Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Monday 18 March 2024

‘I photograph to find out

what something will look like when photographed’

– Gary Winogrand

But don't we all ?



























































































































































And so on...

Sunday 17 March 2024

A Lesson of (Civil) War.

The innocent bystander
who helps build a barricade
will lend a hand to dismantle it.

Trendy Gay Ex-Priest Pop-singer Condones Mindless Violence

 "The first proper book I ever got when I was a boy was the Sherlock   Holmes short stories from my grandfather. I actually made my parents   buy me a deerstalker and I used to wear it around Kettering, and was   obviously beaten up daily – and rightly so."     [my underlining]

Richard Coles, English broadcaster and author, in The Observer


Saturday 16 March 2024

Thursday 14 March 2024

Mille Regretz*.

I rather wish that there would be
some sort of brief hereafter
(not one full of floaty joy
and tedious laughter)
where I could say sorry
to my aunt and mother
for my egotistical, egregious,
distressing, semi-autistical, 
juvenile behaviour.

*The title of a famous song by Josquin des Prez.

see also: kurt gödel - his mother and the argument for life after death

Gödel's belief that he had proved the existence of an afterlife hung on his belief in the soul: an idea or fancy (of the visible and solid continuing forever invisible and immaterial) which has become belief. The further belief that humans are the only beings to have souls is even more unprovable and could be seen as mere (or desperate ?) religious (anthropocentric) arrogance.

Might a soul be acquired (like divine grace or the unearthing of a truffle) ?  Might some people/animals/trees have souls and others not.

Could a soul be lost (like a pair of glasses or a shoe) ?  Could one trade it in a pact as Faust did ?  Could it be shared ?  Could it become a tumour, or diseased and die independently of the person/animal/tree who housed it ? 

Is a soul conscious ?  Is it just another word for consciousness ?  Does it have feeling ?  It is hard to imagine an emotionless consciousness. 

If we don’t have souls, what could constitute an afterlife ?

Even if we do have souls, more questions are raised: how long would an afterlife last ? Might it simply be the persistence of a quantum of energy…or would it be an expansion like a galaxy ?

Could there be a half-afterlife ? Might there be more than one ?

If so, might they be a series of Russian dolls, or discrete existences ? What constitutes an existence in this context ?

Gödel moves from the belief in the existence of an afterlife to the assumption that he would have a particular afterlife wherein he would see his mother again? But an afterlife may be private, temporary, or simply full of too many people to locate particular loved ones!

The concept of the soul raises far more questions than it answers.

When we die, we don't even leave a space behind us.


Wednesday 13 March 2024

Mariolatry.

The word Marry appears quite often
in Shakespeare's plays, prefacing a sentence
and meaning sometimes Indeed! but more often
just an attention-catching word like Look!

It is a short form of By the Virgin Mary!
and disappeared in Cromwell's Commonwealth,
if not before.

It is curious that the secular and proletarian,
tomboy-virginal, revolutionary symbol
of the French Republic since 1976, Marianne
(who appears in silhouette on stamps and on
official stationery and documents) is named
after the Virgin Mary and her mother,
and not the burned-by-the-English Jeanne.

Delacroix's painting of Marianne adapted as a mural
in support of the right-wing Gilets-Jaunes.


Mystery solved.

In my cellar I pulled out plant-protecting wrap
to use as a sieve for my water-and-lime kefir,
and found many of these.












What were they ?  The spent chrysalises of some 'pest' ?
Google lens could not help.
Then I realised:
I had used this wrap last year to protect
an oleander from frost. 
These are oleander seeds!


Tuesday 12 March 2024

Remembering Stevie Smith.

When I was on the point of drowning
in a tide-rip, alone, in the Atlantic, in November,
with nothing around me but a grey-green ocean
and an empty strand,
I actually did, momentarily, remember
the splendid Stevie Smith.

And then I touched a sandbar with a foot,
turned round and crawled back hand over hand
against the current and the tide,
coming up for air as my lungs required.
For half an hour I lay panting
in perfect solitude upon the sand.

I would have drowned, not waving...
what would have been the point ?
And, anyway, what human life is worth saving ?


Hello, Sailor !

My deep-down soul-mate likes to be stroked.

 

Monday 11 March 2024

The Acme

of ugly, dirty-pink vulgarity...
of Pizza-Hut EurAmericality. 



The Helpless in Gaza.

Since the Prophet (Blessed be His name)
was not as wise as His all-knowing God,
He was not wise or prophetic enough
to consider the possibility of carpet-bombing,
machine-gunning, missile-firing
and genocides 1400 years after
His nocturnal Ascension in Jerusalem.


The very idea of Ramadan in Gaza
is a sick joke in quite a different way
from our polyester Lent.

The least and perhaps best that the
helpless Faithless this side of the Dniester
can do in sympathy with Palestinians
is to observe Ramadan this year

especially during Easter.



Sunday 10 March 2024

The Perversion of History.


A Paris mural (after Delacroix) in support of the Gilets-Jaunes,
many of whom were right-wing and racist.









The French Revolution did not bring
liberty, equality or fraternity to France.

The police are still part of the army
and unaccountable.

Indeed, liberty has been granted only
since the EU was formed,
while equality and fraternity will probably never arrive.

