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Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being lead out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of not-knowing will come to an end. For that's all he's experienced since he took up with me, W. says. The horror of not knowing where the next step will lead, for example, he says. The horror of the uncertainty of his destination.

For where's he been heading all this time? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down – and out - that, too is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

For some reason everyone regards me as an idiot … and it is quite true that I was so ill at one time that I really was almost an idiot. But what sort of idiot am I now when I know myself that people take me for an idiot?

Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky's The Idiot

W. has always been immensely susceptible to changes in weather, he says. He can feel them coming days in advance, for example, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there's another low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of England with rain and grey clouds and humidity, and another low front behind that. How's he going to get any work done – any serious work?

It's alright for me, he says, staring out of my window at the incoming banks of clouds. I'm on the East of the country, for a start, which means the weather doesn't linger in the same way. Oh it's much colder, he knows that – he always brings a warm jacket when he stays – but it's fresher, too; it's good for the mind, good for thought.

But W. can't think, he says. He knows the Westerlies are coming. He knows low pressure's going to dominate the weather for weeks, if not months. Sometimes whole seasons are dominated by Westerlies, which costs him an immense amount in terms of lost time and missed work.

He's still up early every morning, of course. He's still at his desk at dawn. Four A.M. Five A.M. – he's ready for work; he opens his books; he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He's there at the inception, at the beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs along his window ledge.

He's up before anyone else, he knows that, but there's still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months. Not one. He's stalled, W. says. There's been an interregnum. But when wasn't he stalled? When wasn't it impossible for him to think? No matter how early he gets up, he misses it, his appointment with thought. No matter how he tries to surprise it, thought, by being there before everyone.

Wittgenstein said to me on more than one occasion: 'The trouble with you and me, old man, is that we have no religion!'

Suddenly, during one of our conversations early in 1938, Wittgenstein asked me whether I had ever had any tragedies in my life. Again, true to form, I asked him what he meant by 'tragedy'. 'Well', he replied, 'I don't mean the death of your old grandmother at the age of 85. I mean suicides, madness or quarrels'. I said that I had been fortunate not to have experienced of any of those terrible things.

from Theodore Redpath's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Student's Memoir

Why does he listen to me?, W. says. But he knows why. There'd be sense in keeping people around to inspire him, W. says. But not to destroy him. Unless it's his death-drive, W. says. Unless I'm his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

Ostracism, that's what I've brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.'s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth, and there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want for himself? Ah, there's no way of telling. He'll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We're heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pine trees to where nothing can live.

Alternative cover of Dogma. Thanks, Rory. It's modelled on the Plymouth Gin bottle.

Our inaugural Dogma presentation was on Kafka – the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke very ineptly (W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse. – 'What were you on about?' But Dogmatists stick together; a question for one is a question for the other. You have to stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says W., but we did so gloriously.

Our second Dogma presentation concerned friendship as a condition of thought. W. stole half his argument from Paolo Virno, and the other half from Mario Tronti. Virno and Tronti write of their ideas as though they were categories in Aristotle, he says. He admires that. W. reminds me of the sixth Dogma rule: always claim the ideas of others as your own.

Forming an ultra-Dogmatist splinter group, I spoke of my friendships, of friendships in which thought was at stake.

W. is prompted to add another rule to Dogma: Dogma is personal. Always give examples from your own experience. No: the presentation in its entirety should begin and end with an account of your own experience. Of turning points! Trials! Of great struggles and humiliations! My life lends itself particularly well to such a rule, W. says. – ‘The horror of your life’.

Our third Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear open our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster – with world-historical seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without question!

W. spoke of nuns; I of monks. He spoke about dogs; I about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.

In our fourth Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. There can be no love in the modern world, W. says. There can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of agape and eros. And then W. spoke of philein: the greatest kind of love, he said.

We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greek terms that you barely understand.

(from Dogma)

Dogma cover visible here.

It's out in February, but available for pre-order now.

The war is beginning, W. says. The forces of the great battle are assembling.

