Ignominy obloquy calumny et spiri(too)-snafu.

Poetasters, philosophasters, Tartufferie & general paresis.

Postscript: The death of 'The Movement' by correctitude.

[Up, Down]

No less and no more than Freddie Nietzsche himself playing silly buggers; or myself. Or could it be callous disinterest? Incomprehension & misunderstanding? There are so many ways to go wrong, to get it wrong gentle reader and I can't find much of a way through them though I've tried. 'Akrasia' (The state of mind in which one acts against one's better judgement; weakness of will, ‘incontinence’.) sez one'a the pundits over at The Guardian. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small helm. "It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you," (says Neil Young, the wanker!). ignominy: in- not + nōmen name - so literally 'without name' (echoes of Nobodaddy); obloquy: ob- against + loqu-ī to speak; calumny: straight Latin - false and malicious misrepresentation of the words or actions of others; also pariah (paṛaiyan, paṛaiyar), shunning, and outcast. Interesting that 'gnomon' comes from a different root - Greek for 'know' not Latin for 'name' although the etymology is confusing, unclear, as if the roots of 'know' are so old as to be almost lost, obscure. Got the cold shoulders. Got the silent treatment. Even got the bum's rush. 'Magine 'At! Got the Kenosha Kid. Got the Hokey Pokey. Got the Shuffle Demons. Waltzing on Air. Got the Tennessee Waltz. Shit from shinola. Only left the apartment on Earth Day to trek across town for cheap coffee grounds at the No-Frills. So. I wish I could disappear gentle reader, vanish and re-emerge as the porteiro in some run-down termas in Mangaratiba or Chuí. The woman over at Compassionate waziz, Julie Johnston, has apparently ... retired. Ah! When Chris Hedges talks about it he says: Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion. But the only mention of 'burnt children' I can find in Nietzsche is: Perhaps there even exists an order of rank among these burnt children, these born artists who can find the enjoyment of life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were, in a longwinded revenge on life): the degree to which life has been spoiled for them might be inferred from the degree to which they wish to see its image falsified, thinned down, transcendentalized, deified - the homines religiosi might be included among artists, as their highest rank. [Section 59 of 'Beyond Good and Evil', translation by Walter Kaufmann 1966. I can't find any more or any sign of a 'molten pit' in Adrian Del Caro's 2014 translation either.] I can't help wondering (and not for the first time) if Hedges is one of those homines religiosi our fine feathered Fred is on about? Friedrich Nietzsche & Arthur Rimbaud - some common elements in their life stories. I will tell you a little about the people in this photograph. Loyola Pomeroy was a fisherman in Great Paradise and one of the keepers of the Marticot lighthouse. They were two brothers, Loyola (Lol) and Albert who married two sisters, Bridgett and Carmel, and all of them kept the light as their mothers and fathers had done before (but that's another story). When I knew them they had taken the "shiftin' money" and so had to humbly ask the government's permission to come back to Paradise and live in their own houses for the duration of fishing season - because the government "growth centres" weren't really growing much except broken men and everyone knew it. Lol showed me how one man could get a drum of gas up out of a skiff and up onto the wharf at low tide by himself. He could also pick up a drum of gas and walk with it - without his arms going all the way around. He showed me how to "run new bearings" into a make-or-break engine without taking it up out of the boat. He taught me the rudiments of splitting cod - an essential skill. Lol fished lobster in the spring of the year and he was renowned for being able to stack an unbelievable number of lobster pots onto his punt on opening day, a huge pile. He would chug out of harbour, top heavy and wavering, with a proud smile that seemed to go twice around his face. One year he had his young son with him and, when they hit open water outside the harbour he caught a bad wave and it all tipped over. The water was freezing. He managed to push his son up onto the hull and hold him there - one hand on the keel and one on his son - but he could not get out of the water himself. When they found them Lol was dead. His son lived. Quite a legacy. The man in the middle was Alton, my father. Look how he puts his hands on their shoulders. Look at the size of those hands. See his smile. The woman was Elizabeth Anetta. See the eager vitality in her face. She quit smoking when she found herself pregnant with me - not so common in 1945 as it is now. She believed that carnal love touches the eternal (a crazy idea) and I must've picked it up from her somehow. The young fellow in front is my nephew. Up in Fort Mac these days makin' money. Still there even after all the recent layoffs. He has grown up to be quite tall, so that when he assumes Charlie Daniel's posture (below) it is particularly comical. There is an implicit story in the photograph as well. When I went out to Paradise in the late 60s, know-nothing kid from Toronto with a beautiful young woman companion - Harold Horwood called us the 'Paradise Hippies' when he wrote about it in The Telegram - mom and dad hired a float plane to come and see first-hand what we were up to. And found it good. Yeah. That was their way - see first-hand - and there's a lot to be said about that ... maybe later.   