Why did you buy  sliced bread?
My hand  reached out and picked it up
That’s a silly answer
Well, it’s true
Are you telling me you can’t control your own hand?
I can hardly control anything
You tell me!
I didn’t mean that, anyway it’s not my fault
I never said I didn’t like it.
You never said you did either/
Didn’t I?
Are you telling me you can’t control your own memory?
Well, I  do remember you wore teal coloured pyjamas
What’s that got to do with it?
Would you be as ardent in grey ones?
That’s absolutely ridiculous
Why?
Who would buy grey pyjamas?
It depends on who is selling them
But surely if you want something, it doesn’t matter who the seller is.
I’d think about that if I were you.Would you buy HP Sauce from Hitler
I never knew he had any.
Your thinking is too concrete.
I never could understand anything except logic.
Even Wittgenstein said , the rest is silence.
What about the bit that isn’t?
I don’t know.He was a philosopher of note
I didn’t join soulmates to meet people like you
Why did you join?
My hand reached out and picked up a pen
I think you might be schizoid
Thanks so much.I don’t get many compliments
Well, you are very nice in bed.But is that good or bad?
Don’t ask me, I’m a split personality.
My,you’re clever, aren’t you?
No one ever said that to me before
Well, you are brilliant
Wow, I think I’ll leave while the going is good
Oh, don’t go yet
Why not?
It is early in the night
I thought it was breakfast time
With you  near me , it’s night all day
You should write poetry, you know
Why?
It will take your mind off love.
Do you think that’s a good idea?
I don’t know, my mouth opened and the words came out
I’ve never met anyone like you before.
Thank you.Neither have I

The art of lying seems to have a master
His face betrays his mind and lack of heart
He lies much longer, wilder faster

It’s not unclear he’s driving to disaster
And poisoned by  desire, we’ll  play our part
The art of lying seems to have  its Hitler

“Other” truth, a verbal sticking plaster
Post truth, post love, post reason, that’s a start
He lies  like Stalin, wilder faster

Aghast, we stare, yet kneel to our new master.
If this is real, then we are in the dark
The art of lying seems to have a master

He  revels in his lies, hides not his laughter
We’re with the children in the bloody park.
He lies like Nero, viler faster.

Who are they now governed by a shark
Cold and silent without voice or bark?
The art of lying seems to have  its master
He lies much crueller, wilder, faster

Geopolitics and the Psychopath

Physicist and psychoanalyst Ian Hughes wrote:

A small proportion of people who suffer from psychologically abnormal personalities have, throughout history, had an immeasurable detrimental impact on our societies, our politics and our world. Enabled by their ruthlessness to readily acquire positions of power, they have long dominated the psychologically normal majority of the world’s population.

Why the London Terror Attack Occurred Now

“So what do these terrorists hope to achieve?

Based on prior experience, they will assume that by striking now they can increase fear and anger among the British population – intensifying anti-Muslim rhetoric, justifying harsher “security” responses from the British state and shifting political support towards the right. That is good for their cause because it radicalises other disillusioned Muslim youth. In short, it brings recruits.

Islam is not exceptional in this regard. This is not a problem specifically of religion. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, disillusioned, frustrated, angry (and mainly male) youth adopt existing ideologies relevant to them and then search for the parts that can be twisted to justify their violence. The violent impulse exists and they seek an ideology to rationalise it.

Once Christianity – the religion of turning the other cheek – was used to justify pogroms and inquisitions. In the US, white supremacists – in the Ku Klux Klan, for example – used the Bible to justify spreading terror among the black population of the Deep South. White supremacists continue sporadically to use terror in the US, most notably Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Terrorists can exploit secular ideologies too, on either the far-right or far-left. Just think of the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the 1970s. The latter famously made a convert of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of publishing empire magnate William Randolph Hearst (aka Citizen Kane). After she was taken hostage, she quickly adopted the group’s thinking and its violence as her own”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3229/elizabeth-bishop-the-art-of-poetry-no-27-elizabeth-bishop

One Art American Academy of poets

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4369/arthur-miller-the-art-of-theater-no-2-arthur-miller

INTERVIEWER

When Death of a Salesman opened, you said to The New York Times in an interview that the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we’re in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity. Do you consider your plays modern tragedies?

MILLER

I changed my mind about it several times. I think that to make a direct or arithmetical comparison between any contemporary work and the classic tragedies is impossible because of the question of religion and power, which was taken for granted and is an a priori consideration in any classic tragedy. Like a religious ceremony, where they finally reached the objective by the sacrifice. It has to do with the community sacrificing some man whom they both adore and despise in order to reach its basic and fundamental laws and, therefore, justify its existence and feel safe.

INTERVIEWER

In After the Fall, although Maggie was “sacrificed,” the central character, Quentin, survives. Did you see him as tragic or in any degree potentially tragic?

MILLER

I can’t answer that, because I can’t, quite frankly, separate in my mind tragedy from death. In some people’s minds I know there’s no reason to put them together. I can’t break it—for one reason, and that is, to coin a phrase: there’s nothing like death. Dying isn’t like it, you know. There’s no substitute for the impact on the mind of the spectacle of death. And there is no possibility, it seems to me, of speaking of tragedy without it. Because if the total demise of the person we watch for two or three hours doesn’t occur, if he just walks away, no matter how damaged, no matter how much he suffers—

Giovanni Sagristani, 38, and his friends were in the El Pastor restaurant on Stoney Street when one of the attackers came in and stabbed a woman in the chest.

“He came in shouting and just stabbed her,” he said.

Image copyrightGIOVANNI SAGRISTANI

Mr Sagristani’s partner Carlos Pinto, 33 – who works as a critical care nurse in London – attended to the woman, with the help of his friend, another nurse.

“They took some ice and cloths and tried to stop the bleeding. She lost half a litre of blood in the beginning. He was keeping pressure on the wound,” Mr Sagristani