The pain we create

as if we were gods
is as great
as the oceans -
which cover two-thirds of the earth
(the planet of pain)
and are dying.

In much of the world
there is only terror
which, unlike the weather,
does not change.

There's no use my crying.

All humans are terrorists.

My hand, today.

In this old French village

there is a mini-plague of half-starved
diarrhœic cats,encouraged by very well-fed sentimentals.

But even the pasty Caylus poor

(some of whom - the men, mainly -
the women have rickets - are rather fat)

are too well-fed to consider
eating cat.

Concentration-camps in the UK.

Also known as Detention Centres,
but, officially, as Immigrant Removal Centres.
https://www.gov.uk/immigration-removal-centre 

They are not only in England, but in Scotland and Northern Ireland, too.
There is none in Wales.

They are run for profit.
The actual transport of detainees from the UK
is carried out at a profit.

Detainees can be kept indefinitely
and unknown to anyone outside Officialdom.

But the good news is that they can be visited,
provided that you know or someone knows that they are there.
There is no forced labour, just forced boredom.
In this they differ from the Gulag Archipelago
and most Nazi Removal Centres for Undesirables.
They are more like what the Chinese herd the Uigurs into
or the places where Central and South Americans can end up in the USA.

After a year in such a place you are sure you're dead.

And the British either do not know or do not care,
even though the Centres are
much closer than Ireland, Cyprus, Kenya, India, Iraq...

I'm so glad I'm not British, though I was born that way...
But I'll just check with Mr McGoo-Gull on similar Facilities in Ireland...

...ah, yes:
Work on Dublin Airport immigration detention centre to begin

Life.

NO
WAY
UP

Everywoman whispers.

There are things men can do to you
I promise you
it would be much better
to kill yourself
before they happen.

Freud versus Pieces of Plastic

In some cities it is very difficult to pay for things in cash.
In Stockholm (I heard on the radio today) almost impossible.
(I can't believe that Stockholm has no 'black economy'.)
A Londoner said that she never used 'real' money
because it's unhygienic.

God help the Addressless!

Since I am capable of writing

three or more blogs a day
(especially after wine)
I should tell my few readers
that, today, (the twenty-fifth of August)
I wrote the blog which will be dated
the ninth day of November (or as Americans say,
November ninth - or just November 9).

I probably will still be alive.
.

Before the ill-named "Enlightenment"

almost the only 'eccentrics'
were incentric monks.

Now the only eccentrics
are locked up against their will.

Eccentrics don't have 'followers'
on Facebook.

(Jesus did; Diogenes didn't.)

BUT:  We love ourselves for loving those

who seem to be eccentric...

NB: This may be the first recorded coinage of the word
INCENTRIC...

After a poem by Yosip Mandelstam.

"And I was alive" below the blizzard
of the blossoming pear,
I sheltered from the stammering
storm of the cherry tree beneath the cherry tree's
leaf-life and star-shower,
its sap-strength, its primal, invisible
axe-susceptible power
which had nothing to do with
what I had been told was me.

What and where is the joy, the delight
that always takes flight from us
and even our shadows ?
What is being? What is reality? What is right ?

Petals wrinkle and rapture the air,
flurry and float, and I am in
time shrunk to a kernel,
time stretched to the
impossibly, unbearably eternal -
brief sweetness transubstantiating into the glory
of all-encompassing rot.

All is now. All was. All will be and is not.

Anthony Weir 30 vi 2019

A page of translations of Mandelstam's  poem BREATH 
The best one is by Paul Celan, of course.

Reflective self-portrait

from one of my other blogs

       www.caylus-cailutz.blogspot.com

My Mailbox

by the front door.

These two photos are dedicated to Karl.

And facing it, just across the narrow street, a landscaped electricity box.

Notocactus submammulosus and a Surfinia (Petunia) variety.

Two months ago.

Today: the Nicotiana have come forth.

Mainly Salvias.

Although I understand statistics

I never passed a math(s)
exam. This is why I say
that the wrinkles between my nipples
and my willy are bountiful
and awesomely uncountable.

Hypochondria.

The human soul
is an imaginary disease.

