​ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM

​

Grinding, grafting slowly to another end, the last of the five days edged closer to one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Boredom, eternal return. After men made dust, women removed it, and they reached for bottles to swill the monotony out.
Swollen knuckles repeated the task. Surfaces attacked, seams splintered, cloths dampened, carpets sucked and beaten, the glazed glitter stayed stubbornly in place. The suggestion of form appeared in clumps and clouds, at once amorphous yet concrete, appearing and reappearing, a suspended, dry black veil. Dropping its diaphanous netting over everything, the enemy is air-borne yet fixed, hiding in borderless spaces, invading, insidious. The difference is spreading, but the workers labour in vain. They know the futility of their work – no-one can dispel the injurious phantoms abhorred by cleanliness and logic. No powder of sympathy, this is the body desiccated, diffuse and atomised. Heavy boots carry this powerful quasi-object along furred arteries, treading filthy vapour with every step, bringing back a hand-wrought, homemade chiaroscuro.
Murmuring incessantly in schoolboy Latin, men brushed off black diamonds from their shoes and eyes, brushing off a grit which is never sleep or opiate. Women, blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick, lost themselves in forgetting chambers and used the streets as a paved double bed. Like them, dust breeds but never settles.

(Cast: Alan Sillitoe, Walter Benjamin, John Ruskin, Gertrude Stein, Georges Bataille, Quentin Crisp)