Category: Overseas

Day 1. Flew into Nashville airport. There are rocking chairs in the arrivals lounge. Our taxi driver detours to pick up his checkers board. He and the other taxi drivers play checkers together when it’s quiet. One, from Somalia, is a checkers champion. Sometimes he wins 10 times in a row. This antagonises the Nigerian taxi drivers, who generally dislike the Somalians.

Day 2. A driving tour of the city. Our Canadian hosts are relieved when we tell them we dislike Nashville. The weird zoning that places a rubbish tip next to a pedestrian bridge next to a football stadium! Vast deserted car parks as the only public space! Mega churches deposited one after another in long strips!

It’s a car city, our host tells us. You’re nothing without a car. When they’d first arrived in America, they tried to do without a car, he says. They walked and rode the bus everywhere. The buses are great here, he says. You can have great conversations. Everyone talks, he says. But it takes hours to get anywhere, he says. They took up cycling. Everyone thinks you’re crazy if you cycle here, he says. People yell at you. But he cycles to work nonetheless, he says.

In the evening, our hosts drive us out to La Hacienda for dinner. We are delighted by the warmth of the waitreseses and the excellence of the food. The only thing for them is to become Mexican, we tell our hosts. Learn Spanish. Learn to Salsa.

Day 3. Downtown Nashville consists largely of car parks. Odd bits of metal stick out of the ground at shin height. This is not a town for pedestrians. The honky tonks distress us with their noise and clamour. A fully outfitted cowboy walks down the street. ‘Must be German’, says W.

Later that day, lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. It is delightful to tip a side plate of herbs into my ramen, and then to squeeze lime jouice over it. You’ll have to become Vietnamese, we tell our hosts. It’s the only way you’ll survive here.

The size of the car park outside the restaurant distresses us. Madly, our hosts drives his car round and round in circles. I can’t get over the amount of space here!, he says. It’s madness!

We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us. We are Old Europeans and this is the New World. People here are very proud of the Nashville Parthenon, says our host.

In the evening, he tells us about his project to photograph the old parts of Nashville before they are demolished. There’s virtually nothing left of it, he says. It keeps him sane, he says, cycling around old ruins and finding a way to break in and take pictures of what he finds. That night he shows us a slide show of photographs on his laptop and trembles with melancholy. Where did it all go wrong?

Day 4. A trip by Greyhound bus to Memphis. An armed policeman behind the counter in the bus station watches us menacingly. On the way to the station, our taxi driver, a Somalian, tells us the USA is a third world country. That’s what we were thinking, we tell him. He tells us about the lack of healthcare and the low wages. People kill themselves all the time, he says. They come to America for a better life, and they end up killing themselves, he says. They want to go to college for a better life and they’re working three jobs. And then they kill themselves, he says. 

On the bus, we’re sitting by the toilet, which was a terrible mistake. Something terrible happened inside. Passengers gasp when they open the door. One brings a portable air freshener, spraying it around her in the sign of the cross. We hold orange skins to our noses. What a smell! It’s terrible!

Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold. The tax driver in Memphis tells us the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing. After lunch, we go to Gap to buy warm clothes. It was the last place we wanted to go, but here we are. The clothes are too cheap! Who made them? In what mess of exploitation are we caught?

Day 5.  We’re heading to Graceland. Hearing Sal is from Nottingham, our taxi driver says he grew up on Robin Hood. he says he always asks his passengers from Nottingham whether there was a real Robin Hood. It’s amalgamates several myths, says W., expertly. The taxi driver’s brother rings. I have passengers from Nottingham, says the taxi driver. ‘You remember: Robin Hood, his Merry Men and all that’. He and his brother grew up watching the adventures of Robin Hood on the TV, he recalls.

We learn from our taxi driver that Beale Street was almost entirely rebuilt in the 1980s. Back in ’68, when Dr King was assassinated, he explains, there were no riots in Memphis, no trouble, but the city authorities took the opportunity to demolish Beale Street, home of the blues, and surrounding areas. At the Civil Rights Museum, sited next to the hotel where Dr King was shot, one woman has kept a 25 year protest against the demolition of black businesses. It’s not what Dr King would have wanted, says our taxi driver.

We are quietly moved by Graceland, and wish we’d paid for the VIP tour, which includes the Elvis After Dark exhibit, full access to the aeroplanes and the jumpsuit museum. Sal buys 200 dollars worth of tat, but cannot find the Elvis tie she promised her dad. Discussion of the difference between tat and tack.

Our bus back to Nashville has been delayed for many hours. No one tells us. The lady in front of us was heading to a funeral; she won’t make it now. I sit down with W. and tell him Hindu stories. Sal offers Gummi Bears to everyone in the queue. No one wants Gummi Bears. On the bus, which arrives 4 hours late at midnight, one passenger watches The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Fitful sleep haunted by screams.

Day 6. In a bar at the Five Points, W. berates the bartender about the poor choice of gin. Bombay Gin is terrible, he tells her. Tanqueray isn’t bad, especially with tonic but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick. She says her customers like it. W. tells her to get Plymouth Gin. You can buy it in America, he says. Our bartender looks irked. She’ll continue to buy what her customers like, she says.

Later, we sit out on our hosts’ porch drinking Plymouth Gin. How have they ended up in America, wonders our host. It’s a terrible country, he says. The guns! The churches! The poverty! In the evening, we listen to Barbecue Bob and Memphis Minnie (trading licks with Kansas Joe McCoy) and Big Joe Williams (with his nine string guitar) and sip bourbon. Our host makes us listen to the funk guitar style of the Mississippi Sheiks. He points out their sophisticated melodies (it’s their microphone technique, he says).

