April 15th (2020)

 

April 15th

‘ Each day just goes so fast

I turn around, it's past

You don't get time

to hang a sign on me’

(Love to you, The Beatles, 1966)

I awake, perform my ablutions, tie a bag for washing, take said bag downstairs, say hello to Phany, (busy cleaning), leave that bag of laundry on Phany’s work space and walk out to Common Grounds for breakfast. On the menu I see ‘Build a Breakfast’, so I do - three eggs (sunny-side), bacon and potatoes fried. I needed to get out of that ever-shrinking, flora-mural-painted, room, if only for an hour or so.

Looking at my mail, on my tablet, in Common Grounds, I tap on a mail in my inbox. Who the f**k is Ryan? I received an email sent to my Martin A Bradley account. It began ‘Dear Ryan’. It was bad enough that once, when I took part in open mic poetry in Singapore, I was called Robert, but where the hell did Ryan, or for that matter Robert, come from? Is this serendipity or some weird quantum entanglement with the actor Robert Ryan, who was mentioned in a Film Noir Facebook group today? Most bizarre.

Being on an enforced solitary sojourn takes its toll. Four days have been transform into four weeks, which would have been okay had I prior notice, for I could have saved. But seeing so many young, attractive women in Siem Reap brings to mind Adrian Henri’s Poem ‘Love Story’. 

‘..... Even when seeing schoolgirls on buses 

their blackstockinged knees in morning for their lost virginity.

My thoughts, however, are not on knees, black stockings, virginity or, in deed, schoolgirls but on abstinence which may, or may not, make the heart fonder. 

Undoubtedly Cambodia, but more especially Siem Reap, is chock-full of desirable young women. Let me re-phrase that, if I were even forty years younger my head would be turning like the Magic Roundabout, casting lustful eyes at scooter-riding Khmer damsels. I’m not forty years younger. And have little to offer any potential paramour. Luckily, over the vastness of time, I have developed a goodly imagination, tempered with little notions such as consequences and a healthy dose of experiential common sense which also prevents me from getting an unhealthy dose. 

Like Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s novella (1912) ‘Death in Venice’, which also, slyly, incorporates notions of Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’, (that is the young man, Phaedrus, in conversation about love with Socrates, not Phaedra daughter Minos king of Crete, or the album Phaedra by Tangerine Dream),  I observe beauty, appreciate it, maybe have some small inkling of potential desire, rather than physically participate in any carnality. To quote Mann (‘Death in Venice)‘... desire is a product of lacking knowledge.’ 

I however, really do not want to delve into a lengthy treatise on desire, Surrealism, Meret Oppenheimer, Georges Bataille and the Pineal Eye, for beauty may be in the ocular orb of the beholder, but is also frequently in the trousers and, sometimes, when you scratch an itch you simply spread the infection.

Today is much quieter. Siem Reap is getting back to Covid normal. Many cafes and restaurants are closed. I have been lucky that Common Grounds has remained open. It is a virtual oasis amidst the cultural and gastronomic desert Siem Reap is becoming, due to this dastardly pandemic virus.

Today’s spend (breakfast)

Common Grounds - 3 eggs (sunny-side), bacon, potatoes fried (scolloped) and a Flat White. $8.75