Adapted from the subtitle file for "Frank", 2014.

998
01:31:14,869 -- 01:31:20,298
♪ Banjaxed and broken

99901:31:20,333 --01:31:25,344
♪ Smashed up in bits

1000
01:31:25,880 -- 01:31:30,675
♪ The only way

1001
01:31:30,676 -- 01:31:34,979
♪ That everything fits

1002
01:31:35,765 --01:31:39,810
♪ All held together

1003
01:31:39,811 --01:31:44,447
♪ With spitballs and string

1004
01:31:45,066 -- 01:31:48,902
♪ And splinters of wood

1005
01:31:48,903 -- 01:31:53,706
♪ On a wren's broken wing.

1006
01:31:54,117 -- 01:31:58,495
♪ Now what's together

1007
01:31:58,496 -- 01:32:03,716
♪ Will soon come apart

1008
01:32:03,876 -- 01:32:08,547
♪ And there's no going

1009
01:32:08,548 -- 01:32:13,309
♪ Back to the start.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605717/

This is my modest Installation

called The Castle and the Chairs
upon the Terrace.

(In fact, the castle is a 12th century keep or donjon.
I live 200 yards and over 800 years away.
This sort of 'castle', rare in France,
became common in Ireland...
which was occupied for 800 years
- though not by the French.)

I liked the term "Significant Other"

when it was current several years ago.
It has been replaced by the cardboard "Partner".
My Significant (or, as I prefer, Special) Other
has never 'co-habited' with me, lives in a different country,
visits me for a month or so at least three times a year.
He is my non-cohabiting, celibate end-of-life-partner.
We have many things 'in common',
but sexual congress is not one of them.

He is a Dead-Head. He has two Significant Others.
My surname is the same as that of The Grateful Dead's
great rhythm guitarist.
His other Significant Other (whom he hasn't seen for years
but talks with several times a week on the old-fashioned
landline telephone) has the same first name
as the G.D.'s brilliant lead guitarist with an Hispanic surname.
I think this is Otherly Significant.

Double Exposure

from 1994.

Doing very well for themselves.

I ruined my mother's life
by getting conceived
- even if it was my mysterious father's fault.
(It's possible he never knew, unless, of course,
he was a member of the non-immediate family -
but that's irrelevant.)
Perhaps I suffer from Survivor Guilt.

'When I was young' I used to hear about people
who 'had done very well for themselves'.
I did very well for myself quite quickly
by jumping off the social ladder, and, much later,
thanks to the mother whose life I did not enhance,
guiltily acquiring a modest and delightful home in France.

The Pilate Syndrome Updated.

As well as bullet-proof vests,
guns, radiophones and tazers,
police now carry
hand-sanitizers.

The achieving do-gooders and saviours

may, 'in the larger scheme of things',
do less good than is commonly supposed -
by making so many of those that they work with and on
feel like failures.

(There must be exceptions - of course.)

You might think that you wouldn't need to treat the French police

with quite as much caution as police, State Troopers or the National Guard in the USA,
or, indeed,  the Revolutionary Guard in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Think again...

On the third of January this year, Cédric Chouviat, a courier on a scooter
was stopped by French police, thrown to the ground, throttled,
and passed out, shouting  "I can't breathe!". (J'étouffe!)
Two days later he died.  [read more]

Show annoyance, anger, outrage or contempt for such bullies
and you will probably not be beaten up, but will end up in court,
receiving a 3-month prison sentence (suspended for five years),
and very likely personal damages to the gendarme you annoyed
 - for to annoy a gendarme is Verbal Assault as well as a Crime against the State.

For calling a gendarme un con (an asshole)
when he gave me twenty minutes' petty, xenophobic grief,
I had to pay him six hundred euros 'compensation'
 on top of the mandatory suspended sentence
- plus administrative costs. But my obligatory,
charming, and quite useless advocate came free
because of my considered poverty.

I have always loved

the Grimm story of The Feisty Little Tailor.
who, like governments and corporations everywhere
boasted successfully of his achievement,
not letting on that the Seven at One Blow that he killed
were flies, not men.

Today, single-handedly, I changed the cover of my king-sized duvet*.

*Formerly known as Continental Quilt, the French word applies only
to a couette filled with goose- or eider-down.

Sooner or later

(probably sooner for me than for you)
everyone will discover, with their last breath,
that the New Normal is the infinitely-old Death,
the non-experience of liberation entirely new.

