Just admiring her tail.

Self-portrait with Stylite Sphinx.

Can I put in a word ?

I am a Dog
- whatever that might mean.
I haven't a clue
what's going on most of the time
- except Food, Outings
and the boredom in between.

My definition of a 'Good Novel' :

one that illuminates yet another
grim corner of the polymorphous
human psyche
while entrancing you.
Not much biography does this -
nor history, either.

I don't understand

why people want to get drunk.
I don't understand jealousy.
I don't understand rape:
sex without complicity is bad enough,
but without consent
seems to me quite horrible.
(But then, despite being male and bent,
- an old term, not used now -
I was never interested in sex for its own sake.)
Masturbation is All about Consent.

To a large extent,

language is the
emasculation
of imagination.

Christianity and Capitalism become one

through the near-congruence of the "stable to throne of Heaven" myth
and the several "rags to riches" stories,

though in the case of Capitalism
martyrdom just before ascending to the sky
has largely been discarded, and Heaven itself
is real-estate in Manhattan, London or Dubai.

The Dissident Blogger's Christmas Office Party

was a great success.  Unfortunately, however...

...it turned into a Rave, and Wing-Commander Gabriel
of Paradise Precinct had to come and close it down -
with a tombstone !

Police tactics have always been dangerously extreme.
Especially around Saturnalia-time.

Dundonald, county Down.

Where a jerry-built hospital sags now
my mother would take me to visit
a one-woman farm : hens in the kitchen,
a pot on the fire, pale yellow cream in a churn.
Outside the half-door was a pile of muck.
I played with her Border Collie and her son
who was illegitimate like me.
We gave the calves our willies to suck.

Accident

is almost infinite.
After all,
everything about us
and our brains
and how we fall
are accident.

An Ancient Phenomenon.

On hearing a nightingale last summer

while walking my dog
past a leafy, riverine cruising-spot
where sad men lurk.

There is no heaven, no hell,
no gods, no demons,
only Landscape and its inner
etherereals
which desire, money, religion,
fear and property destroy.
Alas, the stupid dead,
the even stupider survivors
they have bred!

Family

is just one aspect
of our dread
of the dead.

Odysseus said

Most Greeks would rather die
than have to eat Hummous pie.
I say: if I had been an alpha-male
I'd have killed myself.

Keep up Appearances.

Play the Game
according to the Rules
(come from On High).
Don't let the side down.
Pull together...
Team Spirit...
Them and Us, Black and White,
Saints and Sinners...
All that crap which turned me not just anti-British
(tore up the passport)
but anti-bourgeois.
But I played such eminently bourgeois games
as Monopoly, Bézique, Canasta,
and Mah Jongg for the fun of company and conversation.
I remember Whist- and Beetle-Drives,
and the frequent exhilaration of the only Sport
I ever played : Cruising,
a form of gambling
in which there are few winners.

Ego

is a construction of civilisation
and can exist only when accompanied
by its strange cardboard cut-out supporters
(as in an armorial achievement) Id, Libido
and Super-ego - all fed by artifacts, property,
patriotism, manufactured moralities and 'family values'.
Our egos sit on us like
conquerors' buttocks on our faces.

Misogyny

(when not a mirror of self-contempt)
is mostly - probably - a form of misanthropy.
The greatest misogynists are 'womanisers'.

Tourism

is the Emperor's New Clothes.

I have just read

in a thriller
that mouse-droppings soon sink
in a bowl or jar of the ubiquitous,
white, crystalline poison called sugar.
But dog-hairs stay on top.

Time is mostly blood and shit -

don't stab it -
strangle it gently and well.
Rinse your hands in piss.
Escape from the miasma
of being and being human.
Close your eyes while doing so:

we do too much looking
and not enough considering
we do too much hearing
and not enough listening
too much feeling
and not enough fellow-feeling
especially not for 'animals'
not for the downtrodden spirits.

Writing as a dog,

I don't believe
that there is such a thing as Time.
There is only The Moment.

TIME IS A PLASTIC (SQUEAKY) FISH.

