Two squabbling artists, both prolific yet not in the least successful, sit legs astride a dull curb on the corner of Churchfields and Roan Street. One is a painter, the other a writer, yet both philosophers and partners of a nature. The writer believes himself to be accepting of the painter’s squabbles, of which he has heard many times before, and they no longer touch him. The painter, on the other hand, has maintained a petty dislike of everything the writer says, pragmatically arguing every point even if it means contradicting his own argument. Indeed, to the casual observer would it appear that the painter really didn’t think very highly of the writer. Thus pointlessly do they meet every morning because in truth - and albeit in differing ways - they are both lost.

This current morn the painter is clinically revealing to the writer his personal process of soaking, mashing, drawing out and drying newspaper so as produce his own brand of canvas, one endowed with more ‘grip’ for his paints and other drawing materials. The writer daydreams about his first drink. After a time of hearing his, and only his, voice the painter breaks from his soliloquy incensed at this lack of interest from the writer and attacks him once more.

“Can I just say that I’ve decided that you’re one of the dogmatists of the world.”
Slowly turning his face from the walkings of the street the writer crumples his brow at the manic gleewide grin of the painter that had impatiently been directing its triumph towards him. Before he can dredge up a response, however, the painter starts up again.
“See, I’ve realised that everybody needs something to hate. People have this negative aspect, or capability, within themselves that they need to express in order to strike a balance. Most people try to alleviate this negative desire with faith, but if that doesn’t work then faith becomes the dogma. And you are dogma most foul.” A high cackle and the painter nodding furiously has the writer questioning just what he’s supposed to see from this.
“What would you choose if given the choice of your art or a happy life?” continues the painter, poking a finger between the eyes of the writer, “It might be that love, say, could relegate art down the ladder of priorities, what would you choose?”
“What if art is peace of mind, of a kind, and peace of mind happiness of a kind?” asks the writer against his better judgement.
“You see you would choose art!”
The painter ecstatically believes he has meted out what amounts to the ultimate insult, his long fine hair jiggering about the cracks guanting his long, parched face.
“Give me peaceful life...” mumbles the writer back disinterestedly, running fingertips over his thick stubble, mentally bemoaning the fact that he should really have a shave soon.
“See art is the dogma!” the painter reveals, “and this is very novel, very new, this approach I’ve formulated.”
“Really...” yawns the writer, helplessly going through futile mute calculations on how many times he’d heard this one - or something like it - all before. The writer is all too familiar with the painter’s routine of reading the Guardian and assorted womens’ magazines, culling his arguments and philosophies from them for the next day, and as much as they repeated themselves so did he – so he peers out across the day again.
“...Love is a sexual thing....and it’s also a relinquishing of something.” continues the painter, “A sharing, which brings me to thoughts over the ratio of selfish people in society, to selfless ones. I believe 80% selfish to 20% selfless.”
A slight yet not insignificant shudder translates the writer’s belief of the foolish audacity and blindness of such a generalisation.
“But, it is possible for two people to be in love and be content...You see I never realised this before. Everything is about the sexes!”
It was too good an opportunity and the writer couldn’t help himself, “So you’re saying you’ve just discovered sex?”
The painter forced from his rendition of whatever magazine or newspaper article he’d mentally stored had to think for his answer, “Er...yes.”
“Great, ‘bout bleedin’ time – you’re on the road to redemption.” Against his better judgement, the writer decides to explain himself. “You know, all I get from you is sex. Why don’t ya stop figuring blindly for awhile and get laid, it might relax ya. Give you something you could really get your teeth into.”
“I’m not tense. I’m far more relaxed than you!”
“You don’t seem it.”
“No, no, no, you’re a dogmatist.”
“Alright then, but look take my advice.” the writer suggests, “Cease the gears and cogs for awhile and feel something. How dogmatic is that? I’m talking simple experience for its own sake.”
This comment by the writer was no less than an assault on the very humanity of the painter, one he couldn’t let pass. “Oh you filthy, dogmatic, blighted, poor soul, how can I when imagination says there’s a surplus of love out there, but morality says there a deficit? Everything’s neuroses, you’re a prime example of that.”
“Neuroses can be very comforting...”
“I can’t listen to you because I’d end up a dogmatist.”
“...and real.”
“But I can’t allow myself to become like you and all the rest. It’s my duty to scorn you all.” concludes the painter, his dignity restored.
The smirk the writer had been sporting beams into smile, “But you just implied that everyone’s a dogmatist, so what’s your dogma - dogmatism?”
“Umm, thinking that I know more than everybody else - it’s a highly enlightened position you know.”
“So you’re a dogmatist too then.”
The painter nods, this avenue of discussion hadn’t been covered in yesterday’s newspaper article.
“So, really, you’re saying we’re all people, and I’m a person too and so are you.”

Despite this minor victory, the writer still can’t fathom the painter’s point in relation to his original perceived petty attack of character, but this is how it always is between them; so wonders haplessly whether the painter was even aware of the fact that he didn’t have any point to his argument. Indeed, many were the times he had wondered precisely this.

