Category: Thames Valley

In the Meantime

We’re at the sand dunes – they’re supposed to be building something here, but nothing is being built. A cliff of sand, a halted mechanical digger, a wide field of long grass: this is where us children play, the ones who will be the last to know patches of wilderness such as this in the Thames Valley. We bring our bikes here in the long summer, a few of us. And what do we do? Scramble up and down the cliff; start fires in the dry grass. Above all, it is a wilderness, it is not here for any reason; they were planning to build a school here, but did not; soon, it will be transformed into a golf course. But in the meantime?

In the meantime: that is our time. Our friendship includes our relationship to this space and others, that have not been transformed into places of leisure and work. Off by bike to find other such places – patches of land forgotten by others, woods behind houses, the barrows; all gone now, all disappeared. Now are the suburbs as if they had been there forever. The takeover is complete when all signs of a struggle have vanished. For us, at that time – we were eleven or twelve -, passing through a new housing estate was enough. An estate just like ours, but unalike in one detail or another. A lake, say, or a river – that was enough to make it exotic. But best of all, open space. Best of all, open space without function, a space torn from space.

Through the long grass to the pond with tadpoles. Through the grass, with nets and jamjars. Or, travelling further, to the lake under whose rocks leeches are to be found. We press them on our arms – suck! They never suck, but drop off into the water. We put scrap wood down among the trees and turn it over weeks later in search of slow-worms and toads. And there are snails with different coloured shells which we will place on one side of the road to watch them cross, risking being crushed by cars. Then there are the ant’s nest between kerbstones, and that day when they swarm, and winged ants crowded the pavement. And the drains, down which we drop stones and mud and whatever we find: drains by which we sit and make up songs. Our wilderness, the gaps in the housing estates.

How is it the labyrinth of roads becomes a prison? How is it that the estates becomes the obstacle to our lives? We buy maps and cycle out to the larger expanses, the ranges the army claims as its own. We wander into plantations and through farmer’s fields. What is it we’re looking for? Why do we climb the low hills and look into the distance? There is something missing from our lives – what? Something is missing from our lives, but what is it?

We are friends by way of the wilderness. Our friendship is one of movement; we cycle – we search. So do the days of summer pass. One day, another – summer is passing. What will we have done this summer? Of what was it comprised? Day lies down on day. Days accrete, until summer acquires a shape, like a coral reef. That was our summer: we turn the object over in our heads. Yes, that was it, our summer, and our friendship which passed by way of the summer.

Later, when we are older, there are parties. Our days are spent waiting for parties; we count down each day as it comes. Forty-one days … forty. We play computer games. We cycle to a far town to buy cheap cans of drink. All time is lived in the direction of the party; the days point ahead of themselves like an arrow. We live in the not-yet; the days stand out ahead of ourselves. For what are we searching? When will it come?

But they come, the parties. And then – the post-mortem. Detailed discussion of everything that happened. Analysis. Did it happen, what we were looking for? What happened, even as it seemed to vanish in the crowded details of the event? Our lives were turning. Our schooldays were ending. Was this it – life? Was this all it was? At sixteen, seventeen, our days were full of vast holes. We had time on our hands, all of time! But now time wasn’t liberation, but oppression. Time became oppressive. What were we to do? What were we doing with our lives? Was this life? Was this it – life?

Still we were friends by way of the wilderness. But now it was the wilderness of waste, the expanses of waste. The days were closing themselves down; nothing new was beginning. Gradually, it became clear – gradually, it revealed itself: the extent of the day, the day’s mediocrity. The fields were lost under houses. Sometimes we would go to the construction sites and break the windows of the new houses. One night we went on a vandal’s trip and the security guards shouted at us and we laughed. What could we do? The fields went; the ponds were drained. Now came the companies – Microsoft and Digital Electronics! Now they appeared, the great companies and their workforces. What of our friendship? What of the wilderness by which our friendships lived?

Already they were succumbing to drugs, our friends. Already they were making a wilderness of their evenings, tearing time apart. They were disappearing, our friends – lost in hashish, lost in the smoke-haze. No longer scavanger’s trips to the backs of the shops on Sundays to see what we could find.  No longer thief’s trips to construction sites (rolling home a huge ball of lead). No more vandal’s trips to the new houses.

