Art in a French Village.

All on show this morning.

1. Galerie Flo.

2. Galerie Draw

3. Caylus Arts

With devilish ingenuity

we have bred double-petalled flowers
for our desolate gardens
which bees are powerless
to enter.

Apparently

my one-night

-stand father was a

WW2 pilot

(heroic and

happy band

of brothers!)

Fly-by-night

Vol de Nuit

viol de nuit*

and not Saint-

Exupéry.

viol=rape

Life

by definition
is a hubristic phenomenon
and process.

If queer men had not been hell-bent

on habitually imitating heterosexual penetration
there would have been no HIV/AIDS epidemic.

love-affection-great-sex-untold-story-terrence-higgins

It is convenient for those with viable incomes

to confuse beggars and hustlers. 
On a serious radio programme
I heard a sociologist declare that 'beggars'
now had portable terminals to take his credit card.

This class-war disinformation we can disregard.

From Facecrime to Facebook and Prolefeed.

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander
when you were in a public place or within range of a telescreen.
The smallest thing could give you away.
A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety,
a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it
the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.”

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four.

Democracy can be evil.

Just look at Israel

and despair.

(The USA, which, of course, disenfranchises millions of its non-white inhabitants, is, of course, not a democracy, and was not founded to be one.  Jefferson, Adams, Washington & co. would have been horrified by the very idea of 'Negroes' having a vote...or firearms.) 

(The Holocaust ה שואה is no excuse for the revenge-dispossession, impoverishment and herding of Palestinians into "refugee camps" in Israel and Lebanon.)

Art and Entropy.

Art crudely distracts us from the rude truth
that we destroy the truth

and with it what we can destroy of life
by building, endless building,
flattening, rebuilding.

All of it will fall, all smashed and beaten flat
and not be built again
by the lie of human dignity.

I have a certain sympathy with Vladimir Putin –

or, rather, I can understand where he is coming from.

He watched well-intentioned men dismantle
a no-longer-viable USSR and try to create 

first a viable Commonwealth of Independent States (which fell apart)
and then a Russian Federation with a decent constitution and a parliament.  

He watched evil men from within the former USSR
and from "The West" appear like vultures
(or like bomb disposal squads) to bring Russia
economically to its knees.  

He then watched "The West" enter into illegal wars or "interventions"  against Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya,
knowing that it was Stalin who insisted in 1945
that undeclared war (like political assassination by agents of one state against another, as Israel is wont to do)
was henceforth an International Crime.

And so he decided to Make Russia Great Again
by hook and by crook and by intervention.
SRSV : Сделать Россию Cнова Bеликой

After a bloody success in Chechnya he lopped a chunk
off Georgia.  Then he lopped Crimea (deemed to be Ukrainian
only in 1954, by a minority of the Soviet Præsidium)
and south-eastern borderlands from Ukraine.

Finally, he ordered another "intervention" in Ukraine, which, so far, has not gone well - but has to his glee disrupted the whole capitalist house of cards on which he and the Russian Federation and almost the whole world unfortunately rely.

But Mr Putin has not 'gone mad'.  He is no worse than many bitter dictators.  He is not as bad as Stalin, not as bad as Hitler, not yet as disastrous as Napoleon.
He may be a very unpleasant puritan and nationalist Russian autocrat in the Tsarist tradition, but he has a long-term global view, and that view - any long-term view - is unAmerican.

Sophocles' Antigone :

The respect of ego for ego
against ego through the ridiculous
practice of ritual burial for Important People —
though common soldiers were left just so
for the contentment of wolves.
Funerals are just for show.

Bureaucracy.

 Now it's all in the clouds.

photo by Dayanit Singh

Fairy tales conflicted me,

because I liked the pictures of the dwarves and ogres,
not the entitled, goody-goody princes and princesses.

So I have a certain aversion to blue eyes and blond hair,
preferring swarthiness; and I have had no ambition
beyond a vague desire to practise light sedition.

Heatwave.

Yesterday:
the river Loire at Ancenis, France.

photo by Sébastien Salom-Gomez 

Religious practice

is just another form of entertainment
for those who want more than entertainment.

The difference

between trade
and modern moneylender-capitalism
is environmental cataclysm.

A very clever logo

for Orange's Mobile Connect
security application.

"I don't care what anyone says,

"or how often or winningly they say it: no-one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth, life is catastrophe."
 "And as much as I would like to believe [that] there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there is no truth beyond illusion."

— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch,
a thriller with a back-story almost 500 pages long, and a (tacked-on ?) coda which is a disquisition on Truth, Reality, and whether life is worth living or not.

Amazingly, over 1500 people

have listened to my short musical composition
from around 2006 on youTube
(with its accompanying film made in 1967)
called Tombeau de Kurt Schwitters.

Isn't transience wonderful ?

In 1949, when Stephen Spielberg was three,
I discovered Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus
and (I think) Archæopteryx on a visit with my mother
to the Natural History Museum in London.
My subsequent enthusiasm was astronomy.
I was a skinny little boy with glasses
who read a lot, and, almost skeletal, still do.
Much later I turned to Irish Megaliths.
The more I learn about history, prehistory,
palæontology, geology, the great extinctions
and so on, the more I come to feel
that the good thing about time is that it passes.

