My dreams of publication. My dreams of redeeming all the rubbish I've published by writing another book, a better book …
Do you think a former Essex postgraduate would publish a line?, W. says. Do I think the former Essex postgraduates sought philosophical immortality? Do I think they cared about what posterity would make of them?
Do I think they thought of themselves as thought-archers, firing the arrows of their thought ahead for others to find and shoot on? They shot their arrows upward into the sky, upwards to the stars. They shot them into impassable thickets, into the surging ocean, the most barren desert. Or they shot them into their own breasts, laughing all the while. They shot the arrows of their thought into their own eyes and were drunk with laughter …
Ah, the former Essex postgraduates wanted no legacy. They'd seen too much to want a legacy. They knew the end was coming. The knew the end was nigh. They knew that there was little time left, that the disaster to come laughed in the face of any thought endeavour.
The former Essex postgraduates took the long view, W. says. The very long view. The view from eternity, from the other end of eternity, when everything was dead and the stars burnt out. They've seen it, W. says, the former Essex postgraduates: the end of all things, the drifting apart of everything, the great cool down. It was going to end, and endlessly to end, that's what they knew.
Still, there were some signs left for the vigilant: a few lines, a diagram, traced on the condensated wall of a sauna, photographed by a curious passerby; a philosophical glyph sketched with a toe in the Painted Desert, preserved on Flickr; a Blanchot-like fragment carved in the bark of a petrified tree nearly at the arctic circle;
a few words written in code in a tourist's guide to Shanghai; an except from an abandoned treatise posted on the comments box of an anonymous blog deep in the internet; notes towards an original idea written as marginalia in an abandoned blockbuster on a Tenerife beach;
a sketch of a philosophical system on the back of a bar receipt blowing about in the backdraft of lorries passing through the Karamwanken mountain tunnel; notes on what one former postgraduate would write, if he had written, if he could be bothered to write, scrawled slantwise across a guest book in a B&B on Krk island;
some scattered remarks towards a decisive rebuttal to the philosophy of immanence, taken down verbatim in the diary of a drunk and non-comprehending companion; a snatch of Hoelderlin style poetic philosophy translated into Inuit as part of a translation exercise in an Arctic TEFL class;
snatches of an interview detectable in the squalling ambience of a Jamaican dub plate, blasted from a sound system; a Sappho-like fragment scratched into the run-off groove of a forgotten flexi-disc; the initials of a three word title for a philosophical masterpiece scraped out on the hull of a captured trawler in a Somalian drydock;
a few lines buried in a time-capsule buried by schoolchildren and due to be opened in the year 3012; the chapter titles of a treatise left as crossword answers in an abandoned Metro on the London Underground; the names of great concepts to come written into a Twombly-like canvas hung in a Manaus art gallery;
a draft chapter of an unfinished book burnt for warmth in the St Petersburg winter; a paragraph from an unfinished paper broadcast as part of a sound collage on a Jeff Magnum internet radio show; Heraclitus-like sayings recieved – who knows how – in a broadcast thought to be from an alien civilisation from the direction of Andromeda;
The letters of a few stray words uttered on a deathbed in the Peruvian jungle translated into European notation and used to score a chamber quartet; recorded table talk slowed down and distorted until they were indistinguishable from noise, on the 501st disc of a Merzbow boxset; Bataille-like poems that might be heard when you play a Motley Crue album backwards;
notes on faith and thinking bound by string and forgotten in a garage until they formed the basis of a new religion among the surviving people of a planet-wide apocalypse in 4012; the crucial missing pages of a fragmentary journal with the title 'On Nature' reconstructed by alien scholars who will visit the earth long after our extinction …
Signs, signs: how will I ever understand the abandonment of the former Essex postgraduate? How their neglect for themselves, let alone the neglect of their thought and for the legacy of their thought?
Lars Iyer's Blog 