Category: W.

Upstairs in Foyles, looking through the philosophy books.

‘Do you think they’ll have our books here?’, W. asks, knowing the answer. ‘Of course not!’ His book went out of print as soon as it was published. Before it was published! His publisher went bust. And my books – my so-called books – appeared in the most obscure of imprints, by the most obscure of presses, at a price affordable only by the most prosperous libraries. Our books will have no effect whatsoever! They’ll have no readers!

Oh, he knows I find it funny, W. says. But he has trouble with the sheer anonymity of it all. No one’s going to pay any attention to us. No one’s going to care what either of us is going to write …

Ah, but he still believes, deep in his heart, that our collaboration might lead to something great, W. says. That's what keeps him going, even if all the evidence is to the contrary. Why can’t I see it? Why have I given up on him? On us?

‘When are you going to take philosophy seriously?’, W. says. ‘You haven’t read anything in years. Are you retiring from philosophy?’, he asks. ‘Have you given up?’ I haven’t, I tell him. – ‘Then why don’t you write some philosophy? You have to externalise yourself. You have to experience your shortcomings’.

W. reads my notebook.

Notes on Hölderlin's confinement. Pallaksch, W. reads. — 'What does that mean?' That was the word Hölderlin repeated to himself in the thirty years he spent mad, I tell W. Pallaksch!, he sang out, as he played his piano madly. Pallaksch!, he cried up to the night, when he couldn't sleep for mania.

Pallaksch!: and isn't that my word, too? Pallaksch: isn't that a word for the wordless that murmurs in everything I have written or tried to say? He hears it in my stuttering, my stammering. In the 'hellos!' that I boom out to near-strangers. And isn't it what I try to say in the middle voice? There was a dampening. There was a infestation of rats. There was a proliferation of Japanese knot-weed. There was and will be writing. There was and will be the desecration of speech …

Pallaksch, pallaksch: faecal emergencies come, one after another, W. says. Toilet bowls are spattered. The gods, blind and deaf and mad, are screaming. The sky is darkening. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings …

Manchester was good to us, W. says, as we wait for our separate trains, back at Piccadilly Station. It was good. We gave our talk, fielded questions, we didn’t get lynched …

Capitalism has triumphed, W. told our audience. Capitalism has conquered the external world, W. said; now it’s going to conquer the internal one, too. The very intimacy of our lives, that’s capitalism’s new frontier, W. said. Our private ideas, our tastes, our moods: that’s what capitalism has set out to conquer now.

In the end our loves and friendships will become capitalist loves and capitalist friendships, W. says. Our innermost hopes and dreams will become capitalist hopes and capitalist dreams. Our sighs will become capitalist sighs. Our wistfulness, capitalist wistfulness. Even our philosophy, opposed as it is to capitalism in every way, will become capitalist philosophy, W. says. Even our thoughts will become capitalist thoughts.

And our despair?, W. wondered aloud. Is that what’s left to us? Is that what remains of the good and the true? Is it in truly experiencing our despair that the path to our salvation lies?

Despair! W. took our audience through the twists and turns of The Sickness Unto Death. Of The Concept of Anxiety. He took them through crucial sections of Marx’s Capital. He conjured up a bearded Kierkegaard for our audience. A melancholy Marx!

W. spoke of the attempt to conquer despair while remaining in it. He spoke of the aim not merely to accept despair, but to invert its meaning, take pride in it, and regard it as a blessing. Despair does not destroy hope, but recruits it, W. said. Seen in the right way, despair contains prospects of joy.

And then W. passed the baton to me. The room, abuzz with excitement during W.’s half of the presentation, fell silent. And I, too, was silent. The sound of construction from outside. The beep of a reversing vehicle.

Starting slowly, quietly, I began to extemporise on what I called the time of stupor, the time of drifting. I spoke about Tarkovsky’s Stalker, about Tarr’s Damnation. I spoke about untensed time, about time out of phase, about temporal puddles and temporal ox-bow lakes …

I talked about Manchester as rust-zone, as sleeper. I spoke about the past and the rotting of the past. I spoke of those parts of the city that were cut off from time. I spoke of the unregenerated and the unredeemed. I spoke of the Sabbath, of the interregnum, of the great holy pause …

I spoke of attenuated despair, of grief stretched thin. I spoke of diffuse melancholia, and the of the disorders of the vague. I spoke of the fear of the everyday – of cop show repeats on daytime TV, of Columbo and Magnum P.I. I spoke of stale beer and gingerbread men.