In the string bands, you can find the ultimate blend of melody and rhythm, says our host. He’s really an enemy of melody, he says. W. thinks he’s gone too far. Fuck melody!, our host says. He hates dead syncopations, he says. He hates drums. Everything goes wrong when drums are brought in, he says. I’m swept up by his argument. Fuck melody!, I shout. Fuck drums!

Our host makes us listen to early John Lee Hooker. He plays electric guitar rhythmically, he says. Rhythm is everything, he says. He puts on Bukka White. The guitar produces the rhythm, says our host. 

Day 7. Through Sevier Country to a cabin in the Smokies, listening to rural blues and gospel. Route 441 takes us through the so-called Redneck Riviera –Pigeon Forge. Our host shouts and cries as we pass the mini golf courses, go-carts, water rides, laser games, motels, adverts for The Miracle Theatre and The Comedy Barn and then, finally, The Miracle Theatre which presents a show that includes an aerial battle of angels and a re-enactment of the crucifixion and the Comedy Barn, which presents an award winning family variety show for all the family one after another, one lined up after another. The buildings have been deposited here without sense or order. They are linded up in an endless strip. Kroger’s. The Old Time Country Shop. Mini-malls. Huge crosses that loom out over nowhere. Is there no end? We’re crushed. There’s no room for him, says our host. This is auto-satire. It satirises itself. There’s no perspective left from which to laugh. He cries and wails with pain.

Earlier, as we drove, our host and hostess tell us of the Yukon. Of the endless stretches of pristine forests, of deserted lakes where you could pitch your teepee and be undisturbed. Of the close harmony singing that would ring out in the Canadian night. How had they ended up here?

Night falls and we are lost in the mountains. Where’s our cabin? Precipitous falls to the left and the right. Our host, the driver is edgy. We get out and walk – the road’s too steep for the car. What are we going to do? Then we see it: the cabin. It’s almost too late for our host. He’s raving. What’s he doing here? How did he end up here? He can’t drive anymore, he, a non-driver! Not another mile! Later, he collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: the dying swan, half wrapped in a towel.

Only turnip greens can save us, he decides. He cooks a whole pan of them. Turnip greens!, he says. Plymouth Gin! Rural blues! Barbecue Bob! The Golden Gate Singers! These are the talismans that allow him to survive in the USA.

Day 8. Snow. W. is reading and writing in his notebook. Is he having any thoughts?, I ask him. The others have gone out. W. says his mind is a perfect blank.

That night we drink ourselves into oblivion. Our host’s complaints rise to the same magnificent level as our Somalian taxi driver’s. It’s a third world country!, he says. It’s gone mad!, he says. When they first arrived in America, he says, he saw two 12 year old kids held face down by an armed security guard. He was pointing the gun at their heads, he says. Our host went home and didn’t come out for days. This country is insane, he says.

Back in Nashville, our host, our driver, falls out of his car. I can’t drive anymore! We talk softly to him, and sit out on the porch with Plymouth Gin cut with water. This is yuppie hour, says our host, slowly recovering, when joggers and dog walkers fill the streets. He shows us his tattoo: workers of the world unite, it says.

Day 9. Our host talks movingly of the early blues players. They led such short lives! But life is short! There’s not much time! He and our hostess reminisce about Canada. How have they ended up here? I think at night our open-hearted hosts dream of the endless stretches of the Yukon.

Day 10. Our last taxi driver, who is taking us back to the airport, is apocalyptic. In America, your teeth rot in your mouth, he says, because you can’t afford healthcare. There’s the rich and there’s the poor, he says, and the poor have nothing and never will have anything but nothing. We drive through the Projects. There’s no minimum wage here, he says. People are paid five – six dollars an hour, that’s all.

Monday, 2nd April. My hostess picks me up at the new airport. We follow the road along a little, and the whole city is there on a lower hill, spreading up the calley: Cork. Greetings, then dinner at the big kitchen table: lamb, with a dessert of rhubarb and custard. And then out in the car again, along the roads with which I will become joyfully familiar, until we park up by St. Finbarr’s and walk up to Tom Barry’s. A pint of Murphy’s, and then a walk out into the night. How long as it been? Several years. Several years years since I was walked along these same streets, but in the other direction, by my hostess. Then back to the farmhouse and I sleep in my big, cool room in the basement.

Tuesday. My hostess comes down to wake me. What time is it? Really!? That late! Up to the kitchen and I am cooked griddle cakes, which I’ve never had before, with maple syrup and bacon. Then to town, walking up from Leigh street to Tom Barry’s, to retrieve a lost phone, and then to the English Market to meet friends of my hostess. We lunch at Liberty Grill and my hostess and I drink a glass of Cava.

Then up by ourselves to the North side, to Chapel Hill and to ‘Jandek street’: the road that featured on one of his album covers. I take photos: yes, this is the street. Jandek was here! Imagine! To Tom Barry’s again – still closed – and I drink a pint of Beamish at the Abbey – thick and creamy; what happiness!, before we at last retrieve the phone. It is like cream, very thick, substantial, but not sweet. And then, in the evening, to my hostess’s friends for dinner. Beef again, curried this time: excellent. Saki-based cocktails to start, then papadums and dips; ice-cream to finish. And are they really Fall fans? They are; ‘Chiseler’ with dessert.

Wednesday. In the morning, to the English market again to buy food for our picnic. Then driving out towards Galway, through Limerick and Ennis in the blazing sun. We eat lunch at the Cliffs of Mohar, the three Isles of Arran spreading before us in the brilliant water, our happiness spoiled somewhat by the expensive car parking (8 Euro!), and the built up, touristy feel to the area.