Postscript:                 THE DEATH OF THE MOVEMENT  BY CORRECTITUDE. You may already be aware of the 'Keep it in the Ground' campaign spearheaded by The Guardian. The development of this campaign is documented in a remarkably frank series of podcasts (six so far). The latest initiative is to promote a video to 'go viral' - and the first try came on-line on April 30th: Dear Bill Gates, Please help us to Keep it in the Ground. Now (after 24 hours) it is pushing 50,000 hits - too soon to say if it will really take off. If it did it might actually reach Bill Gates. I find the campaign fascinating because Alan Rusbridger and The Guardian are playing it straight. If you listen to the podcasts (above) you will see the birth of a campaign: bumbling, bungling, warts and all. It began when Rusbridger met Bill McKibben late last year as they were both about to be awarded 'Right Livlihood' awards, and finally hit the front page of the Guardian in March; and although McKibben has not (as yet and as far as I can see) supplied much substantive support, his '350.org' logo appears on some of the Guardian pages endorsing the campaign. I may be quite a cynic but the thing has captured my imagination and I have done what I can (which is not much to be sure) to make it known about in Toronto (as mentioned in the last few posts here). So yesterday, as I just so happened to be on-line when Alan Rusbridger's email with the video link arrived, I immediately passed on the news to the Toronto 350 mailing list (something on the order of 100 email addresses). It wasn't long before the 'President' of 350 Toronto whacked my peepee: Please don't use the members' list for posting things like this. The members list is for important announcements that relate directly to the whole group. This isn't the kind of thing we want to fill our people's inboxes with — especially without explanation. People will either think it's spam (especially with an moralistic and imposing subject line like that), or might have seen it before from other sources. [sic] Judge for yourself how imposing and moralistic it was. The entire message was, "Please look at this and pass it on, it's the right thing to do!" with the URL of the video. Oatmeal is moralistic? Who knew? This is not the first (or even the second or third) time I have been stopped cold by Toronto 350 on bullshit correctitude issues. The last time was when I suggested making a Chinese Dragon in the form of a black tar-sand pipeline. The only reaction was for someone to inform me that 'Chinese Dragon' is not an inclusive term and that some people might feel 'unsafe' in places where such phrases were spoken openly (this from the so-called 'Director of Outreach'); and the chairman of the meeting (the 'President' already mentioned) refused to include the suggestion in the minutes. And that was the end of that (!). Not a pretty question but ... I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG  WITH YOU PEOPLE?! (Thanks to Bill Maher.)   For someone firmly embedded in an agnostic/atheist landscape - even a fat old whoremonger like me - it is hard to live down early exposure to the KJV. This empty space now resonates with Lot's story of Sodom (and the very comparable 'Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like'). And one can't help but wish that any of them had heard and understood Matthew's "go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone". What to do? Good question. Best idea is to get (ta fuck) outa this uptight town somehow but ... I don't have the money for that anymore gentle reader ... nor any objective, nor any invitations. Oh my. I'll come back to this issue in a week or so when I've cooled down. A-and here's an interesting 75 cent word for y'all (picked up this week in Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians') - maieutic: Pertaining to intellectual midwifery, i.e. to the Socratic process of assisting a person to bring out into clear consciousness conceptions previously latent in his or her mind. (OED) And anyone with experience of midwifery knows it's a messy business. The 'come-back-to-this-issue', the carry-on (carrion?) is here. Fact is, you just never know: After some months of apparently increasing indifference my sweet beloved sends a bunch of photographs and pretty soon I'm hummin' Manu Chao "Só têm que ser homens" and dreaming of better days - and then she wants pictures from me and I don't have any but I snap a few selfies on the cell phone and figgure out how to get them over onto the computer and then here. Ain't love strange. Ignominy nothin' !!   Did I tell you I love you     I love you.                 Did I tell you I love you    I love you. today? No.                                                     today? No.                     I adore men with Alzheimer's. Unfortunately it's not all funny: Sex, Dementia and a Husband on Trial at Age 78 (in the NYT a few weeks ago).

