Stuff from September, October, & November 2018

       Intellectual Integrity 

I’ve known far too many people

who’ve been a certain kind

of shitty human

(Homo sapiens being a species

predisposed to shittiness

in myriad ways),

the ones who try,

and succeed too often,

to pass off confidence as competence

and substitute guesswork and bluffing

for knowledge and understanding –

aggressively.

You’ve probably known people like that.

Maybe you’re one of them,

and don’t think that’s shitty at all.

             Free Speech and the Gurgler  

To Hell with censoring offensive language and hate speech.

To Hell with denying dickheads any platform at all.

To Hell with censorship in all its forms.

Let the only fetters to freedom of expression

be laws against incitement to violence, defamation,

false advertising, and fraud,

laws permitting the use of provocation

as a defence in cases of simple assault

(‘Them’s fightin’ words!’),

and, voluntarily, kindness.

But …

I’ve come, in my old age,

to understand what I imagine might be behind

some social-justice warriors’ craving for censoring

people who advocate various forms of shittiness.

Unlike the promulgators of the Enlightenment,

they seem to assume that most people are shitty –

something that I won’t dispute –

and given a free choice between shittiness

and intelligently reasoned decency

they’re likely to flock to the shitty ideas

en masse.

We’ve evolved with capabilities beyond our capabilities,

with too wide a range of mental aptitudes among us,

so the widespread revulsion toward corporate capitalism

and the misuse of state power

having reached beyond the intellectual elite

into the consciousness of people sorely oppressed

has brought outrage into minds unreceptive

to the intellectual niceties of Enlightenment values.

I’m receptive to them, though,

and censorship frosts my balls,

but it’s beyond my power to turn the tide of evolution

and prevent my species from destroying itself.

                     Confession  

I once struck a woman.

I was eighteen,

unattractively drunk, of course,

unskilled with managing testosterone rushes,

insecure, clueless,

devoid of self-esteem and social skills

(I still have those two flaws),

and under the influence

of my acculturation.

We were at a large party;

she was my date,

although I’d just met her,

and she was dancing close

with someone else.

I slapped her,

weakly.

As soon as I did it

I felt instant guilt and regret,

which I still feel

unpleasantly often

fifty-four years later.

As soon as I did it

she told me to get away from her

and stay away from her,

and I did.

We encountered each other again

in a professional situation

about twenty-two years later

and half a world away.

Neither of us mentioned anything,

but her eyes told me she remembered.

I wonder if my eyes did the same.

           Our Short-Term Future  

The human species, it seems to me,

is deep in the throes of a bad case

of Ozymandias syndrome,

with no sense of proportion

when it comes to either time or importance.

The eugeneodontida, for one small example,

patrolled the Devonian-period seas

for more than 155 million years;

Homo sapiens have been around

for fewer than two million,

and I don’t think we’ve evolved

to survive all that much longer,

since we have developed

with a genetically embedded

penchant for shittiness,

along with a self-destructive streak

and the capacity to use it.

All those trees I’ve planted all my life

have provided me with enjoyment

just by planting them,

and maybe some will flourish

when no people are left

to enjoy them,

and will do their flourishing

without self-reflection

or delusions of lasting legacies,

as did the eugeneodontida.

                 Unhappy Internal Health  

The country with some of the unhealthiest

social, political, economic, and cultural systems in the world,

the USA,

is one whose institutions of violent coercion are obese,

but whose institutions of justice are anorexic.

     Getting To Know You 

I read people poorly

and my judgements

in regard to the character

of those people I meet

more often than not

turn out to be inaccurate.

Now, my overall opinion

of people in general,

y’know, as a species,

tends to be extraordinarily low,

yet I usually form too high

a first opinion

of those individuals

whom I get to know

superficially,

but of course

I usually discover,

in time,

that I’m mistaken,

thereby reinforcing

my negative assessment

of the phenomenon of

the human race.

          Yearning for Kudos 

To the best of my memory,

I’ve never spoken or written

the word ‘yearn’

or any form of it

in an effort to communicate

with anyone,

other than mentioning it in the abstract

without context,

as I just did here.

Since I first heard it as a child

it’s seemed to me to be

corny and affected,

if not downright unnatural.

It still does,

partly because I first heard it

in the lyrics of

corny and affected

pre-rock & roll popular songs,

and partly because

to my trauma-damaged mind

the whole concept of yearning

for someone or something

seemed to me then

and seems to me now

to be silly and overblown.

I’ve never been comfortable

with the word ‘kudos’, either,

for some reason;

I’m even uncertain

about how to pronounce it,

since I don’t go around

pronouncing it.

             Gypsies and Indians 

The Gypsy Fair had come to Claudelands Park,

encircling their caravans and house buses – 

right where the local Somali-Kiwis usually

play pick-a-side soccer football –

looking like pioneers in old Western movies

when the Indians attacked,

using tactics seen only in cinema.

This time, on a footpath outside the circled wagons,

the Indians were a medium-elderly couple,

the woman with a bindi between her eyes,

plus my dog, and me.

