Some people

are so wise
that they never
 'accomplish'
anything.

In the world of appearances

truth depends
almost entirely
upon who speaks it.

The process

of capitalism
destroys families
and family enterprises
because they are communistic
in their natural tendency
towards mutual aid
and primeval
interdependency*.

*(see blog below)

The pedant mourns the defunction of copy-editors

Leaving aside the nice matter
of punctuation, I would expect
writers of literary novels to know
the difference between

tend and attend
riffle and rifle
forgo and forego
envisage and envision
rack and wrack
hark and hearken
intense and intensive
motive and motivation
latter and later
loose and lose
lie and lay
proceed and precede
alternative and alternate
expect and anticipate...

(Don't get me started on hideous pseudo-words
such as obligate...)

Oramorama / Daphnedelia

my twenty-minute musical montage-remix
can be heard on Vimeo.
(Classier than youTube)

to the Salvation Army

Victory
like property
is more thuggery
than buggery.

OD ?

OMG ! =>

In a life of moral unclearness

failure is only apparent.
We are only the living.

Fundamentally erotic

for Jindra
How much more exciting
to be naked beneath a Burqa
than inside a restricting
pair of trousers.

Art Hoo-ha

The Usual Suspects are scandalised by this 'restoration'
of a sickly-schmalzy, faux-pieux
19th.century church-decoration
in Borja (Aragón).
Needless to say,
being contrary
to most received opinion, trend and movement,
I think it is a definite (and authentic, vernacular,
Boteresque) improvement.

'Zeus and pals rape Selene' (update)

I have never had a television setso I did not see the hubristic
human military and militaristic
Lunar Defilement.  Nor did I see
the epic destruction of the twin
towers of debt (and destruction).
The family of summary
Rapist Number One
(who died yesterday)
had the gall to ask us all
to look up at the Moon
and give her a wink
'in his memory'.


In the ancient Greek world, Seléne [Σελήνη - Roman Luna] was the brother of Helios,
the sun-god.
Silenus [Σειληνος] was originally a forest god, and later the foster-father of  Dionysus and a leading Satyr.

Ugly princeling

ashamed of nakedness
- so what's new ?

 

click to see some princely chaps proud of their masculinity

 

What I learned from my 6-minute slot on BBC Radio 4.

Interviewers and politicians deserve each other.

The famous interviewer (CBE, or
Commander of the Bloodbath British Empire*,
no less!) obviously had an agenda -
which I suspect was not even his,
but foisted on him by the faceless
programme-makers - for he
(or the editor) went out of his way
to alter what I had to say
about our scary civilisation
and my regret at having a sickly-coloured skin.

He was impatient with what I told him
was necessary narrative information
- which could have been edited later
by someone with integrity.
He talked over me, hurried me on...
sounded like he was in haste
and wanted to get somewhere else
(as everyone seems to do nowadays) -
or interview somebody more to his taste.

Although I did manage to say one
thing I thought important à propos my failure
to live with the 'Pygmies' of the Likouala forest,
it was removed.  I don't want to sound
like an old, complaining curmudgeon -
but I didn't even get to say
that Original Sin is religion.


*Of course all empires (from Babylon to Washington), 
all civilisations, being based on the Principle of Smash & Grab,
involve blood-baths.

I celebrate inglorious failures

I sing the bodies pathetic
the people whose chief talent is humility,
inconspicuousness,
I praise the turning of faces to the wall,
the abandonment of all the shoddy hopes,
and those who hang back and don't dance
or go into bars, and those who don't have
a talent even for hypocrisy,
the suicides, both rational and desperate,
the conscientious objectors, the Jehovah's Witnesses
who refuse transfusion,
the winos, the hobos, the miscarried infants,
the beggars, the unfit, the drop-outs, the cowards,
those embarrassed by praise,
those who feel trapped by existence -
all those whom the Celebration Industry rejects,
and those who write unpublishable poetry.

Anders Behring Breivik

The man who killed
roughly 80 white Norwegians
and horribly wounded
twice as many more
in the name of Keeping
Norway Christian & White
was declared sane by the court.

Long live insanity!

I've searched

and searched in the fog
of existence
and found nothing
and no-one
(not even a dog)
who can show me
that Human Dignity
is other an oxymoron.

Pots often call kettles 'Black-arses'

Those who deplore
the destruction of trees and of life
in the rain forests
don't stop to think of the lesser
death and damage they deal
just mowing the grass.

American Interrogation

 

for Julian Assange

Civilisation

is the mere destruction of beauty
to create something ugly.

But capitalism
(whose only enduring product
is the manufacture of desires)
is the systematic
destruction of minds
by minds destroyed by usury.

Unforeseen consequence.

The decline in the teaching
of Latin helped femininism -

simply by removing the capacity
of the young to be infected 
by Ovid's vicious sexual rapacity.

Beloved.

I said:
"Don't you feel
that life is theft
snatched from nothing
and turned into you
by horrible magic ?"
You said, "I do, I do,
I do, I do, I do."

Pirahã

The 400 or so Amazonian Hi'aiti'ihi
(known to outsiders as Pirahã)
don't have numbers in their language,
and don't need tools to survive.

They had no interest in Jesus
when told that no-one alive
had actually met him.
They don't tell each other
what do do,
and resist coercion.

