On Grooming.

If people didn't talk so much

they'd touch much more.

ZATAOMM

It is fifty years since Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance was published.
I was impressed at the time, but
it did not improve my dyspractical connection
with my motorbikes.  It may, however, have
distantly helped my relationship with laptops.

Its simplistic and vague Message
has more to do with Dao than Zen
and maybe more to do with archery than Dao.

It may be relevant that its author came
from a colonising country which holds
nearly 20% of the world's prison population),
a nation founded on schism,

and a culture which has systematically sought
(especially through arms, music and the movies)
to erode, deplete and debase 'quality', world-wide,
reducing it to monetising memes
of fashion capitalism.

BUT see second comment below.

"Her head was like a magic lantern

into which slides were thrust
noisily, one after the other."
 – Elizabeth Taylor, 'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont'.

When I was six or seven,
I found a Magic Lantern in the attic.
It had a wick and a little bowl for oil.
My mother had an electric bulb put in it.
It projected Edwardian images
on to a sheet tacked on to the wall.
In my insouciant awkwardness
I cracked and broke the glass slides
one after the other.  Much has there been
that I managed to spoil.

Light the blue touch-paper...

 

A codpiece was often used as a pocket

for a kerchief or hand-kerchief

or maybe a bodkin, a florino

or a rocket.

Poem ('se vero è alcun proverbio antico')

Truth is ruins
'The Old Woman' as she was called
Smelly cailleach in dirty black shawl
used to come to our door the front door
at tea-time  Once when I was alone
she rang and I brought her in from the cold
and put her in front of the fire with a mug
of strong tea She was soon chased out
and I was sent to my room
Beauty is the shallowness of Michelangelo
the celebrities who look to me like
ugly sisters and horribly mutant, hairless apes
Poetry is something that sounds good
for five minutes or less until you
think about it and spit This is not poetry
but scuttlings in the emptying house
of the asperger stare
The world is paradise and
the paradise of despair.

Museums Culture.

In London there is already
(or at long last)
a Museum of Homelessness.

I am now Crowdfunding
for a Museum of Hopelessness
in Caylus...

'Plastic Manufactured Women'

is a phrase by Rafia Zakaria
which describes female celebrities
who fall into the punishingly-narrow
category of beautiful in the Anglosphere (at least). 

This scary example (loud and hard)

looks to me like the Wicked Stepmother
or perhaps an Ugly Sister;

while this one (pale and characterless
and also, necessarily, loud)

is, in the 'orwellian' Looking-glass World of America,
labelled 'Black'.

Both of them sing plastic, manufactured songs.

On more or less the same topic,
this year's Oscar 'champion' was a film
so creaky, badly-scripted and woodenly-acted
that I deleted it after half an hour.

Don't blame the Algorithms :

after all, they're only human.

On the development of modern humans.

 

Other 'evolutionary advantages' may include
testosteronal overdrive, congenital paranoia
monthly female fertility, and the invention of religion.

Good to miss !

BBC Radio Trash

Not with a bang, but...

 

A guest-house bedroom in Morocco.

Compare this oppressed
Ouagharda bedroom rug at Imini

with this one, $3,500 on 1st Dibs website
a couple of years ago

The cheaper rugs on 1st Dibs website are imitations made in India.

Meanwhile, here on Earth...

 

Unnatural Selection.

 

Another angle.

Evil
is venal.
Vengeance
is banal.

The Omens.

Some funny lights in both northern
 and southern skies.

American cattle get bird flu.

Man with pig's liver transplant dies.

Le rêvecauché – Only a daymare.

The next time a 'major' genocide*
is meticulously planned, the Architects
will have learned a lot
from airport-management.
Zig-zag lines for ticket-scan or registration,
zig-zag lines for vaccination verification
zig-zag lines for luggage and ticket-inspection,
zig-zag lines for passport and police 'control'
(it's all about control)
each line 400 metres long

Ryanair flight FR 6668 to Toulouse
Proceed with cabin-baggage no larger than
55 x 40 x 20 cm to gate Q
and stand in line to be controlled
(present your boarding-pass and passport
and stand up straight; do not salute)
into a tunnel-bridge and onto a
moving walkway in an aircraft
which is not an aircraft and which will rapidly
fill up with people and a precise amount of Sarin gas...
from which corpses will be delivered to another
moving belt and on to the Pit or Crematorium.

As I was dreamily controlled
through Menara airport, Marrakech, Morocco,
I had the unpardonable thought that
some of the much-travelled boat-people
who had paid ten or twenty grand
(rather than a mere hundred for their trip)
might possibly fare better – unless, of course,
they were strafed at sea
or machine-gunned on a corpse-strewn strand.

* Everybody knows that, since 1945, there have only been minor genocides, even in China.

Many people, many times.

How many times
have I seen a new moon
and wondered how many
more times will I see
a new moon ?

