The Call of the Wild

In Trafalgar Square a homeless man shuffled along with the pigeons. Barefoot and spectacularly shabby, his face was larded with dirt so engrained and so thick that his eyes seemed like blue gems shining out of coal. His hair was a solid mass of matter. Near one of Landseer's great bronze lions he got down on all fours and roared. Then he stretched out completely, on his back, as if going to sleep. His cohort of pigeons clustered around him. He reminded me of that terrifying apparition in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive, who emerges from behind a dump-master out the back of the diner; or perhaps he more closely resembled William Blake's watercolour of Nebuchadnezzar.

Willam Blake's, Nebuchadnezzar, 1795.












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