Through County Clare, the countryside often rocky and barren, but beautiful too along the bendy shoreline, lakes and the sea. We stop for a pint in the sunshine, and drive on to reach Galway, and our hotel, by 7.30. Neachtains, next, and Irish whisky – I try Connemara and then Midleton on the barman’s recommendation and we watch a Polish band playing folk tunes from central Europe, and then songs of the late 60s, when Dylan lived with The Band in Big Pink.

Thursday. Breakfast at Ard Bia. I have chowder, thick and creamy in a big plate. To the bookshop, Charlie Byrne’s and then a stroll out through town to Salthill. We sit and watch dogs play on the rocky shore. The sea, brilliant in the sunlight. Later, more whisky: Green Spot and Bushmills 16 (Beckett’s tipple – that and Jameson’s); my hostess sticks to Hoegaarden. And then to Oscar’s for dinner. Hake for me, with rocket and sun dried tomatoes, lamb for my hostess; Fleurie wine.

Friday. Good Friday, when alcohol is banned from sale in Ireland (though we would see it sold in hotel bars, bouncers outside to keep the locals out …) To Sherridan’s for our picnic – venisson from West Cork – and then we drive out to Connemara, for which you can never be prepared. Twelve rocky crags, and a rock plain all around them. Are we in the extreme North? The deserts of Africa? We could be anywhere. We listen to Diamanda Galas’s The Singer. ‘Devil, devil, devil …’ Perfect. And at Roundstone disembark to climb a hill to see the rock plain and its lakes, and the sea all around us.

Saturday. Ard Bia for breakfast for the third time, but I’d had enough of chowder. We visit the aquarium, where my hostess wears a constant look of horror. Fishes in pipes, starfish feeding on mussels in the touchpool, spider crabs … It is only the Brazilian seahorses, bred for export in nearby Carna, and the tagpole fish, wide mouthed in its hiding place that redeem the ‘Atlantiquarium’ for her.

Then back to Cork, Nina Simone playing in the car (Jazz as Played … and … and Piano). We follow the shortest route this time, with no distractions, passing a sign to Yeats’ tower, and then one to Coole Park, where Lady Gregory lived. Along the road, jovial billboards of Bertie Ahern joshing with folks young and old.

We eat out, 12 of us, at the Ivory Tower, after cocktails at Long Island. We listen to Pussycat Dolls and Clipse on the way in the car to get us in a party mood. My hostess gets a slab of steak, done perfectly, she says. I opt for fish. Wine and jollity. Then out to the Crane Lane to try out our moves at the rock disco. But why is no one else dancing? And why is the music so bad?

Sunday. A long walk to walk off our lunch, being dropped off halfway up the Straight Road to walk through Fitzgerald’s Park. And then dinner again; we’re cooked bloody beef which we drink with Chablis and bad cider. The taxi ride back is frightening: we plunge too quickly into the dark; it’s a fairground ride. But the roads are familiar to me now; I know where we’re going.

Monday. Our second excursion, to West Cork this time. We stop on the Warren Beach to skim stones. And then, stopping for a Murphy’s and a sandwich, we arrive at the hotel at Baltimore, which is next to a building site. We eat dinner at La Jolie Brise – haddock for me, and pizza for my host. We finish two bottles of wine!

Tuesday. Breakfast La Jolie Brise, and then to a marvellously still loch, before taking green tea at The Plaza in Skiberee. We drive out along the penninsula through Ballydehob and to Schull, where we lunch at the Gourmet, my hostess buying various West Cork salamis for me to give to my friends on my return. Then through Goleen to Corkhaven, where I drink Beamish outside O’Sullivans by the sea in the brilliant sun, and my hostess fails to find gossip magazines for us both to read. Later, back to the famous Levis at Ballydehob for a drink before dinner; at Annie’s, brill for me, monkfish for my hostess and I have to take a walk after I am so full. Lucinda Williams accompanied us all day – West, twice, in the car, and then most of Sweet Old World.

Wednesday. Kinsale, listening to Justin Timberlake on the way. The new album’s much better than the first one, we decide; but we’ve only reached track 7 by the time we park and wander out to Fishy Fishy. I eat a half lobster – the first in my life; my hostess opts for a salad of fish. We drink cool white wine in the sun. And then, later, to the beach at Garettstown, where we spend the whole day, skimming stones, trying our moves and larking about.

Jim Edward’s for dinner – crab salad for me, salmon for my host. My last pint of Beamish. Then we drive home along the same route we walked several years ago. Memories! Up past St. Finbarr’s, then right past the Abbey, then another right along the path, and then out to the street that runs along the university. And then back to the house to talk around the fire.

Thursday. Up in the morning early, tired, we drove out to the airport. My hostess congratulates herself on her good work: I am tanned and well-looking, she says. And drops me off so I can go and catch my plane.

1. W.’s favourite question, that he likes to ask and be asked, ‘When did you know you were a failure?’ When was it you knew you had intelligence enough to appreciate brilliance, but not enough to be brilliant yourself? When was it you knew a great book from a merely good one, and knew you would never write neither a good book nor a great one? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own – not one?

Yet we still the desire to to think, I say. Still a kind of reflex to try to think, and to write a good book. To do what you cannot do – that for which patience will never be enough, and learning about the history of philosophy will never be enough. That which the brilliant can do and you cannot. That which is effortless for them and remains the greatest of effort for you.

‘What’s your IQ, do you think?’, says W. – ’83. I was tested. But it’s going down, year by year.’ – ‘What is it now?’ – ’77.’ – ‘So you’re an imbecile?’

