Roger sent me this astonishing 1907 clip of a dancing gentleman pig and girl. It manages to fuse in one brief flurry my vintage porn collection with my nightmares, which in turn are indistinguishable from any other kind of dream. The pig, male, for a change, as almost all of our contemporary pigs are women, from Palin to Darrieussecq's porcine-sex toy in Pig Tales, does his best to seduce the girl in her frills and bonnet. First he curtseys, then he kneels. She shoos him away, eager to return to folding laundry. The pig tries to get fresh, swapping gentlemanliness for straightforward physical intervention. At this point, the girl gets cross, kicks him and pulls his suit jacket and shirt off. As she dances with, the pig holds his stomach in shame, and this is genius, even though it was on display when he was wearing his suit. There is no better definition of shame, perhaps, than trying to hide what was already in plain sight.

The gentleman pig tries to cover himself with a newspaper whilst the girl thrusts a stick with ribbons on the end into his trotter. He forgetting his nudity, and she forgetting her irritation - they dance together for a while before walking away, the girl leading from behind by pulling at his tail. They return, trotter in delicate hand, for a final encore. A curious, and rather terrifying addendum, sees the pig, alone, flapping his ears and jutting out his tongue in disturbing fashion before grinning to reveal a set of vampiric teeth, a scene which can have only been the inspiration for this cover that China once sent me:



Swivelling his snout and opening his eyes, the monster dancing pig with his many and varied seductions, reminds us that behind every animal archetype (Jung's all too predictable faithful dog, enduring horse, devious cat) lies a mass of confusions, oneiric, sexual and geopolitical. This is partly why the pig has proved to be so fascinating - hairless enough to be uncomfortably human, obscene enough to be a capitalist, beady-eyed and barrel-chested enough to be a cop, curiously both smart and stupid, dirty and clean, loathed and loved, the pig is unplaceable in the attempt to forge a simple anthropomorphic exchange. Jung's archetypes fail because far too many animals are far too mysterious. Far better Neurath's isotypes in all their glorious, generic universalism:



The science of communication is infinite in its simplicity. Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, a systematic attempt at a kind of benevolent internationalism that would take signs for wonders, in a good way:

'Why should not everybody get a chance to learn a lot by means of pictures?' - Neurath.

But how much can we learn? When animals are occasionally allowed to intrude into our dream-worlds, the results are astonishing:


The big other, the little others, or the animal other? Only the lovers are blind...

Jindřich Štyrský, illustrator, writer and editor of the Czech Erotická revue and founding member of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia is peerless as a practitioner of the simultaneously archaic and modern, in both form and content. As Karel Teige put it: 'the poetic image is the book illustration, the photograph, the photomontage'. This flexible recording of the unconscious in the age of lightbulbs can still be seen in the likes of Samorost, a wordless Czech computer game just as you had always fantasised about but never thought would actually exist. Here machines, discarded consumer objects, nature and animals form a world both depthlessly strange and curiously attractive. Švankmajer hopefully plays this as he sits in Prague, dreaming of animations to come.

It is in this combination of the tension between constructivism and poetism that the animals reside. But it is too late for us. Teige again: 'In the period whose essence is formed by contradictions, we must have the psychological ability to perceive strange almost paradoxically sharp contrasts.'

Štyrský's sexual dreamscapes draw attention to these contrasts, revel in them. In the promotional flyer for Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream', a short sexual reverie, illustrated by Štyrský's own photomontages (including the one above) tells us that 'with scissors one is able to sever any type of inseparable double' (recall the scene in Daisies where limbs and heads start getting lopped off and the very material of the film is no longer safe from snipping (you can watch it here (at 1:57)).

What are we asked to do but 'perceive strange almost paradoxically sharp contrasts' and yet pretend as if everything is 'as usual'!