Once, the wilderness was full of promise. Each gap in the world pointed beyond itself: there was the future – there it was in time subtracted from time, just as space was subtracted from space. The wood glade was an indication; the lake pointed beyond itself; the diving beetles prophesised. And now? The future had arrived; we fell out of the world.

And then, one day, I was the last one left. The others had gone away to study, and I was left. Now it came, the apocalypse. Now came the unveiling, whereby I knew the gaps were closed and there was no future. What did I see? The completion of the suburbs, the indefinite expansion of the housing estates: it was over, the world was over. Walls on all sides. Escape – but to where? I worked; I took no holidays. I worked – the day was over; this was the apocalypse.

No need to search, it’s all – here. No need to travel; the world was expanding from – here. No escape; apocalypse: everything that was to happen had happened. Time had stopped going forward. It was a circle: time and space, a circle. I lived the same day over and again. And when they returned, my friends, from their holidays, it was only a brief reprise. When they came back, it was only to seize upon those few moments from which the last drop hadn’t been squeezed.

We were friends by way of the wilderness. Now, when we visit them, our friends have disappeared from themselves. Haze of smoke; a rented flat – three of friends collapsed, half-dead. Was this it? This was the apocalypse: this was all there was and would be. I worked at Digital Electronics; I worked at Hewlett Packard: there was no more time.

Two Alterities

Time is the other, says Levinas; no surprise that it is to erotic love, to romance that he will first trace the gift of time (even if such love is subordinated by him to the engendering of the son, by which the relation to the infinite is accomplished). Love: is it by that the wilderness might be found again? It is true in those days I did find such love, even as it eluded me – even as it did no more than vouchsafe itself and disappear.

Was that enough to be able to look beyond the world – or at least, receive it, the world, by way of the gaps in its extent, its unbroken horizon? It was nearly enough. Nearly – but didn’t it, that love, set itself against the apocalypse of the everyday so as to throw the latter more starkly into relief? Didn’t it confirm the closure of the world it opened?

And would I say the same of reading? I know this: that it was not by success that such love as I refer to could be known, but by its failure. Impossibility was its path; the wilderness was revealed to me because of what did not happen. Only by its withdrawal could love be known: this was its pain, but also its promise.

By this love had I been elected – but to what had it returned me but myself? I could say I learnt then of a wilderness inside that was the correlate of an outer wilderness: that the horizon of the world was breached even as my own horizon – the closed space of my identity – was likewise breached. What was awoken outside was awoken inside me too; henceforward I would know that inner falling away by her name, the one I loved. So it became, this name, a magic charm.

And what of reading? I consumed books; I was hungry; I read several a week. Came the day when I could not consume the book I read: Kafka’s The Castle held itself from me even as I read it. What was I reading? That by which I knew the meaninglessness of the world, its very extent as promise. This was miracle: an affirmation occurred by way of reading, of the very closedness of the world – or rather, that closedness, the wall of the world, became the blank screen upon which the world was projected, just as, by night, the window reflects the lit room with darkness behind it.

What had I discovered? Something like the nothingness of the world, only I did not suffer from what the world was not. Was it Sartrean freedom I had discovered? Heideggerian authenticity? Rather, it was the fall away from the self – the giving up of those contours which had held me intact and held the world apart from me. Who was I? The ‘who’ resounded without answer. In those two alterities, which came almost at once, I received the world again. But how long it took to learn the lesson of what I received by love and by reading!

The Ogre’s Heart

But perhaps I never learnt a thing. Is it because I’m a certain kind of person that I was attracted to the thinkers I admire? Or is that what I am was made by that encounter; that I cannot subtract myself from what I read? Perhaps this is a false alternative: isn’t that I was ready for the encounter and was changed by it, such that I was not myself thereafter? But I was already changed by what I encountered by way of the two alterities. How did I know that Blanchot would become important to me, I who could barely understand a line he wrote? But I understood and that reading laid the path I am following now. That was my life: is it possible to say that? Or is it that to live was to have been dispossessed and to have known friendship by way of dispossession. Wasn’t it in the wilderness I was already lost? Wasn’t that what I always sought – to lose myself?

