more new cuts

Where is the child in all this? - is this a child? a Fool's child? or a child fool? facing a blank future in an immense dark wood, no hands, no arms, no mouth, powerless, but taking it all in??
then bandaged trees: and two more flooding images...

I keep thinking my Fool looks a bit like Frankenstein's monster with all his bandages...
and actually this morning I was reading about Mary Shelley's later book The Last Man  published 1826, about a global plague at the end of the 21st century wiping out all but one man on the planet - how prescient of her - after writing Frankenstein in the year of the great grey winter that followed the eruption and ash-fall across the globe of Mount Tambora in 1816. She then lost her husband Shelley by drowning, two of their three toddlers, the death of Byron from sepsis, and her brother from the cholera pandemic that followed the volcanic eruption, and isolated herself because of all the gossip that surrounded her and her friends, writing her own Journal of Sorrow, not published until 1987.....
Eileen Hunt Botting , has written a book Artificial life after Frankenstein to be published later this year - she writes -
By identifying thus with the plague in her private journal and The Last Man, Shelley confronted the stark fact that humanity is the author of its own disasters, even those that seem purely natural or beyond our control....we are the problem behind and the potential solution to the pandemic....

Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft had written in her journal in 1795 on her intrepid trip to Norway on a mission for her lover Gilbert Imlay..
The view of this wild coast, as we sailed along it, afforded me a continual subject for meditation. I anticipated the future improvement of the world....carried my speculations so far as to advance a million or two of years to the moment when the earth would perhaps be so perfectly cultivated and so completely peopled as to render it necessary to inhabit every spot...pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Whither was he to feel from universal famine?....and the world appeared a vast prison....
more covid reading indeed.....