2. We are travelling to the city of phenomenology, and standing at the bar on the train. We like the rowdy Germans around us. They’re playing ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ on their stereo and smoking. We’re on the train! In Germany! And off to the city of phenomenology!

On the last such jolly, I wore Hawaiian shorts, W. reminds me. That was Poland, a few years ago. All day on an old European train, being brought cheap beer and snacks, we arrived half-drunk and rowdy, like children who need looking after. This time, we’ve organised the trip by ourselves. Or rather, W. has followed me in booking flights and a hotel. It’s all going to go wrong, we know it. Still, we’re off to the city of phenomenology! Imagine that!

W.: ‘What are your impressions of Europe?’. – ‘Very flat. Very green. A lot like England.’ – ‘And what are you going to bring to Freiburg? What will be your contribution?’

That night, we wander through Freiburg. ‘It’s lovely.’ We feel ashamed and dirty. Then we come across restaurant tables in an alley. For the first time, I eat sausage, sauerkraut and mustard – it’s marvellous. W. knows how happy eating makes me. I’m a little dizzy. And then he has me try some German Sekt. A new world opens to me. ‘It’s like Cava – but nicer.’ And so it is. Like dry Cava.

Where are the others? Have they arrived yet? But W., grim faced is determined to find an internet cafe. Up and down the streets we go, until we find one in a Burger King. The keyboard is metal and its keys are sunk into the table. Hard to use your fingers. The emails come out wrong. But we are happy to be in contact with the world. Now we can go back to find them, the others.

Our friends arrive the next day – X. and Y., and Z., too, who knows W. X. insists we have to go to the reception. So up to a lobby where we are charged for drinks, and then a big, round room where food is served. It’s ghastly. ‘I want to go.’ But we have to stay. On a big screen, photographs of previous conferences. ‘This is horrible.’

Later, in the lift, I become mildly hysterical. It’s too much! It’s all too much! All of them, all the others! Later, we calm down over drinks. Here we are in Freiburg! The home of phenomenology! And what are we going to bring to the city?

3. In dead time, travelling from here to there, I try to provoke W. with my sociobiological musings. What nonsense posssesses me! Pure streaming of nonsense! Sometimes, W. talks to me very seriously of love. It’s not based on fantasy as I seem to think, he says, but is an ethical act. ‘But you’re not capable of that, are you?’

Trains and buses, across Germany. We have to get out of Freiburg. It’s stifling. Our friends A. and B. have a hotel outside the city. I write down in our book of lessons, ‘never book to stay in the conference hotel’. And then another lesson: ‘Never attend receptions. Or anything.’ We are determined to learn.

At one cafe, our Polish waiter urges us to get away. ‘This is the wrong part of town. It’s too expensive here.’ He touches his heart. ‘It hurts me here for you.’ So we wander off, our whole party, to another part of town. Where should we go? We’ve no idea. So back to the ’emergency scheisse bar’ for caiperenas. These will save us.

Now we are jolly and light again. Freiburg falls away around us. We see a rat scurrying by our chairs. A rat! But what does it matter! We have our caiperenas! In the city of phenomenology! We’ve brought nothing here but British drunkenness and British lairiness.

4. A. makes a trip to Todnauenberg. ‘Did you shit in the well?’ You can’t get near the hut, apparently. Hermann, the son lives up there. Later A. meets him. Hermann says his father turned down the Rectorship twice, and only accepted it as a favour to a friend.

So we walk up the observation tower outside the city instead. There it is, all of Freiburg! Phenomenology’s city! And who are we, who have come only to soil phenomenology and the memory of phenomenology!

5. In the bar after our paper, we drink ‘Lady Velvet’: Sekt mixed with Guinness. The barman plays The Smiths because some of our party are for Manchester. In the urinals, tiny goals with balls you can move with the stream of your piss. It’s football season, the world cup. When Germany win some game or another, the Freiburgians are as loutish as the British.

When we return from Strasbourg, Pina Coladas in an Italian ice cream bar. We’re desperate. ‘Why did we have to come back?’ X., Y. and Z. are long gone; and now it’s time to say goodbye to A. and B. Back to the hotel bar, then, once again. The hotel bar, where we ended up every night!

Then a terrible spectacle: up comes X, whom we all want to avoid. There he is! In person! I stand and shake his hand. I simper – that’s W.’s word, after. Yes, for my shame, I simper. I handle it badly, simperingly. ‘You know about my problem with authority’, I say to W., afterwards. ‘And besides, I have to make it up to him – the beer, I mean.’ I’d spilt beer on his stetson. Beer on his velvet stetson! That was years ago, but I remembered his anger.

Do you think he remembers me? He remembers everything, I’m told. So I simper. I curry favour. It’s grotesque – my worst feature. W. is disgusted. I’ve let myself down again, he says. For his part, he handled the encounter well, laughing, and keeping his distance.

6. Initially, we are excited about our breakfasts at the hotel, and plan what we’re going to eat the night before. Gradually, it wears us down: the poor coffee and the heavy, farmed salmon, and take to leaving for a cafe in the square which does Orange Peking tea (is that what it’s called). We sit and drink our overpriced tea, and I always imagine we are right by a river.

What joy when we discovered the concrete channels cut into the road which let shallow, narrow streams of water run along the street between pedestrians and traffic! I marvelled, then and later – and especially when we found that alleyway where the river itself passes through the town. Later, when we took X. and Y. there, it was not nearly as exciting. We learnt not to try to repeat our experiences. ‘Write that down in your notebook’, W. tells me.

