The end of W.'s conference. We've run out of drink, and the bar is closed. W. goes back by taxi to his house on the other side of the city, and fetches back, after half an hour, the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. Nothing is too good for his guests!
Sitting in the quad, we finish W.'s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We drink a couple of rare bottles of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, since they couldn't find good quality damsons. And we drink his treasure of treasures: Plymouth Navy Strength Gin in the old bottle, before the redesign: gin at 90 proof, made that strong so as not to be inadvertently ignited by gunpowder. That was the one time he was refused a drink at the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, W. says, when, already drunk, he asked for a Martini made from Navy Strength Gin.
We drink W.'s Polish bison grass vodka with apple juice, and Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Bela Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink Slivovitz, plum brandy from Eastern Europe – drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says – and Becherovka from the Czech Republic, some kind of nutmeg liqueur.
We drink some weird version of Baileys from Malta, sweet cream with the addition of cumin or cinnamon, or something. W.'s not sure where he got that. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, but how else is W. going to keep his guests drunk?
Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them spiritual impossibility and political impossibility of the political. It always passes through despair, drinking. Passes through it, but bears us beyond it, if we are prepared to drink right through the night.
We think of Krasznhorkai telling Mihaly Vig about the unbearableness of the world in the streets of Pecs. I was born into a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive.
We think of a hungover Bohumil Hrabal, feeding pigeons in his fifth floor apartment. I love ruination, I love hangovers …
We think of Marguerite Duras alone at Neauphle, except for drink. A man who drinks is interplanetary, she said. He moves through interstellar space. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God, she said. The lack of God! The void you discover in your teens, she said. We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God what in fact we are!
Guests sitting in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbecues. Bags of kettle crisps. Empty bottles. Spread blankets, and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop. Everyone begins to leave, taxis drawing up in the night, until W. and I are the only ones left, the last drinkers, the most drunk.
We have to libate the palm trees!, W. says. I didn't know there were palm trees on campus, but W. assures me they exist. And there they are – palm trees in a grove, which we libate with a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.
Dawn. The air is moist. We talk of Beckett and Avigdor Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentia, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers? They were exiles, of course, but drinkers?
The exile is a man of a coming future world …: Flusser wrote that. Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the huge role alcohol played in these people's lives: so Arhika's wife in her memoir. And Gombrowicz, what did Gombrowicz write? We have nothing of relevance in our notebooks.
I tell W. an anecdote from the life of Debord: Alcohol kills slowly, read the government information poster near Chez Moineau. We don't give a fuck. We've got the time, the comrades sent out by Debord scrawled over it …
We've got the time. Life is long, not short, W. and I agree. Life is terribly long … It's too long! … To live without a lifetime. To die forsaken by death … What should we do? What's left to us?
God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I say, paraphrasing Jabes. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W. But God has something to do with the distance between us. With our nearness, with our distance. Speech. That's what brings that distance to life. Speech between friends.
Dawn, the plateau of the morning. We're high up, for the campus is built on the edge of the moor which looms behind the city, and we can see out to the city and to the shining sea. Dawn, and the sky seems to open itself above us … Is it time to speak? Time, finally, to say something? But we're silent, quite silent, as we swill the last of the whiskey round our glasses.
Lars Iyer's Blog 