I spoke of falling to the level of the everyday. Of letting yourself fall. I spoke of watching the end credits of Neighbours not once, but twice a day. I spoke of what Perec called the infra-ordinary, and de Certeau, the murmuring of the indefinite. I spoke of peripheries without centre, and of suburbs which never reach the city.

I spoke of nightbuses and eternal rain. I spoke of five hundred different kinds of boredom. I spoke of the wisdom of the long-term sick and the unemployed. I spoke of kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.   

I spoke of empty hours and empty days. I spoke of wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. I spoke of misty thoughts yet to coalesce. I spoke of hazy skies and clouds of midges.

I spoke of being lost in time, buried in time. I spoke of time piling up like a great snowdrift. I spoke of space as an ache, as a wound, as a sigh. I spoke of space as a prayer, as a plea, as a poem.

I spoke of the nihilism of Joy Division. Of music which came from the other side of death. I spoke of rigor mortis and lockjaw. I spoke of the dancing chicken of Herzog's Stroszek.

I spoke of the anti-gravity of dub. I spoke of the Rastafarians of Old Hulme. I spoke of polytricks and the Bablyon shitstem. I spoke of the exodus and of the repatrination. I quoted Prince Far-I: ‘We’re moving out of Babylon/ One destination, ina Ithiopia …’, I quoted. ‘Ithiopia, the tyrants are falling/ Ithiopia, Britain the great is falling …’, I quoted.

W. was moved, he says. I was moved. Our audience broke out into spontaneous applause. He’d thought my prophetic days had gone, W. says. He’d thought my oracle had shut up shop …

Stuck again. W. looks into the air. He grinds his teeth. He clenches his fists, then unclenches them. Then he sees me looking at him. – ‘You enjoy this, don’t you?’, W. says. I enjoy watching him groping for thought.

W. thinks of his other collaborators, over the years. Of others in whom he had placed his hopes. One by one, they were picked off by careerism, by laziness, by the temptations of applied ethics and the writing of introductory books. Of course, it was really the futility of thinking that destroyed his collaborators. The lack of recognition. They expected their thought to be rewarded! They expected that the world would be interested in their Denkwegs, in their paths of thought. When that didn't come, they sought recognition through other means.

With me, there's the opposite problem, W. says. My disregard for the world. My indifference to the opinions of others. My aim is to make thinking yet more futile. It is to make philosophy part of my vagrancy, part of my escape from the suburbs. I take delight in the oblivion of thought. In wearing it out. What have I ever sought but to undo philosophy; to unwork it, just as Penelope unpicked by night the tapestry she wove each day?

Somehow, he senses that my unworking is greater than all his philosophical labours, W. says. That my non-philosophy encompasses his thought and dissolves it. Will his legacy lie in his books and articles: in his studies of messianism (his mathematical messianism) or in my destruction of his legacy? He thinks of the painting of de Kooning that Rauschenberg erased. He thinks of the paintings Francis Bacon would buy just to kick them to pieces on the street.

W. reads me a passage from the new Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on Hermann Cohen:

In Cohen's hands, this historical orientation contributes in no small part to other aspects of his writing that none of his readers can fail to notice: its obscurity, repetition, and sometimes unnecessary length.

Don’t they understand that Cohen should be praised for his style?, W. says. That the philosopher, least of all, is obliged to be clear? The philosopher shouldn’t understand what he’s doing, W. says. He shouldn’t know where his thought is going; and nor should his readers.

A thinker should be at least regarded for his unthought as well as his thought, W. says. In what remains undeveloped in his work. Unseen!

W. speaks about the work of commentary, which is completely different from the work of introducing a thinker. An introduction makes the work of a philosopher intelligible to a time, and thereby reduces it to the preccupations of that time. A commentary, by contrast, makes the work of a philosophy untimely. It shows us that we have no idea of who that philosophy was as a thinker, and that we've hardly begun to read his work. And doesn't commentary reveal this by focusing on the very obscurity and repetition of the philosopher's work? In its no doubt unnecessary length?