The ogre in the fairy tale buries his heart in a chest somewhere far away; the hero, to kill him, must discover its location. What of me is buried in the Thames Valley? What is buried there, such I lag behind myself, snagged so that it is necessary to pass by way of the Thames Valley in order to speak of myself? My heart? Only if the heart is the organ that turns the body inside out. Only if it is by my heart that I am claimed by the two alterities that opened for me, then.

Protection

How old am I – nine? ten? – when it comes to me that if I do not meet him, dad, at the top of the road as he comes home from work, he will die. Nine or ten, no older than that, and if I am not there to meet him, he will have died, I am sure of it. Do I already know he is ill? Or is it something else, a greater threat that I sense? Now it’s up to me to meet him, to hide and then surprise him and then to walk home with him.

But why? Does he really need my protection? If I do not meet him, then what? If I am not there to meet him, what will happen? But I must be there, so I am there. As if he needed my protection – from me, still a boy. As if I, still a boy, can afford him protection. But then he is the only brown man in these parts. And didn’t a girl reach out her hand in class to scratch me with her fingernails to see if I was brown underneath the surface of my skin, I who am not really brown at all? And think what my friend’s mum says about the Jews who employ her: they so greedy! We are not Jews, of course not, but if they’re in for it, so are we, that much is clear.

Us and the Jews on one side, the rest on the other. Us and the Jews on one side – and blacks, but there are no blacks here, I’ve scarcely seen anyone black since we moved out of Southall – and the whites on the others. The odds are stacked against us, that’s clear. We have to stick together, and though I don’t know any Jews, it is clear they’re on our side. Jews, us, blacks – all of us together, not like it was in Southall.

Jews, us, blacks versus the rest. There’s a Polish family up the road – on our side. And there’s my half-Egyptian friend at school – one of ours. There’s the rest, the whites, a great undifferentiated mass, the whites, hundreds and thousands of them, everywhere. All the whites! And then us!

Deaf ‘Uns

Back in Southall, whites and the blacks got along fine, but the we played by themselves. The blacks had some cachet with the whites, and the whites, who never needed to be called whites, they were still the majority, rubbed along with the blacks, but we played separately from the blacks and the whites on the concrete playground, when the others played on the school field. They broke Baraj’s arm, the blacks and the whites, but it was just rough and tumble, I knew that. His mum came in, crying, but it was just rough and tumble, boys will be boys, and so on. But we were best off avoiding the whites and the blacks, that was the lesson.

Sometimes, the whites and the blacks would together hunt down the deaf kids, the deaf ‘uns. Off they went, a great hunt for the deaf ‘uns. Summer on the playing field, hunting down the deaf ‘uns and pulling down their trousers and their pants – that was the sport. The deaf ‘uns, taught in a separate terrapin, and with boxes around their necks to help them hear – they were the Others, and they were for it. Open season on deaf ‘uns! Chase them! Pull down their skirts and their knickers, pull down their trousers and their pants! Separate one from the other and give chase, all across the field!

Paki Shops

When we moved out to the Thames Valley, it was our turn to be Others, we who never thought of ourselves as exotics, but whose names gave us away. How unfortunate, our names! How unfortunate, to be asked to explain where it is our names came from! ‘How did you get a name like that’? Now there are no blacks and only a few Asians, who run what are called paki shops. That’s what they’re called – paki shops. The mums and the dads of our friends refer to the paki shop – ‘are you going to the paki shop?’ Paki – that’s the word, that’s what they’d call us, given half the chance.

The Poles run one shop, the Asians another shop. It’s clear: the foreigners are here to serve the whites. There are whites, and there are foreigners, and the foreigners serve the whites. How unfortunate to be lumped in with the Asians at the paki shop! A morose, expressionless old lady served there, her hand cupped for our money – how unfortunate to be lumped in with her! Back in Southall, there were Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs – but out here, just an undifferentiated morass: pakis, each one the same as the rest.

The vandalism is directed at us – pakis out; NF – initials in a circle. At us. As a reminder – we were not welcome here. My friend’s mum would talk about the greedy Jews and the paki shop, so what did she say about us? We were pakis, to her, no question about that. To her: pakis, and though her son was allowed to play with me, he later joined the British National Party with her approval. ‘It’s a free country. He can do what he likes’.