7. Conversations on trains, in bars, when there’s nothing left to say. ‘So what’s your next magnum opus going to be about then?’ Laughter. Or I will make pans for future papers and collaborations. ‘You’re never happier than when you make plans’, says W., ‘why is that?’

We grow tired of drinking, and of German sausage. Our visit to Strasbourg soothes us. We speak hushedly, and I enjoy hearing W.’s gentle French. Exquisite Alsatian wine, the finest I’ve ever drunk. Then the cathedral, and the river, which we follow along. So many beautiful buildings, one after another! It’s too much – but at least they are really old, and not faux old as are the rebuilt buildings of Freiburg.

We find one square, then another. Water, then espresso – the first good coffee we’ve had in a while. Yes, we are in Strasbourg, and carefree. Our souls expand. When we return to Freiburg we tell everyone to go there. ‘You have to escape Freiburg. Then everything will make sense again.’ We all agree: we’ve been here too long; every thought has been driven from our heads. Who of us has read a book, or even tried?

Sitting out with a beer outside the hotel, I try to read, but there’s no point. Later, in my room, which looks out from five stories over the town and to the hills and mountains, I manage to read three essays. This is an achievement. I feel slightly more real. I’m coming into focus. But then I grow blurred and hazy again. I’ve lost all hold on myself, I tell W. So’s he. But at least he has music. We listen to mp3s on his laptop. The world comes together again.

8. One day, the clouds parted, and I could delude myself there might be something to our collaborative projects. ‘Do you think we have a position?’ At least, for a time, the illusion of having one. We have a view of this, and that.

It was a moment of clarity, such as we had on a few occasions during our trip. ‘Write it down’, says W., ‘write down our findings.’ But I’ve no notebook with me; all that’s left now is the certainty that, for a time, we were certain about things. What luxury! It was the espresso, I tell W. It was caffeinated certainty.

9. In downtime, I like to exasperate W. by my musings on diet and on sociobiology. Then I like to trace grand philosophical motifs through the Greek and the Latin. Sometimes, we speculate on what makes our clever friends clever. W. likes to work out their IQs. ‘What’s your IQ’?

You’re never witty, says W., that’s a sign of intelligence: wit. W. says he is sometimes witty, but, more generally, he’s never witty. W. is more intelligent than me, he decides. But what about those illuminated moments when the clouds part, and I have ideas? It’s true, I do have moments of illumination, W. grants.

We wander on the shady streets, trying to find another route to our favourite cafe. Freiburg won’t let us become imperceptible. We were imperceptible in Strasbourg, says W. We think of the path along the river, and the street cafe in the French city where we drank a good espresso. There’s no good coffee in Freiburg, we agree.

10. What have we learnt, from Freiburg? Always book your own hotel – away from the conference. As far away as possible. This is what A. and B. achieved, and with what were they rewarded? The sight of Husserl’s grave. Of Edith Stein’s nunnery. And what did we see?

Husserl’s grave! Stein’s nunnery! And who were we to defile this city, the city of phenomenology? Who were we to drink beer outside the Novotel? We leave without regrets. What have we learnt? Never, never come back to Freiburg, says W.

8th June. We drink a great deal and stay up very late. We’ve already lost our place in time. What day is it? How long do we have left? What’s going on back at home? We wander through the Old City.

W. has resolved to keep a notebook again. Z. shows him his – a large moleskine, in several different inks. We talk about thinking at breakfast. How do you think?, W. asks Z. He thinks as he writes, Z. tells X. And then he tells us about the meditational practices he learnt when he was a monk. It is like that, says Z. – like meditation. But he hasn’t thought about anything for a few days, he tells us. That’s the effect we have on people, says W.

Yesterday, pedalloes out on the lake at Titisee, in the Black Forest. Our passenger, R., sings in the high and lonesome bluegrass style. The Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers. He yodels, too. Then, in the middle of the lake, we stop pedalling and let the boat drift. I let my head tilt back and there is the whole sky spread before me, like the whole of my life. Life, life, I say to myself. Elsewhere, far ahead of us, the pedallo with W. and the others.

At a restaurant in Titisee, on the first full day of our trip, W. and I are delighted by the gentleness of the waitress. How peaceful and calm she is! And we, too, are peaceful and calm, the lake spreading out below us, and the pine-covered hills and mountains around us. I have my first glass of Sekt, the German Cava. I am captivated: it is marvellously dry. The Sekt, the lake, the mountains, the service. When, later, we reach the other side of the lake, W. is melancholy. We’ll never experience that again, he says.

Two days later, after the pedalloes, we bring our friends to the restaurant. We will experience it again, after all! But the service is poor: there’s no one to attend to us, and when they come – and there are many of them now, not just one – it is harsh and unsweet. Why don’t they like us?, I ask, distressed. And it’s me in particular, with my ludicrous attempts to speak to them in German, who they seem to find particularly offensive. 

I order a beer, but it doesn’t come; in the end, X., feeling sorry for me, has to approach the waitresses directly. I’ll try and win them over, she says. Meanwhile, a dark cloud obscures the sun. It’s just like Repetition, W. and I agree. Just like Kierkegaard’s Constantine Constantius revisiting Vienna. Titisee, we had thought, had the kindest of waitresses, and now? We’ve brought our friends out from Freiburg. We came out on the train – and for what?

Luckily, we have the happy memories of the pedalloes, and the long walk around the lake. There is the blazing sun and the thought we escaped for a day from the others. Later, we agree the pedalloes were the turning point; it was the hinge of our visit. After that, we grew tired of being abroad, and longed for our normal lives. We need a strategy, we decide. We need some structure to our days. We need to brace ourselves.