That's why the true thinker always awaits his commentator, W. says. Didn't Husserl await Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty? Wasn't Rosenzweig reborn in Levinas? Sometimes, W. dreams that the work of Cohen has awaited his commentary. Rozensweig's, too. Isn't W.'s mathematical messianism the commentary that will render these thinkers untimely?

Sometimes, he thinks that it might be the same with Kierkegaard, in our collaboration, W. says. Sometimes, he thinks that Kierkegaard’s despair of capitalism, about which he wrote nothing at all, is the unthought that will echo through our speculations.

When do you work?’, W. says. ‘When do you have ideas?’ But he knows the answer. I am too busy to work, I tell him. I am troubled to have ideas.

I’ve been institutionalised, W. says. Bureaucratised! It was when I became the perfect administrator that I stopped doing any real philosophical work.

What do I do in my office?, W. wonders. Answer emails. Fill out spreadsheets. Take home management communiqués, and read them with bloodshot eyes. And what do I do in the evenings? He sees me, in his mind’s eye, W. says, opening a bottle of wine in the squalor of my flat after a day at work. He sees me, booting up my laptop, getting ready to write.

But that’s my problem!, W. says. I think that writing is the same as having ideas, when in reality, they are entirely different. You have to stop writing to have an idea, W. says. You have to pause and wait. Thought has to come to you, W. says, not you to it. You can't force thought by writing.

My writing is really the enemy of philosophy, W. says. Its waters close over the head of thought. Its dark matter occludes the sprawl of stars and planets. Its mantras drown out the holy scriptures.

In the beginning was the non-Word, W. says; in the beginning, there was no beginning. A kind of eternal seething instead. The licking of black flames… Nothingness turning in nothingness… The void, thickening, and thinning out… That's what he hears in my writing, W. says. That's what rumbles in his head when he reads me online.

Of course, it’s worse for me when I actually stop writing, W. says. It’s worse when I collapse into my bed and try to sleep. He pictures me, staggering around my flat in the early hours, amidst the squalor, amidst the mould spores and the flies, preparing for bed. He sees me, drunk, or half drunk on Tesco’s cheapest wine, ranging around my flat like the abominable snowman, with my dressing gown flapping around me …

‘You can never sleep, can you? You’ve never been able to sleep’, W says. He sees me, lying sleepless in bed, full of great paranoid imaginings about the way I think they’ll sack me. He sees me, lying there, quite panicked, fearing that I’ll be sent back to the dole queue. And he sees me, falling asleep at last, collapsing into unconsciousness at last, just as dawn breaks, and the birds start singing, just as, at the opposite end of the country, W. is waking up, ready to begin his studies. He sees me, dreaming fitfully about working out my notice and exit interviews. He sees me, mouthing the words, No!, No!, in my half-sleep … And he sees my eyes open again, the Leviathan awake, rolling out of my bed like a Spital Tongues Gargantua …

The ascent. We climb higher to where the river Dart is supposed to have its source. This is the source of the water they use in Plymouth Gin, W. says. It's the peat which gives it its special softness. And the way it's filtered through granite.

W. passes me his hipflask. We’ve brought our gin back to its wellspring! To its Eden! We’ve completed the circle. We drink to the Dart, and to the rain that feeds the Dart. We drink to the clouds, and to the seawater that evaporates to make the clouds. We drink to the sea and to the rivers that feed the sea.

We drink to our digestive systems. Our gin-processing systems! And we fantasise, as we drink, about a thinker of the moors, a thinker lost on the moor like King Lear and twice as mad as him. About a thinker whose madness is his thought, W. says mystically.

He'll be our Hölderlin, who grasping Zeus's lightning – madness itself -, will pass it to us 'wrapped in song'. He'll be our Artaud on his mad Irish quest, looking for Saint Patrick in the bogs. He’ll be our Judge Schreber, visited by little men from Cassiopeia, Wega and Capella, who warned him in tiny voices of the approaching end of the world …

He’ll be our Louis Wain, with his cosmic cats. And he’ll be our post-conversation William Kuzelek, painting the grain elevators on the Saskatchewan prairies, painting the vast sky above the prairies. Canadian madness is lucidity itself, we agree.