Middle Class Hatred

She didn’t like the Jews. She resented them, with middle class resentment. She spoke about their greed, with middle class hatred. Quietly, but with hatred. Satirically, but with hatred. We didn’t know any Jews. Jehovah’s Witnesses we knew, but no Jews. Mormons we knew, but no Jews. True, there was the Jewish home for the handicapped, where some of the mums worked, but no Jews, or the Jews amongst us had not declared themselves.

Where were they, the Jews? I wondered what their houses were like. Back in Southall, I’d visit Indian friends and drink sweet tea from stainless steel cups. We’d sit on the floor and drink sweet, milky tea from hot cups. What would a Jewish house be like? They were greedy, said my friend’s mum, but she was not to be trusted. We had a German friend, and her house was different – a samovar and china and portraits of old barons; we were served Stollen and unfamiliar biscuits and she would speak to the children in German; and I had a half-Egyptian friend, a Copt, though there was nothing particularly Coptic about his house; his mother was Dutch, but there was nothing particularly Dutch about his house.

I knew the white middle class had a special punishment waiting for the Jews. I knew it, for they were loathed for being so similar to the whites. At least we weren’t similar to the whites, us lot. At least there were clear identifying marks to tell us apart from the white middle class. But the Jews – what trouble! They had the temerity to look like them, the white middle class! What temerity! Special punishment for them, then! Special punishment for looking so similar and being so different! We’d be up against the wall, no question, but they’d have a special torture for them, the Jews.

The Pack

Later on, at secondary school, I was moved to the back to sit with the skinheads and thugs. Truce in the classroom, but open season in the playground. Truce in form period, when they’d carve WHITE POWER into their knuckles with compass points and Indian ink and talk about skinhead bands and setting their dogs on pakis and tramps, but open season in the breaks. But outside the classroom – avoid them! Keep clear of them! They went around in packs – avoid them! Keep out of their way!

Luckily for me, there were many Others, all sorts at our school. A sprinkling of all races – just a sprinkling. There were the weaker remedials, who were taught separately from the rest of us. Plenty of Others to pick out from the herd! Plenty of Others, where weakness and victimhood is all, regardless of anything else! So was the retarded boy thrown in the river in the winter. So did they break the ice with his body. So was the brown-skinned boy chased round the school and beaten to the ground and kicked and kicked. They were on the look out for weakness. For Others. Others didn’t have a chance. They’d be found. No bolthole could hide them. They’d be driven out, exposed. It was time for a kicking. Time for a beating. For the most part, I escaped. Mostly, I was cunning enough to escape. But for the Others – no mercy.

Sometimes, they were made to fight one another, the Others. The burnt boy whose hair grew in clumps and patches around his scars was set upon the big lad with learning difficulties. Let them fight it out! Let them fight, for everyone’s entertainment! Let them scrabble for a place slightly higher than the lowest rung, for everyone’s entertainment!

Like dogs in the mud, they fought. Like dogs – fighting, and around them, the crowd, the crowd encouraging them. Fight! And they fought, pathetically, one against the other. Weak blows, weak neckholds – the Others couldn’t even fight! How pitiful! They can’t even fight! And so the crowd dispersed and turned away. The Others – they couldn’t even fight!

Later, the pack would be kept busy with dramas with their girlfriends. They stand about smoking, their arms around their girlfriends, at peace for the first time. They’ve become gentler; soon it will be time for them to leave school. We come out from our boltholes and hiding places; they’re busy, the pack-hunters, the thugs; the school is ours again to pass out the long sentence of our childhood.

The Protector

Earlier, before the rot. I am 9 or 10, long before secondary school. Dad’s coming home in the sun. Would he die on the way home? Would he be stabbed on the way home? I’ll surprise him, I think to myself. I’ll meet him at the top of the road, I tell myself.

Then, behind me, an older boy on a bike calls out: ‘what are you doing?’ – ‘Waiting’. – ‘What for?’ – ‘My dad’. He cycles away. Then, later, when I am coming home with him, my dad, who has miraculously survived another day, I see him again on his bike, the lone boy, the lone hunter. Will he turn, this boy who would sometimes kick a football around with me on the wasteground? Will he join the great pack? I can tell: he’s on the cusp. I can tell already: he’s on the cusp. Like the others, he’s waiting for a Hitler. Like the others, he’s primed and ready and waiting for a Hitler.