They have no notion of chastity
or property, don't collect things,
have no interest in the past,
no historical narrative,
nor creation myth, no big god
and do not tell stories -
but live without fiction,
and are always smiling.

My achievement :

successfully
avoiding prizes,
excellence,
normality,
human dignity,
career
and qualifications.

Somnambulant

Although I know that I've lived
and often intensely, I feel
that I haven't. I guess it's the
old feeling that Life is a Dream
and that I'm just sleepwalking.
Now, in full health, I am living
intensely in books (this being
the Golden Age of the BritIrish novel)
- books I devour while sleepwalkingly
slipping towards death.

The fewer uncertainties

we have in life
the more frightened
of uncertainty we are.
How sad that we've become
addicted to frail comfort,
fragile certainty.

The Crime of Israel

Instead of wreaking justified revenge
upon the Europeans who hounded, tortured,
terrorised and slaughtered them for
a thousand years, Jews wreak it
on the Palestinians who never
did them any harm,
and might have been their friends.

Chaos Theory

 

This is the butterfly

which caused the drought

in the USA 

and months

of almost-daily rain

in Ireland.  

But what caused it

to flap its wings

exactly where

the weather could be altered
so far away ?

"Money answereth all things."

 (Ecclesiastes X, 19)

All religions are moralities of debt.
The new religion is no different:
Expect more
Pay less
Follow the herd.

The new religion also proclaims
Freedom of Choice, declares
that everyone is autonomous.
Tell that to the Bolivian miner,
the human robot at the check-out,
the genitally-mutilated child-bride,
the homeless dishwasher
in the greasy diner!

What - no moneylenders ?

photo by TomB

Christianity offers Redemption.

But I for one
am not a pawn-ticket
and try not to be a pawn.

'Triumph over Adversity'

is one of those self-satisfied
phrases that the smugly mindless use,
not pausing to consider that Mao's, Stalin's.
Hitler's  and the Inquisition's
triumph over adversity
involved the death of millions.

Perhaps

marriage is
the ash-tray of romance.
Perhaps
every opinion is smug
- even this one.

When I was very young

and not being a wilful handful,
I sought quiet hospitality - toast
by a blazing fire, widow-
presence, antimacassars,
tasselled tablecloths,
sugar-tongs and Dundee cake
on a silver-plated stand.
And now
I'm looking forward to the
welcoming, black hospitality
of everlasting nomansland.

There must be some reason

why it is much easier
to joke about 'getting' Alzheimer's
than it is about 'getting' cancer.
Surely I am not alone in saying
that I would much rather receive
the latter than the former.

The armchair

is the armpit
of comfort.
So how appropriate it was to read
that the Turkish for armchair
is the Uzbek for armpit.
(Uzbek is a Turkic language.)
However,
checking imperfectly online,
I found that koltuk in Turkish
can also mean sofa
- and even an ottoman! -
while the Uzbek for armpit
is qebyz according to one source
and qo'ltiq according to another.
Why did I bother ?!

Our bland banality

depends on
other people's
bleak brutality.

The last thing we need
is yet more entertainment.

In Madagascar

there were over a thousand species of tree.
(France has fewer than fifty.)
Many of them have disappeared
as soon will also the animals
who depended on them.

Oppression

requires collaboration.
At least two-thirds of any population
will collaborate with the oppressors,
some of them with great enthusiasm.

Vague and general good-will
is easily destroyed by targetted ill-will.

Every day I fail

to treat as natural
the bleak landscape
of ignorant collusion
in competitive insanity.

Education in the USA

A teacher in an American secondary school
introduced to the assembled 'students'
(they no longer say 'pupils' in America)
the last surviving member
of the air-crew which dropped the first
atomic bomb from a cloudless heaven
on to Hiroshima
as a participant in World War 11.

Olympic Games / Nuremberg Rallies

The British Prime Minister
has just announced that
competitive sports will be made
compulsory in primary schools.
   It's not the winning,
   but the taking part.
And what Gulag across the sea
will take the refusards like me
who loathed élite sports and PE ?
Or will they just be thrown
into a Correctional Facility
to be injected with testosterone ?

(Of course in the Hypocrisy Olympics
everyone gets a gold medal.)

The Flowers of Literacy

 

A Brooklyn wall, photographed by Thomas W. Bevan.

Because we cleave

to the familiar, we live
with sordidly comfortable lies.
In the Culture of Advertisement
sewage works and abattoirs
never advertise.

The freak

industrial,
post-feudal
culture of complete control
lost it long ago.

It is the tragedy of dogs

that they are both more sensitive
than we are, and more resilient.
Their resilience feeds our cruelty.

Incredible!

Fantastic!
Unbelievable!
Awesome!
Magnificent!
Amazing!
The Olympic Games
have trumped
the Second Coming.

Knitted by my mother

before her dementia,
this sock has been darned
respectfully - and latterly by me
(as you can see).
It is 25 years old today.

An old woman dies beside a ventilator.

We are trapped within a culture
which sees triumph in delaying
an unconscious person's death
at great expense, for just a week,
with artificial breath.

At the Unsponsored

Uncensored Olympics
(which has attracted universal odium)
the team which comes last in the men's
mutual masturbation marathon
stands proud upon the podium.

Almost every human activity

from higher mathematics
to humble defecation
is entertainment.

But people make other people
do mind-numbingly boring things,
and so great problems
out of petty boredom grow.