The (liberal) Left,

loving to define people as winners, highly undeserving winners,
losers and victims -
then by minority status, ethnicity, colour, religion, and sexuality -
fails to see that they continually create division
by obsessive definition, addition and subtraction.

One of my most-persistent Earworms.

Until recently, I was slightly embarrassed
by frequently humming the catchy melody of
the Horst Wessel Lied, notorious anthem of the Nazis.

But I have discovered that the tune pre-dated Hitler,
accommodating World War I lyrics such as
Vorbei, vorbei, sind all die schönen Stunden (Gone are all the Lovely Moments)
and the Königsberg-Lied,
(Königsberg is now in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad
between Poland and Lithuania)
and, later adopted for a Communist marching-song,
was probably of Viennese origin.
So now I hum the tune - wondering what Johannes Brahms
would have done with it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD6oDnm43HA

To be humble

is to be unhumiliatable.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski's

horrible journey up the Congo River
took seven weeks in the boat named Roi des Belges -
(the appalling Leopold, King of the Belgians, who took the Congo
for its unlimited slave labour, rubber and ivory
as his lucrative private fiefdom).
Years later, Joseph Conrad (as he is now known)
took just seven weeks to write
Heart of Darkness.

In the 1920s The French Republic disposed of roughly 10,000 Africans
(mostly from Oubangi-Chari, now the Central African Republic)
to build the railway from Brazzaville (on the other side of the river
from Léopoldville, now Kinshasa) to the coast.
Ironically, Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà was a believer
in the equality of people and peoples, which is why the capital
of the People's Republic of the Congo is still called Brazzaville.

My Good Deed for the Day

was to send a staggering €15 to Jimmy Wales
to help keep Wikimedia afloat.
In my accompanying PayPal message I expressed amazement
that Google with its billions cannot subsidise one of its most popular
AND NON-PROFIT-MAKING SITES.

Apart from being one of the most atrocious butchers of all time,

all we need to know about the strutting megalomaniac Napoleon I
is his comment :

The greatest woman alive or dead
is the one who produces the most offspring.

The Code Napoléon oppressed and handicapped France
for 150 years.
Women didn't get the vote until 1945.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave : Alligator Bait

"A brief video on the use of black babies 
as live alligator bait in Florida in the early 1900s brought me here" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlTHvJBeP0

Itsenäisyyspäivä.

Happy Hundredth Birthday, Finland!

And all Hail, Sibelius !

The great François Couperin said:

 "J'aime mieux ce qui me touche que ce qui me surprend."
I'd rather be moved than be amazed. 

Worth pondering, in our age of great amazement and false emotions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxMCpiHhmP0

To be planted out.

Chrysanthemums
are flowers for the dead in France,
for they are in bloom on All Souls' - All Hallows - Day.
My mother loved chrysanthemums.
I too loved their russet colours and the mysterious
erotic smell that they don't have in France.
Every autumn there was a big cut
bunch of them in our narrow hallway, bought
from a seedsman, nurseryman who lived just 50 yards
from where she was born, and later taught
(and later still was buried),
and whom she'd taught when first he went to school.
Her birthday was on the third of November, 1907.

This past third of November I stole
one of hundreds of to-be-neglected
and wind-scattered pots
of gold-and-russet remembrance-chrysanthemums
from the pleasant little cemetery
where my periwinkle-covered grave awaits,

and placed it on my balcony.

« L'érotisme,

c'est donner au corps les prestiges de l'esprit.  »

Georges Perros

English: "Eroticism accords the body all the prestige of the mind."

Comment: Eroticism is not love, nor is it sex, but arousing sensuality.

“When we are headed the wrong way,

 the last thing we need is progress.”


Nick Bostrom, Swedish philosopher, in “Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept”, The European Magazine, 13.06.2011

"Stinking rich"

most likely refers to the smell
of the rotting teeth in their mouths,
from eating sugar, white bread and cake.
The silver spoons put into their mouths
as babies did not protect them.
The poor were reduced to selling
their teeth which were healthy
from eating rough bread and ....ation
(though their gums were destroyed by starvation).