But money is coming to the Thames Valley, and soon new people move into the area. The motorway reaches us; the big American companies set up in new industrial estates. In truth, this is what saves the region from being mired in hatred and mediocrity. It comes, the great tide of capital, and with it, new workers from all over the world. We are not the only ones anymore, the only Others. They have come, the other Others, from all over the world. The town is changing; the region is changing, it’s beautiful. They’re coming from all over the world, and there are plenty more of them to come. The white middle class can fantasise all they like; we’re here – this is no longer pioneer country; we’re here and Hitler’s coming is infinitely deferred.

I won’t have to meet him, my dad, from work any more. He’ll survive. And now another story begins – no longer the violence of bullies and tormentors, but the slow triumph of capital. No longer discipline, but control.

The Voice

Come close to someone and they may speak to you in the voice in which they speak to themselves. That voice, never heard out loud, by which they goad and orient themselves – allowing them to press forward or sink back, to strive for something or to give up. Come close to another, and you’ll hear it, that secret voice in which they speak to themselves.

This is the way to learn what another is like. Live close to them, live alongside them, and even if you dislike them, that voice will let speak the integrity of their lives, the way it binds itself together. But also that which that life seeks to bind itself against – you’ll learn what threatens them, and how they have made their way through the world.

Perhaps this is why Kafka and his father were set against one another: the father let the son hear the voice which allowed him to lift himself from peasantry. And what a voice! So savage and so raw! Kafka’s voice was different; perhaps you could say it had been claimed, that it was literature’s – only it was Kafka who claimed himself for literature. It was he who set aside, with a determination that was the echo of his father’s, a few hours each night, to write.

Each night, every night, he would experience the claim of what claimed him, reaffirming it in turn. He heard a voice, but it was one which said nothing. A voice as privation, to which he joined his own voice that we hear sometimes in his letters. He said to himself – but also to literature, for what was he, as he asked Felice, apart from literature? -: I will set the hours aside for writing. I will wait for writing and write as I wait.

But what voice was it that told him to put aside The Trial and then The Castle? Perhaps it was literature’s voice again, this time saying: do not trust false idols, not even those I, literature, allow you to make. So the peculiar demand to cease work. So the manuscripts disappeared into the drawer and he sought to follow other stories across the days and nights.

Monologers

It is true, much to R.M.’s consternation, that I like very much to hear the voices of others. Nothing better than the pub in which others speak in great gales and floods. Marvellous to hear long anecdotes and long thoughts-out-loud. Then does something emerge that is new, because it does not come from me.

I hear it then, another’s voice, the one that would direct their life. I hear it: not fate, exactly, nor necessity, but a sign of that freedom which runs up against fate. The voice which says: I will make myself; I will make something of myself. Which lets speak that self-relation by which each of us lifts ourselves above the given.

Wonderful to be close to the voice as it knits life together. To be there as what is spoken turns round that self-relation which makes of life a coming back to oneself, a movement of return. Yes, that is what is common to my friends: the capacity to speak, the capacity for certainty. And I, who am uncertain, am caught in the great movement of their return to themselves, the sweep of their voice.

But what of those who cannot speak thus? What of the ones whose voice never raises itself against the hand they were dealt?

The Ones We Left Behind

As a child, to come across a new housing estate on our bikes was infinitely exciting. Another world, another labyrinth of roads and paths: where had we found ourselves? Perhaps there would be other children like us. Other children on other bikes in houses much like our own. Joy that our lives were doubled thus! Joy at the vastness of the world!

When we were older, those same housing estates trapped us. One after another, from here to eternity – who wouldn’t feel trapped? It was time to move away. Our friends who stayed drifted into drugs. Work, then drugs in the evening. Work all week, and drugs at the weekend. They were either doped or speeding, one or the other. That’s how they accommodated themselves to those estates and to the vastness of suburbia.

