Months and then years, falling into unemployment. How far would we fall? Always further, as the welfare state drew itself to a close and the city regenerated around us. And we the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sick benefit to unemployment benefit and back again: how did we manage to outlive our use?
No solidarity: that, too, was falling away. Some of us were captured by the counsellors. Some of us decided to ‘work on themselves’. But this was to confuse one kind of sickness with another. Didn’t they understand, those who sat silently and asked us to talk, that we were sick from time, from the withering of time?
Speak: but what were we to say? The word ‘I’ did not belong to us. And the word ‘us’ designated in vain the solidarity of which we were incapable.
‘Work on yourself’: when did counselling culture arrive among us? Who asked for it? True, in the cafes and the scrappy countryside along the river, there were some who had dropped out of work because they were in search of something else. But didn’t they understand that to drop out could only break them from the forward movement of time? To drop out, to get sick, was to become sicker still, to fall back into the stagnancy that separated each moment from itself.
Work on yourself. And when you’ve detached yourself from time? Work on yourself. With what borrowed energy will you bring time to yourself. Work on yourself, and be unworked. Errant one, satellite passed beyond the solar system, you will not be able to signal back to the other world.
What, now, was to happen? How was anything to get done, when it was an effort simply to change the channels on the television? Stagnant time, time lost from its streaming: in what ox-bow lake were we stranded? Who marooned us in a time without minutes?
Say the words, I am sick. Say them, try to let them reach you. Say the words, and let the ‘I’ you speak awaken the ‘I’ who speaks. Awaken him, the speaker, the agent, who can coincide with what he says. But you are already lost. Fallen, in advance, from the words you might once have been able to say. How can you speak but in mimicry of the others? How can you but repeat the speech of those who have not yet fallen?
What would you like to say? What words would you like to bring to speech? – The word ‘I’. ‘I’: that would be enough. To say the word, ‘I’ – but that is impossible. ‘I’ – you say it without being able to say it. Quoted word: ‘I’. Cited from the lives of others. Once, it was possible for you to say the word ‘I’. And now?
‘I …’: word that speaks nothing. Cited word, monument that stands alone in the desert. ‘I …’ mouthed without completing that word. Scarcely a word, but a breath. Scarcely language but the word of concrete, the word of white skies. I would like to say the word ‘I’: say that to your counsellor. I would like the word ‘I’ to reach me: say that.
Quoted life, life in quotation marks. We were your doubles, you who drove home from work in the evenings, you who stepped from the bus in your suits. We quoted you; all our effort was to hold ourselves between quotation marks. That was our effort: to simulate life. To draw ourselves together so we could imitate the way you could attach the word ‘I’ to a statement.
To own speech – but was it possible? To speak for ourselves? We quoted our counsellors back to themselves. We spoke in their language, or in the language of those who were active and able. But in truth, we had fallen beneath speech as we had fallen beneath time.
How could we distinguish foreground and background, the important from the unimportant? Nothing emerged to be said. Nothing, with no urgency, needed to be spoken. If we spoke among ourselves, it was with a fragmentary speech. If we spoke, it was only by failing speech, by words that could not reach themselves.
We did not stutter, or stammer. But with us, language stammered; we spoke and were joined by another speaking. The words undid themselves in our mouths. Fragmentary speech: how could our sentences reach their ends? How could our statements join themselves to the word ‘I’. ‘I think …’, but we thought nothing. ‘I would like …’, but we wanted for nothing.
Queuing in the discount Greggs for a packet of gingerbread men. Queuing in the discount supermarket for a fourpack of sweet beer. Carry home your shopping in a plastic bag: that was already enough. Something to eat, something to drink, and draw the curtains against the day. Eat, drink, and the half-darkness, the afternoon on the old sofa in front of the TV.
Lars Iyer's Blog 