We head out in search of the temporal layering of Newcastle. Temporal layering, W. says, is usually a hierarchical layering. Mumford said that. In the city, time becomes visible, Mumford says. Buildings, monument and public spaces, much more than the written record, leave an imprint of the minds of even the ignorant and indifferent. 'That's what you are, isn't it?', W. says. 'Ignorant and indifferent'.
For Mumford, W. says, the city sees time clashing with time, time challenging time. He looks through the different strata of time for liberatory temporal modalities. We're looking today. The traces of the medieval city are still there by the quayside. The last buildings to survive the great fire of 1854, started in a munitions dump in Gateshead, before exploding over the river to Newcastle.
A little further up, we explore a steep-sided valley where a river once ran. The Pandon Burn, W. says. It rose near my flat. In fact, it runs under my flat, in a culvert. It used to wind across Newcastle, past the hospital and through the university. Beer was brewed using Pandon Burn water. George Stephenson's house, long demolished, was built with a view of it. And what is now called Barras Bridge has, beneath the tarmac, an intact medieval bridge that stands above the culvert. A bridge over a sewer, since that's what they use the Pandon Burn for now, W. says: a sewer. Then it flowed east for a while before heading directly south, and carving out its valley.
No trace of it now, though, W. says, by the new apartment blocks and the new law courts. The burnside was supposed to be very beautiful. We head up from the quayside to inspect the Keelman's Hospital, W.'s favourite building in this part of town. The keelmen used to ferry coal up the river to waiting ships. When they were old and infirm – it was backbreaking work – they came here. Do we find any liberatory temporal modalities here? – 'How do you think you'd fare as a keelman?', W. asks me.
Of course, there's a serious limit to Mumford's analyses, W. says. Can it really be a matter of seeking older, supposedly more organic approaches to living in time? W. dislikes nostalgia, he says. He's more focused on the homogenisation of time, on the monopolisation of time that's occurred under capitalism.
Somehow, he thinks religion might be an answer. Didn't Bataille elect the obelisk commemorating Louis XVI as a sacred site? W.'s favourite pages of Bataille are about the sacrifice of the gibbon. He reads from his notebook.
Near a round pit, freshly dug in the midst of exuberant vegetation, a giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches.
We need a place in Newcastle where we might sacrifice a gibbon, W. says. And we need a gibbon.
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