Hardly an original interrogation –
but it seems so, every time.

If you judged

from how they congregate
in cities, towns, crowds and ghettoes
you'd think that humans liked each other.

 

Looking for Life

elsewhere in 'The Universe' –

The fools! Everywhere Lifeless
is Unimaginably Wonderful.

A Freudian Delusion.

Perhaps the dodgy illusionist
Sigmund's silliest notion
was that Shakespeare was a Frenchman
called Jacques Pierre.

But this little offshoot or digression
from his Delirium intelligens
was not nearly so appealing
to the intelligentsia –
nor so harmful – as his ridiculous
Œdipal obsession.

F is for Faith,

the lie
we have put
like a blood-rusted knife
at the centre
of life.

AMOC – AMOK

 

Well! Who would have thought it ?

...unless (of course) you are asexual.

The same Sibylline source confirms
the occurrence of peegasms,

sweet little brothers of which I produce
every time I urinate — a pleasant
side-effect of senility...and, perhaps,
of collecting and ingesting Psilocybe semilanceata
near my home in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bombarded, befuddled,

probably bamboozled
by crazy news from the USA,

I have come to the conclusion
that everybody in that benighted
country has been infected
by a desperate delirium of confusion.

Typical of the French obsession

with homogeneity, normalisation,
is the impossibility of buying
blended coffee beans
of different roasts or origins:
just the one type from the one location
the one colour...as if to mix motley beans
was tantamount to dire adulteration.

The meaning of wealth.

"In the mid-18th century a group of economic theorists,
led by David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790),
challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines —
such as the belief that the world's wealth remained constant,
and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state."  [Wikipedia on Capitalism]

Hume and Smith were, of course wrong. 
The world's wealth (the biosphere) is finite and constant,
though a state's wealth (artificial, monetary, military)
can be elastically huge.

Smith and Sympathy.

It's cheering to know

and to tell that the language 
I'm hearing around me this week –

in which the words for
Welcome, Yes and No
are Brrk, Ya and Uhu –

is very alive and well.

Dies Iræ.

Suddenly, all of them
burst out, singing  –
not birds, not children,
not the angelic choir
– but millions of happy devils
aflame in a sky-drowning gyre
as the ultimate war was beginning.

Vincent van Gogh did not finish

his last painting.

Grim determination.

I am so woak

it's not a joak

But I'm not broak

until I croak.

Democracy

has been hollowed out by greed and cynicism.

Hence the rise of right-wing populism.

Most of us now realise

that everything we do
destroys the biosphere.

And so it's easy to say
what the hell! and fly away

to South Morocco
as I did yesterday.

Unaerated oddball.

Never in my life
have I met another person
who, too, expressed dislike
for fizzy drinks.

Surely "The Banality of Evil".

must largely include
the even greater banality
of revenge ?

Awareness

is the wound
on this side of nothingness.

Each day a liberation
from the day before.

Maybe they'll get to the English coast...

...and then escape to Ireland.

Beyond limits.

Too much meaning.
Too much misery.
The misery is in the meaning.

The dirtiest word in French :

Entrepreneur.

 

A Former British Prime Minister for 50 days,

Liz "Stunningly Stupid" Truss
said in Washington this week :

“I like to think of the United States of America
as Britain’s greatest invention.”

Can you believe it ?

A sensible plan.

If you think you might soon start to
lose the plot, pretend to have lost it,
and see what happens.  But don't
lose your plot.

I have done this
and find myself adventurously alone.

camus-sartre

la peste – c'est nous autres.

Not Russian parachutes

delivering succour to the citizens of Kharkiv.

'Food Aid' dropping down to Gaza

Pink ?

Full moon: infantman

stretches out to capture it

piercingly screaming.

'A painter should study the stains on walls.'

 – Leonardo da Vinci

It's a Long Way to Rwanda.

UK passes law to send refugees
to camps near the Mountains of the Moon. 

Venice Biennale:
Refugee Astronaut by Yinka Shinobare

Jesus said:

'If you're establishing a hierarchy
put me at the bottom.'

And so it came to pass. 

'Gay Icon'.

 This is mine.

“The Island of Men with Long Beards”

How many more are there ?

Two of them have big ears.

Compare with ikons of St.Onuphrios and others.

I can't imagine why anyone would prefer Marilyn Monroe
or Taylor Swift.  But that's Queer Asperger's for you!

Poster Boy.

From his endless ranting about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
to his reported habit of cheating at golf,
Donald Trump is a walking, talking monument
to extrinsic values. – George Monbiot

Hugh Hefner, yet another appalling, rich person.

“Power is insidious when it masks itself as generosity.”

Word of the Week

as applied to UK governments since 2010:

MORONOCRACY.

This is how antagonistic or adversarial two-party, majoritarian democracies end up.

Three cheers for coalition-governed, proportionally-represented Denmark.