11th June. A day trip to Strasbourg. We speak more quietly; we walk quietly through the streets. And the wine! The glorious wine, and after X. had tried all the wines on the menu in Freiburg last night, and found all of them foul (except for the Sekt). We are emotional. We speak hushedly. And then back to Freiburg, for pina coladas.

Pina coladas! In Freiburg! It’s madness. But just as with the caiperenas the other night, they are what like the holy fire Holderlin writes of to Bohlendorff. Holy fire – just what Freiburg lacks, but here it is in a glass.

6th January

We arrive at Chennai airport. Warm night. An uncle and his daughter meets us; we are conveyed by taxi to the hotel. It’s been a long time since I was here last. Roadside shrines to Ganesh. Advertising hoardings painted by hand. Construction sites. Argument with the night porter at The New Woodlands Hotel: we’d booked the Krishna cottages but they only have double rooms. In the hotel foyer, a map of South India and then a map of Chennai.

7th January

Masala Dosai for breakfast. Thinner and crisper than in London. Coffee sweet and milky. I read The Hindu and then we change rooms to the Krishna Cottages. Then the oldest uncle comes, and his son. I present my uncle with my book. We talk about it, briefly. We are given a car and driver, and arrangments are made to meet later. To Anna Silai through what seems at first the madness of Chennai traffic. But there is a logic to it; you have to work it out. No more people die on the roads here than in England. Business of the streets: bicycles, mopeds, rickshaws, cars. People run across the street. Horns constantly sounded: be careful, I am here.

Chennai pollution and chaos. I visit a bookshop and pick up Deleuze’s Francis Bacon and Delanda’s Intensive Science for £2.50 each and books about the future of India. In the evening, to the family’s new block of flats. Happiness to see everyone again. My sister and brother in law married again, she in a sari, he in a veshti. Photographs, conversation.

8th January

With our car and driver to Mahabs. Tsunami damage along the coast. Resettled villagers. The Shore Temple by the sea, surrounded by granite sculptors. Wild dogs, hawkers and beggars. Great waves crashing in from the Bay of Bengal. Beauty of the landscape south of Chennai: palm trees, grass. Folk art on the trucks: written, Sound Horn Please, and then images of birds and animals on yellow and blue.

In the evening, dinner Bengali style as a guest of my cousin. He loves Oscar Wilde, and quotes from Earnest. We talk about film; he hasn’t yet seen any Bela Tarr. We walk on the beach. 6,000 died here; the Tsunami came early in the morning. It was further along the beach that my father’s ashes were scattered in the water, my cousin explains, and talks about the 13 days after death, as the soul finds its way to heaven. Above us, he says, the rishis are the stars. And so will our father find his place there, among the stars.

9th January

To another uncle’s for lunch. A gift of gold sovereigns. Then to the school to which we have donated in memory of our father. A plaque by the door of the Chemistry lab: from the heirs of N. Ramakrishnan Iyer, Wokingham, England. Ceremony. Shawls placed on our shoulders, milky tea and biscuits in the classrooms. Outside, the children at drill. Seeing us on the balcony, they march towards us and hold thumbs aloft when we do the same. My mother stops in an embroidery class to look at the childrens’ work. We feel rather like the Queen; beneficient guests who receive great hospitality. Later, in the car, my oldest uncle commends the school on the ceremony they arranged for us. A long conversation with my cousin: what is like to study and then work in America? He tells me of the tax reform of which his cousin in Delhi, with whom we will be staying, is an advocate.

10th January

To The Music Box and Landmark in the shopping mall in Chennai. Purchase of a good stack of Carnatic music. Western books and CDs readily available. Later to receive our gifts from the uncle who came with us in the taxi from the airport. I choose a big statue of Natarajan and a little statue of Ganesha, who is everywhere here. Then to a wondrous Sari shop. Beautiful fabrics, lined up in order of colour. Counters where the assistants spread saris before us. What magnificence! I buy a shawl for RM. Later, out for dinner, we eat talis on banana leaves, but I am unable to justice to mine. My sister and brother-in-law eat a two-and-a-half foot dosai.

Our last night in winter Chennai. We have been fortunate: blue skies, and as hot as our English midsummer.

11th January

To the airport to fly to Delhi. How cool it is in the North! What beautiful weather! A cousin to pick us up and the drive along the avenues to the Friends colony. My cousin lives in a luxurious flat with plants along the balcony. The same dogs as in the south everywhere, apparently ownerless. We stay in a hotel nearby, to which we return after a meal in a huge complex – more than a mall, more than an entertainment centre.

Conversations on the future of India. 50 years – we’ve been robbed of 50 years, says my cousin. Tax cuts; foreign investment; poverty to be wiped out by 2025 -but will the new wealth be redistributed? I think about our conversation all night. What has happened to Nehru’s socialist India? What of Ghandi’s dream of resisting industry and returning to small crafts and village life? The taxes were too high to encourage industry and investment, said my cousin. There is a great deal of work to do, he says, everyone realises that, he says, but there is a new self-confidence.

12th January

A long drive to the Taj Mahal, with one of my cousin’s drivers. As magnificent as you would expect; evening thermals bear birds around the dome of the building, setting off its massiveness. I walk barefoot on warm marble. A low wall and a sheer plunge to the river: what beauty! Three mischevous boys follow us around. Other tourists ask to have their picture taken with my sister and brother-in-law. We would like to spend longer here, but we do not have time. Back through the gardens to the doorway through which we first saw the Taj Mahal, when it seemed without size, until you worked out those dots at its base were people.