What's in a name ?

Swiftopecten swiftii 'Hamburger'

photo by Aleksandr Semenov

A "New Normal" is unlikely.

Double and triple air-kissing
is back in France, alas! 
though hand-shaking seems not to be...yet.

Perhaps touching cheeks isn't particularly infectious
if both parties hold their breaths...

The figures will show if, two weeks from now
there will be a rise in the number of deaths.*

*currently only six in this département of little more than a quarter of a million humans.

In Shakespeare's time and later

people would unashamedly swear and curse:
Zounds! for example (= Christ's Wounds)
and Plague Upon You! 

Not many today
would shout at others: Covid Get You!
or Cancer take you in a hearse!
- not even in a controversial play.

I curse the voracious little Bambi
that ate the red-flowered horse-chestnut seedling,
which I planted in my unfenced acre of deciduous trees
to enhance it and attract the bees.

Note:
In Ireland I left behind my little badger-sanctuary
of elder-trees so dear to brocks
in which I planted dozens of trees, both native and exotic
- including Eucryphia and Embothrium from Chile,
Rhododendron macabeanum from Nepal,
and from New Zealand, Pseudopanax ferox.
from cool, damp climates all.
By now it will be impenetrable
to all but the badgers and the fox.

The Forward Fixation

People have been coming forward
constantly in this (difficult) (testing) time (of crisis)
to tell us (more or less straightforwardly)
about the way forward to meet the challenge,
boldly proceed along a road-map through uncharted waters
so that we can advance, move forward (if not look forward)
towards actually going forward to a future
called The New Normal
in which, indulging in the old, familiar vices,
we can again advance our aspiration
to be very comfortable being backward.


                 Fifty Ways to avoid being The New Normal
place your order now with  Heart of Albion Press.

'Mindfulness'

is just a silly version
of the Attention or Attentiveness
described at length by Don Juán Matus
in Castaneda's allegories
q.v.

Fawn seems now to be called Beige

Nigger was what black labradors were named when I was young
 (though nigger-brown meant chestnut-coloured)
Puce is the colour of squashed fleas
Magenta was a battle celebrated by an early artificial dye
 and by a famous Paris boulevard
Reds are found beneath Louisiana beds
 and (with black) is the colour of Hell
Yellow were the bellies of eels and men of Lincolnshire
 who may have been unusually prone to jaundice
 (and is The Colour of Coyotes - another good title for a book)
Purplish are the acorns of men's cocks
 and many find it suitable for scarves and socks
 Red-Purple dye came once from boiling small Tyrrhenian molluscs
 now choked by microplastic
White is the colour of the Most Evolved Zincky-Flakey and Callow
 - and probably of God and Racism and fantastic Chance
Mauve is named after the flower and was also known as Mallow
Orange is the brazen shade of the monarchs of the Netherlands,
 is a town in France, and (as a fruit) lost its initial N in France
Blue meant sad (or beaten black and) way back in the 1300s
 A ship which lost its captain flew a blue flag

Brown was the mistress of a notorious German leader
Black (see also above) was an Irish Augustinian hag
 (Cailleach Dhubh) reputed to have been a witch
Grey is the polluted water in a ditch
 and the colour of money the minds of the rich
Green composed Aida

Maybe it's not quite true,

but it sounds good:
only tourism and dumping waste
are more banal than human reproduction.

Talking of waste: the thousands upon thousands 
of tons of fantastic
anti-virus protective gear
manufactured in such haste this year
is made of plastic...

[composed 18th April 2020]

Talking of statues

(but it's time to stop it even in joking) -
here is a very fine statue
of a clothed white writer...smoking!

James Joyce

While everyone's mentioning statues

(most of them hideous)
why not talk about 19th and 20th century
crosses in concrete or iron or stone
on streets or on squares or by roadsides
all over Europe and over most of the world
taken over, converted by Christians -
those ugly, obsessive
erections which mildly-to-sorely offend
millions of non-Christians ?
Get rid of them.  They are all
triumphal, aggressive.

Social, Philosophical and Artistic Distance.

My Netherlandish Neighbour
(and successfully-bad painter
born a few miles from the birthplace of van Gogh)
who invited me to dine and came to dine with me
called me (online) The Man without Empathy
(good title for a book!),
No-one has hitherto suggested that I am
'a cold fish' - but perhaps he thinks that men
who are not fathers are unfeeling.
Empathy's a fancy word for sleeve-worn
sentimentality.
In return, I called him (in an e-mail)
an Abrahamic dynast.
Now we ignore each other in the street
on the very rare occasions that we meet.