Our thinker will be a playmate of God, who, now God is dead, sings of God's absence on the high moor. He'll be a thinker of the roof of the world, who will stay up high on the roof, refusing to come down.

Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? How can he explain it to me?

There's story by Kafka – a parable really. The Master demands that his servant saddle up his horse. 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. – 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Why did he come crawling back? What secret fatality led him home? Why was he chained to Britain as a dog to its vomit? Was it some inadequacy? Some sense that he didn’t belong among the cafes and cobbled streets? Was it British inadequacy? British stupidity? A British inability to take himself seriously as a thinker?

Perhaps he lacked some dimension of belief: W. sometimes thinks that. He lacked a real sense of himself as a thinker: that’s what he had to conclude, W. says. He wasn’t ready for Old Europe. Britain sits too deeply inside him. He bones were British bones. His heart beat British blood. The voices in his head were British voices.

What could he do but come home? What, to the country that is completely opposed to thought, and in which thought can only be rebellion and despair, and wild, vague pathos? Perhaps we need something to think against, W. says. Perhaps thought needs an enemy. Or perhaps it is just his weakness, he who has never done anything but react against the horror of Britain. Against the horror of capitalism! Perhaps there are more affirmative ways to think, to live …

Away-From-Here … But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters … 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and some of the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. They compromised, he says, they who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullness somewhere else, in another place; that life moved in Old Europe like fire in fire, like weather on the sun …

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.

In the end, he's still not sure what messianism really means, W. says. Messianic: that's what he wrote in his Facebook profile under religion. Messianic: he wrote that under politics, too, without understanding what he'd written.

What does it mean to talk about the messianic when neither of us is in the least bit religious? What, to dream of a messianic politics?

It has something to do with the apocalypse, W. says. He’s certain of that. The Messiah, the apocalypse: you can't have one without the other. The Messiah only arrives at the end of times, in the Last Days, W. says. It's only at the end of politics that politics might become messianic. And perhaps we are at the end of politics, W. says. Perhaps politics really is over.

Evening. W’s college, at the edge of Dartmoor.

Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Spread blankets and a portable MP3 player pounding out Jandek’s Modern Dances.

This is his kind of political protest, W. says.

W.’s disappointed that none of his sport science students have joined the occupation. He thought he might have been able to turn them. He thought they might have ended up on his side, armed with cricket bats and hockey sticks. Hadn't he promised them extra credit, if they joined the revolution?

But his philosophy postgraduates are out in force, W. says. The last humanities students of the college! The brave three hundred, who will stand against like Leonidas's Spartans against the enemy army.

But there is no army. Only a lone security guard, sitting on a plastic chair.

They were a phalanx, he and his fellow Essex postgraduates. They faced outwards, together. They faced Britain, faced the forces of capital with their shelds locked together, and their spears poking out. And isn't that what we'll be doing today: facing the forces of capital with our shields locked together. With our spears poking out!

Shoulder to shoulder: that's how we must stand, W. says. Sharing the risk equally. Each sustaining each other's courage. Each holding each other's place in the line of battle …

No one will break the phalanx. – 'Not even you, fat boy!' No breach will be opened, so long as we all stand firm. And the enemy will hear our battle cry. Capitalism will hear our battle cry: pallasch, pallasch, pallasch!

Political despair: that's what we should guard against, W. says. Political defeatism.

The danger is that we are in love with the loss of politics, W. says. That we are happy with it; that we depend on it. That we love Britain, even as we pretend to hate it. That we love our own inertia, our own impotence …

'The self must be broken in order to become itself', W. quotes from Kierkegaard. And mustn't politics, too, be broken? Mustn't politics, too, be brought to its knees?

There’s always a danger of revelling in our woes, of taking refuge in depression: that's what Kierkegaard warns us of, W. says. We need to intensify our despair, to despair over it, that’s what Kierkegaard tells us, W. says. We must despair over our despair of politics! We must double up our despair, setting despair against despair, if we are ever to transform despair into faith!

The trick of politics is knowing when to act, according to Debord, W. says. You have to study the logic of politics. You have to learn lessons from it. And, sometimes, you have to set the rules yourself, and follow those rules through to the end.

To act! To strike! To remake the terrain of politics, the nature of politics! That should be our aim, W. says.