All roads

lead back into the forest
and turn it into desert.

Psychedelic

plants just let us see
and feel
what we expect to feel and see.
No big deal.

Other people

have no inkling
of how evil they are

which is yet another reason why
I'm ashamed to be human.

Friends

are what lonely people have.

I'm so glad I have never been lonely
though sometimes bereft

glad
too for all the friends I never had

I'd rather have feelings than friends

Both at once are not possible

Today's other deep thought.

Several (though now this word is obsolete
and I should say multiple) times over the years
I felt I was about to stumble on
The Meaning of Life -
but then my consciousness flipped over,
like one of those lovely desk-calendars
I always envied but never owned.

To dogs

(who are Creatures of Yes)
we are Creatures of No.

Sitting out on the balcony,

with delicious scents coming from below,
watching the swifts zoom about and listening to Billy the Blackbird's
familiar snatches of melody, I am induced to think that,
despite our escalating destructive enterprise,
large areas of our planet are still
lovely in their slow demise.

"Why can't you be normal ?"

my aunt would say to me.
-as if I had chosen to be 'abnormal'.
Now I would say to her that
in many places at many times
it was normal to be nasty
and in certain places at a certain time
it was normal to be nazi.

Of the Universe of Feeling

the shrewdest
among us know
that we know very little:
we have only the crudest
most superficial
awareness

compared with
any dog, any tree.

Buddhists say:  All is suffering.
Jesus said: Humans (only) may be redeemed through me.
I say: there is no possibility of redemption;
it is best to assume
that every plant and animal is suffering
unless, through our thin compassion
or our holy absence
we can confer exemption.

We comfortable complainers/whingers about climate-change

should remember that
many, many thousands of years ago,
(when North America was nearly twice its present size)
what is now the North (formerly German) Sea was rich and fertile land
inhabited by hyænas...and humans
who did not deign to move westward
into what was then inhospitable land,
now the not-too-hospitable British Isles,
until the inundation.
Then came glaciation...
And, eventually, our little planet-warming civilisation.

Listen here.

But let us remember:  99% of all species
that have ever lived upon the earth
are long extinct.

Today on BBC Radio 4 :

Jesus is said to have said:

"He that loveth son or daughter more than me
is not worthy of me."
This also must have been a reason why
heterodox early Christians had themselves castrated.

I had myself vasectomised so that I might feel
more worthy to exist than more worthy to serve
a jealous and drama-loving son of a jealous and drama-loving god.

Sterilisation cancels out many alleged sins.

The ten most important things

to know about addiction : read pdf

And an eleventh: competitiveness is an addiction.

Many members of our species gone agley

regard others, and every living thing, as prey.
Of course, they're right -
merely because they think that way.
Which is why, for most of my life,
I've hidden in plain sight,
hoping that One Glorious Day
they'll simply evaporate
or, at any rate,
poison or explode themselves away.

I am not colour-blind.

On the contrary, I think I see
colours more differentiatedly and brightly
than most other people,
especially the fifty shades of green
and the fewer than fifteen tones of black,
my favourite shade of human flesh.
I cannot understand why - at least in the British Isles -
'black' designates pale coffee-coloured skin.

Words and The Word.

Adam and Eve
mean Clay and Life
respectively in Hebrew.
Life emerges from mud
like Eve from Adam's side -
hence Jewish Patriarchy!

The greatest writer

wrote nothing but
a suicide-note
to his pet pig.

It's only in exceptional,

uninstitutional societies
that evil does not thrive.

It is hard not to giggle at and to love crusty old Punic & poetical Tertullian.

...ab  haeretico quam ab ethnico, 
et non protenus et non ubique convicium  carnis, 
in originem in materiam in casum, 
in omnem exitum eius, immundae a primordio ex faecibus terrae, 
immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo, 
frivolae infirmae criminosae molestae onerosae, 
et post totum ignobilitatis elogium caducae in originem terrae et cadaveris nomen, 
et de isto quoque nomine periturae in nullum inde iam nomen, 
in omnis iam vocabuli mortem ?