They both asked me, in their subcontinental lilt,

if those were gypsies,

and I told them that no, they’re not Romani,

but they try to live like them.

The woman asked me if they sell things,

I told them, ‘Well, they try to’,

and they both laughed.

Then the man asked me if they lived in their vehicles,

as the real gypsies do,

and I said that they did,

then he asked if they go to another city next,

and I confirmed this.

The man seemed to like this thought,

and looked as if he were considering

running away to join the gypsies himself,

breaking out from his set-in-concrete life,

but his wife steered him away.

Romance has its limits.

                              Imperatives

You can’t be thin-skinned.

You must respect other people’s religions.

You have to keep up with the latest digital technology.

You should only do what you love.

You can’t lose your enthusiasm.

You must always have self-belief.

You have to believe in something!

You should look people in the eye.

You should always face your fears.

You shouldn’t ever eat margarine.

You shouldn’t ever eat butter.

Well, why can’t I?

Why do I have to?

Why must I?,

Why should I?

Why shouldn’t I?

Or else what?

In order to achieve what?

Who says so?

Why should I pay them heed?

What’s their angle?

Imperatives without context,

without qualifiers,

without clear indication of why they’re imperative,

seem to pour out of a certain type of people.

Whether I shalt not or otherwise,

I wouldn’t covet my neighbour’s ass, anyhow,

but I’d understand it if my neighbour coveted mine.

              Male Art  

The curator explained

how a certain woman artist

had described her work

as a reaction against minimalism,

which she called Male Art.

Now, I can sorta see the connection,

politically if not artistically,

as minimalist paintings often appear

on the walls of the headquarters

of predatory, male-dominated corporations –

guilt by association, and all that –

but I fail to understand how

this makes the paintings themselves –

which, incidentally, tend to leave moi,

a confessed male,

generally unmoved but not repelled –

innately gendered.

I would associate the idea of Male Art

with blurry representations

of staunch and manly stockmen on horseback

wearing oilskins and leather hats,

and smoking rollies in the rain;

or of lushly coloured paintings

of dissolute Restoration roués

carousing licentiously with buxom libertine wenches

in thickly furnished bordello parlours,

their attire in debauched disarray,

or maybe a couple of muscular mates

making shirtless goo-goo eyes at each other,

but then, my imagination is limited.

          Wild Breakfast Animals  

They returned from the breakfast buffet

put on by the conference organisers

and ensconced themselves at a table to tuck in.

The bald man with the fleshy face smirked,

pointed vaguely at his table partner’s

bowl of muesli with berries and melon balls

and said,

‘What kind of breakfast is that?

Are you a monkey? Or a rabbit?’

The olive-skinned fruit-lover smiled,

then gestured toward baldie’s

eggs with bacon, sausage, and ham and said,

‘That’s me; then you must be a hyena,

scavenging meat from animals

that somebody else has killed,

as you do.’

Stuff From July & August 2018

        The Last Morning In June 

I was looking for a book

like the one I’d just finished,

but they (whoever they were)

had rearranged things,

and all I could find

was a large, flat, white book;

I had no idea what it was,

so I was late for the buffet

and all the plates were gone;

the people just ahead of me took the last ones,

and the woman in the white server’s outfit

handed me some

porous cardboard paper plates,

but they wouldn’t do,

so she took them away

and I went to the drain

to wash a just-returned dirty dish,

but I was having trouble

getting some baked-on

cheese and pasta sauce from it,

and I figured that

all the food would be gone from the buffet

by the time I got to it,

so I said, ‘Fuck this dream. I’m getting up.’

And I did.

I opened my eyes,

had a good, long stretch,

climbed to my feet,

turned on the light,

donned my dressing gown,

and headed for the loo and the shower.

Everything was where it should be.

                  Cheesy Politics  

Not being an ideologically motivated vegan,

I sometimes buy a brand of sliced cheese called Yolo.

Havarti, Gouda, Emmental, Mozzarella.

It usually costs a bit less than Dairy Works.

This does present me with a values dilemma, though,

since Yolo is imported from Germany.

All those food kilometres!

Burning all those hydrocarbons

just to bring it to my local Pak’n Save.

I googled German dairying, though,

and learnt that since 2015

Germany has had the most stringent

animal welfare regulations

in the world,

and from what I can tell,

the New Zealand dairy industry

(it has become an industry, Wal)

seems to base its livestock-welfare practices

on the principle of sadism.

I can’t win on this one.

  

         Let Me Put You Wise: 

Children have enormous wisdom,

but puberty strips it away from most of us,

then after we acclimatise ourselves

to our urge-to-reproduce hormones

wisdom can start to return,

bit by bit,

in fits and starts,

for those of us

who let it

and don’t close it off,

until (if we don’t die)

in old age we approach

having the wisdom

that should have been obvious all along

when it’s already too late

to make effective use of it,

but part of that wisdom

is to know that this doesn’t matter.

(El diablo sabe más porque es viejo que porque es el diablo.)

