We've opened our veins to the future, W. and I agree. Our wrists have been slashed and are open to the future; we hold our upturned bleeding arms ahead of us. Death, that's what we want, and that's where we're headed. We're pledged to death, but in great comfort. Our flats and our houses will bear us forward, but in truth, they are only ships of death, just as our country is only a supertanker of death.
Europe still belongs to history, W. and I decide; but we are essentially posthistorical. England has risen like a new island in the middle of the sea. It has removed itself from history; there's nothing here. Oh, there are castles and so on, but they are meaningless. There's the present, and barely even that -but we live from the future, from the brave new future that will see returns on our investments.
Our country is nothing but a trading floor, W. and I decide. Nothing is historical; nothing has any historical weight. Europe, of which we are not a part and can never be a part, is essentially old. The phrase, old Europe is an oxymoron. Old Europe is where things once happened, and continue to happen in their way. The Europeans live in history, as we do not. We are plugged directly into the future, but they are rooted in the past. They speak all the languages of Europe, but we only speak English, the language of the future, the language into which everything will be translated.
Of course this translation will always be incomplete, we decide; there will always be languages and idioms of languages, just as we will always be idiots. But the need to translate is all – the need for the brightest, the best to make themselves understood in English is everything. Translation is imperative – it is the streaming of vapour trails in the sky, infinitely far above the languages and idioms of old Europe.
Europe is fallen, we decide, and we, who are not European, can only pass across its surface like skaters. Old Europe may well be old, but only to itself, we decide, and not to itself. It's historical depth is something of which we are only half-aware, we decide. It troubles us, it makes us feel guilty, but in the end, we can have no relationship to it.
Wars were fought across the body of Europe as they have not been across the body of England. The English fought their wars everywhere except England, and so the body of England has always remained untouched. But of course, there is no body of England, not really, not anymore. It's been seized as investment potential; its value has not yet been realised. How much we would earn if we ever sold our houses! But we will never sell our houses. Our mortgages pledge us to the future, which is to say, to our death.
When the great ice sheets come down as far as Nottingham, it will only be what we deserve. When they scour London into the earth, it will be our just desserts. We'll have nowhere to go, they won't want us in Europe. They'll have their own problems over there, we decide.
Meanwhile, the great work of translation is ongoing. The best and the brightest Europeans speak English much better than we do, we decide. They're better than us, more intelligent than us, but they are still weighed down by history, we decide. They're still historical beings, whereas we are posthistorical beings, with no roots and no memories. Because we don't remember anything, we decide, not anymore.
We've lost the past, although we've no idea we've lost it, nor what it might mean to have lost the past. We don't miss it. It's gone the way of the welfare state: it's a relic, its root have been cut from it. It's senseless, in this, the new world. When the glaciers come rolling down from the North, it will only confirm this great senselessness, we decide.
For our part, W. and I have long been reconciled to the apocalypse. 'It's coming.' – 'What will we do?' – 'My God, look at us! What do you think we can do!' In the meantime, stay at the peripheries, each at our own end of England. In what European cities haven't we been drunk? What European skies have we not seen from the gutter? But we stick to the periphery in our own country. Best not to be noticed. Best not to be seen.
Lars Iyer's Blog 