 
[Up, Down]

(Valentine's Day)

When the music (finally) stops and you're between chairs,
and there's nowhere left to go.
What then?

[Up, Down]

Friday 13th yesterday and the start of Carnaval. A rare confluence and hard to resist. This is the 128th post, 26. Imagine that! This ambiguous young person at the right with appliqué breasts. Who can say with confidence what's goin' on? It's the stuff of bedtime stories, of Prospero & Ariel. Proper thing to do was take the money & run to a hidey hole. There were hints, clues & examples - all ignored. Thing is, one can always emerge from a well-stocked Thousand Secrets bomb shelter - and pick one's time to do it too, or not, or, not have the choice. I closed the deal on the house in Metcalfe on Valentine's Day ... mid-80s sometime ... 85? No reason for choosing that day, a whim. I paid way too much, doomed from the get-go, simple as that. I thought, "I'll make a stand in Metcalfe," and then I tried to but didn't have the jam. ashram: a place of religious retreat, sanctuary, or hermitage; adaptation of Sanskrit 'asrama' hermitage, from 'a' (near to, towards) + 'srama' (exertion, earnest endeavour). forbear: a very old verb indeed - many citations in the OED starting in the (incomprehensible) 9th C; check out Ephesians 4 (& read on about the whoremongers). Elections in Nigeria today, could be the end of Goodluck Jonathan. And it's the anniversary of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger - there's a stone memorial halfway up Signal Hill to close that story. I recommended three good efforts recently and forgot to mention Angela and GreenSpiration! Doh! I found these excellent videos thanks to her newsletter (there's a link on her site to sign up):         Bill Moyers, The Children’s Climate Crusade; and,         Naomi Klein & Owen Jones, This Changes Everything.     (Both videos point at books.)

When this (right) by Chiquinha first came up I missed the connection with Charlie Hebdo and thought, "She's heartbroken and is (simply) telling us about her broken heart, sweet." Then the insatiable curtiosity of elephant child kicks in ... (see TV clip).