Like Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian.
I have never been aware of a "mind/body" Problem,
there never having been a black hole between my body and my mind
(and much less than 'normal' between my legs)
because both were simultaneously attacked by,
and hence united in, their resistance to Education.

Not many people know

that the word heathen
comes from Latin ethnicus (and ethnica for a female).
Thank you John Updike!

For those jaded by innumerable reproductions of 'The Wave' -

this print by Ishii Shigeo (1933-62).

When we are told how wonderful our brains are

we tend to smile contentedly and then go on to more serious topics
like the rate of income tax, the price of petrol/gasoline,
or the American-Iranian World War To Come.

But this evening I listened to an old broadcast performance
of Grigoriy Sokolov playing Schubert's last sonata (D.960)

and was able to compare it (unfavourably)
with my surprisingly accurate memory
of the orgasmic performance by Mitsuko Uchida
(whose name I always have to check on Wikipedia)
which I earlier deemed better than those by Alfred Brendel and Alfred Cortot -
though the latter has divine rubato.

Mulling over Paul Celan.

The only things worth talking about
with other human hackers of the tree of life
are the things that cannot be mentioned:
overpopulation, ecocide, suicide,
the godness of water, plants and animals
and how each delicious bite we take
has destroyed so many living things...
and so it's not so much that
one doesn't know how not to begin a conversation,
but that (having been sterilised)
one doesn't know how to make any kind of communication.

Camus was wrong.

The sole 'philosophical problem'
is human dominion.

Guilt

is a shameless
form of self-abuse.

It is so sad

that Jesus' anti-institutional
exhortations to kindness and good nature
and simple fairness and justice
were transformed into unbrotherly,
desiccated morality and moralism
by his immediate followers
and two millennia
of his rapacious traducers.

With poor sight

and slightly deaf,
slightly lame,
slightly sociable :
I live quite slightly.

In 19th century Russian towns

welcome-lamps were lit when there was food to spare
or someone needed to be comforted
or company was wanted.
The lights now outside houses
have been installed to threaten
and expose intruders.

Ever-accursed Prometheus.

Evolution
has been all downhill
since we discovered fire.

Our sadly-malfunctioning brains

have evolved either because of an unfortunate mutation,
or simply because God went mad (as Nietzsche didn't dare to contemplate
or didn't dare to tell),
and our Universe (amongst many)
is his padded cell.

Back to the Buddha!

say I.  
Everything is One – 
and unbelievably Multiple and Disparate.

Two things I'd like to remind you of.

Inca gold and silver
together with the Catholic Church
and men on benches in Bologna
were crucial in the development
of capitalism.

Serfs were freed in Russia
without a civil war
before slavery was (technically)
abolished in the USA.

When 'western culture'

largely consists of shopping, work and sex
all mixed up with 'human rights' hypocrisy;

if its popular music reflects the thoughts,
ideas and concerns of most, democracy
is doomed.

As I write I hear that there are more refugees than ever
in the history of the world,
that there is less trust in politicians and in vaccines.

Welcome to the Dark Age
of demagoguery, apocalypse.

Like breaking horses.

Education is an exercise
in bridling children's spirit -
if their parents
or other children haven't already done so -
or if they had any to begin with.

I am trying to figure

why everyone, even in a little French village,
is wearing incredibly drab and badly-cut clothes
in shades of brown, black and grey.  Obviously
it's The Style of 2019, but why ? 
The only brightness is the occasional lurid
early adolescent. There is no beauty
of apparel to contrast with the dour faces of the
modern bourgeois army.

It's quite scary,
especially as I, in my Indian cotton pants
and home-designed t-shirt, get strange or hostile looks
from the ugly uniformities who pass me by.

Kissing

Missing
Pissing
Reminiscing

Breeding
Needing
Bleeding

They tell us to praise
the darkest of days.
They tell us
that the all-powerful animal
with the ever-expanding, ever-tightening mind
as big as a galaxy, small as a turd,
is utterly exceptional, phenomenal,
and that you and I
should 'borrow' light from the blind
to give to the other unredeemables
who go unheard.

Each one of us
each day
destroys a world.

Masturbation
should be enjoyed
not resorted to.
Remember: almost anything
is holier, more reverential
than human procreation.