ankle-high

The staff, a ragtag bunch of closet fascists, at the Alliance of the Blessed Flower (a sanatorium) took us out for a field trip, and whereas most people, institutionalized or not, would have contemplatively admired the méli-mélo of ankle-high flowers at the arboretum, we crushed them mercilessly with our mud splattered boots. The Spaniards in charge of the flower squelchers were armed to the teeth–half of them expecting the blue-eyed among us to make a break for it and the other half just wanting to dress in the finery of the Guardia Real. Naturally when a doddering fool chained himself to a fire hydrant, there was consternation. But some of the inmates were acting strangely too.

Time

Prospero, what is time?

(As if anyone would ask such a cosmological question of a madman!)

Time, my friend (wink, wink), is something that eccentric Spaniards paint.

[Now I really must interject. These sorts of aphoristic statements were fine for cinéaste Robert Bresson, but are no longer in vogue, even in today’s film industry, for present day film directors are, in the main, wholly unaccustomed to the rigors of thought. And Prospero is probably referring to Salvador Dali’s malleable clocks in The Persistence of Memory. But obscurantism is also passé, and there is little hope, I suppose, for those in exile who hollowly hark back to the days of old, have a fitful fascination for French film directors, and use with frustrating frequency words that have tiptoed, under cover of an umbrageous linguistic hinterland, from one language to another. Ed.]