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POETRY

poems of the month

orpheus in soho

a seriously sexy man

fish

measuring my face

old clothes

modern iranian poems

my hero

face at the bottom of the world

perhaps (maybe)

the diogenes sequence

where to store furs

i am and am not:
      fragments of rumi

destiny and destination

the zen of no-enlightenment

the iraqi monologues

already backwards

a light in ruins

separate amputations

the sexy jihad

awaiting the barbarians

the smell of possibilities

ultimate leaves

rejoice in the dog

post-millennium maggot

the book of nothing

dispatches from the war against the world

albanian poems

french poems in honour of jean genet

the hells going on

the joy of suicide

book disease

foreground trouble

the transcendental hotel

cinema of the blind

lament of the earth mother

uranian poems

haikai by okami

haikai on the edge

black hole of your heart

jung's motel

wine and roses

confession from belgrade

gloss on rilke's ninth duino elegy

jewels and shit: poems by rimbaud

villon's dialogue with his heart

vasko popa:
a shepherd of wolves ?

the rubáiyát of omar khayyám

genrikh sapgir:
an ironic mystic

the love of pierre de ronsard

imagepoem

 

TRANSLATIONS

 

BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE

maxims, part two

nice men and
  suicide of an alien

anti-fairy tales

the most terrible event in history

maxims in hungarian translation

the maxims of michel de montaigne

the rich man and the leper

disgusting

art, truth and bafflement

 

SHORT STORIES

godpieces

the three bears

three albanian tales

a little creation story

waybread

lazarus the leper

 

ESSAYS & MEMOIRS

helen's tower

extortion through e-bay

schopenhauer for muthafuckas

never a pygmy

against money

'original sin' followed by
crippled consciousness

a gay man's guide to soft-willy sex

the holosensual alternative

tiger wine

the death of poetry

the absinthe drinker

with mrs dalloway in ukraine

love  and  hell

running on emptiness

a holocaust near you

a note on the cathars

happiness

londons of the mind
& dealing death to the caspian

genocide

a muezzin from the tower of darkness

kegan and kagan

being or television

satan in the groin

womb of half-fogged mirrors

tourism and terrorism

the dog from sinope

shoplifting

this sorry scheme of things

the bektashi dervishes

a holy dog and a dog-headed saint

fools for nothingness

death of a bestseller

vacuum of desire: a homo-erotic correspondence

a note on beards

 

PHOTOGRAPHS

introduction

metamorphotos

 

Nuadú, God of War

field guide to megalithic ireland

houses for the dead

french megaliths

 

a small town in france

 

 

 

 

 

'Man is a frightened animal who must lie
in order to live.'

- Ernest Becker

 

 

 

'If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering,
then we are the most maladapted species on the planet.'

- Schopenhauer

 

click
to visit the

SHALLOW THOUGHTS
website

 

 

 

 

combat
normality

Swami Vrhka Baba

MAXIMS

(Latin: Maxima Sententia - "greatest pronouncements")


"EVERY MAN TALKS - IF TALK HE MUST - THE SAME TRIPE."
Samuel Beckett


click here for
aforizmák
Hungarian translations


aforizmák

 

1. I think - therefore I do not understand...
that other creatures also might think, and perhaps more simply, better.

2. Mankind's destiny and motto:
to change the world and not ourselves.

3. "Perfection of the life or of the art" precludes - as does our civilisation - perfection of the art of life.

4. Just how 'superior' is our abuse of our 'superiority' to Nature ?

5. Machines and institutions grind on while we do all the work
of failing to live well.

6. The people we call 'great' are just the most-noisily dissatisfied.

7. The worst of us are good citizens.

8. The only Pillar of Wisdom: There is no human wisdom.

9. Humans have 'suceeded' because we perform so well in crises.
So we have turned the world into a permanent crisis.

10. Religion: institutional conspiracies to cut us off from Nature and ourselves,
and efficient means of bending reality.

11. Desire is both a form and a creator of suffering.

12. We who have not killed ourselves know nothing of self-respect.

13. The examined life may also not be worth living.

14. The profoundest oppression is aspiration.
In a "free society" the most difficult freedoms are freedom from
envy and disappointment.

15. From the Indus to Silicon Valley, the most "successful" societies have been the most dysfunctional.

16. Physics and Philosophy are offshoots from Religion,
and religion is the supernatural justification of power
and power-structures.

17. Love is like faith: not so much a leap in the dark as a windowless room with daubed walls. It is also appropriation.

18. Evil prospers - because prospering is malign.

19. Man is God's Original Sin, and farmers are his Cherubim.

20. In a world devoured by his demons, the best of Man is his ruins.

21. After conquering America the goddess Avaritia stepped out of the closet and became Queen of Heaven.

22. The past is an odourless lie - sanitised meat-dust and pain.

23. The American Dream: globalising hallucination.

24. Only self is shallower than mind.

25. When the only spiritual value is Liberty, all falls apart
just as all falls apart when the only social value is Normality.

26. The Outsider defines himself not by inclusion in any group but by exclusion from all.

27. The greatest artists remain unknown.

28. Without farmers there would be no armies.
Without armies there would be no farms.

29. Depression, apathy, rage cruelty: what we are controlled into.

30. You cannot be smart and have a pure heart.

31. All institutions are malignant because they quickly come to exist only for their own perpetuation. Even if, like the French National Assembly, they vote themselves out of existence, something worse will take their place.

32. Nelson Mandela spent a fifth of his life in solitary confinement. A thousand million creatures spend their whole lives solitary confinement and torture, as 'pets' and 'food' and laboratory animals.

