My friend Tomoyuki in Tokyo mailed me after he'd been watching the monologue Sight is the Sense... which i made with the American actor Jim Fletcher.

The piece... reminded me of what Imre Kertész said in his Fateless about the linearity of the order of things that happen. He says the fact that things happened one by one during his Auschwitz experience saved him.  He would have been destroyed if all the things happened at once.  What if all the definitions in Sight is the Sense... came to me at once?  Then it would be a very dangerous piece, but doesn't the linearity of the monologue somehow save me at the same time? 

Tomoyuki underlines the linearity of the piece (the text for which consists of many many many disconnected single sentences one after the other), and to the way that all performance in fact unfolds in this way over and through time, building and accumulating, but at the same time systematically forgetting and undoing itself. The lived event (performance in life) is always slipping away. Its accumulations (such as they might be in short-term memory, or in the build up marks/detritus in a space, or in their impact on a body) are inevitably only partial and incomplete traces of its present moments and their sequential impact. (Strange parallel process of both both building/accumulating and slipping/disappearing).

More info and writing about Sight is the Sense... via the tag below. You can see the work live in Paris later this month, at Theatre de la Bastile who are also showing the more recent solo in pieces I made with the Japanese dancer Fumiyo Ikeda - dates and all the proper info here. Further tour dates for Sight... and other projects here.

A cruel boss, it was rumoured that he punished people who were late to meetings with him by making them eat their watches. Common were the complaints of the local doctors called to the bedside of men who were trying with some difficulty to pass the indigestible remains of a large Rolex or whose throats were ravaged by the fragments of a crushed diamond encrusted, four time-zone Seiko.

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I've been thinking a lot, she says, then adds, well, i should be careful of the word. It's not so much that I have thoughts these days - I am invaded by them.

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Out front of the gas station, as other cars come and go, a very large guy is inspecting the underside of the very very large jeep/four-wheel drive which he evidently drives, peering under it methodically as he walks around it, a baseball bat clutched ready in one very large hand.

The city has no pens, cages or shelters in which it gathers stray or abandoned animals. Instead it pursues a policy of catching, vaccinating, neutering and tagging the many such creatures to be found there before then returning them to a life on the street. Poster campaigns from time to time remind the city’s inhabitants to feed or give water to these animals, specially as the summer temperatures rise. This now-established shadow population constantly performs a set of subtle but extraordinary demands and gestures in relation to the urban space. The streets are full of them - dogs with their own corners, shop doorways, park benches and traffic intersections, cats in the bushes, running along walls, sleeping on the boxes of books outside a second hand bookshop, or under the tables in a restaurant, or peering from rooftops here and there. In many cases these animals have particular sets of people providing sustenance for them in specific locations – impromptu homes with dishes for water and food, a scrap of clothing for a blanket even, to sleep on. And all this has a strange effect on the public space of the city, populating it with animals that lack either the status or the indignity of ‘ownership’, existing as they do in a physical and social space that’s at the same time highly public and yet which becomes, by sheer dint of their custom, domestic. The ubiquitous presence of these animals also thrusts a strange collective responsibility on the city’s inhabitants, tying them in a collaborative project of nurturing whose rules and roles are uncertain. At the very least, the population are required to negotiate (with care, indifference or cruelty) the spatial needs of these animals as they lie on streetcorners, sit beneath restaurant tables or hang out beside playgrounds, scavenging what they can. All cities have wildlife of course.. a layer of the natural in the urban, but these animals are sanctioned semi-citizens – loping their way through the crowds, or laying with apparent indifference at the busiest of markets or shopping streets.

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Small news. I'm going to be writing a fortnightly column/diary for Guardian on-line imaginatively titled 'Tim Etchells on performance'. You can see the first one of them here. I hope that writing on or around performance there will leave me free to meander here. See above.