Buttering the Sky (after Hafiz* — حافظ)

Putting on my shoes

Boiling water

Toasting bread

Buttering the sky

Parcelling the rain:

that should be enough contact
with The Divine in just one day

to drive anyone

insane. 

                               more >

* Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muhammad Ḥāfez-e Shīrāzī 

I daren't go out

to today's Medieval Fair in the village.
If caught without a smartphone,
I risk being burned as a heretic.

It has been a long process.

"There was no important reason for Mandalay's existence.
It never possessed a strategic or commercial importance,
and the whole district had had a detestable climate since,
centuries before, pious kings had cut down all the trees
to be used as fuel in brick-making for pagodas."

— Norman Lewis, Golden Earth, 1952

Dubuffet : La Fleur de Barbe

 

see here for fluffy translation and more pictures.

Street-furniture, Paris,

in wintry days of yore.
In the foreground a urinoir
(also called pissotière, vespasienne, tasse, etc.)

Time

runs out
of the ever-breaking
egg of time.

Assemblage.

 

Self-portrait, May 2022.

While tourist destinations suffer fire or flood

global-lost-luggage-crisis-mounts.

'Dehumanised' –

 if only I could be!

In Germany,

the proportion of people
who have resisted smartphones,
facebook, tik-tok, instagram and twitter

is much smaller than those
(mostly trade-unionists
and communists)
who resisted Hitler.

Prediction-fallacy.

Forecasters of climate change
have not quite realised (or failed to tell us)
that it is not a simple linear progression.
Nor will it be exponential,
but somewhere in between –

some kind of fluctuating sequence
like the death-wriggles of a worm,
for which there is perhaps no algorithm
and for which I cannot invent a term.

Desertification: Surviving solitary Date-palm, Iraq.

It is hardly known

that Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
four-times-president of the USA, and well-disposed
to the poor and bereft,
wanted to introduce not just a minimum wage
but also a maximum income
beyond which 100% tax would be imposed.

Spot the Woman.

In this bizarre painting of 'Timeless' or Eternal Russia
the only woman to be found in a sea of wartless men
(I have identified Rachmaninov, Dostoyevsky,
Tchaikovsky...and Jesus – but where is Stalin?)
is a pin-up (extreme left)
who seems to have wandered in, weeping,
from a drug-infested, possibly abusive photo-shoot.
All that pious, inhibited testosterone !  It's just as well
that the fresh air is wafting away the smell !

detail of painting by Ilya Glazunov, 1988.

Not all the facts,

Mr Sweeney or (hiding and wood-haunting,
pronounced-the-same) Suibhne,
there's more than the Trinity of The Three Facts:

when you come to flaunting brass tacks
there's much more than twice as much as 

just birth and copulation and death:

in between there's a pile and a heap
of consuming, excreting and sleep

in the (DO NOT REFUSE OR INHIBIT)
Birthday Gift of the Sacred Fart

which is Life or is Death and is bad or is good,
inhabited vacuum, escaped-from breath...

Beginning and end :
when you come to the bend

there's no way (through the wood)
no way to tell them apart.

Feminism at half-cock.

It seems that women can only be accepted

as possible almost-very-nearly equals

when they play competitive 'contact' sports

(boxing, football) and play men's games

in male-created hierarchies.

One way or another

we are 'cooking our goose'.

Would Nuclear War be a better (if more alarming)
end to the short, obscene Anthropocene Age
than the burning up of the planet ?

Would Nuclear War and the brisk end of farming
hasten or slow down global warming ?

A Lionfish

near the ancient coastal town of Korykos, Turkey.

photo from theguardian.com

A Brand-New Neologism !

Although
I seem definite and even doctrinaire
and make many an unpopular assertion
I'm really
rather a perhapsish Person.

Product-recognition.

Hello, Product.
— Hello to you, Product!
We're all Products here,
even when we're not, and long ago,
and we are all Reproducts
and Retro-proto-reproducts, too,

productive
Products of Untoward Seduction
or Voluntary Intimacy, Upbringing,
Education, Medical Intervention,
Alienation, Abuse, Desire, Shame,
Grief and Regret...

...Product-awareness,
Productivity and even Unproductivity.

It's nice to be a Product like any other
using, abusing and meeting Products
in this Production-line of genealogy
and Production-liability
and non-liability
and productibility
and destruction

on this definitely-not
infinitely-productive
Planet of Production
and Reproduction.

Castrating the Hyænas.

"Once a street child in Kenya and a grave digger in the UK,
Professor George Wajackoyah (63) has become a political sensation
by running for Kenya's presidency on a promise to turn the country
into a major exporter of marijuana, snake venom and hyenas' testicles, although many question the feasibility of his plans."

'Candy'

(I discover late in life) is southern-states
rhyming slang for 'cock'
(of the male piss-organ kind)
which rhymes with 'rock' 
of the fun-fair, bed- (not cradle) kinds.
Hence this Candyman and other verbal schlock.

Rock candy, not to be confused with British
seaside rock,
which is less phallic but harder.

The Two Berts.

Flaubert

declared that to find happiness too early in life
is like contracting syphilis at puberty :
it ruins the constitution.

I think of Schubert.

A state governed from the top

cannot possibly be democratic.

A centralised, hierarchical system means concentrated power,
and concentrated power favours concentrated wealth.

– George Monbiot

The main problem with monogamy

is not sex, but cohabitation.  

– James Ellroy

Mr Putin is absolutely not

Another Hitler'. He has a bold
and clear-eyed view of
The American Hegemony,
simply seeks to wreck it
– and restore Ukraine 'to the fold'.