He feels like Arjuna in the great battle of the Bhagavad Gita, W. says. He feels like the great warrior who had thrown aside his bow and sunk to his knees. Why should he fight?, he wailed. Why should he go on? And that’s what W. wails: why should he fight? Why should his  go on?

Krishna comforted Arjuna by granting him a divine vision. The warrior was granted a vision of Krishna’s celestial form: the entire cosmos turning in the body. He saw the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He saw a million divine forms in the fire, and the manifold forms of the universe united as one …

'What does your celestial form look like?', says W. 'Go on, show me'. Actually, he thinks he's already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. My vast, white belly. My flabby arms. The trousers that billow round my ankles …

And my dancing, my terrible dancing. It’s end of the cosmos that W. sees in my cosmic dance. It’s the destruction of the divine forms, and of the manifold forms of the universe. He sees the putting out of the stars. He sees the extinguishing of the sun, and the night swallowing the day. He sees the opposite of the act of creation, the opposite of cosmogony …

(from Dogma)

How peaceful it had been, his college, when he first arrived! Colleagues greeted each other warmly. They sat out in the quadrangle, taking tea and discussing their scholarship. No one taught more than a couple of hours a week.

Then the fall began. Contact hours went up. Colleagues became busier; there was less time to talk. Scholars worked alone, with their office doors closed. But still they waved at one another across the quadrangle. Still they visited each other’s offices for tea.

Things fell still further. Colleagues worked in solitude, only in solitude. Some stayed home to work in their studies. Some fell ill in isolation. Some prayed in solitude in the college chapel.

And then? His colleagues have begun to scowl at one another, W. says. Colleagues snarl at each other in the college corridors. Who talks of their scholarship now? Who talks of ideas? Who reads now? Who writes?

(from Dogma)

Rolling thunder. Lightning flashes in the summer sky. There’s trouble at his college, W. says.

The rumour is they’re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialise in sport instead. They’ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says.

Oh, some staff will be kept on, he’s been assured of that. The college needs some academic respectability. They’ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He’ll be teaching shot put metaphysics …

But everyone will have to reapply for their jobs, that’s the rumour. They’re going to cut the workforce in half. It’s Hobbesian, W. says. There’s going to be a war of all against all.

(from Dogma)

Dogma: that’s what we should call our intellectual movement, we agree. Dogma should have many rules, we agree. We should never break them!

The first rule, says W.: Dogma is spartan. Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others. Really speak to them, using ordinary language.

The second rule: Dogma is full of pathos. Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep – weep without end!

The third rule: Dogma is sincere. Speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics that demand the greatest of seriousness. Aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity. Rending sincerity. Be prepared to set yourself on fire before the audience, like those monks in Vietnam.

And the fourth rule? Dogma is collaborative. Write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend upon what you write. It should mean nothing more!

W. reminds me of the collection, Radical Thought in Italy. Paolo Virno! Mario Tronti! They’ve always been a touchstone for him. It's pure Dogma, he says. They're all friends. Their essays have no quotations, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were world-historical. Oh yes, that's another rule: always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory: Dogma plagiarises. Always steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own.

(from Dogma)

St Hilda’s College, looking at the river. Capitalism and religion, W. muses. He hasn’t got much further with his thinking, W. says. His notebook’s nearly empty. I flick through it.

Where there is hope there is religion: Bloch, I read. Sometimes God, sometimes nothing: Kafka, I read. I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room: Celan. Beautiful! But there are few thoughts of W.’s own.  He’s going through a dry period, W. says.

Maybe he should try his hand at poetry, like me, W. says. He could write haiku: ‘Half ton friend/ in trouble again’. ‘Fuckwit in a vest/ Friend I love best’. Or he could draw some pictures.

(from Dogma)

The bus back to Nashville. Sounds of screaming. A roaring two-stroke engine. The passenger in front of us is playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his laptop.

