LONER

is a masculine noun. 
For a woman
it is much more difficult.

The cure is simple...

but, alas! no longer available.

Dear Ancestry.com

Thank you for the results of my DNA test.

If I send more money
could you make them show
that I have at least some
African/North African heritage ?
For seventy-seven years I have wanted to be black,
but the results show that I am entirely
of Scottish and Swedish ancestry.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Little White Tony.

From a song by Boris Grebenshikov.

Login, password...one two three.
And they're all burned from the inside out
And they're walking around with their heads screwed on.
Urbanised
Stupefied
Stacked up
Dehumanised

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW8VZoEYWg

Господи, прости, ну и гад же ты

Ты и все твои гаджеты

Логин, пароль, один, два, три

И все уже выжжены изнутри

И ходят воцирковлённые

Обухотворённые

Штабелями сложенные

И обезбоженные

The Withering.

To add to the Israelis'

mostly self-inflicted woes:

since they returned to Palestine

the Jordan hardly flows.

Despised and rejected of men*

I think that it's fine to be rejected,
but to be universally despised as well
might make me suicidally dejected.

*Isaiah 53, 3

Unfortunately,

net curtains
are easier to hide behind
than dirty windows
(indicating Sloth).

Why not have both ?

Adjective.

 I have invented a new word:
Americanslick.

I thought of it while reading
some poems by the by-many-celebrated
poet Buddy Wakefield.

Three Politicians.

 

Salifou Lindo (Cameroun)

Armistice Day 2023.

The British and the French commemorate
the end of the First World War
in Western Europe. 
But it never ended
in 'the Middle East';
it just 'developed' through the land-grabs
of the British and the French.

Progress.

No path, nor romantic poet's winding stair,

just festering slope down to where

the tottering piles and pyres

and lakes of noxious slime

pooling in desert

will shortly be – and there 

in due or undue course

forget forgetting, forgo forgoing,

deny denying,

and, staggering past the treadless tyres,

and the endless slashing, mowing,

follow the faded peach-petals (plastic)

up the sewer of night fantastic

back to the whining end of amputated time.

I should be dead!

Old glass leaches very tiny quantities of lead,
and constant use, especially as vessels for alcohol,
could result in lead-poisoning.

Oh dear!  I have been drinking wine
exclusively from antique (Georgian/Victorian)
glasses and decanters since 1973.
I wonder what the long accumulation
of nanograms of lead have done to me ?

In the same newspaper I learned that

People [like me] who live alone and never see friends or family
have a 77% higher risk of dying from any cause,
and an even higher risk of dying from heart disease or stroke, compared with those who see friends or family daily,
according to a study.

Totalitarian.

The proportion of people
who have resisted smartphones,
facebook, X (formerly twittler)
and all the other 'platforms')
is much smaller than those
(mostly trade-unionists)
who actively resisted Hitler.

Death is less frightening

than living people,
most of whom seem
half-dead in their heads.

It could be so
much fun
to live with a crow.

有 歎

What Du Fu* might write today

my energy has ebbed and sobbed away
my grey beard straggles towards mortality
and war is raging everywhere on earth
where are the birds ?
over half the animals have died
mountains have been cut in two
or removed completely
great gorges have been drowned
and refugees are fleeing heat and genocide

*China's greatest poet, living when Beowulf was composed,
during the T'ang period.

Note: Scholars and academics should never attempt to translate poetry;
they are way too tied, too literal, too stuck in academic mud and literary mire.

On the occasion of her 80th birthday

I heard by accident a famous song* by Joni Mitchell
whom I had never heard before :
trite words, boring non-tune...so I clicked
on a youTube suggestion and got this

and I thought what a world! where relatively
talentless, crude and overblown
Americans are adulated, rich and famous,
while great musicians in most other places
are unappreciated and unknown.

* 'Both sides now'

Since writing this I heard her sing My Old Man
with great musicianship (and, of course, back-up.

Moralities

invented by men

are mostly weaponised

hypocrisies.

We are all owned

by 'enterprise'.

When I decided I was queer (aged 39)
I was keen to enter a 'community' of men who did not like sport
or competitiveness or noisy, banal music,
or 'the gutter press' or unpleasant virility...
a community of men like my semi-autistic self. 
What silly fantasy!

Now queerness has been taken over
not just by American vulgarity and vainglory
but also by the unplayful industry of sport.

The Asian Gay Games are now
making money in Hong Kong.
Maybe Qatar or even Saudi Arabia
will one day invest and make a fortune
out of promoting (if not hosting) Gay Olympics.

In Morocco

as elsewhere
tourists whinge
at being hustled. 

But I guess
that if you dress
like a tourist
you may thus be treated.

This is me in Morocco, photographed by Malcolm.

Won't you come into my bosoms ?

