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Sport 30: Peter Black-Real Fiction

Disquietude And Its Characters

Disquietude And Its Characters

‘How little, in the real world, forms the basis of the best reflections—the fact of arriving late for lunch, of running out of matches, of throwing the matchbox out the window … the fact I'm nobody in the world …’ So utters the narrator in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude, a character Peter Black might cite as a kindred spirit, the two of them perambulating through the roads and paths of their separate cities, both of them gatherers and orchestrators of observations—of things seen and thoughts, as we say at home, thunk. Peter Black cultivates a certain distance and might be described as a Pessoa-esque ‘realist’—that is, an individual ‘for whom the outside world is an independent nation’.

That said, it would be inaccurate to cast Peter himself as an outsider, even if his work is characterised by detachment and understatement. It's just that he shuffles rather than strides through the modern world—he glances rather than stares. Avoiding the overt and showy, he eschews not only the smoke machines and lighting rigs of Romanticism but also the Mobile Disco of subjective emotion. His ambiguity is unequivocal, his ambivalence decisive. Ultimately, he is a figure neither apart nor integrated, adrift in the space between the personal and the impersonal. The camera, then, is a halfway house between the subjective world and the objective one.