On the way home, a policeman stops us: we are white tourists be driven by an Indian – is this an illegal unlicensed taxi? Of course not; he is looking for a bribe. All of this outside of sight of us, the passengers; we learn what happened later, from my cousin. Our driver in a jumper, like many of the locals here. How strange, for us, to have arrived in the middle of the coldest weather in the capital for 70 years! But still the mosquitos reach us.

13th January

We are to visit the attractions of Delhi, but it is the Cottage that holds us. Crafts from all over the country; I buy another shawl for RM. Then to the open markets in Delhi and then to the Kahn market, which I’ve been looking forward to all day. I buy Hindustani music and Sufi music – at last, I have a recording of Hamd in Raga Mishra Khamaj, which I know as Allah hoo. Illustrated books about the gods so I will understand their iconography. Then we visit a Kashmiri clothing and rug shop in the Defence Colony. We marvel at the shimmer of the silk-on-silk rugs and drink Kashmiri tea. Rugs spread magnificently on the floor before us! What splendour! It is an enticing as the Sari shop in Chennai.

We learn it is Lhodi and on this day, branches are burnt to celebrate the new year. We are invited to a party to celebrate, but go out as a family to eat Italian style near the Friends’ Colony. My sister is in cahoots with my cousin’s daughter. Across the table, I drink a Margarita.

14 January

My cousin drives us to the airport. He explains how many cities overlie one another in Delhi. We pass along the great avenues and he points out the great buildings to us. Here we are in Delhi! But we have barely explored it; Chennai is familiar to us by now, but not Delhi. Roadside temples once again – Ganesh, his palm pressed towards us, his round pot belly. How many kinds of Ganesha icons there are! Sometimes he sits, legs in the lotus position or perched on a mouse or a lotus, sometimes he lolls, and sometimes stands, each time with four arms, with his trunk (he has an elephant’s head) to the left. Over his shoulder, the sacred thread.

Later, we see the Himalayas from our plane. Over the Black Sea and then grey Berlin, and then home to drizzle and clouds.

The narrator of Cixous’s Book of Promethea (I used to be tempted to call this my favourite novel. I saw a hardback copy here for $10; why didn’t I buy it for R.M.? Because I was afraid if I read it again – if I even glanced through its pages – it would no longer be my favourite novel. And besides, some books should live only in the memory, they are happier there. Do not read them again. They are reading themselves inside you. Their pages are turning in your heart and will always turn there -) is invited on an anthropological trip with her new lover. She doesn’t want to go because she can’t take her books with her. Would it be the books she misses, or the remove into which they would draw her? Before a full shelf of books, how can you feel but ashamed at not writing?

Even with the few books I brought with me to San Francisco (Benjamin’s Illuminations – I read ‘The Storyteller’ on the plane, and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, neither of which I’d been able to read, really read, before. What did I find? Why is Benjamin for me a man who moans because he cannot have a sit down lunch?) and the many I’ve bought here (a bunch of Kafka related materials (a book by Corngold, an edition of ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘The Stoker’ and ‘The Judgement’ called The Sons, in accordance with something Kafka wished (but he did not wish – he was explicit about this – to have the insect of the first story to be pictured on the front cover of the book! For shame!), Lyotard’s Peregrinations, which he wrote in English and about which I wrote a long, botched post which I deleted (better to start from scratch than to redraft – begin again so it all comes together in a single creative gesture), a nice book by Disch on science fiction (he used some words with which I was not familiar, among them: minatory, which I look up from time to time and immediately forget), and many more, I still feel a kind of guilt about not writing (no – better – about not allowing myself to be brought into that remove where writing and non-writing are part of writing, are lived in the space of writing’s demand). Worse for me because I am only able to think – which invariably means to think other’s thoughts again, to allow them to be repeated in me – when carried along on the strong draft of a book. Not to be so carried is to be becalmed, lost from myself. Until I ought to write something if only to remind myself of what it was like to think – or at least, to be carried along on the strong thoughts of others.

2.

Here I am in America. My trip is almost over. On my first day, City Lights bookstore. I noticed with delight they had the last three of Josipovici’s novels. As R.M. knows (she says I repeat it all the time), the sign of a good bookshop is that they stock his novels, which seem to go out of print so quickly. Well, there they were. I bought Goldberg: Variations, and then went back a few days later to get In A Hotel Garden. I was impressed with this bookstore, finding its basement, with its philosophy section only after I’d looked at the European literature shelves, the poetry section (a lovely complete edition of Neruda; a collection of Mandelstam’s prose …) and the new books section (new lectures by Foucault from 76-77). I came away with a Josipovici book each time I visited.

On my second day, Green Apple bookstore at 6th and Clement, very large and rambling, full of interesting secondhand material. I didn’t bring my credit card, so had to visit twice to buy all the books I wanted. Yes, there was Peregrinations, the book Lyotard wrote in English, which I’ve never been able to get hold of. I looked carefully through Perniola’s books, but didn’t buy any, perhaps because at the conference I attended recently, he stayed only to give his plenary address, attending no other sessions; I also looked, as I always do when I see them, through various works of Octavio Paz, although I never actually buy them. I bought some nice things for R.M. and Borch-Jacobsen’s book on Lacan in hardback, at $32. Then The Sons, the Dora Diamant biography, a collection of Kafka’s letters to editors and friends, a little book of his parables in a bilingual edition. Yes, all this was marvellous, but I agreed with my sister, who lives out here, San Francisco is a bit of a dump, and we much preferred dear old Blighty.