Why don't you put    Why don't you put     Why don't you put    Why don't you put   Who are you your memories         your metaphors         your jaws                your molecules        really? on paper?                on the clothesline?     in the barrel?           in a credit rating?    I'm not shouting! [Serasa: The word is not in Dicionário inFormal nor Houaiss - nor anything in between: Webster's, Collins &c.. The only on-line references I can find are to the name of the largest Brazilian credit rating agency: Serasa aka Serasa Experian.] If Jerry Van Amerongen's air-horn floor-lamps catch on (like, say, hula hoops) will it be enough (I wonder) to penetrate, to upset the smug complacency that rules? Probably not. Life would be simple if it were all white-hats & black-hats like in western movies; all Citizens & Terrorists. The correctitude mavens (in white & brown) at The Globe and Mail want it to be the cancer of extremism. There is a notion among some Christians that pursuing the historical Jesus is persuing a red herring - along the lines of the "If there's a design then there must be a designer" falacy, heresy, whatever these kinds of things are called theology-wise. Chris Hedges (in the article referenced a few posts ago) quotes his friend Hamza Yusuf talking about duelling in Kentucky & Ireland and honour and "something deep in the soul of men". He may have something useful to offer here - even if he did write a book called 'I Don't Believe in Atheists' just a few years ago, even if he doesn't find the Charlie Hebdo cartoons funny, and even if he makes the (mistaken I think) leap with Hamza Yusuf to "I have no feeling of solidarity with mockers." The people at Charlie Hebdo knew they were pulling the tiger's tail and knew, not hypothetically but from experience, that the tiger has claws. I do find some of the cartoons funny (though I also appreciate how Hedges may not) but regardless of that their characters include courage - in spades! I know a shrink who thinks that all humour involves putting someone down. I don't agree with her but she has arguments (which I'm sorry I can't remember well enough to recapitulate) including references in Freud (I think). I just wish Charlie Hebdo would chase the purveyors of the environmental catastrophe with the same enthusiasm, fervour ... as assiduously and acerbically! Here, this was going to be a separate post but I'll make it a Valentine's bonus: How fuckin' stupid Are these people?!! •   EU paper calls for binding CCS targets by 2030, Arthur Neslen, Monday 26 January 2015. Phony solutions proposed by time-servers - even the time frame (2030?) is nonsense;   •   David Cameron rejects call for fracking ban, Damian Carrington, Monday 26 January 2015;   •   The Other Pipeline You Should Worry About, It’s Not Just Keystone XL, It’s Also Line 61, Dan Kaufman, January 16 2015;   •   The Keystone XL Illusion, Joe Nocera, January 16 2015;   •   Regulators grant environmental permits for Lancashire fracking site, Press, Friday 16 January 2015;   •   Oil lobby calls for North Sea tax reductions as BP cuts 300 jobs, Terry Macalister, Thursday 15 January 2015;   •   Engaging with oil companies on climate change is futile, admits leading UK environmentalist, Damian Carrington, Thursday 15 January 2015;   •   It is 'impossible' for today’s big oil companies to adapt to climate change, Jonathon Porritt, Thursday 15 January 2015;   •   Does climate change exist? The Senate is about to let us know, Suzanne Goldenberg, Thursday 15 January 2015;   •   Harvard defies divestment campaigners and invests tens of millions of dollars in fossil fuels, Suzanne Goldenberg, Wednesday 14 January 2015;   •   For the Love of Carbon, Paul Krugman, January 11 2015;   •   Australia accelerates coal mine projects in the face of study that finds it should stay buried, Oliver Milman, Wednesday 7 January 2015;   •   Organic farming not always best for environment, says government adviser Lord Krebs, Fiona Harvey, 7 January 2015;   •   Heavyweight Response to Local Fracking Bans, Jack Healy, January 3 2015;   'Infantilizing dictats' says George Monbiot. It's out of context here but ... that's exactly the phrase that seems to sum it up for me and I like it. ['Dictat' (with a short 'A') is not quite in the OED, and the plural (not quite) suggested is 'dictata', and one might expect italics for a Latin expression - SO - it may simply be a typo in The Guardian (and not the first time) - OR - it may be intended as written, in which case, like I said ... I like it.] Your keen apprehension will have picked out Lancashire in this list of official nonsenses ... So. This Valentine is also going out to the members of Frack Free Lancashire: Good On 'Em! Meanwhile the science gets clearer & clearer: •   Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists, Oliver Milman, Thursday 15 January 2015;   •   Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet, Will Steffen et al., January 2015; and an accessible pdf; and Supplementary Information (pdf);   •   The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration (pdf), Will Steffen et al., January 2015; and Supplementary Material;   •   Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says, Carl Zimmer, January 15 2015;   •   Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean, Douglas J. McCauley et al. - Abstract the rest is locked up tightly;   Grant you, the scientists involved are not naked and shouting on streetcorners or rooftops, the conclusions are all carefully hedged, but you don't have to read between the lines, you just have to read all of the lines to get the message: We Are (Very Nearly) Fucked!

I think there's enough in the frames above to see what they have in common. And now? We will do what?

Anyway ... I checked in 'Six Nonlectures': ee cummings absolutely uses 'soi-disant' so I am diddled. And doubly diddled because in the process of re-reading emerges a privileged, smug, self-involved ungrownup child, a 50s Mick Jagger (of a sort) whom I missed first time through. Oh well. Still laffin' over it though; have to say I would include both expressions in my lexicon: soi-disant for self-styled solipsism, pretentious pretence, general complacent assholery - bog standard pillicock posers; and soi distant for serious & pathological alienation carrying hints of ecstasy, Greek theatre, (possibly noble) hauteur, (possibly fearful) reserve - the mind-state of politicians, bureaucrats, drone pilots and weapons manufacturers.