Tacca chantrieri

said the Bat-flower to the fly.

Often, the 'bitterest enemies'

(almost always anti-democrats)
help each other 'maximally'.

For example:
Ghazi Hamad (leader of Hamas)
and Benjamin Netanyahu
(prime minister of Israel).
play their intoxicating,
ecstatic, two-hander
while hundreds of thousands suffer,
and millions may yet be affected.

Autocrats and extremists
get on like a house on fire.

Not quite all anyone needs to know about Christianity.

An Edict issued by pope Nicholas V in 1452
granted the Portuguese king Alfonso V the right to
“invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue
all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever,
and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,
and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions,
possessions, and all movable and immovable goods
whatsoever held and possessed by them
and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”.

No surprise !

Large-scale warfare occurred in Europe
 ‘1,000 years earlier than previously thought’.

and maybe 1,000 years before that...

Jews and Israelis quite rightly

tell us all the time about Hitler's
Holocaust but don't choose
(or perhaps know) to mention
Stalin's, which more slowly disposed
of at least twice as many non-Jews.

In war

it's usually better
to be killed than to be maimed.

In England
it was usually better not to be Irish.

Soon, I see faces

every time I leave my house
Our lives are crowded with faces
that read like made-up languages
the minds behind them
as inscrutable as those of cats

and my own mind
mysterious to myself
like a fronded rock-pool

What happened where was I
in that first year of life
Was it fog-blindingly terrible
and why, in my
mother-agonisingly 'maladjustment'
did I not start wondering
till I was 81

and why did I never once mind being fatherless ?

Ranting again!

Hallow E'en (Christian version: All Hallows Eve)
was, for Western Celts, the brief closing, once a year,
of the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead
(a bit like the Nordic ginnungagap),
and (for The Sensitive) the difference
between seen and unseen realities was blurred.

It had nothing to do with crude and childishly-absurd
ghosts and zombies, nothing to do with bats or masks
or pumpkins (which did not grow in Western Europe),
nothing to do with fireworks, 'trick or treat' (an American
capitalist insertion), or parties. Hallow E'en
was a hallowed, perilous, unstable time,
a flickering twilight of The Normal - the opposite
of the vulgar, stupid, profitable travesty it has become,
tawdry and spiritually obscene.

And God said

(to Moses)
Thank you for having me
on my mountain.

After a planet-warming flight

in an aeroplane
then a few stops
on a motor-bus
what is most clear
to my ear
is my tinnitus.

(Where do we get off ?
What did you say ?
Speak louder !)

 

The only science that is not destructive

is moral philosophy –
and even it is rife with
don't-rock-the-boat practitioners.

Last Night I watched 'The Graduate',

a film from 1967 which featured
a pudgy-puppy Dustin Hoffman
and close-harmonious Simon + Garfunkel.
Here is my IMDb review:

I wonder what I would have thought of this film when it came out...when I was 25. At 82 I found it completely baffling, and actually rather disturbing.

Is it a satire on the American Nuclear Family and the oppression of parents ? Or is it a comment on the mores of a country beyond decadence ? Or is it a simple horror-film to frighten queer men like me away from the hideousness of rapacious and compulsive heterosexuality ?

The epicene but randy wimp Dustin Hoffman is quite unbelievable. As an ex-autist I could quite understand the things he said and how he said them, but not his actions, which were Pavlovian.

The beginning was good: student almost driven mad by his ambitious-for-him parents and their rich white bourgeois friend tries very ineptly (and unbelievably) to avoid the ghastly celebrations they have organised to mark his graduation and his birthday.

Then came the Harpy: Mrs Robinson, one of the creepiest monsters in all cinema.  Chilling, scrotum-freezing bedroom-scenes ensue.

The most distressing scene in the film, however, was that of the two traumatised chimpanzees trembling and cuddling each other in a hideous, brutal zoo which I hope has since been closed. (But it probably hasn't.)

I couldn't watch it through to the end.  Any ending would have been bad, given the nasty story.

This sort of sneakily-sub-pornographic film (shown in the Kingdom of Iran not so long after it came out) was surely one small ingredient in the socio-economic-cultural-amoral-political entity which the Appalling Ayatollah called The Great Satan.

(I am actually a fan of Mr Hoffman, due to his brilliant performances in Midnight Cowboy and Tootsie.
I should add that I had to download via PTP from my favourite Russian website a version with subtitles, since the mumbly Ms Bancroft is totally incomprehensible to the partially deaf.)

Descartes had a dog

that he called Scratch (Gratte)
and was reputedly fond of,
although he thought non-human animals
were mere automata, and presumably
had no access to anti-flea powder.

Two Fine Beards.

Biologist Javier Burgos with a painting he believes to be
one of a series called Monomania
by Théodore Géricault,

illustrating drunkenness.

