In 1948 (also a leap-year)

a year before the pseudo-Marxists
came to power in mainland China,
George Orwell published 1984,
a hugely-influential book
recently translated into Uyghur
and published far to the west in Turkey.

Many of the horrible predictions
that Orwell made have come to pass,
not in Russia nor elsewhere (apart from North Korea)
but in Xinjiang,
so as to wipe out the 'dangerous'
Muslim and Turkic culture of the Uyghurs. 
Children are taken away to be 'educated',
women are 'encouraged' to marry
Han-Chinese men,
and all are instructed to sing
happy songs of love for China, the Party
and Big Brother, Xi Jinping.



Xinjiang's capital, Kashgarh is an oasis
between a sand-desert to the east
and the mountains to the west
shown on this satellite view.
The Uyghurs have enough to contend with
besides forced education and suppression of their language.

If copies of 1984 in Uyghur are smuggled into Xinjiang,
will it do anything to help the huge province's
small number of Turkic inhabitants ?

A possible cure for constipation

- if the sufferer could actually think
of besmirching such an exuberant object.

Man attacks left-handed waitress.

Nantes, France, February 26th.

A customer in a coffee-shop threw his cup of coffee in the waitress' face
and slapped her because she served him with her left hand.

The left hand is tabooed by Islam because (in right-handed people)
it is designated to be used for arse-wiping.
Of course, we left-handed people use our right hands for this purpose,
and our watches are on our right wrists,
so you can tell a left-handed person, a 'southpaw' in American parlance,
from yards or metres away.

I wonder which hand he slapped her with...

Literature

concerns itself with our failure
to connect with each other.
Science concerns itself with such things
as tinkering with DNA
and sending computers to the sun.

(In other words, we are brilliant
at breaking down and measuring,
but utter rubbish at simple mutual harmony.)

Time and its quality.

Least-mentioned and most-enduring
of colonial evils
was the introduction of necessary employment.
Its absence is now seen as
(and has often become) personal
or cultural failure, catastrophe
rather than an opportunity
to celebrate Free Time.

The freedoms that nation-states bestow
do not include free time or nourishment,
because capitalism's cult of numbers,
growth and 'going forward'
turns people into mere economic
units, groups and classes,
a to-be-closely-regulated spate
of consumers and providers.

Money is holy. The world is not.
Time and its quality are defined
and doled out by the State.

see: https://dsdnt.blogspot.com/2019/10/good-travellers-are-heartless.html

When I listen to music

I hear three things at once:
my ever-present tinnitus,
my almost ever-present ear-worms
(which vary enormously from Machaut
to Mahler, Marley and Methodist hymn-tune),
and the music I have voluntarily chosen.
There might be background noise as well.

If someone talks above all that
I am involved in tiring, cerebral acrobatics.

And if I turned on speech-radio
rather than music it is all too much, too much.

While reading John le Carré's "Mission Song".

John le Carré is certainly, like me,
ashamed to be a Western European
pinkish grey-skinned person.  I suspect that,
like me, born British, he might be ashamed to be human.

I hope he is about to write about the latest White Man's Shame
of childish panic about an alleged pandemic
(2% mortality rate, less than 50% infection rate)
while slow and bloody, ultimately efficient
genocide is quite cynically permitted to occur in Syria
by almost every politician outside Syria.

Who is worrying about the effect the latest influenza virus
might have in the ignored-by-all
(except the Turks and Kurds and Syrians)
crammed refugee camps of south-eastern Turkey ?
Almost no-one.

Sic progressit - And so it goes...on and on...and on...

Can language-abuse get any worse

than
ADVISEMENT ???
which I came across the other day.

Just one more little thing to make me lose the will to remain on the planet.

An unrelated language-note:

The English word journey
comes from French journée
meaning the (sunlit) length of a day.
So a journey was a day's travel.
by horse or on foot.

The French for journey or trip
is voyage, (from voie: way or path)
whose meaning
has in English been confined
to a sea-crossing.

There are hundreds more examples
of how meanings slip - and sometimes reverse -
from French to English, and even
(as with etiquette and ticket) back to French again.

Technology breeds

technology
and technology to counter
technology.
It can only end in tears
and fire, not ice.

Zoö-pornography - food for disgust.

More than one and a half million
pornographic films of animal sexual abuse
are freely available
and watched
every year in France and the UK... 
Many more in North America.

More than 10,000 human beings
visit online ads for sexual experiences with animals.



from mesopinions.com (France)

Shakespeare was wrong.

The world is part-stage,
part-abattoir,
part-holding camp,
part-prison,
part-environment-to-cherish,
and for most it's
just a place wherein to perish.

Wonderfully-wacky Word of the Week

Deconfliction.
Go figure!

Most intellectuals

have little understanding.
Those with understanding
tend not to be intellectual.
On the radio the other day
I heard that hairy men
tend to be intellectuals
(and/or the other way round ?).
My aunt had a sweet little moustache
but was not an intellectual,
and was always forgiving
but rarely understanding.

I did not care for princes or princesses,
but fancied hairy ogres when I was very young.

The problem with people

(I find)
is not so much that they are so limited,
but that they are so self-limiting.

Happiness

doesn't just happen.
It has to be permitted.
In The Real World
(which I luxuriously keep at bay
though Consumer Choice)
thought is a complication.

Carrière,

the French word for career
also means quarry.
The English word quarry
also means intended victim.
I have done what Yevtushenko
(whom I have not much read)
recommended in his poem about Galileo*,
and pursued a career (not a quarry)
of not pursuing one.

* Kарьера (Career)

Cool swells.

North Americans (but never British)
used to say that things (or people) were
swell.  
A male person could be A swell.
Swell swells have gone.
Now they (and some British) say
that people (or things) are funky
or are cool.
But now there seems to be a semantic rule
that neither male nor female is ever called
A funky or A cool.

"...men have invented God -

[as] a being capable of understanding."
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American.
...of understanding the cosmic joke
of bird in the hand and pig in a poke.

And lo! The first intelligible

(if not very intelligent) message
to reach Earth from Outer Space was:
We are going to make Wolf 359* 
GREAT AGAIN !

*Wolf 359, a Red Dwarf, is not at all bright.
'Two planetary companions are suspected, but as yet no debris discs have been unmasked...'

Soteriologistics

Even if we had the faintest idea what they might involve,
Enlightenment, Redemption, Salvation...
Saving the sad Planet from flood and fire
would still be merely
infantile desires for abstractions of desire.

The cosmic joke

is a pig in a poke
a bird in the hand
a bridge too far...
and not a nasty existential yoke.

Somehow

I got off the conveyor belt
after refusing to worship
the god of getting on.

Heard on the radio today:

"From the point of view of a photon
the entire universe is perfectly still."

Which means that such a particle of light can get off
and away if it wants to without risking injury.

'You can bet your bottom dollar'

that capitalism will thrive
on strategies
for manufacturing and marketing
value-added, bogus remedies
for climate change.

(Incidentally: as long ago as 1967 Isaac Asimov wrote that we were trashing the planet irreversibly.
 That was just before the oil companies started a big drive to increase the consumption of oil.)

"Too young to die."

Obviously,
no-one is...

any more than
anyone is
too old to die.

From your pedantic uncle.

With reference to my post of 28th December last
(Homage or insult to Miss S.)
Gertrude Stein's alleged poem, Pigeons on the grass, alas!
has almost-imperceptibly more meaning
if you imagine that the aforementioned birds were close to a notice:

or, since she spent so much time in Paris:

I might be wrong about this,
but she certainly published a recipe for Hashish Fudge in 1954.

Peduncle Wofl

Truth is a little boy.

And what are little boys made of ?
"Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs tails."
That is what Truth is made of.

It has to be my lupine ancestry

that makes me sure
that humans are supremely stupid.

Slick Simile.

I slip into bed
like a frozen chicken
into a microwave.
I have never slipped
a frozen chicken into a microwave.
I have never had a microwave
and for thirty years or more I haven't eaten chicken.

But I slip into my
electro-blanketed bed gratefully
and with abandon.

I snuggle into bed
like I used to snuggle whole chickens
into an earthenware pot
of golden cardamomed, tarragoned
and saffroned onions with segments of three lemons,
before slipping it into the oven
to be served (with fluffy rice) an hour or two later.

The Defeat of France

by Prussia in 1870,
and the subsequent decline of French power in Europe,
led directly to "The Race for Africa",
the brutal scrum of colonialism
which has destroyed the world.

A Kind of Poem.

Unlike kindness,
love comes in different kinds
like the kinds of water:
stagnant, spring, tap, sea,
puddle, polluted river,
pond, salt-marsh,
weedy canal, cascading,
soft, hard...
Unlike water,
love can be manic,
but no love is oceanic.

"The Jewish Problem"

and the Israeli problem
is the tragic triumphalism of the chosen.

The late John Baldessari,

notorious "conceptual artist" 
(who famously burned his terrible paintings)
declared that he would never make "boring art".
Unfortunately, almost all "conceptual art" is boring,
mind-numbingly, eye-frustratingly boring
at least after the first five seconds.

https://www.barnebys.com/blog/photography-was-not-exhibited-in-art-galleries-it

Today's YogArt

Three Ages of Confusion

The young
try to make sense of
the present

The middle-aged
try to make sense of
their future

The old
try to make sense of
their past

CORONA

(from the Latin corona and the Greek κορώνη meaning crown or halo)

is a word describing:
1.  the projecting part of a classic cornice;
2. the upper portion of a bodily part (such as a tooth, the skull or the penis);
3.  an appendage or series of united appendages on the inner side of the corolla in some flowers (such as the daffodil);
4.  a faint glow adjacent to the surface of an electrical conductor at high voltage;
5.  the gaseous 'atmosphere' of the sun which is even hotter than its surface, typically visible during an eclipse, and which emanates a  'solar wind' to afflict its planets;
6.  a circle of light made by the apparent convergence of the streamers of the aurora borealis;
7.  in medieval Latin, a unit of currency vulgarly known as a crown, krone, krona, koruna, etc.

Now we are hearing a lot about a particular corona-virus  in the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae...
which probably comes from the sun, lives in the aurora borealis, hangs about on cornices & daffodils, and is propagated (upon payment) via faintly-glowing penises of pigs and humans.

Secrets and Lies

Science tells us continually
how rational and successful we are.

Literature worries continually
at and about our tragic (often ludicrous)
irrationality.

"Procreation Today...

...is the moral equivalent of selling berths on a sinking ship."

- Les Knight

The ibex,

a very large kind of goat,
is, with the snow leopard, the most revered
of the Asian mountain animals, and used to live
in mountain ranges from Mongolia to Afghanistan.
Like snow leopards, they are almost extinct.

Pickled ibex blood, thick and hard to swallow,
is considered a powerful tonic by the Mongols.

The customs of humans are like footholds
carved into the marble cliffs of inhumanity.

This book appeared in 1972...

...and was ignored.
Even then it was probably too late.

A walker

was originally a man who trod wool or felt underfoot -
a kind of dancer.
The modern meaning of to walk came later.
Walkers are now just minor curses of the countryside.

If women had beards

I would have been bisexual.

Vivian Wheeler, 2010.

Today's YogArt®

'Fresh' (still wet) in the first photo under artificial light.

'Set' (morning after) in the second, in natural light and with different background.

Retrospective misery

is all the rage.

Most cooking

is done by women,
and in many Asian countries
they eat separately,
because a woman is considered
to be a service rather than a person.
As for Western cultures -
I wonder how many cooks
(even male ones) consider that the best part
of feasts and dinner-parties
is the cooking ?

Today's YogArt

was erased immediately
due to overworking.

'Local' Wild-life

https://blog.invasive-species.org/2018/01/10/giant-rodent-invasion-the-coypu/


photographed by Malcolm.

Today's YogArt

photographed when fresh (yesterday evening)...




and this morning in natural light.

A neglected poet.

UNSUSPECTING

There is a natty kind of mind
That slicks its thoughts,
Culls its oughts,
Trims its views,
Prunes its trues,
And never suspects it is a rind.


PEOPLE

To those fixed on white,
White is white,
To those fixed on black,
It is the same,
And red is red,
Yellow, yellow-
Surely there are such sights
In the many colored world,
Or in the mind.
The strange thing is that
These people never see themselves
Or you, or me.

Are they not in their minds?
Are we not in the world?
This is a curious blindness
For those that are color blind.
What queer beliefs
That men who believe in sights
Disbelieve in seers.

O people, if you but used
Your other eyes
You would see beings.


CONVERSION

African Guardian of Souls,
Drunk with rum,
Feasting on strange cassava,
Yielding to new words and a weak palabra
Of a white-faced sardonic god--
Grins, cries
Amen,
Shouts hosanna.


THE DANCER

Spatial depths of being survive
The birth to death recurrences
Of feet dancing on earth of sand;
Vibrations of the dance survive
The sand; the sand, elect, survives
The dancer. He can find no source
Of magic adequate to bind
The sand upon his feet, his feet
Upon his dance, his dance upon
The diamond body of his being.


A CERTAIN MAN

A certain man wishes to be a prince
Of this earth; he also wants to be
A saint and master of the being-world.
Conscience cannot exist in the first:
The second cannot exist without conscience.
Therefore he, who has enough conscience
To be disturbed but not enough to be
Compelled, can neither reject the one
Nor follow the other...


REAPERS

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.


STORM ENDING

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers,
Rumbling in the wind,
Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .
Full-lipped flowers
Bitten by the sun
Bleeding rain
Dripping rain like golden honey—
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.


Jean (as in Gene) Toomer, 1894-1967

Yesterday's YogArt

the other way round,
different background,
different lighting.