at the moment

 

Something I’m doing, and wherever it’s going, at the moment.

Lucy

 

‘Lucy’ by William Wordsworth put to music by The Divine Comedy back in the early 1990s, and which group is pretty much the efforts of Neil Hannon from Derry in Northern Ireland.

Hannon, for the sake of the song, changed around a little the order of the poem, which is in itself four shorter poems together comprising ‘Lucy’ as a whole, and the lyrics of the song below, which I’d suggest reading along in time with the song:

Lucy

The Divine Comedy

by W. Wordsworth

I travelled among unknown men, 
In lands beyond the sea; 
Nor, England did I know till then 
What love I bore to thee.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream! 
Nor will I quit thy shore 
A second time; for still I seem 
To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel 
The joy of my desire; 
And she I cherished turned her wheel 
Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, 
The bowers where Lucy played; 
And thine too is the last green field 
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
Beside the springs of Dove, 
A Maid whom there were none to praise 
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye 
-Fair as a star, when only one 
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know 
When Lucy ceased to be; 
But she is in her grave and, oh, 
The difference to me

A slumber did my spirit seal; 
I had no human fears; 
She seemed a thing that could not feel 
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force; 
She neither hears nor sees; 
Rolled around in earth's diurnal course, 
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Transposition

Scholars who become politicians are usually given the comic role of having to be the good conscience of a policy.

Nietzsche wrote this in his book Human, All Too Human in the late 1870s, and to transpose to our own times: 

Entertainers and celebrities who align with politicians and their ideologies are usually given the comic role of having to be the good conscience of a policy.

Go, go, you countercultural rock stars and icons of the entertainment industry! 

Not to add, lest the implication be too absolute, that scholars need feel too left out or aggrieved - they still have their role to play, and a not insignificant one. Though it simply must be understood, and most of all by the scholars themselves, that as we stride forwards in triumph and certainty, our Noam Chomskys are now a step or two below our Bruce Springsteens.

Sometimes for the cause, even pride must be tempered by humility.

Trafficker Interview Excerpt

Below is an excerpt from a fascinating interview with a child trafficker and sex/slave trafficker in general -  and who also indulges in some traditional drug trafficking on the side - and which interview in full might or might not appear in full somewhere, sometime:

Interviewer: What do you think of open borders?

Trafficker: I love them.

Germans, Dostoevsky

 I nourish the profound conviction that one has to practice getting used to Germans, and without such practice it is hard to tolerate them in large doses.

Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863).

Uncanny

“It’s great when you realise that your deepest convictions correspond exactly to policies being pushed by the political elites and the attendant or parallel power structures like the media, entertainment industry and so on.”

“And what’s interesting and gratifying is you often didn’t even realise they were your deepest convictions until the elites started pushing the policies that correspond to them.”

“Yes, that’s uncanny.”

watery

 

A piece from a while back I’ve gone back to working on a bit.

Soulscape 3

 

Something I’ve shown at least a couple of times, and which I still fiddle with hopefully towards a finished state I’m comfortable with. This with the tablet camera which gives a quite coarse look to it, like a filtered effect - which can be not unpleasing in itself.

Ascetic Principle

Indulgence in one thing will lead to indulgence in another.

The Moment We Lost the War

 

This was the very instant when it all went wrong. 

Higher and Lower Intelligentsia

“I’m not sure how true this is, and of course there’s going to be all kinds of shades of grey between the lines, but a thought came to me in terms of dividing up our modern intelligentsia into two groups.”

“Very interesting. Tell me.”

“Well, let’s say there’s the higher intelligentsia and the lower intelligentsia comprising the intelligentsia as a whole.”

“And how do you divide them?”

“Well, the higher intelligentsia believes their own bullshit.”

“And the lower intelligentsia?”

“They believe someone else’s bullshit.”

If not completely finished

 

A picture I’ve shown before, and here again, though now I think if not in its completely finished state, it’s probably very close to it.

We Don’t

Fake News Shitstorm have, you’ll be pleased to know, an upcoming single ready to be unleashed on our collective ears: We Don’t Talk About What We Don’t Want to Talk About (That’s Why Our Relationship Is So Strong).

Spruce Pipedream is said to be particularly excited to hear the song, and which he expects to be most likely a masterpiece.