The problem with democracy

is that (as with every other -ocracy)
there is no democracy of the sane,

or the accountable.

The Guardian newspaper

invited its readers to comment on an Opinion Piece
about Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the near-Stalinist
'leader of the French Left'.

Mélenchon and the Judeophobe left.

This whole complex and tangled issue could certainly do without Walter-Ulbricht Mélenchon sticking his rotting, anti-Jewish oar into the mælstrom.

[Please can we stop using 'anti-semitic' to mean anti-Jewish ?  Most of the people of the Middle East are Semites (Sons of Shem rather than Ham). Iranians are the big Indo-European exception.]

It is very hard to be pro-Jewish as I am, while being anti-Israel.  Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is not so different to that of people of the Western Russian Empire towards Jews.   After independence, Arabs were progressively stripped of rights and protections.  So now, little by little, Israel has created a  burgeoning world-wide dislike of its Jewish inhabitants (increasingly right-wing and narrowly Hasidic as they have streamed from Russia and Eastern Europe over the past 30 years) because of its anti-Palestinian policies, which are not even 'inclusivist' - as is the mendacious pretence here in France.

Love (if it exists)

is only part of time (if it exists)

sometimes, for some.

How can time be 'how you spend your love' ?

It can only be the series of illusions

between birth and death

and all the whens and whats and whys and wheres

and hows and whos that punctuate and puncture it.

More than 'food for thought' –

more a complete change of diet:

'I finished the book feeling,
as I’m sure she wants us to feel,
that understanding is an overrated process,
merely an ersatz moment of empathy.' 

– Julie Myerson on Shame (La Honte) by Annie Ernaux

Invasion.

Humans have introduced more than 37,000 alien species
to places they do not naturally occur.

– The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

I guess these include the Yucca, the Agave and the Beschorneria
below my balcony.

'Nomacorc'

tell me on their wine-bottle stopper
that they are Smart Green and
'100% recyclable',

but don't say that the plastic 'cork' industry
is devastating eastern Portugal
where the cork-oak forests
and their fauna used to thrive.

Should I send them their stoppers for recycling ?

Conquesting.

We conquer Fear,
each other,
The Enemy,
Everest,
Nature,
Space –

But not (of course)
the insane desire to conquer
for the sake conquering :

a defining attribute of the human race.

#teeming, scheming, screaming

The Kingdom of Dis.

It is a depressing fact
that those who have never suffered
from 'depression', the inner abyss,
cannot imagine it.  For them
it is a mere abstract.

'Human beings worked constantly

to make their gods unnecessary.'

— Henning Mankell, Depths, 2004.

In Shanghai.

 'In 1937 more than 20,000 bodies
had been found in the streets
or on the waste ground of the city.

'By 1938 with the help of the [Sino-Japanese] war
the number of corpses collected had risen
to over one hundred thousand
in the International Settlement Alone.'

– J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip.

From the same work:

 'Let me give you and example, Jim, of what happens when cash and the idea of profit dtrike root in a country unaccustomed to them - like Burma.
It seems that there's a ghastly Darwinian principle of economics known as the Law of Substitution which declares, more or less that "the cheapest will survive".  This has all sorts of unpleasant consequences, one of which is that non-ecnomic values tend to be eliminated.'

'Cognitive behaviour therapy'

is a kind of 'brainwashing'
based on the idea that our 'psychological problems'
come from 'unhelpful or biased ways of thinking'
rather than rational reactions to the conditions
and/or the global reality in which we are living –
not to mention the biased ways of thinking
of those who influence our lives and the world,
including those who practise or impose
'Cognitive Behavioural Therapy'. 

The cpountries which embrace it most enthusiastically
are the United States of America and North Korea.

Dissimulation.

Those who do worst
in human societies
are those least capable of
(or least successful in)
subterfuge (hypocrisy).

(But there is a fine line
between subterfuge and strategy.)

Death might be the mirror of life

laid down on the marble
its tortoiseshell back facing up.

We are not born with the dead,
as Old Possum the phoney philosopher said,
but of them and through them

and sometimes despite them,
prismatically.

Everything that we make derives
from the cruel reflections of our monstrous minds,
even more separate from reality than from each other,

and thus the Great Death arrives
climatically.

"What can I tell you further ?

I once lived among humankind,
and found them in their generality
to be cruel and cold,
and yet could mention the names
of three or four that were like angels."

– Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture.

An epitaph for us all.

In the slough

of consumerist pleasure
joy is an even greater anomaly
than despair.

from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

On the present horrors in Israel.

How does a feminist put aside all she believes
to cheer on a rapist?  asks Howard Jacobson of 'Caucasian' Hamas sympathisers in Europe ?

"History needs to be mightily inventive

about human life
because bare life is an accusation
against man's dominion of the earth."

– Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture.