The blessings of travel

expire like passports.

*

– Reason for visit ?
Nomadism.
– Permission refused. 

It's a bit early for Christmas,

 but the decoration tells a different story.

"I am being offered a job

by the government
that I can't take
because of the government."

Ireland immures itself in the Whiteys' fortress of shit.

Schubert has no copyright.

Resistance

 

Time and evil.

Tyrannosaurus rex
is closer in time to us
than to its predecessor
Megalosaurus.

Pause for thought
that the tiny, soon mini-end
of our world can't come soon enough

to end the suffering of animals
that we, unlike Megalosaurus
and its æons of successors,
torture to exploit.

Our notion of 'perpetuity'
is very much shorter
than the time-span between
the emergence of ungulates
and us.

Our superior 'intelligence'
is the Will to Exterminate.
It's such a pity that the
superior beings of East Asia
don't believe that the semen
of seamen is more powerful a medicine
than the milked bile of Moon Bears
of which there are in China alone, at least
twenty thousand in iron straitjackets,
unable to move, as their bile drips
from a catheter into a cup.

Continually, throughout its life,
a moon-bear suffers more
than a human hostage
strapped for life
in an electric chair, or a screaming soul
portrayed in medieval Hell,
tormented by a devil.

I wish I could have, at birth, resigned
from the species that invented evil.

China, Vietnam, South Korea...

Who do you know that knows or cares
about the suffering of tortured bears ?

 “The cages are extremely tiny, scarcely larger than the bears themselves and completely devoid of stimuli. The bears lack everything. They are ill and lifeless. I have seen animals that could not even lie down properly in their cage. They had to sleep in a sitting position. Bears kept on these farms usually have no access to water..."

One of the 'woke' Weasel-words

that tell you nothing, but sound
liberal and 'inclusive' :

neurodivergent.

Yuk.
I shall from now on describe myself as

wtf sociodivergent (nearly-sociopathic nihilist).

*

I remember poorer children that I liked
who were classified as E.S.N.
(Educationally sub-normal)
already the worse for wear.
I myself was designated
maladjusted,
a label I am now more proud to bear.

Close-up

of a jumping spider
'garlanded with pollen',
by John Oliver Dum

 

'Police State'

was a much-used term in the 1950s and '60s,
describing totalitarian régimes in Eastern Europe,
and more distant parts of the world, especially
Haiti, Honduras and Paraguay.
Lately, we heard talk of a mysterious Deep State.
But now we're back to Police State, not describing
Poland, Guatemala, Myanmar or even Chile
– but the USA.

Dining Out.

Ossiano's, Dubai.

"Blue Brittany Lobster (known as the king of crustaceans)
grilled over binchotan, paired with pain perdu in kombu milk,
topped with salicornia and trout roe.

"At its core, a beetroot reduction with marigold, finished with horseradish cream, smoked eel, and delicate foam..."

I think I'll stay at home tonight.

Does this explain

the original function of large stone circles ?

Reason for travel ?

 Nomadism.

Permission refused.

That's just in Finland...

What horrible, unreported destruction
is Google wreaking elsewhere ?

his blog is hosted by Google.

Haireas.

Baldness does seem to indicate high testosteronal activity
(but not in my case). 

Armpit hair stores the sexually-attractive pheromones
from armpit sweat,

which I used to ask one or two pheromonal males to let me sniff.

Pubic hair is bushy so that will catch and keep and emanate
the odour of a rival - or at least it did before
the obscene modern obsession with washing 

and mortifying the flesh with chemical scents
and acrid deodoriser...which, come to think of it
might help reduce the rate of population-increase.

A Face of War.

   Awaiting eye-surgery, Ukraine.

I started painting in 1965

because I had nothing on the walls
of my primitive house (no electricity,
no bathroom...).
Of course, I keep moving my pictures about...
...for the wicked, no rest...

 

...and in in my much more recent,
much larger French home
I can never decide which wall
shows this one off best.

Burning Big and Burning Small.

The ruling class would rather burn the world
than share it with the poor,
writes George Monbiot, almost slogan-trite. 

There are several 'ruling classes',
some only semi-ruling.

The poor can only, on very rare occasions,
led by trouble-mongers, loot pathetically
and set vehicles alight.

Tele-non-communication.

Both my phones stay at home
in my never-locked hermitage.
Neither instrument has rung for weeks -
until today the fixed phone rang
and I actually picked it up,
looked at the dodgy number,
and, nevertheless, pressed the connect button.
Silent proof that there's nobody out there...

So I continued the blog I was composing
about originality.  
Somewhere I had read:

"Very few people are original.
Because to be original means you have to stand alone."  

To stand alone requires not just stubbornness
but also a feeling of otherness....

Hope, perhaps,

is a kind of moral collapse.

 

Planting a Narcissus bulb.

God in his own image.

Taking a Selfie,

not in Paris, but another European capital:

the clue is in the flag used as a scarf.

Republican Ogres.

 

In fact, the Gendarmerie (Gens d'Armes
unlike British and Irish police
who don't have guns about them,
except in Northern Ireland)
is a unruly-when-necessary
part of the armed forces.
The CRS or riot police is even more
unaccountable and terrifying.

This is why France is so often on the edge
of turning into a Police State.
French 'Law and Order' (with some exceptions)
had a lovely World War Two.

read more >

But it's not very far from Calais to Dover.

A Palestinian slogan

shouts Resistance is Existence!
For me, existence has mostly
been some kind of resistance.

Binary.

In a dualistic, duelistic
Manichæan world
Satan inevitably wins -
for winning is Satanic.

Two sculptures

carved thousands of years apart.

Gilgamesh between two Minotaur demigods
holding up a sun disc.