What, after all, were they to do? In the end, there was no rebellion, only accommodation. They adjusted themselves to life; they were reconciled to it. The voice that spoke to them was capital’s voice; it supplanted their own. With what voice did they speak, the ones who’d hollowed out their adolescence? The same as the one I heard in the alcoholics I would come to know – one that lacked itself, that had withered from itself. And in the end, like the alcoholics, it was as though they were possessed, those friends. Only now it was capital that spoke in them, not the bottle. It was capital that spoke and stared through their eyes.

Oily Fish

What happened to those friends of ours? Nothing happened; years passed, they are still there. And what has happened to us, who were able to lift ourselves from that place and go elsewhere? I admit I feel guilty about the voice in which I speak to myself, and that sometimes I hear when talking to those close to me. Yes, there is guilt, which is why I like to hear others speak, and not myself. For who am I to speak?

You were a dominant child, says R.M. looking at an old photograph album at my parents’ house. Dominance – it’s true I wanted to achieve something, to make something, but what? I never saw anything through until I came to academia. But then what have I seen through? There is that voice which breaks against necessity. How is it I find myself here? By a formless desire to do and to make. A desire that found form.

Up early, never late. Up early, at work before anyone else and then the whole day ordered. Up early, plenty of oily fish, carefully regulated caffeine intake – isn’t it capital, still, that orients my days, which have no room for error? I tell myself it is the fear of capital that orients me thus: the fear that I will find myself back on the dole, having fallen from that high place in which I find myself.

A fear of capital – fear born of the deregulation of labour which forced me from of the suburbs. Then unemployment, from this perspective, was my good fortune. Deregulation was my good fortune – and so was capital. I was afraid of unemployment, afraid of recession. I chose a different direction. But how, in turn, not to resent that choice? How not to thrash like a fish on the line?

Unemployed Negativity

I said to R.M. once she was full of ‘unemployed negativity’ (Bataille). Was I speaking of her or myself?

Most often, Bataille says, it will direct you towards religion, or towards art. Those are the temptations. But what happens when religion and art offer you no purchase? Then you thrash like a fish on the line: you’ve been caught, and you can do nothing. You’ve been caught, you allowed yourself to be caught, but what can you do? Resentment: because you escaped, you ended up far from home in a world you cannot really understand.

You escaped, but the world in which you find yourself is not your own. You’ve escaped, but you can’t go back, either. You’ve escaped, you struggled to gain the high place where you are, but you don’t belong there, or you do so negatively, not positively. You are there by default, by a kind of default.

But where are you, and what are you doing there? Look around you in the canteen. Am I like them? Am I really like them? For them, this world is theirs by default; they belong here. For them, this world is continuous with Oxbridge and then a fee-paying school. It is one and the same; they deserve to be there; it is their milieu. In the end, they are on the inside, and you are on the outside.

This a travesty, of course. It is fantasy. For a time, you try to turn away from the place where you work, surrounded by a circle of charred books, written by those who escaped the university. But what does it mean to teach those charred books in a university? In the end, you tell yourself, it’s laughable: you are a domesticator just as you have been domesticated.

But even this is naive, for the old patriarchy is collapsing. It is pure naivety, for no one minds that you teach Bataille. No one is bothered that you teach Bataille. You can publish what you want. You write whatever you like, and teach what you like. True, you have to bring in income, but as long as you do that, the university is indifferent. There is no rebellion and no domestication, either, since the old patriarchy is disappearing.

Perhaps the university where unemployed negativity finds itself accommodated. It is where it finds itself corralled not because of restraints but because everything is permitted. You cannot turn away from the university; it is everywhere. Wherever you turn, it is there. The world is training; everyone is training. The university is only part of a world that is perpetually in training. The content of what is learnt does not matter. Only skills matter, and skills that are transferable.

And you, who work in academia, for what do you work? To write another article? another book? So does unemployed negativity puts itself to work. So is it eminently obedient. Unemployed negativity, if it becomes anything, becomes academic. This is what Bataille missed in his ‘Letter to X’.

Thrashing on the Line

What became of our friends in the suburbs? The same as became of us, who escaped the suburbs. We have been captured and drugged in a different way. We’ve been caught, we thrash on the line, but in the end we’ll go still and that will have been our lives, that thrashing.