W. yearns for his study, he says. He yearns for his bookshelves. He yearns for the tranquillity of his mornings, when he leaves a sleeping Sal in bed so he can do a few hours of work before breakfast.

There was no need to come to America, he says. He’s learned nothing here. His thought hasn’t advanced. How about my thought?: has that advanced? He thought I looked quite reflective by the Mississippi. Quite meditative. It must have been the flowing water. Rivers calm even the most frantic apes, he’s heard that, W. says.

He turns through my notebook. – ‘Ah! Drawings! Who’s that supposed to be?’ Huckleberry Finn, I tell him. There’s the raft. – ‘And what’s that?’ It’s Moby Dick, I tell him. And that’s the Pequod. W. admires my classics of American literature series.

And what is this? A poem? Preppies, it's called.

Tall/ sand in the hair/ white teeth/ pullovers/ deck shoes/ white shirts and blouses / yachts with white sails/ fuckers'

Very perceptive, says W. Here’s another. Cabin Boy, it’s called.  

Upstairs, on deck/ The preppies are dancing/ with their caps worn backwards. /I am the cabin boy/ scrubbing their things./ I am angry

He like that, W. says. It’s very terse.

And what are these? More poems?’, W. says, turning my notebook upside down and squinting. Lyrics, I tell him. They’re lyrics from Jandek.

Ah, Jandek, W. say. Wasn’t Jandek was supposed to be my great discovery, rivalling W.’s discovery of Béla Tarr? He has to admit, there is something to Jandek, W. says. It’s the quality of his despair. The wailing. Jandek understands the apocalypse, W. says. Jandek knows that the End Times are upon us.

The Humility of Pain. That’s what he calls a song title, W. says. The Blues Turned Black. And he’s been releasing records for twenty-nine years, giving no interviews, remaining wholly mysterious? It’s admirable, W. says. I should learn from it.

Hasn’t W. suggested that I write a book on Jandek, on the religious aspects of the music of Jandek? You should always write on what you love, W. says. On what you love, and don’t understand, W. says.

(from Dogma)

Spurious available as $1.99 e-book.

Not the Booker press release.

We visit the full-sized concrete replica of the Parthenon, which sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Nashville’s supposed to be the Athens of the South, our hosts tell us. The Athens of the South! I should feel at home here with my formidable knowledge of ancient languages, W. says.

W. insists on buying us souvenir togas. I take a picture of us posing on the steps. W. feels like Socrates, he says. But who am I, next to him? It’s ironic, because Socrates had a kind of idiot double, a man who looked exactly like him, but who begged for a living, and lived in a barrel in the marketplace, his shameless habits scandalising all of Athens.

But Diogenes merely acted like an idiot, W. says. He lived in squalor, true enough – but that was because he despised the conventions of society. He lived in poverty – but that was because of a disdain for the stupidity of the rich. He was shameless – but that was because he thought human beings lived artificially and hypocritically.

But Diogenes had a terrible wisdom of his own, even Plato granted that, W. says. He had a terrible teaching, which he taught by living example. A Socrates gone mad, that’s what Plato called him. A Socrates, because Diogenes, too, believed in reason, exalting it above custom and tradition. But a Socrates gone mad, because he took shamelessness to a new extreme: eschewing all modesty, pissing on people who insulted him, shitting in the theatre and masturbating in the public square …

A Diogenes gone mad, W. says: that’s how he thinks of me. A man without shame not because he rejects ideas of human decency, but because he knows no better. A man outside of society, not because he would live as an ascetic, but because no one wanted him in it.

(from Dogma)

Downtown Nashville consists largely of car parks. Odd bits of metal stick out of the ground at shin height. There’s no one around except a fully outfitted cowboy walking down the street. – ‘Must be German', W. says.

Where, we wonder, are the people of Nashville? That’s one thing we like about our cities, we agree: there are always people about. They’re usually drunk, of course. Drunk and lairy. But that is a good sign.