A Moment of reflection with Herman the Wolf:   Starting tomorrow I'm going to start loving people ... as if there were no tomorrow. This was another ... Moment of Reflection.

I'm not dead yet. Anything could happen. You thinks I know fuck not'ing, but I know fuck all! [Thanks to Lloyd & Anita, and this Valentine is for them as well."]   To err is human! To really fuck up is even more human!   Be mine Valentine.

 
[Up, Down]

Sheep & Goats (Full Moon).

Lookout! The living-dead are on the loose!

[Up, Down]

Indeed, on the 17th will begin the Chinese lunar Year of the Sheep, Year of the Goat, or Year of the Ram - as you like. In Portuguese, however, 'carneiro' is specifically a male sheep or ram, with 'ovelha' for the generic, 'bode' for billy goat and 'cabra' for nanny goat. One of those little linguistic cracks that let in the light. :-) [Letting in light for the dim dills eh? As usual I've got it wrong and make little or no sense. And yet, all pretentions revealed ... even imagining these cracks is a comfort.]

And worse still considering the likes of Canada's Ludicrous Left which is as much behind building pipelines as the rest of the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers. There is a HUGE turd coming down the pipe (followed by many more), officially unacknowledged and popularly not hardly understood, but it's there on the periphery of the Zeitgeist and soon to be a central feature (and soon after that 'the' central feature). It's in the consciousness and no accident that Gwynne Dyer began to take the environmental catastrophe seriously when he noticed his chums in senior security positions doing so.

Most of you will make out the fellow to the left as a Republican, but some of Joep Bertrams' acronyms may not be familiar: Pegida, PVV, FN, and UKIP. And there are others popping up every day (reminiscent of Edward Lear: "And thick and fast they came at last, and more, and more, and more!"). Neo-Nazis of one flavour and another, Stephen Harper's Conservatives of course, and whatever Tony Abbott's party is called. It would be bad enough if these were nutbar fringes, but it's mainstream in Canada & Australia and increasingly so elsewhere.

 

Belt tightening in a home economy, at the scale of one or several individuals or a family, even some certain small neighbourhoods, can be accomplished without immediate blood letting. At larger scales I think not. At larger scales it's police and the army and vigilantes and gangs of thugs. A suite of Laerte on the general theme (a ram in this case): What cracks nuts: Nutcracker! Nutcracker! Speak to me nutcracker. The magic is gone. Will it be the year of the ram? The Ram - One Act:         Study         Pain         Applause         Immortality The Ram - Second One Act: EMPOWERMENT STATION      Fill the tank.      More!      More. The Ram - One Act No. 3:             Do the possible and you will get the probable. The Ram - One Act IV:             Forgetting the causes does not cancel the effects. The Ram - One Act Vol. 7:         This is the historical moment. This is the historical place. I just don't feel like it.   The Twilight Zone (indeed) I:

Brian Gable's effort comes from 2013 - so, a perspicacious fellow then, is Mister Gable. Watching the whole State of the Union speech several times I see a good man, worn out and looking for a Flander's Fields moment. No one in sight to pass the torch to though ... Oh well.

The Twilight Zone (indeed) II: Why do we hate the politicians (when we do hate them) so viscerally? Is it that they (the ones we hate) lie so transparently and so continuously that our psyches are forced into a lower register? The phrase 'dead cat bounce' turned up in The Globe and Mail. Quite forthright talk for Crowley or whatever his name is to permit on his pages. See: Crude oil prices gain for second day: A bottom or a ‘dead cat bounce’?. 'Hog cycle' is another one: Oil's 'hog cycle' smacks Canada but in this case the columnist is touting the Bank of Canada deputy governor, Timothy Lane. I am hoping that his 'hog cycle' analysis is optimistic and that the decline hovers just above drop dead until the greed heads have squandered all their cash and wind up in the welfare line (with me). It hardly got started ... ... and 2015 has already crashed.   But Adão exaggerates. It hasn't missed, yet. 2015 is the last chance saloon sure enough but it's got some months to go. Gonna be what they call in the trade a 'cliff hanger'. (David Wilson)   I wonder if readers find this blog irritating in the way that I often find Doctor Who irritating?

 
[Up, Down]