the literal request for contact, received as a request for money — "passerby after passerby interpreted his appeal…" · S5

The book's cleanest parable of a message that cannot be received as itself. Loach stands outside the T-station asking the literal thing — touch me, make contact — and the entire commuting public hears the one thing it has a slot for, a stem for change, and pays him off precisely to avoid the contact he is begging for, "abstract loose change" swapped in for "genuine fleshly contact." The plea and its total misreading are the same event, and the misreading is not cruelty but the absence of any channel by which a request for human warmth could arrive as a request for human warmth.