(from Dogma, sequel to Spurious)

Are we even alive?, asks W. Is this even happening? Are we really talking – right now? Because all he can hear is a great roaring, W. says. He's falling, W. says, as through the clouds of Jupiter.

When will he ever hit anything real? When will he strike his head upon the hard shore of the real? Because that's what he wants, even if it dashes his head to pieces. That's all he wants, and especially if it dashes his head to pieces …

Only death is real, W. says, and it's time to die. But death isn't coming any closer. If anything, he's too healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, eradicated, along with everyone who has known us. Our memory should be wiped from the earth … 

Sometimes W. finds the coming disaster a comforting thought. It will be a relief, a blessed relief, the parched earth, the boiling sky. Because won't it entail our absence? Won't it mean, at the very least, our complete destruction?

Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn't that a relief: that there is no future? And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

No more, says W. No more. He's passing through a dead zone, he says, like the ones they are beginning to find in the oceans: blank regions where there is no life. There's no life in him! It's all over!

W.'s despairs are like magnetic fields, he says, like great clouds in the air through which he passes. They have nothing to do with his inner states at all. It's not a matter of emotion. His despairs, W. says, are not even his.

‘We tried to tell them, didn’t we?’, says W. Yes, we tried to tell them. – ‘We tried to warn them?’ Yes, we tried to warn them. Our lives were living warnings. We all but set ourselves on fire. We all but soiled ourselves in public. – ‘Actually, you did soil yourself in public, didn’t you?’, W. says.

30 Oct 1940. Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time – is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Cesare Pavese, from his Diary

 - The painter Philip Guston once said something very nice about this, he says. He said that when he went into his studio everybody was in there with him: his dealer, the public, all the great artists of the past. They are all looking over his shoulder and talking. One by one they leave, and then he himself leaves, and then the painting begins.

Gabriel Josipovici, After

… it has never occurred to me in this war to seek out danger and death as I had done so often in earlier years – at that time death avoided me, not I it; but that is long past! Today I would greet it very sadly and very bitterly, not out of fear or anxiety about it – nothing is more soothing than the prospect of the stillness of death – but because I have half-finished work to be done that, when completed, will convey the entirety of my feeling. The whole purpose of my life lies hidden in my unpainted pictures. Aside from that, death is not frightening …

Franz Marc, writing to his mother in 1916 from the front, two weeks before his death.

Thanks to your reviews, Spurious has been shortlisted for the Guardian Not The Booker Prize 2011 award.

Naturally, I issued the wrong instructions at the blog and elsewhere, with the result that most of the 48 reviews Spurious received did not count. However, there were still a sufficient number of votes for the novel to make it to the shortlist.

Thanks to all who voted.

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk through the gorse towards Cawsand. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He's a man of the city, W. says. And if we're out of the city today – apolis, as the Greeks would say – it is only to return to it refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsand to Plymouth.

His city, W. says, but not for much longer. By what cruel fate will he be made to leave? For what reason will he be forced out? He knows the time will come. He’s always known it, which has made his relationship to the city that much more intense. He’s always known the city would slip through his fingers.

A man without a city is a terrible thing, W. says. But that’s what he might become. Aren’t there rumours of redundancies in the corridors in W.’s college? Aren’t there murmurings in the quadrangle? It’s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says.

Of course, he’ll have to leave, if he loses his job, W. says. He’ll have to take to the roads. Because there’s no work here, not in Plymouth, W. says. There’s nothing for the locals, those who’ve lived here all their lives, let alone W., who is only an adopted son of the city.

You can lodge yourself in an adopted city, but you’re never entirely of your city, W. says. He thinks of me in my Newcastle. – ‘Don’t think you’re safe’, W. says. ‘Don’t think you’re going to live out your life in the pubs of Newcastle’.

‘They’re coming to get us’, W. says. Who? Who’s coming?, I ask him. He’s not sure. But somewhere, far away, our fate has already been decided.

[Opening section of Dogma, second version. Also replaced.]