Observing tourists

passing my house,
gazing blankly straight ahead
or at their smartphones,
or walking briskly their eyes cast down,

I conclude that their minds
are so cluttered by the
accumulating junk of culture
that they notice nothing.

How can they be expected
to question the origins and destinations
of what they wear and use and eat
and drink and put onto their feet ?

"In the depths of my heart,"

wrote Gustave Flaubert.
"I can't avoid the conviction
that my dear fellow-creatures
(with a few exceptions)
are worthless." 

Why make exceptions ?

High sensitivity and mild autism

are very similar,
and may just be different names
for different kinds of awareness.

read more about HSP >

I scored high on an HSP test...

I am a collage

that doesn't dislike merely its frame
but also the surface it's painted on -
and maybe the paints and bits of maps which compose it.
The art-work's title is Entropy.

I hope they had great sex together.

ex-British Prime Minister and the son of a Russian 'Oligarch'
 whom he appointed to the Upper House of Parliament.

Maybe we should be less concerned about Democracy

and more about having governments
which are neither criminal nor incompetent.

They are not numerous at the moment.

The vast range of inequality

among humans has little to do
with primate hierarchies
(matri- or patri-linear)
and much to do with the un-nature
of culture.

For Bonobos

"sex is as banal
as a handshake, though much more fun,"
wrote Frans de Waal.

That would be good for us...
though for us, handshakes
can turn into arm-wrestling, or worse.

" The whole dream of democracy

(wrote Flaubert)
"is to raise the proletariat
to the same level of stupidity as the bourgeoisie"
 – who, wallowing in hypocrisy,
aped the aristocracy
– who aped the kings and popes
and khans and emperors
who dreamed of Omnipotence.

And now even I live a life undreamed of
by Roman autocrats.

Hell

 

is a crude but logical construct,

whereas human life on earth

is anything but.

Some of us

have delusions of grandeur.

Others have delusions of intelligence,
competence, social acceptability
or/and sexual attractiveness.

I regret to say that I have a had a little of all of them
except the last.

Branding.

Marriage is just a relationship
with a label –
and a price-tag.

 

Once upon a time there was a princess –

– I don't like princesses.

Once upon a time there was a prince –

– I don't like princes.

? ? ? 

– Once upon a time there were two hairy ogres
and they lived happily until ogres
became deeply unfashionable
and were discontinued.
The End.

– Or maybe they were Ainu.

False accusations

of rape must be almost as old
as rape itself (and potentially
more deadly) and were once
a defining feature of life
in the Deep South of the USA.

Scholars

are trying to decipher
the ancient Cretan language Linear-A.

Astronomers are thrilled to find a new B
lack Hole ... while Lesser People
doss down on their doorsteps
and beg on the streets

and ice disappears from the North Pole.

Missing: Global View.

If sheople could only see

beyond their noses, their status,

their children and their dicks,

there'd be no appalling problems

for them to fail to fix.

In British English we say

He laughed his head off.
Americans say He laughed his ass off.

The astonishingly frequent American use of 'ass'
is one of several influences from French,
which uses the word 'cul' in dozens
of daily expressions - from je suis sur le cul
(bowled over, gobsmacked, flabbergasted) and
faux cul (a shifty, tricky shady person; a hypocrite)
to cul-de-four and cul-de-lampe, not to mention cul-de-sac
now often replaced by impasse.

'Ass' is a bowdlerisation of 'arse' (inadmissible in Puritan New England)
which left no word for the long-eared equine (Latin: asinus)
which came to be called 'donkey' (also donky, donkie, from 1785),
itself probably a corruption of 'Duncan' (a stupid Scot,
just as 'Paddy' meant a feckless Irishman),
and pronounced to rhyme with 'flunkey'. 

Fortunately the old word (Old World) 'arse' survives
in most overseas English,
though the original word for the handsome and intelligent equine
seems to owe its scant survival
to the King James version of the Bible.

We are 'petroleum

on the surface of the ocean'. 

(Asmaa Jama, du ha'r ret!)*

We are poisoning all life forms below us.

We will burn, we will burn, we will burn

as we get and get and get and get and get....

*Asmaa Jama is Danish.
Du ha'r ret is Danish for You're right.

What use is education

for those who are intimidated
and stupefied by the schools,
their class-mates, the teachers,
the class-system and its demeaning rules ?

Young Sakha woman wearing a wedding-mask.

photo by Alexander Khimushin.

It is good to stroke plants.

They like it.  And you
will not have a heavy
emotional reaction –
except from the thorniest
shrubs and very
self-protective cacti.

The Society for the Promotion of Cannibalism.

My canine friend said :

If humans really wanted to Save the Planet

they'd take up cannibalism — 

as we (and chimpanzees) do

when the worst comes to the worst.

I had one of

the Best of Educations –
Reeling and Writhing, of course,
to begin with. And then
the different branches of Urethratic –
Ambition, Distraction,
Uglification and Derision
designed to make me
a Refined kind of shover.

I may never fully recover.

(with acknowledgement to Lewis Carroll)

Reeling from the ugliness of absolute hierarchy.
Writhing from the punishments and derision I received.

 

Indeed.

 

photo by Mark Wilkins on FlickR

Daisies on the Grass

Three out of every four Americolacans
(93% in the Bibble Belt)
believe in Angels.
Angels are kinda mystic.
They drink heavenly Pepsi
And are sexless but not genderless
and make believers Spiritual
and almost Artistic.

But who am I to jeer,
who am Borderline (low-end) Autistic ?