          New translation of the Epic >

A corner of Hell, Girona cathedral,
Catalonia.

Senile confusion

I have unsuccessfully tried two books by Sarah Dunant
(who writes novels about the Italian Renaissance and the Borgias)

because I mixed her up with the late Helen Dunmore,
who wrote a marvellous novel about Leningrad, 
called The Siege. 

Two Duns made for confusion in my addled brain.

But, on pursuing my error,
I found this fine poem by Helen Dunmore:

CITY LILACS

In crack-haunted alleys, overhangs,
plots of sour earth that pass for gardens,
in the space between wall and wheelie bin,

where men with mobiles make urgent conversation,
where bare-legged girls shiver in April winds,
where a new mother stands on her doorstep and blinks
at the brightness of morning, so suddenly born —

in all these places the city lilacs are pushing
their cones of blossom into the spring
to be taken by the warm wind.

Lilac, like love, makes no distinction.
It will open for anyone.
Even before love knows that it is love
lilac knows it must blossom.

In crack-haunted alleys, in overhangs,
in somebody's front garden
abandoned to crisp packets and cans,

on landscaped motorway roundabouts,
in the depth of parks
where men and women are lost in transactions
of flesh and cash, where mobiles ring

and the deal is done — here the city lilacs
release their sweet, wild perfume
then bow down, heavy with rain.

* * *

(But lilacs are not that common, and are slow-growing...  I wonder if she might have mixed them up with Buddlejas which are everywhere (like fig-trees here), including behind wheelie bins and growing out of walls, but usually flowering later than Spring... More addlement.)

Pillage and predation

continue, of course, everywhere,
including Gabon.

When there are riots and looting

(resulting from peaceful demonstrations)

it has been usual and convenient, since before the 1920s,
to blame "the extreme left". 

However, as Naomi Klein (amongst others)
points out, chaos now benefits the ultra-rich,
not the poor.  Socio-statistically, I count as poor.

Although the price of local lettuce has recently doubled
while the price of coffee has not,
I live comfortably on my 1,050 euros a month,
in green rurality, waiting for a war.

Comment by First Dog on the Moon >

After Descartes

belief in the Power of Reason
seems childish.

Thinking does not precede feeling.
I feel, therefore I exist.

 

Yesterday in the middle of France.

 

I am even farther from the French ructions
than I was from the Northern Irish ones.
But there's probably unrest in Toulouse.

My contribution to political life in France
was to buy five pansies at the Sunday market.

Politix.

'Centre-left' inevitably means
right-wing : socialism for the rich
and austerity for the deprived,
as Yanis Varoufakis has described.

– Nihilistorix

'Selfish genes'

do not make selfish humans. 

Selfishness is taught and learned,
so greed can thrive and strive.

Scrapings from today's newspapers.

Who remembers cardboard discs on top of [thick glass] milk-bottles ? 

“You can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television,” said photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in an interview in 2022. “But you can’t show two men kissing each other.” 

...a world in which capital moves freely but people do not.

Socrates relates a legend of the invention of writing, and the warning that accompanied its creation: “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
“scratching many deadly signs on a folded tablet”, according to The Iliad...

Sleeping Tesla driver using self-driving mode crashes into police car injuring officers.

Perhaps,

dying alone,
you are so taken up by dying
that you neither notice or care
that you are on your own...

Happy days.

 

Museum architecture.

The National Museum of Qatar, Doha.

The Pterosaur Museum in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

I bet you didn't know

Ireland's Great 9th century
Gift to the World :
the space between words in written text.

So if it weren't for Irish monks
youdhavetoreadsentencesandwholepageswrittenlikethis.

which could leave you a bit perplexed.

The Waste Land

Received and popular Ideas are usually wrong.

 

Well worth reading.

Drink for Thought.

Cold blackcurrant-leaf tea
tastes rather like red wine.

Which is why some wines
are described as blackcurranty.

Maybe I should try wine generously laced
with cooled tisane of leaves
of Ribes nigrum (cassis in French)

to dilute the alcohol content,
since I have always been very

sensitive to its effects
(wooziness and headache)
and I drink wine mainly for the taste.

And have never much cared for
the fizzy flatness of beer*.

I tried this experiment, but the quantity
of tea necessary spoils the zing of the wine;
and adding a dash of wine to the tea
would not result in anything like kir. 

*(as opposed to silky draught Guinness).

'You can take a good photo of anything.'

 William Eggleston: Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973.

from today's Guardian

...talking of which, from the same publication, a good photo of a road less than a mile from where I lived for my first 20 years - without the mural:

Edward Carson was Oscar Wilde's nemesis,
and a separatist Ulster protestant 'loyalist'.

Our future may depend

on this little fella in

Looking forward

 to soon being famous !

Islam and Christianity.

War-lords such as the Prophet M'hamed had been,
tend not to offer the other cheek,
though some might have been crucified.

It may thus be fair to say
that the presentation of Christianity today
is a horrible display of hypocritical rot
whereas Islam, largely,
and mainly among the masses, is not. 

I wonder when

Donald Trump will, by fake-regal decree,
declare the re-naming of English
(the language) to American...

It would be vastly expensive
but maybe not complete insanity...

I often feel

 that my brain is boiling 

– but there's nothing to cook.

Prison Art of America.

 

The much-invoked/touted Armageddon

 will not be caused

 – The Guardian, 1st October.

The best of Man is his ruins.

The Northern Lights
the other night,
behind a Scottish castle.

And behind the standing-stones of Callanish,
Isle of Lewis.

Catastrophe שואה

 

A crime against humanity,
like a pogrom,
does not require gas-chambers
or even a concentration-camp.

النَّكْبَة

The 14th century expulsion of Jews
from England.

Politics, insanity, catastrophe...