We need a strategy!, W. says. We need tactics! We need to aim our blow, as Clausewitz puts it, on the centre of gravity of the whole war. And it is a war, W. says. Politics is war, at the end of times.

The desert is growing, W. says. I’m writing more, much more than he can follow on my blog, my infernal blog. Posts about him. About us! It’s remorseless. Thousands and thousands of words. Day after day.

Don’t I know there’s a war on – a philosophical war?, W. says. Why am I not marching to the philosophical front lines, like him, to do my bit?

His sports science students are complaining, W. says. They don’t see the relevance of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz to badminton ethics. They don't understand why they're being made to study the guerilla tactics of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh in a module on shot-put metaphysics.

'War has no constant dynamic', he quotes, 'just as water has no constant form'. 'The skilful strategist defeats the enemy without doing battle', he quotes. 'The enemy advances, we retreat', he says. 'The enemy sets up camp, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue'.

If he can’t make his sports science students into a guerrilla army, W. says, he might make them into beasts of burden instead. Hasn’t he dreamt that he might saddle them up and ride them, placing bits between their teeth? Philosophical bits! The bits of Rosenstock! Of Rosenzweig! Hasn’t he dreamt of kicking literary spurs into their sides? The spurs of Kafka! Of Krasznahorkai!

W. dreams of mounting his last postgraduate students on the backs of his sports science students. Of combining brain and brawn, like Master/Blaster in Mad Max III: Beyond the Thunderdome. He and his army would take to the hills, W. says, getting reading to charge the college in a few months time.

The suburbs are deepening in Reading, W. says. The suburbs are condensing. They're becoming more real. They've almost managed to pass themselves off as reality.

W. thinks of Philip K. Dick's gnostic vision. For Dick, the world as we see it is a stage-set. It's false. History ended in AD57. It ended when the Roman Empire reigned triumphant. The empty-headed yuppie is really a centurion, W. says. The company manager is an tribune. Reading is really Rome, just as all towns and cities are Rome.

W. thinks of the Biblical cities: of Sodom and Tyre. Of Babylon and Jericho. Aren't they really one city, the same city, the same horror?

But in Reading, it will only ever be the '80s, W. says. The council houses are being eternally sold off. The markets are being eternally deregulated. The corporations are eternally moving in. The housing estates are eternally being built. The golf courses are eternally opening up. The gypsies are being eternally moved on.

The suburbs are deepening, W. says. Reading looks like its succeeding. Reading is passing itself off as utopia. Reading says: this is the future. This is all there every can be. But the financial storms is coming, W. says. The banks will fall, and Reading, too, will fall.

The main road, thick with cars. Big cars. Company cars, shining, pristine! BMWs, and that sort of thing. It's so crowded! So congested! There's no space here, W. says. Every road's going somewhere… Every car's on its mission… 

W. sees our inability to drive as a kind of heroism. We're holding out!, he says. We're the last pedestrians! Cars are a materialism of capital, he says. An embodiment of capitalist flows. It's the same with the planes that cross the sky. We must have nothing to do with planes, W. says. We must never fly again.

Older houses. Villa-styled piles subdivided into flats. Victorian houses with pattern-tiled paths and iron railings. Wide avenues with big-canopied trees. Landscaped gardens. The sun flashing on conservatory glass. Peace and calm.

The mask of loveliness, W. says. What does it conceal? The children behind the windows are depressed, he says. The children in their bedrooms are starving themselves to death. They know what Reading is. They know where it is they live.

Builders’ vans. Scaffolding. The bourgeois are extending downwards, into the earth, W. says. They’re putting in swimming pools and home cinemas. But it won't save them. The world will end here as elsewhere. The Reading rich will scream, just as the Reading poor will scream …

Reading. The edge of town. Blank-box executive homes, inches apart, five to a plot in place of old bungalows. '70s semis with barn-sized extensions. Driveways packed with Land Rovers and 4X4s.

Mock Tudor houses… Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows… Great estates with roads named after flowers, after colours, after days of the week… All the styles of history and mocking history. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Reading. The old buildings of the hospital. This is where I was born, he knows that, W. says. This is where I came into the world. He imagines the midwife, holding me up by my heels. He imagines my first bellow, my first cry.