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk through the gorse towards Cawsands. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He's a man of the city, W. says. And if we're out of the city today – apolis, as the Greeks would say – it is only to return to it refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsands to Plymouth.

At most, he admires the sea as it borders the city, just as he admires the edge of Dartmoor, which you can see from his office. But then, of course, he likes to approach the city from the countryside – Plymouth from Cawsands, say, or Plymouth from Jennycliff: either way, there's nothing better than seeing the city – his city – sprawled across along the edge of the Sound and running up all the way back to Dartmoor.

His city, W. says, but not for much longer. By what cruel fate will he be made to leave? Why will he be forced out? Of course, he knows the time will come; he’s always known it, which has made his relationship to the city that much more intense. He’s always known it would slip through his fingers.

W. is familiar with my desperate love for my city. He shares it, after all. When was he happier than when I led him up one of the hills on the Town Moor to survey the city?

It was a bright day, W. remembers, and though we'd already spent many days drinking, I hadn't yet turned, as I am wont to do, he says. Yes, I hadn't yet come to resemble Blanche Dubois as I usually do when I spend many days drinking. I was neither maudlin nor vicious.

W. still cherishes my comprehensive account of the history of Newcastle delivered from the top of the hill on the Town Moor. My account of the history of the city and its buildings, which I pointed out to him one by one. My interest in local history surprised and delighted him, W. says. It ennobled me, he says; I stepped forward in a new way in his imagination.

But then, of course, he knew I was making it up; he knew it was all nonsense; he knew it all along. How could it be otherwise? W. has never liked facing up to the fact that I'm a faker. He always wants to imagine the best for me, and me at my best. He has the highest hopes for me, W. says. He always has.

W. had to piece together the history of Newcastle for himself, he says. He read tour guides and websites; he consulted plaques on our walks. He traced the course of the culveted rivers that run beneath the streets and speculated upon where they run out into the Tyne. He consulted Ordinance Survey maps of the riverbanks and insisted upon reconstructing the medieval city in his own mind, walking the route where he thought the city walls once ran.

You ought to know everything about your home city, W. says, if only to know what you're about to lose. It makes it more poignant, more mournful, W. says: your inevitable loss of your city. Because we will both lose our cities, W. says, it's inevitable. Just as he will be forced out of Plymouth, I will be forced out of Newcastle. Just as he will be kicked out of the city he loves, I will be expelled from the city I profess to love, despite the fact that I know nothing about it.

[Opening passages of Dogma, now replaced]

Spurious reviewed by Biblioklept.

And by Anna Aslanyan at 3:AM.

What first got you interested in writing?

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you've been driven from the realm of the given world, says Jean Genet. I don’t feel I got interested in writing so much as forced into it. 

Who or what particularly influences your work?

Who? Writers from continental Europe, from South America … from anywhere except Britain, where I'm from. Or who regard themselves as internal exiles in this country.

What? A sense that we are living in the end of times.

Describe your writing process.

‘Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go’, says Clarice Lispector.

For my part, I always had vocation. I think what I learnt, through the million or so words I wrote at the blog on which Spurious is based, was that my talent lay in decrying my 'talent'.

The writing process? A lengthy self-assassination. The systematic expunging of literary gestures. Humiliation in public.

What is the most surprising thing you have learned as a writer?

That novels sell very, very few copies. But perhaps that’s only the case with my novel …

 Which of your books is your favorite and why?

No contest. The Blanchot books are academic things, Spurious a living thing, because it knows its own anachronism, and laughs at it.

 What kind of effect do you hope your books will have?

I like nothing better than hearing a reader laugh out loud. But I want to make the reader sob, too.

Interview with Contemporary Authors (offline publication)

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, and to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. Curled up woodlice in room corners. ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature’, W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling.  And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, that’s what W. thinks.

They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try and communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it saying it now, for those who have ears to hear it? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it. – ‘You understand the damp’, W. says. Or rather, it understands itself in me.

