Street Pig

A sofa has replaced the bench that the council took away to prevent further disturbances. The drunks and hangers on and hangers out outside the battered old bike shop overflow from the arms of fake, pinkish velvet, squabbling over the embrace of the centre spot. Dogs gather round the seat front, hoping for a drop of sweet, special brew, or a vinegar crisp kiss, as though suckling on the belly of some obscenely fertile street pig. "Ahh, bless 'em," says a local, lamenting the loss of the bench, admiring the innovation of the street dwellers, and understanding the need for the succour of the sofa in the street.

Mindmap

A man walks down the street... It is hard to write about the real world - reality is unwritten. For as long as it is real. A man is crawling down the street, partially incapaciated by the singularity of experience... He rises now, given strength by the inscription of his crawl. His mind is alive with the crimes of the city, and young drug-running children scamper constantly across his mental map of the borough. They scuttle with a lope, like ailing monks limping their way to vespers in dens of iniquity. The forgotten, the excluded, the deprived, attend an illicit church.

E5 Lives and E8 Traits. E9 Dines.

A family of seven sit in the curtainless front room. The height of the ceiling, the size of the room, which is somehow narrow and deceptively small, all serves to give the window onto the street a disproportionate importance, like some unfortunate portal that relentlessly disturbs any domestic peace. The slightest shout from outside and the family flinch and the kids rush to peer out, hopelessly attracted, overflowing almost, from within their four bare indoor walls. It is not much more than cave life, hanging over the high street of deprivation.

Le Boucher (1970)

The man is society's butcher, the repository of the violence of the world. He hated his father, he waged war for fifteen years, he is the village's butcher! The blood flow, there is so much blood, and his life blood is reliant on the flow of blood. He does not rape, he kills his friend's wife. He provided the meat for that wedding. He wants the schoolteacher, the young headmistress, chaste, somewhat aloof, a hurt spinster, who smokes men's cigarettes and smokes them in the street. She has no lover but she is not bloodless - her bloodflow is repressed, his is strained and overstressed. Her contained eroticism. She wants to share the meat she got from him, with him, she wants his blood. Ultimately it is her restraint and surface bloodlessness that draws him, that flushes him out - he corners her, and she, in protecting him, corners him, and it is this that enables him to draw his own blood rather than somebody else's. She cares, she hides the lighter. She protects him from the consequences of his own violence, that is of him but is not him. She endangers herself for him, and this enables him to draw his own blood. His is a victory, he is a hero, he fights with the world's violence, and in suicide he wins. He ends the killing, overcomes it. The pulsating light of the lift down to purgatory is crimson red.

Litter Struggle (quickly, there I am in an adverb)

The literal quest for the real is subject to no mean difficulty. In language we are straining to convey the reality of our experiences and the world around us. We repeat, 'literally', that, 'basically', things appear to us 'blatantly'. Conversely though, affirmation comes not from individuation, but from a kind of wanton generalising - a fullness of reality is seen in things we judge to be 'totally', 'completely', 'wholly', or 'absolutely' something. We put great emphasis on the authenticity of experience, the first-hand sense of it, but have to resort to its quintessence as the symbol of wider field of meaning to give it value. It is the old catch 22, that I am meaningful only in so far as I mean the same as everyone else, and therefore struggle to mean anything distinct at all. There is also the denial of this danger of oblivion-through-commonality. Many things that happen that are deemed to be inexplicable are described as 'random'. "What a coincidence!" The very idea that there is some sort of recognition of an incidence of two disparate things coming together, negates their disparity. Coincidence is a nonsense. Or rather, coincidence is the problem of perfect sense. It is the way in which perfect sense must be denied, held at bay, the way we must expel it from our communal psyche into the realm of the random and haphazard, for fear that in recognising its wholly contiguous nature we would annihilate our individuality. We all have our own i-pod so that we can be identically individual in listening to our 'personal stereo'. The duality inherent in the notion of the singular. Singular from what? Many have sought the perfect minimum of meaningful reflection. Sancho Panza happiest in the company of only his ass. Don Quijote himself, best able to expound his individuality to Sancho Panza alone. Tristram Shandy's most singular autobiography, a self-referential chaos. The iconic cigarette, the smoke and mirror of the lonely mind. Consider the problem of 'celebrity', so often a condition in great conflict with 'personality'. A mob-rape of the locus of desirability. The superstars of the forever more infinite finite galaxy of our empty-me players! Infinity to the power of infinity. Nothing - you lose. Music to the tune of my choice.