pictures
from that which you will see
on looking up the Japanese  侘 寂

Putting it yet another way :

for all our self-proclaimed intelligence
we are the roughest, toughest, stupidest of beasts
wrecking the world through sheer intransigence.

It is not difficult to imagine

that what we know as 'floaters' flitting through
the aqueous humour of our eyes
would have been for millennia interpreted instead
by some as spirits of the air, or of the dead.

Sibilant or fricative ?

The reassuring sound
of gas street-lights.

(Now heard no more.)

Jesus is not recorded as saying

that real people don't have families,
but seems to have assumed it is so.

Wallace Stevens said

(or rather wrote that) the self
is "a substitute for all the gods."
And - I would add - an outrage
against natural humility.  And all our selves
pollute the world with terrible imagination,
murderous alphabets, accursèd languages,
repulsive rivalries, our pride, our money.

The planet will spin on unpaid;
the shroud above its crust will be our filthy bed.

Art is not stuff -

but how you live your life.

The thing about dolls

and stuffed animals
is that they feel no pain.
We treat each other like dolls
and animals as if they had no sentience.

Silk.

The more that Nature is defeated
the less subtle we become.

Between

routine and dance
lies the opening
of awareness.

Comfort

is the enemy
of consciousness.

The Flood.

Several
thousand miles away
we are drowning
in the U.S.A.

Hurrah!

James Ellroy
doesn't have a cellphone, either !

Nor has he a laptop...

He likes Rachmaninov -
but does he have TV ?

Life After Death

was invented (by ghouls) to encourage
the thought that life before death is worth living.

Unfortunately,

cities now
grow faster
than forests.

(And they are water-consumers

rather than water-conservators.)

After we had devised the bag

we should have stopped our inventions.

"Sex"

isn’t that much better than a good sneeze –

though it can last longer.

There's nothing like a good sneeze...

and then there's ear-cleaning

and foot massage...

and having your back scratched...
and tantric pissing...

Only the unsensual obsess about "sex".

Pascal's strange Apologia.

"The simple application of reason tells us that we are a  hateful species.
The only religion that teaches us to hate ourselves is Christianity.
So no other religion can be considered
by those who know that they deserve nothing but hatred."

But, of course, if we already accept that we are a hateful species
we don't need help from hypocritical Christianity.

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford,

son of the first British prime minister, genteel,
asexual author of the first Gothic Novel (The Castle of Otranto)
wrote more than once in his vast correspondence:
this world is a comedy to those that think,
and a tragedy to those that feel. 

I am not as knowledgeable as I thought,

and, being almost square,
have never moved in the right circles.
I still have no idea how Club Sandwiches
differs from other kinds. Nor do I care
enough to look it up on Google Images.

There are few memorable epigrams by Stalin,

apart from his reply to French Foreign minister Pierre Laval's suggestion
that he might gain the Vatican's favour if he stopped persecuting Catholics in the USSR :

"And how many divisions does His Holiness command ?"

On the other hand,
The powerless Lev Trotsky is very quotable:

The end may justify the means provided that something justifies the end.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

"The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country." 

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Revolutions are always verbose.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'