And there are the rats, too, he shouldn’t forget them. My rats, that’s how he thinks of them. My rats, my familiars, living under my floorboards. He’d hear them chattering if he pressed his ear to the floor, W. knows that. He’d hear them speaking their obscene language, for all that I tell him that the rats are all dead.

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants – and the mushrooms. But W. believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat to begin, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic …

'The messianic era is about to begin', W. says quietly, almost to himself. Then he shouts it out, for all to hear: 'The messianic era is coming!' And then, 'Let's drink to it!', he cries, but we've run out of alcohol.

1.06 AM. W. catches a taxi back to his house on the other side of the city, to fetch back the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. It might be his finest hour, he says.

1.51 AM. Sitting out in the quad, we drink W.’s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We even drink his rare bottle of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, because they can’t find good quality damsons. And we drink one of his 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 cannon 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.

Then, we drink a bottle of Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Béla Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink a round of Slivovitz, the famous plum brandy from Eastern Europe — drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says — and then Becherovka, a kind of nutmeg liquor from the Czech Republic. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, since it should be served ice-cold with turbot, but how else is W. going to keep us all drunk?

2.41 AM. Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them the impossibility of the spiritual and the impossibility of the political. Drinking always carries you through despair, W. says. Carries you through it, but bears you beyond it, if you are prepared to drink right through the night.

3.22 AM. We have to libate the palm trees!, W. tells us. 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, over which we pour a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.

3.31 AM. The hour of the wolf. We look for the Plymouth Pear in the campus woods. We talk of Beckett and Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentina, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers?, W. wonders. 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.

We tell the postgraduates of 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, 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, I read from my notebook. To die forsaken by death …

4.30 AM. We need to discover a new discipline of drinking, to drink until our teeth are stained red from wine, W. says. In Vino Veritas, W. says. In Vino, all we’ll ever know of Veritas, he says.

I read from my notebook. A man who drinks is interplanetary, Duras 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! We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God, what in fact we are!

4.50 AM. We need to wait, W. tells the postgraduates, as we watch the first plane land at Plymouth Airport. We need to be watchful, and as watchmen, drunk. Above all, we need to drink, W. tells the postgraduates, filling their cups. We need to perfect a continual drunkenness, we tell them. A vigilant drunkenness. A sober one.

There's no point going to sleep, W. tells the Plymouth postgraduates. What use is sleep to us? We must stay awake, ever-watchful. We must stand watch for the signs of revolution. We must be like the pillar saints, waiting for God. We must be like Saint Anthony in the desert, wrestling with his demons. And above all we must wait, and wait together. Above all!

God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I quote from Jabès. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W.

7.00 AM. All around us, on the grass, the Plymouth postgraduates are sleeping. All of God’s children are asleep.

What are they dreaming of?, we wonder of the postgraduates asleep in the long grass. What are they dreaming of, the other postgraduates we’ve met on our travels?

We see them in our minds’ eyes: across the whole country — our damned, benighted country — postgraduates are turning in their sleep. Middlesex postgraduates, with their filed-down teeth, are dreaming of Armageddon. Staffordshire postgraduates are dreaming of the British Events, of British Autonomia. Manchester Metropolitan postgraduates are dreaming of dérives, of stupor, and the forgotten kingdom of Old Hulme. Greenwich postgraduates are dreaming of new kinds of friendship, the seed of the coming revolution, and of new kinds of political faith. And Dundee postgraduates are dreaming of that point at which despair becomes hope, and becomes despair once more.

What do Newcastle postgraduates dream of?, W. wonders. Of being left alone by me, for one thing. Of being untampered with, ungroomed. One day, they’ll put me on trial for the abuse of postgraduates, W. says. One day, he’ll see me on TV, being walked into court with a coat over my head.

And of what are W.’s postgraduates, the Plymouth postgraduates, the children of God, dreaming? Of the wide, high moor, W. hopes. Of cider made from the apples of the moor. Of songs of peace and gentleness sung on the moor. And of Plymouth Sound, which they will see glinting all the way from the moor, like utopia.