      White People and Toilet Paper

I remember when I was seven or eight

reading a story about how a girl in western Virginia,

or some such Appalachian place,

when it was what they called the frontier,

had been captured in a raid by irate locals,

or Indians as they were then called,

whose land her people had stolen

and who had, in return,

munted all the rest of the colonising invaders

in the settlement where she’d been living.

The story then jumped ahead a few years

to when some colonising frontiersmen

had found her, thoroughly acculturated

and integrated with her adoptive people,

married and a mother,

and it told how she refused to be liberated

and returned to white civilisation in Virginia.

In my child’s mind I wondered,

knowing that Indians were savages

who lived in camps in the forest –

what the book called the wilderness –

without streets or other civilised amenities,

I wondered how she had been able to live

without toilet paper,

the idea that white people

didn’t have toilet paper

back in the seventeenth century

didn’t occur to my little head.

       A Reflection On Extinction 

I really shouldn’t watch video clips

that show me what’s going on in the world,

with real people and everything.

It makes me feel shame for being a human,

for being another member of their species,

due to the evil and cruelty, yes,

but even more,

I think,

due to the stupid.

                 Blowing Bubbles  

Y’know, when I was much younger,

university undergraduate age, and thereabouts,

I thought it was a worthy goal

to be able to mix, and fit in comfortably,

with any kind of social company,

upper class, middle class, or desperately poor,

bosses or workers,

urban, suburban, or rural,

ancestry from any continent or country

or ethnicity or mixture thereof,

educated or just-went-to-school,

artistically aware or just plain square.

I thought that this would give me

a richer life experience

and awareness of a more diverse range of perspectives,

than just, as people say in 2018,

staying inside my bubble,

so I tried to give it a go.

A half-century or so later

I have a somewhat different viewpoint.

A lifetime of experience

and the tardy, gradual growing of my self-awareness

have convinced me that

I’m unable to feel at ease mixing socially

with any kind of company at all.

I don’t even have a bubble.

       Snake Oil, Anyone?  

She dismissed all of science

with a dismissive sneer

as ‘male and Western’ –

being, as she was,

in the business of selling

unscientific therapies and remedies.

I wonder about the respect

that her blanket dismissal showed

to the more than one and a half million

Chinese woman scientists.

               Snapshot Us  

Our long and stumbling

series of tiny incremental changes

from being animals of the forests and fields

to palaeolithic hunters and gatherers

to the multifaceted, glittery, destructive,

cruelty-based mess that we have today

has been painfully uneven;

we’re now gathering the harvest

of our evolutionary mismatch

between intelligence and egotism:

We have the brains to construct

fabulous civilisations

and the vestigial sort of

primordial atavistic survival instincts

to destroy each other en masse.

We’re able to look at the stars and wonder,

but our brains have also evolved to focus

on our personal lives and self-absorption,

and most find it awkwardly difficult

to acknowledge our insignificance

in a universe of a size we’re unable to imagine,

let alone picture,

so over the millennia we’ve tried

to explain it all on a human scale,

preferring to create explanations

that put us in the centre

to just enjoying the wonder,

even though with a bit of uncowardly thought

it’s obvious that we’re not.

        Power & Culture 

We are supreme on this planet!

We don’t eat what we kill!

We don’t kill what we eat!

We’re victorious and glorious;

warriors deserving of dominion

over all life forever!

Aren’t we?

        European Spiritual Art 

She told me that when she was in Italy

one thing that struck her was

that there seemed to be

an architecturally significant church

on almost every city block,

and that some local Italians

approached her,

in her traditional long, Navajo plush dress,

full turquoise adornment,

and striking Navajo features

and asked her for spiritual advice.

She told me that she wondered

what all those churches are for

if they’d approach her with this;

“And I’m a fucking lawyer,” she added.

When I see images

of mediaeval or renaissance paintings

of saints and such

that purport to be spiritual,

what I usually see is depictions of people

whose faces seem to indicate

that they’re having digestive difficulties.

Maybe it’s those expensively gilded

circular things around their heads.

          The Wisdom of the Ancients  

I scoffed at his complicated woo-woo folderol,

and he said, ‘Who are you to question

the Wisdom of the Ancients?’

and I couldn’t help but snicker:

The Wisdom of the Ancients?

What about the stupidity of the Ancients?

Or the mediocrity of the Ancients?

Or the piss-taking of the Ancients?

Or the guesswork-and-bluffing of the Ancients?

The Ancients were, you know, people just like us,

and capable of the same bullshit as we are,

only the ones with wisdom

had less knowledge to work with

than wise people have now,

since wise people are also curious people,

and have always passed on new stuff that they’ve learnt

to the next generation of wise people,

while the stupid people,

being too stupid to know that they’re stupid,

and unable to distinguish wisdom from dog vomit,

just keep repeating the same old ancient shit.

             Elitism   

It seems to me that,

in recent years at least,

the word ‘elitism’

has increasingly become

a pejorative that people

with more or less

average mental ability

use to pass disparaging judgement

on people who are

significantly smarter than they are,

but who lack the good taste

to pretend that they’re not.