Pondering racism,

thinking of Covid-19,
I'm wondering
do bleak lives matter ?
Mine is not bleak
and doesn't matter at all,
not even to me.  But of course
I'd rather not suffer.

(I write as an inside-sort of outsider.)

Pondering racism
I notice that no-one is saying or writing
that many brown people,
(most of them Hindus locked into Caste)
are racist, and in countries where skins
are a pale shade of yellow
people in the quite recent past
have been known to avoid or attack
humans with skins which are black.

"We treat airport luggage

far better than we treat
the animals we eat."

- Bill Maher of HBO an American tv network.

NO!  We deal with garbage
 better than we treat
the animals we eat.

"Mind the Gap"

between the real
and the rail.
Especially if you're thin.

I was right...

...of course !
There are demonic mega-business profiteers from the pandemic.
Big Pharma
(who also sell environmental poisons like there's no tomorrow)
are selling millions of unreliable - indeed bogus - testing kits.
Medico-agri-pharma-corporations rule the world!
Of course the quack-junk and the quick-fix merchants
(like slave-traffickers) won't see (or even acknowledge) the sorrow.

Statues

are In The News today -
slave-owners' effigies toppled or quietly removed.
But statues of Leopold II, monstrous King of the Belgians and of the Congo, remain
(in Belgium).



The Chancellor of Oxford University
revealed this morning that a statue of him,
the last Colonial Governor of Hong-Kong,
is to be erected in Beijing.

No-one is remarking that full-length, clothed portrait-statues
on pompous plinths are almost always ugly,
often ridiculous, grotesque.
It would be better to celebrate celebrities with busts
that can easily be put on or taken away from
a ledge, a modest pedestal - or a back-room desk.

Perhaps the falseness of friendship

is merely precautionary
self-defeating defence ?

Another view on it.

Time
is just mathematics
strangely elastic,
cerebrally-tickly,
wobbly like a nervous soufflé.
Suddenly, this year, in an exciting way,
it has begun to pass delightfully quickly.

Property matters more

than Black Lives, of course.
The bandwagon rolling briefly
through the cities and the towns
avoids those areas where house-prices
will decrease or have decreased already
due to inflow of yellows, blacks or browns,
or Muslims (though, mostly,
no longer thin or fat Jews).

The vicious circle
of property-value racism
can't be broken.
But the most aspirational
protesters can topple the statues.

Like Diogenes,

I despise the rich and the smug
and of course the police.
Like Diogenes
I'm more emotional than intellectual
which is why I failed to acquire a degree.
I wonder did he, too, distrust the sea...

Backward.

It took me over seventy years to learn
that I can learn nothing,
guess nothing from human faces,
unlike the faces of dogs, and of dogs
in the sky and the earth.

They risked a Resurrection

rather than take heed
of what he had to say.

Man's deadliest weapon
is stupidity.

On Property

"Poetry does not belong
to those who write it,
but to those who need it,"
says the postman to Neruda in the film*.
The food is now the dog's
though it did seem to belong
to those who, daily, feed it.

*Il Postino, 1994.

Unique

photo by Frank Liu

spotted zebra, Maasai Mara National Reserve, Tanzania.l Reserve

It is difficult for a poet

not to be sententious or, on the other hand, banal.
There was once a smug New Englander who ventured in a wood,
saw two paths and chose one, Sinatra-like, his way.
He was probably not a nature-lover, nor philosophical,
for in any wood or field or life
there is a multiplicity of ways
for those who see beyond the daily daze
and have the subtlety to sense the maze.

'Might the history of thought be actually driven by aphorism ?'

asks a philosopher in Aeon magazine.

                          Montaigne replies:

'Reason is forever defective, lame and lop-sided.'

One of the crimes

that capitalism is not accused of
is the gradual abolition of ritual
except where it can be monetised
or ghettoised to rite. This is one reason why
outrageous, evangelistic religions stamp triumphantly on reason.

Civilisation

'progresses', ever 'going forward'
by ever more individual isolation.
Just recently came (pseudo-) social media,
then the oxymoronic social distancing -
and louder come the cries of Family!

I was alienated before I was born.

Sex is like Money :

it is surprising how little
one can thrive on.