Monterey, however, was delightful. A kind of purple moss. A green-blue sea. The sea otters in the aquarium. The trees (but what kind were they? Yews?), the rocky promotories. Houses out of Hopper. I bought Speak, Memory, at a second hand bookshop determined to have a real go at Nabokov at last (I never liked his prose. It wasn’t plain enough). We found a pub in the evening and stayed there all night. Newcastle brown ale American style. Pinot Noir like in Sideways.

That night, I read Josipovici’s On Trust in my room at the Butterfly Motel. I couldn’t go beyond the acknowledgements, which filled me with an obscure distress. The author thanked colleagues at Princeton University and Oxford University for the time he spent there as a guest Professor. I wondered how this was possible. What would it mean to be a recipient of such honorary positions at such grand institutions? I thought to myself: what is it in you that finds this inconceivable? Why is it so necessary for you to think you live in the time of the Great Collapse? Disgust divides you from yourself and in yourself. Remember the line from the gospels: we cannot meet God until we have a face with which to face him. But what if your face had been devoured by disgust? What would you face then? Only the correlate of that disgust: the world become disgusting, the university as festering vileness.

Meanwhile you lead a parasitic existence in the folds of the great beast of the university: if only you can cling on here long enough, then … then what? You could write another bad book – or a whole string of them, blaming their badness each time not on yourself but on the academy. Through clenched teeth: you made me, it’s your fault. How laughable! How absurd! Disgust is funny, don’t you see? My sister tells me the Americans she works with don’t like self-deprecation. ‘It upsets them’, she says.

3.

Thoughts of an idiot: writing when travelling becomes a search for anchorage, a place to hold oneself amidst the streaming of the new. It becomes identitarian, tied to personal memory and to personal desire. The expression I would like to write with: pour down like silver. I would like to write about the contorsions of memory and desire, that great veering where whining and complaint become something glistening and true.

Turning the pages of Bernhard’s Correction in a Monterey bookshop yesterday I experienced it again: here was prose of complaint and disgust. It held itself in the streaming of disgust. I thought to myself: this is just what is lost when you travel. There’s no streaming. The world is too interesting, too charming; the constant change of scenery is distracting. Your attention is held my minor things, like the quality of American service, the smell of sewage in the cities and the curious little flushes on male urinals.

Yesterday, being driven through Big Sur, I remembered the picture on the front cover of Desert Islands: Deleuze had been here once. He walked on the beach. But Deleuze was never one to travel. He stayed at home and underwent another kind of nomadism. Comedy: the Deleuzian nomad stands still (or sits at his desk). But there are other kinds of movement. Deleuze knew nostalgia is always a terrible danger for the traveller. In my first days in America (I’d never been here before) I knew I had to find familiar places in which I could regroup. I found them: the bus which ran down Geary out to Richmond, the Green Apple bookstore and the Chinese cafe on the street opposite, the bar on Union Square. But the desire for places of rest, for consolidation (looking through your shopping bags, placing those infernal $1 notes in order) is the opposite of that which asks for reading and writing.

4.

An idiot repents. I reread what I’ve written above and think to myself: to list the names of these books and authors shows such bad taste. Complacent aestheticism. A thought comes to me, although it is entirely unfounded: Benjamin, unlike Blanchot, did not experience a global despair with culture. Then I say to myself: you, too, have forgotten that despair. Writing this list of names is an index of your faith in culture. A faith which must be eradicated if anything is to begin.

Something terrible happens when you find yourself able to afford lunch sitting down. When you can afford to buy the books you always wanted. Really, why do you want them, these books? What is it you want to become? A man of letters – how repugnant! A man of culture – how disgusting! A collector – there’s nothing worse. To buy books that you don’t immediately want to discard is a sign of death. You have contracted out the desire to read, the books on the shelf read for you. The whole of culture is there, turning its pages before you. Do not think you can recapture what you felt when you first read Mandelstam’s prose (I’ve been thinking a lot about The Noise of Time recently – I even saw it on W.’s bookshelf the other day, in the old Quarter Encounters edition. I thought: it’s a living refutation of the claim that poetry ought not to be translated. Who cares about the original? The strange leaps in the translation could perhaps be accounted for in terms of rhythms, sonorities or wordplay, but I prefer them as they are: this is a text which leaps strangely line to line, from sentence to sentence -). It’s too late to reread ‘The Stoker’ now.

Her workmates, my sister told me, feel a great pride in what they do. They are proud employees, proud Americans. I thought at once of the ape teleported in The Fly. When the door of the teleportation booth opens, there is only a twisted, steaming, mangled thing, turned upon itself. That is the image of disgust, I thought. Thinking is impossible without disgust.

Disgust: that is the great gift of Europe, I thought to myself. Old Europe, and not New America. Old Europe is disgusted with itself in Debord’s millionth glass of whisky, or in the bottle of wine Duras popped open for breakfast. Old Europe contorted, dying staring at dying. American alcoholic writers are boring, I thought to myself (there was a statue of Steinbeck down at Cannery Row; I never cared for Hemingway). But European ones are pickled in disgust, their livers wear out with disgust. And that’s when everything begins. Perhaps Bernhard’s disgust was purest of all, because he didn’t need to drink. Old Europe curdled itself in his heart. That’s what I read in Correction, in Extinction (but which book is the better of the two?)

Wasn’t there a Hal Hartley film – Trust – where the heroine’s father dies of disgust (‘Your father’s dead.’ – ‘What did he die of?’ – ‘Disgust.’ – ‘He had a heart attack. No one dies of disgust.’ )? Ah, but it’s not a disgust which is heavy with European culture and with European horror stories.

5.

Other highlights of my trip to America:

(i) the pictures I saw by Robert Bechtle at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: still cars in still driveways;

(ii) Wholefoods. No better grocery.