W. reminds me of the story in the Koran. When the first human being was born, a fish came up out of the water, and a vulture came down from the sky. 'The danger has come', they said in unison. The catastrophe! And the fish dived down to the bottom of the waters, and the vulture flew away into the sky.

'Just as man must suffer from God, so God must suffer from man', W. says, quoting Jung. – 'How much do you think God suffered when you were born?'

Broad Street, Reading. Office blocks. Glass box buildings.

A crowded south Indian restaurant. Women in saris. Men with masala dosas on big plates. Silver lassi jugs, and big bottles of Cobra. What are my people doing here, in the midst of it all?, W. wonders. They're software engineers, I tell him. Computer programmers, come to work in the Thames Valley. They're following the international flow of capital, I tell him, and bringing India with them.

Pictures of the gods on the wall. A statue of Shiva in dark wood, with a garland of flowers. - 'India in Reading!', W. exclaims. 'It won't last. It can't last'. The Indians will settle down in the suburbs. They'll stop going to the temple, stop celebrating Deepvali. Capitalism demands that! You shall have no other gods than me: isn't that what the international flow of capital proclaims?

Actually, capitalism has its gods, too, W. says. Transitory gods. Appearing and disappearing gods. Isn’t that what we see, flashing on the windows of the company foyers? Isn’t that what is visible on the windshields of the company cars?

W. looks through my notebook. Notes on Robert Walser's confinement, he says. Names and dates. Ah, very interesting, W. says. Didn't Walser volunteer to be taken into Herisau asylum? Didn't he want to go there for the peace and quiet? Hadn’t he had enough of the world? Enough of having to make a living. He’d had enough of crowded streets and noisy neighbours. Enough of writing! Of trying to write! Of his will to write! He wanted to give up writing.

At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible.

One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, like children exhausted from their play.

To fade away; to lie like a felled tree; to be blown around the world like a leaf. What Zen master has ever wanted to achieve more?

Walser wanted to disappear, W. says. He wanted to dissolve into the everyday like some kind of mystic of the ordinary. It’s what I’ve wanted, he knows that, W. says: it’s what I’ve sought in my years of unemployment. Haven’t I wanted to become a man without qualities?, W. says. Haven’t I said I wanted the everyday to smooth away my distinctness like a river does a pebble?

It’s what gives me a strange kind of wisdom, W. says. A strange kind of religiosity! Sometimes, he’s even thought of me as a kind of saint, W. says. As a holy man of the banal; a hermit of the empty hours.

Haven't I been a kind of suburban Saint Anthony: a man who ventured into the deepest of suburban deserts? Haven't I wrestled with  the most banal of demons, and passed obscure trials which have left others made or drunk or dead?

What vacancies I have known! What boredoms! What diffuse despairs! The everyday still clings to me like bits of shell to a hatching chick, W. says. It's why, in the end, he has a kind of respect for me. For isn't the everyday the contemporary equivalent of the Biblical desert?

The non-cosmos. The non-ontological. That's what W. sees in my damp, in my rats, the Japanese knot-weed, growing in the yard. That's what he sees in everything I have written and will write. In everything I have said or have tried to say. He hears it in my stuttering. My stammering. In the ‘hellos!’ I boom out to all-comers. And isn't it present in my dancing, too? In my stomach problems? In my ceaseless consumption of celebrity magazines?

Non-thought. Chaos. It's what he hears when I use to the middle voice, W. says. There was a dampening. There was a infestation of rats. There was a proliferation of knotweed. There was and will be writing. There was and will be the desecration of speech.

Faecal emergencies come, one after another. There will be a spattering of toilet bowls. The gods, blind and deaf and mad are screaming. The angels are weeping. The sky is darkening, W. says. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings.

Kurtz is heading upriver… Robespierre is sharpening the guillotines… Lenin is ordering more Kulaks killed… Danton dies again…

Pallasch. Pallasch, Pallasch.

In the beginning was the non-Word, W. says; in the beginning, there was no beginning. A kind of eternal seething instead. The licking of black flames. Nothingness turning in nothingness. The void, thickening, and thinning out …

The thought of despair, the despair of thought. What if there is no difference between thought and the failure to think? What if thought is failure, and failure, experienced rightly, a kind of thought? What matters is for W. to plunge more deeply into his idiocy. Into my idiocy!