We take for granted

that Action is much better than Inaction...
so we swim and squirm
around our busy brains – like goldfish
through decaying sperm.

Compulsory Education

penalises those (many, bottom-of-the-heap)
who are intimidated by it at the outset
and are doomed to remain in what
the self-styled educated
call the Underclass.

Last week in Benidorm (Alicante, Spain)

 

and in Ukraine.

photo by Maksim Marushenko

T.S. Eliot was half-right.

The planet cannot bear
very much of our reality.

Civilised Societies

have sad taboos
on silliness.

Soul Music.

Some souls
are more profound
than others.

Beauty is not for fucking.

Too many men see women
only through the penetrating gaze
of the penis-eye.

"Going forward",

a particularly egregious and woolly phrase of politspeak –
meaning, it seems, 
From now on or From then on, or In the future –

has long since made it into Serious Literature :

'After Saeed was born, the frequency with which his parents had sex
had dipped notably, and it continued to decline going forward.'

– Mohsin Hamid, Exit West, 2017.

From the same book I read with horror
that malnourished and underfed people all over the world
are watching cookery programmes on smartphones.

Going forward.

Chimpanzees' Tea-party.

Contrary to what they encourage you to believe,
most cultures promote and cater to
most of our worst tendencies.

The Word of the Day

which I heard yesterday :

INVISIBILIZED.

On Doctrine.

"We don't embrace an idea.
Rather, the idea encircles
and enslaves us, and drives us
into the Arena where, forced
to be gladiators, we fight for it."

— Heinrich Heine.

Tree of Birds.

Part of a flock of Budgerigars resting on a dead tree in central Australia.

photo by Charles Davis

Pathetic Androcracy :

a form of society controlled by and for men
who are so conflicted about their pudenda
that they are unmanned simply by being naked
in any situation that they do not control.

 

Reports from Ukraine

that a Russian General Kotuzov has been killed
in the Russia-Ukraine war do not mention
that another General Kotuzov fought against Napoleon
in 1812, and is an important character
in Tolstoy's War & Peace.

All civilisation

is based on the addictive species'
greatest addiction: the accumulation
and protection of property -
from twigs to forests,
and fields to skyscrapers.

Good news for (a tiny bit of) Ukraine.

A small Ukrainian vineyard next to a Russian-occupied area
has won a gold medal (in blind tastings)
at a prestigious international wine fair.

read more >

Intelligence

is an inherited hypertrophy
or tumour on the brain
which, when encouraged by civilisation, 
causes psychopathic narcissism.

As the world warms up

we can expect destruction of Northern Mediterranean
environments by Opuntia stricta, the invasive
Caribbean Prickly Pear,

which is already devastating parts of Africa,
whither it was introduced as an ornamental plant
and for hedging.

It grows happily beneath my balcony.

Crocodiles on Greenland.*

There have already been 5 earthly extinctions
- one of which eliminated 95% of all life on the planet.
So the present one is no big deal, cosmically speaking.

What 'sticks in my throat' (so to speak) is that
the present one is occurring incredibly fast -
not over hundreds of thousands of years -
but only since the 'Stone Age' and
mainly in the last three or four hundred years,
and now at industrial speed -
due entirely to a rogue runaway species
powered entirely by greed.

* And no humans to admire them.

American Education ?

There are web-sites which offer Aids to Education –
for whom, I don't know. 
(Heaven help them!)

One of these is GradeSaver.

When I googled 'The Kreutzer Sonata',
the eighth listing on the first page
revealed its 'study guide' to Tolstoy's novella.

Read it and be appalled.

Before Eden.

In the world of 'naked savages'
there was no lord nor master.

'The sound of water

 says what I think.'

― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 3rd century BCE.

How could anyone

as thoughtful and intelligent
as the great novelist Margaret Atwood

(1974)

have decided to submit herself to a face-lift ?

One of the many insuperable

problems of civilisation
is that it depends on leaders,
and every leader turns out to be
your enemy.

Fête du N'Œuf.

click to see all the eggs

This creative Easter eggfest lasted only a very few years in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val (on the river Aveyron in SW France), because it was the 'brainchild' of one very imaginative man, Tim Grosvenor, who had his own excellent art-gallery in the village. In 2008 he moved to Switzerland, later opening an art gallery in Brussels.  

Virtue,

 the word, comes from the Latin for 'man'.
(Virile and world have a common root.)
Is a woman's virtue, therefore,
a measure of her manliness ?

I think that marriage

protects women less
than it divides them.

 

'Bye-bye Blackbird'

The loud and delightful warbling
that I listen to on the balcony fades
to almost nothing when, one by one,
I take out my hearing-aids.

Category-wonder.

This self-portrait by Charlie Wetzel
makes me ponder the terms
'transgender', 'hermaphrodite'
and 'pseudo-hermaphrodite'.  

A different myth.

Asteria, the female Minotaur
cut off her breasts
(a practice which is fairly rare)
and placed them on a marble plinth
as offering to the dying slave
who was the cleaner of the labyrinth.