"Contre nous de la tyrannie" runs the third line of the Marseillaise. But it doesn't take a Proudhon to observe that all governments are tyrants, not just militarist ones...


see the-persistence-of-the-old-regime and tolerate the mis-spelling of 'racked' in the blurb;

also my blog of 14th March.




Empty Shelves

No food, no spinsters –
just regret and Goya's monsters.


Saturday 9 March 2024

Obscenity aplenty.

Fascism, including Nazism, was an obscene expression
of conservatism.
Bolshevism, including Stalinism, was an obscene expression
of collectivism.
Consumerism is the obscene expression of capitalism.


Ignore the small holocaust

in Gaza.
Instead, be wowed
by UCL Professor John Oppenheim's tweet:

“Folks, something seems to be happening.
We show that our theory of gravity …
can explain the expansion of the universe
and galactic rotation without dark matter or dark energy.”

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money
out of science and put it into astrology & the reading of palms...
Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

- from Kurt Vonnegut's address at Bennington College, 1970. 

Friday 8 March 2024

What religion

has a sense of humour ?
Dear Pious Person, True Believer,
the Person you are calling
is not available.


Abortion - OUI. Sex-work - NON.

France has added to its Constitution
the unassailable right of women to choose abortion.  

In 1945, France (under the odious Charles de Gaulle)
finally gave women the right to vote,
and abolished the right of female sex workers
to choose their profession
under guaranteed medical supervision.


Same old, same old.

 











Thursday 7 March 2024

The failure of democracy

will be due to many factors, including
the programmed infantilism of the electorate.

Moreover,
if there is a choice between the trivial and the cosmic,
people almost always choose the trivial.

There is also the disengagement of the informed...


'Merlin'

is a smartphone application
which records and identifies birds.
Here are some of our feathered friends
identified in the last three days
(here in SW France) :

plus Spotted Woodpecker
and Owls...















Cirl Bunting


Homeless in Paris.

I think the government should issue
lockable polycarbonate domes
to protect these colourful semi-dwellings
for the 'Orrible Olympics 2024.





Wednesday 6 March 2024

Nothing natural is square ?

This question led me here*,
but I am none the wiser.

*scroll down to read after opening

 

Tuesday 5 March 2024

Still upright

in the smoke and ash
stand the trees that loved each other.
As our ravages and waste get bigger
we rich get richer. Our world will end
in fire and flood (no ice), and blood
and whimper mixed with snigger.


The dizzying heights of comfort.

Latrines of a 15th century fortress
in the Médoc, SW France.



Monday 4 March 2024

Rogue Species.

Though Jesus said that some are meek,
every human is a freak,
thief of beauty, and despoiler of diversity,
hundreds of thousands born each week.


For I thy God am a Vengeful God.

The Jews are revenging themselves for the Shoah
(which they revere as the Christians revere the Crucifixion),
not on the Germans, Poles, Ukrainians,
Dutch, French or Romanians
but on abject Palestinians.  

Meanwhile the Germans refuse
to substantially help Ukraine,
one of the countries
they holocaustically occupied
and relieved of its Gypsies and Jews.


$17.74 for 136.50 hours of work.


California prisoner donates earnings from 13-cent hourly wage to Gaza.


Sunday 3 March 2024

Saturday 2 March 2024

"When I was in his class

I felt as though I understood something amazingly deeply and well, and then the sense of understanding would dissipate when I left. Only the sense of awe remained."

This is exactly how I felt about my philosophy professor* (in Belfast in the late nineteen-sixties), but was written by Wendy Moffatt on Harold Bloom (1930-2019).

Bloom was 'a controversial figure' who worshipped Shakespeare.  I agree with his forthright opinion that the lives of the wretched and oppressed will not be improved by the privileged middle classes reading the bad (and often highly-praised) verses of those who claim to be (and co-opt, hence despise) the wretched and oppressed.

Unlike Bloom, however, I do not think that (unlike philosophy) poetry should be read aloud. It is exactly what led to 'performance poetry' (rather than thinkers' poetry) and on to the kind of well-performed, crowd-pleasing doggerel that publishers now like to print.

Poetry is best judged on the page.  Consider Eliot or Yeats – or Shakespeare.

*Bryce Gallie, late of Peterhouse, Cambridge.


Friday 1 March 2024

Woke up this morning...

 ...and wondered if there were such depraved
and depraving things
as pornographic jigsaw puzzles.
Of course there are!

Some are artistic, and not really pornographic.

Egon Schiele: Self-portrait, 1916











Struggle, by Sabina Nedelcheva-Williams
























And of course there are jigsaws for queer guys
without artistic or anthropological bent.






























And for Biblical Scholars.

Abraham circumcising himself, Alba Bible, 1430.














Also from the Catalan semi-Sephardic Alba Bible,
but not as yet a jigsaw, Joshua circumcising the Israelites
who, for reasons of hygiene and/or practicality, had not
been circumcised during the forty years of wandering
in the wilderness.  Here he is at the Hill of Foreskins
performing his gory religious duty.





















It's amazing how one thing can lead to another,
especially on the World Wide Web.

I must now investigate Ms Nedelcheva-Williams...

Footnote: After the second world war in Europe the number of circumcisions went into huge decline, not only due to the lack of Jews, but also because of resistance to the long-fashionable American fad, as to the other (shorter-lasting) fad of 'frontal lobotomy'.