We’re growing old, W. says. Our eyes are dulling and our hair is greying. Even my eyes, the one who he took as a protégé! Even my hair, the one he singled out for his youth!

Socrates taught Plato, W. says. Plato taught Aristotle. And Aristotle taught Alexander, who conquered half the world. Hasn’t W. dreamt of a pupil who would leap ahead of him? To be superseded in thought. To become a kind of springboard for a thinker who would leap yet higher, yet farther. Of what else does the true thinker want? To nurture the protégé who would blast new skies open …

Cohen begat W., who in turn begat Lars: isn't that the succession of which W. has dreamt? The unthought of Cohen, which begat W. The unthought of W., which begat Lars … But he's engendered only a monster of thought, W. says. A monster of non-thought, of the sacrifice of succession. I am the last of the family line: isn't that clear? Thought stops with me: isn't that what W. has come to learn?

Tottenham, emerging from the underground.

W.’s not surprised that one of the madmen of the underground sat next to us. Did he sense that we had something in common? Did he believe us to be akin, somehow? Like-minded, somehow? He was a religious man, as all madmen are religious. He was an apocalyptic man, as all madmen are apocalyptic.

He spoke of the end of the world. W. nodded in agreement. He spoke of the last judgement. W. affirmed what he said. He spoke of the remnant, of the last stand of the righteous. Yes, said W., a number of times. And then the madman rose and wandered down the carriage.

We musn't be afraid to see our world in apocalyptic terms, W. says. In religious terms. The language of the Last Days is wholly appropriate to our times.

We know what is coming. We know that a new dawn — the opposite of dawn — will spread its dark rays from the horizon. We know that the time will come to put down our pens and close our books …

Climatic catastrophe. Financial catastrophe. W. quotes the prophet Joel: ‘the rivers of waters are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness’. He remembers what the prophet Jeremiah saw in the ruins of Jerusalem: the earth without form and void. The heavens without light. The very mountains reeling …

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell W. How could it be otherwise? Driveways packed with Land Rovers and 4X4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows, in great estates at the edge of everywhere … All the styles of history, and mocking history, laughing at it. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. said. The eternal end.

Reading University is a campus of the suburbs, W. says. He couldn’t think of anything worse. A campus on the edge of a town, like an out-of-town leisure complex. Like a DIY superstore …

Of course, so many of the interesting universities are buried in the suburbs, W. says. He thinks of Essex University. Of the University of Middlesex! But the suburbs of Reading are particular invidious.

It's so crowded!, he says. So congested! Labyrinthine estates with roads named after flowers, after colours, after days of the week. Hypermarkets and out-of-town retail parks. Death by Pet World! Death by Staples! And cars everywhere, cramming the roads. Big cars! Company cars, shining, pristine! BMWs, and that sort of thing. Cars and car-parks and front gardens tarmacked over and covered in cars.

Blank-box executive houses, inches apart, five to a plot in place of old bungalows. '70s semis with barn-sized extensions. New dormers on old houses. Gardens of gravel. Car-park yards. This is what prosperity looks like, W. says. This is home-counties contentedness.

The campus. Space at last. An expanse of grass. Yew trees. Don't be fooled!, W. says, as we follow the path. This is still Reading. He can already feel his thoughts becoming suburban, he says.

It was Kafka that led me from the south to the north, W. knows that. It was Kafka that led me into the university. Before Kafka, there was my warehouse life. My life as a finder of UTLs, unable-to-locates, searching up and down the warehouse aisles.

I stumbled when I tried to convey it to W., which is a good sign, he says. I spoke of the castle hill, veiled in mist and darkness, and of the buzzling and whistling on the telephone line. I spoke of the illusory emptiness into which K. looked up as he crossed the wooden bridge, and of his abjection and passivity as he sought to settle his business with the authorities. What was I getting at?, W. wonders. What was I trying to say?

The world around me was unreal, I told W. that. The warehouse was unreal. The suburbs in which I had grown up, and on which the warehouse had been built, were likewise unreal. Despair reveals the truth of the world: isn’t that what was revealed to me by Kafka’s book? Despair reveals the nullity of things.