33. Progress is a kind of retrovirus.

34. There is no narrative but that which we impose:
the destruction of Nature through Reason.

35. Those who do not worship trees and mountains
are already dead.
The universe is living - but for us whose consciousness
is a greed-hole in the head.

36. An "Otherworld" is not another place or time or state of consciousness, but another attitude.

37. Just as most pædophilia is parental
most murderous terrorism is governmental.

38. The Nation State shrinks people into mere function
(within 'Normality'). Thus Roma and 'vagrants' cannot be tolerated - and freethinkers must be ignored.

39. We cannot afford to understand that other mammals might communicate rather better (and more economically) than we do.

40. Humans do not so much communicate as create communication-problems.

41. The offer of 'personal salvation' by Religion is at best irresponsible, and at worst cynical. 'Salvation' can only be global - and hence is impossible. In any case, we have fully demonstrated that we have no souls.

42. Men without beards have an extra job to 'prove their masculinity'!

43. Information is a dangerous myth, and the desire for it is just another aspect of our galloping greed.

44. The more technology we have
the more infantilised we get.

45. Only the dead are wise. And, as Samuel Beckett said,
"The living wash in vain."

46. You rarely see a man in public joy except at some kind of victory.

47. The most spiritual beings are icebergs.

48. Men are good a making structures.
Women are good at getting out of the way when they collapse.

49. There are a few sages - but not one stupid tree.

50. The oldest trap of consciousness is Novelty.



51. Self-contradiction is the hallmark of wisdom.

52. Western civilisation has always been mechanistic:
e.g .the mechanical procession of the Saved to Heaven
and of the Damned to Hell.

53. Every time I turn on a tap - or my computer - a piece of world dies.

54. Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is our stupidity and Nature's mistake and misery.

55. To a dog all the world is dog, but to us it is fragments of a dream that we cannot reassemble.

56. All of us behind windows, shut in by doors, ignore the crucifixion of a tree.

57. It is perversely unfair to reward success -
which is surely its own reward.

58. If you want to be happy - stop wanting.

59. Our culture's obsession with success ensures our failure- and the Sixth Extinction.

60. Humanity is a word for the heartless. Whenever I hear it, I feel sick.



61. The only limit to human horror is human imagination.

62. The great human sharing: unacknowledged shame.

63. 'The Deep' is a fantasy that we shallow beings place inside our heads.

64. Culture: a thousand subtle forms of shallowness.

65. Ritual: pompously-shared routine.

66. Our brains are hooligans' footballs.

67. An interesting accident of language:
fiction is the major part of crucifixion.

68. Who now knows the difference between Thalamos and Thanatos (Marriage and Death) ?

69. Death is not dearth but payment to the earth.

70. The answer to Chuang-tzu's question Where can I find someone who has forgotten language so that I can have a word with him ? is: Listen to a dog.

71. Knowing my dog is like knowing God: a liminal being beyond world.

72. The creator of Anti-Memes: doomed to failure!

73. What we are is how we think and thought is only words.

74. Explanations (the obsession of our culture) also are only words. Having moved from cultures of miracles to a monoculture of explanation, we now prefer words to miracles.

75. Nationality is one of the most poisonous and lethal concepts of the European mind.

76. Farming: the first, greatest - and last - malignance.

77. Employment is both the most trivial and the most dangerous form of work.

78. 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd...'
What rubbish! Poetry is the opposite of the obvious.

79. Because vision does not depend on light but on sensitivity, there is no such thing as darkness.

80. Culture is awareness-abuse as "education" (which has long since been only schooling) is childmind-abuse.

81. The chief function of culture is, by restricting our awareness, to prevent us from committing suicide.

82. We are indoctrinated with a belief in our superior power of reason - but we abandon reason at the slightest and most unreasonable excuse - and use reason to justify ourselves. Indeed the main use of reason is self-justification.

83. They think they have it - but there is no key to the Terrible Parade.

84. The world is nearly 100% non-human. What is human is surely only slightly interesting.

85. Our brains are clever condoms filled with demented sperm.

86. Most of us are too clever to understand that our intelligence is our stupidity.

87. The cruel, complicated shallows of that little reification, the human 'soul'.

88. The comfort of houses is the rape of the world.

89. In the war against happiness that is humanity, Man has won: we are the sunset of the world.

90. The greater the technology, the smaller the consciousness.

91. Holocaust: The worst that we do to each other is nothing compared with that we do to mammals, fish and birds.

92. Outliving evolution, we are all idiots-savants
stupefied by the tyranny of our concocted words.

93. Civilisation: the Experiment against Nature.


94. Those most afraid of death are those who never even thought of beginning to live.

95. Evolution is not just a one-way-street - but a cul-de-sac.

96. Senseless to weep for the end when the whole of it calls for tears.

97. The people who are lovelier than their bodies, the people who are uglier than their bodies, and the people who are at least as ugly as their bodies...

98. Sex is the exchange of spiritual disability within a physical connection.

99. Men's seed is tears rolling back into navel-tight eyes, into rotwork.

100. How to cut the crap, knowing that we are crap in the Empire of NothingButConsumption ?

 



continued on


Speak out - but do nothing!


 


'Better, oh better cancel from the Scroll
of Universe one luckless Human Soul,
than, drop by drop, enlarge the Flood that Rolls
hoarser with Anguish as the Ages Roll!'


- Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald


"It is very strange to be the only human being on the planet to have these thoughts."


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"It is hard enough for me to remember my opinions -
let alone my reasons for having them."

Friedrich Nietzsche

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