The writer exhales solemnly, “Well I’m glad you set me straight on that one – forget salt; confusion, now that’s the silent killer...” getting from the curb, stretching, beckoning the painter with a flick of his head that it was about that time they got a move on to the cafe’ in the train station for some coffee.
Bumping silently along past Straightsmouth street, taking the long route to savour the keen and easy redstrung morn, they covet a silence, a truce you could say. Yet coming to the metal underpass leading up to the huge stolid wine warehouse abutting the main road, the painter starts in on insulting the writer again. The writer remains silent, as usual, nodding every now and again or asseverating something too faint to really be heard. What was the point when it seemed, despite his most profound wishes, that his life had seemingly come to nought but this scene and its repetition every morning? As if his was a forlorn futility that the closest to a friend he had was the painter.

The writer used to have many friends before he’d given up a promising career in architecture to pursue his dream of writing. He used to be the centre of every occasion. But those friends of the past had issues with the world he had chosen to inhabit, they recoiled from its darkness back to what they knew, like moths to a flame. Now, day after day, he met the painter, and of his own free accord. Day after day did he invite the same ordeals and rigours. Day after day, it seemed, had he spun a web from which now he arbitrated a slow dissolution.

He didn’t dislike the painter, nor did he blame him for his manner. A solitary soul living in an old shed in a wrecker’s yard, the painter stalked the streets like the crazy hermit that he was, he didn’t care. And sought no one but the writer, sat with no one else, spoke with no one else in all the pubs and cafes and curbs. No, the writer felt a genuine kinship towards him and in fact had come to find the presence of the painter quite necessary.

Though the writer couldn’t be sure he had always thought the painter to be a good ten years older than himself, putting him in his mid-thirties. And for quite some time he had come to present an image which the writer increasingly interpreted to be himself; everything that was skewed, disconnected, out of synch within him. The painter had become his inner expression then, and as much as he hated to admit it what he saw there leant him a dark comfort. He’d spun his web, just as that great ‘other and all’ weaves perpetually for all else. For these days the writer no longer understood what he was doing. His work had become strange to him and he could not recall why he had ever started writing in the first place. Hung now from that long silken final strand below else.

Settling within the dusky woods and steams of the cafe’ they receive their coffees. Neither of them pay, as the proprietor has come to know them and now welcomes the attention their antics bring to his establishment. Their faces were familiar all over Greenwich Village. Of course, the painter still drones on incessantly bringing to the writer’s attention an article in The Guardian, which he’d snatched from another table, written by Niomi Woolf, or someone with a similar sounding name, about the sexes - he couldn’t have been happier! The writer, however, occupies himself with rolling a cigarette to keep his coffee company, dazedly nodding every now and then, clearly not taking the painter seriously. In frustration at this nonchalance, the painter enters unto raving again, blaming the loud nattering of an elderly lady on a nearby table for his lack of gravity in this respect. Cackling merrily to himself, he leans over behind his chair to an adjacent table and grabs a magazine owned by one of the girls working in the cafe, flicking loudly through the pages in a blasé fashion until he comes to a crudely drawn picture of a man and a woman wrapped around one another and denoted at the top by the legend ‘Sexual Gratification of the month’.

“Ooh - oh - ohh hee hee hee, well - well I never - well, well, well, I say...” he stops, “...have you seen this?” holding it spread out in front the writer’s abstract gaze so he couldn’t help but see it, bunching his shoulders and licking his lips, his thin ferrety features aglow. “Let’s terrorize that wittering old bag with this - we’d be doing her a favour, she obviously needs something to think ‘silently’ about.”

Peering around hardly able to contain himself he hisses, “You never know, she might be a go’er. A real go’er!”
Without waiting for the writer to reply, the painter kicks his chair back and heads off towards the old woman’s table with a serpentine grin. For his part, the writer has become distracted by a milky young waif of a darling wearing a woolly bulging coat out the top of which bobbed her head on a slender spindle of neck. Stroking the coat adoringly, her face flames unselfconsciously, her fluttering lashes poofing out glitter. Gaping out from her hangsome drab coat at the excited proclamation, that it was indeed made from actual astrakhan, the waif’s friend grabs both her cheeks. For the last part was whispered, the word itself, ‘astrakhan’, from the sheer excitement and importance of the fact.

The friend inches a trembling hand towards the coat like a pithecanthropus towards the initial flame - fingers outspread, her eyes rolling toward her friend for the nod of permission - until resting atop its nettled surface and stroking it tentatively, cooing, concluding finally and grimly that she must have one. The writer sits back and sups from his coffee noting the long slants of rain appearing at the cafe window, and muses, ‘crying in the rain is all, maybe we could all do with a spell in the desert.’

A thought in itself which might have actually meant something; yet as come had it gone as the painter erupts again swinging his hands wildly over the table of the bemused old woman and her companion.

“So did they have this in your day, a-ha?” he shouts, “Never should the insidiousness of your dogmatism be allowed its attempts to hinder in any way the clear thoughts of a man detached. You are dogma most foul my dear - yes! - yes you are, personified in age and ritual. Don’t shake your head that way. What do you say now? What can you say now?”

Lobbing his smoke into the ashtray the writer goes back to dreaming what the waif had concealed beneath that astrakhan coat.
Soon, with morn waning, the writer and the painter with their coffees finished will leave and go their separate ways, to their separate labours; and after a time it would be as if they had never been there, in that cafe.

At all.

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