I had a vision, I told W., he remembers. I saw the workers around me like rats in a rat-run. I saw the pristine buildings around me like rat-pens, like rat-mazes. Absurdity was doing experiments on us: that’s what I saw, wasn’t it? Madness had us caged in the suburbs like laboratory rats …

My soul was a UTL: isn't that what I saw? Life was an unable-to-locate, although no one seemed to know it but me.

The Castle made my life quiver like a compass needle. Things pointed in one direction: north! Out of the warehouse! Out of the south! North: to where dereliction, like The Castle, revealed things in their truth!  North: to where the destruction at the created order had worn through!

A chance, a promise. That's what they were given, the Essex postgraduates. Life was elsewhere … They lived in the wrong age, and in the wrong country. They were men and women out of time and out of place.

Their ideas weren't British ideas, or at least current British ideas, W. says. Their ideas weren't commercial ideas, ideas that belong to the new reality. Ah, in another country, they thought back then, they would have been taken by the arm and treated with great politeness and interest. In religious or recently religious countries, where they still revere philosophy.

How might they have been treated in Mediterranean countries, the Essex postgraduates wondered, where they pour you wine and sit down with you to discuss ideas over olives and chorizo? Wouldn’t they have found allies and admirers in the countries of Eastern Europe — in political or recently political countries — where you can still discuss Marx over your Weissbiers, where Weil and Kierkegaard are on everyone's minds?

Of course, they all study philosophy at school, in Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates knew that. Everyone knows a little something about philosophy. Everyone has something philosophical to say. It's in their blood. In the air! It's in the aether of Old Europe, they said to each another. It's in the cafés and wine cellars. It's in the city squares and riverside parks. And can't you see it shining out in the faces of children?

Old Europe, Old Europe. But its day was passing, the Essex postgraduates knew that. And so the promise of their day was passing, they who never really knew Old Europe. Their philosophy would die unnoticed: how could it be otherwise? The ideas of Old Europe would not take root here.

They would have to fly off elsewhere, the Essex postgraduates, as dandelion seeds of thought. They would have to take root in South America, perhaps — in Argentina, which is supposed to be a very thoughtful country, a real thinking country; in Columbia, which has philosophy departments like great castles; in Uruguay, which probably already harbours thinker-friends who will take the next great leap of thought.

Or they would have to reach fertile ground in vast China, vast India, or in overcrowded Japan. Somewhere, someplace else, there would have to find the countries of thought. Somewhere beyond Old Europe, itself no longer fertile soil for the ideas of its thinkers …

Ah, its time had come, Old Europe. It’s time was already overdue. Old Europe had already outlived itself, was already posthumous. But didn't it dream nonetheless? Didn't it send its dreams back from the other side of death? Were they its dreams, Old Europe's, the Essex postgraduates?, W. wonders. Were they the way Old Europe dreamed of coming once more to itself, now and in Essex?

Now and in Essex, now and in Essex. W. has always had a waking dream that our country might become the next country of philosophy. He's always dreamt — and he knows it's ridiculous — that something might begin in our Britain: a day, the chance of a day. That the sunrays from old Europe, from the sun-touched countries of the south, would burst through our northern clouds. That a heavenly fire would illuminate our ancient landscapes and break across our upturned faces …

Our tears would flow, W. says. Our hearts would melt, our knees buckle. We would fall into the arms of thought. Thought would be as easy as falling. We’d play with ideas as one child with another. We’d speak to each other at last. We’d hear each other speak – at last, at last!

A chance, a promise… How they dreamed in Essex! How ardently they dreamed, the Essex postgraduates! And was it Old Europe that dreamed of itself through them? Was it Old Europe that sought to reach them from the other side of death?

Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? W. remembers a Kafka parable. – 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. – 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Do I know what brought him back?, W. says. Do I know why he didn't stay in France? British humour, he says. Having a laugh, British style. Taking the piss. Having the piss taken out of you. That's what he missed, W. says. They don't take the piss in France, or have the piss taken out of them in Luxembourg. He saw nothing of taking the piss in the trains of Europe, or in the European archives. No one takes the piss out of the Germans …

Away-From-Here … But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters … 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. He compromised, he says, he who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullnesss somewhere else, in another place; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun.

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.