The Copula

The end is coming, W. says. He's sure of that. Our end, or the end of the world? Both!, W. says. The one is inextricable from the other. Do I see it as he does? Is he the only one who can read the signs?

He can see them even now, on this sunny day in Cawsands. He sees them in our honey beer, W. says. In the dog who wants me to play with him, dropping a stone at my feet. In the narrowness of the three-storeyed house opposite. In the name of the pub in whose garden we drink: The Rising Sun. And in me, too? – 'In you above all', W. says.

The Rising Sun: what sun is going to rise over us? A black sun, says W. A sun of ashes and darkness. He sees the image in his mind's eye: the man and boy of The Road, pushing a shopping cart down an empty highway. Only in our case, it'll be two men, squabbling over whose turn it is to ride in the cart. Two men with ashes in their hair, exiled from our cities and all cities.

At the bus stop, W. tells me about his current intellectual projects. Can be summed up under the following heading: Capitalism and religion. The 'and' is designed to be provocative, W. says. Of course, the project isn't original to him. He's a follower, not a leader. An imitator, an ape.

Still, he persists. He's taking notes. He's reading, thinking. Even dreaming. He's dreaming about the 'and' that links capitalism to religion. What is this link? What is the significance of the copula?Perhaps it has something to do with the word that is the most opaque of all, W. says. The everyday.

Really it's my word, W. says. It's a word to which I am close as he is not. For isn't it in my long periods of warehouse work and unemployment that I came into contact with the essence of the everyday? Wasn't it then that I knew myself brushed by what Blanchot calls its infinite wearing away and Lefebvre its eternullity?

I am an expert even in my idiocy, W. says, that's the paradox. No doubt it's my idiocy which drew it close, the everyday, and let it follow me like a stray dog. – 'You'll never leave it behind', W. says. He's impressed with my loyalty, even though it's the only example of my loyalty. – 'You'll always carry it with you', he says. Because there it is, in my eyes, carrying a kind of distance with it, a sign from faraway.

'You feel it, don't you?' Yes, I feel it. Years of warehouse work. Years of unemployment. A kind of living death. But a death you were unable to die. I am the copula, W. says. I live it; I embody it. And he, beside me at the bus stop, does he live it too?