The rich also stank in courtrooms.
They feverishly chewed garlic, caraway, cardamoms
to prevent infection from the breath of the poor
whom they sent off to New England
then to New South Wales
for petty larceny - for the jails
were even more crowded than they are today
in England and the U.S.A.

"Without fiction, we poison ourselves...

...on the lies of the first person."

Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
and First Person.

===========


(PS  Today I wrote the blog that will appear on the first of February)

What I had for dinner tonight,

(by Astérix, the blogger's dog,
with just a little help from his Editor and slave)

I had:

Sautéed leeks with farce (forcemeat, raw of course)
moistened by a local free-range egg,
a Brussels sprout or two
(Que Dieu bénisse les Bruxellois!),
a few roast chestnuts,
a couple of stewed plums.
and what was left on plates
and serving dishes.
It wasn't enough.
But it was delicious.

Museums

are only décor.

My Cheap Solution

to the Irish Border/Brexit problem:
give every anti-Irish Ulster family
a million pounds
to go and colonise the Sinai.

Five hundred years

since irate Martin Luther
let loose a century of havoc
with his 95 Theses,
still we have heard nothing
about his delightful dog
and his 95 feces.

The turbulent doctor had a dog named Tölpel
(which was apparently a synonym for “Dummkopf”),
and wrote:

“The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.”

As old as Adam - and language.

There was always "fake news".
The Old Testament,
The New Testament,
The Blood Crime of the Jews.

There is only one person

whom I respect and like
more than even any dog.
Here are both of them:

And here is the dog.

An unusually high-quality

Facebook Page:

Postcard to Silicon Valley.

An infinite amount of data
(even if accurate)
will not be greater
than one tear-drop of wisdom
(whatever that is).

A comment on civilisation.

A society governed arbitrarily perfectly resembles a herd of cows

placed under a yoke for the service of a master.

He feeds them just enough to put them in condition to serve.

He treats their illnesses only enough to keep them useful.

He fattens them only in order to feed off of them,

and he uses the hides of some to harness others to the plough.

Une société d'hommes gouvernée arbitrairement ressemble parfaitement à une troupe de

bœufs mis au joug pour le service du maître.
Il ne les nourrit qu'afin qu'ils soient en état de le servir;
il ne les panse dans leurs maladies qu'afin qu'ils lui soient utiles en santé;
il les engraisse pour se nourrir de leur substance;
et il se sert de la peau des uns pour atteler les autres à la charrue.

Voltaire (1694-1778), Republican Ideas by a Member of the Corps, II

Dylan Thomas was an arrant wordsmith.

Darkness is sweet.
Why rage against the dying of the light ?
Why burn and rave at close of day ?
Those who fight their end are mad.
Why should old men not be glad
they're slipping creakily away ?

Assuming that time is not an illusion,

all life is a waste of it.

As the time-dependent Schrödinger wrote :

${\displaystyle i\hbar {\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)={\hat {H}}\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)}$

Religion

from water- and willy-worship to esoteric Buddhism
is just a means to justify our self-importance as a species
if not as individuals.

Fear of death

is experienced only by those
who know they haven't lived.

There is of course only one way to live:
as we did for 99% of our existence as a species.
This is now - and only recently become - impossible.

The Earth is not afraid of death
even though, strictly speaking,
she is not immortal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09dz25d
                          (second half)

My country, too, is the world...

...but I'll have no monument.

18 April 1999

Sunday.

I made a rubbing:
"The Pope gives a computer-expert a pedicure."
Eva finished painting her series of "Holy pictures."

from An Alchemist's Nightmares,
extracts from Jan Švankmajer's diary.

On the removal from power of Robert Mugabe,

President of Zimbabwe for the last 37 years,
let us not forget Francisco Macias Nguema,
first president of Equatorial Guinea (formerly Rio Muni
plus Fernando Pó and other islands),
who had a huge collection of human skulls in his mansion,
and replaced crucifixes in churches with his own image.
He abolished all education in 1974, executed and maimed civil servants,
and on his overthrow tried to flee with the entire paper currency of the country in a suitcase...