'Go on, have an espresso', says W. He's having one; why not me? But he knows why not. He knows the effect coffee has on me. He knows the excitement, the fever-dream. W.'s hoping for a moment of illumination. He's hoping for the clouds – my clouds – to part and for me to say great things. He's waiting for my eyes to roll back in my head …
My prophetic days seem to have gone, W. says. Once I was worth listening to. Oh, not for what I thought I said, and nor indeed for its content. No, it was the pathos W. remembers. The mood.
Is there something like a messianic mood?, W. sometimes wonders. My voice used to tremble, W. remembers that. I sounded upset, as though about to cry. And then it began, then I began to speak – or someone spoke, at least, W. says. The espresso spoke. The caffeine. I became the sock puppet of God, W. says.
Oxford Spring. It's always Spring in our Oxford. The sky is open, expansive. We feel wistful, full of a vague sense of possibility. This year, things will be different, we tell ourselves. This year will be a new beginning.
But of course, nothing will begin. We've long since worn out any beginning. Long since mocked it, laughed at it, and finally sunk beneath it, staring mutely upwards like apes in the gutter. Life, real life is elsewhere. And who might we have been in that foreign country, that glittering elsewhere?
Until the seventh day, some theologians say, the creation was unfinished W. says. Until the Sabbath. And what is the day after the end of the world, our eternal day, our non-day except a kind of Sabbath?
He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters … Why aren't our souls restored as we wander out to Jericho? This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Because our day is a mockery of the Sabbath; it laughs at it. Because our day is what has unmade the Lord …
Still, it's good to be out of the city, we agree over our pints. Why, almost as soon as we arrive in Oxford, do we try to escape it? But the answer is obvious. What do we see that others do not? It's finished, it's all finished, and never more so than there: in Oxford (though Jericho, too, is in Oxford, the periphery to its centre).
The sky has become a great door shut against us. And the earth, too, is a shut door. We live in two dimensions, not three. Our world is a thin film, a kind of stain to be rubbed away. And it will be rubbed away.
And in the meantime, our non-Sabbath, our parody of rest. Meanwhile, our pints, and pint after pint. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. Consider the idiots of Jericho, how they drink …
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