Category: W.

At night, our hosts tell us, they dream of the Yukon. The mountains, the open spaces … the fawn-like gentleness of the Yukonites … the lakes, beside which you can pitch your teepee. Hadn't they spent whole summers by the Yukon lakes in their teepees?

Our Canadian hosts – latterly stranded in Nashville – are people of the expanses. They have expansive souls. They're used to the outdoor life, to taking great strides in the wilderness. They're used to horse riding and kayaking, and of singing close harmonies around the fire at night.

They're used to the Canadian summer, of days that go on forever, and to the Canadian autumn, when the aurora borealis flashes about above the frosts. And in the Canadian winter, the absolute clarity of the Milky Way crowns them, stars pinprick sharp in the frozen winter.

The Canadian is a friend of the bear, of the wolf. The Canadian is a friend to his fellow Canadian by way of his friendship with the bear and the wolf. The wilderness opens between them, Canadians. They safeguard it; they inhale it; it's the element of their lives, W. says. He knows that because he spent his childhood in Canada. He knows something of teepee life. He knows something of Canadian loyalty, he says, and of close harmonies sung in the Canadian life.

Out hosts are gentler than us, W. says, kinder. W.'s tried to explain it to them. – 'You're not like us'. They're not rats crawling over rats. They don't bicker. They're not vicious. Once, he wasn't vicious, W. says. He didn't bicker. He sang beside lakes. He hiked on forest paths. And then what happened? They moved home, his family. They moved back. Disaster! That's when it happened, the fall, W. says. They moved back to Britain, and his soul became crabbed, mean. His soul shrank. His friendships shrank.

And now, like me, he has trouble imagining himself in a teepee. We're men of the city, W. tells them. We're rats, used to tight corners and narrow corridors. We're channelled; we're not men of the expanse. We never lift our eyes to the sky, or look out over bodies of water. – 'Look at us!', he cries. 'Look at him!', he says, pointing to me. 'Can't you see?'

We'd be lost in the Yukon, W. says. Looking out over the lakes, we would have to search our souls – a melancholy act. We'd have to contemplate our failure yet again, and from a new perspective. How could it end but in a drowning, two blue corpses face down in the water?

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says, broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! How do I ever begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense? I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from day to day? W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He's seen too much. He knows where it's heading. He's seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … What am I thinking about? What thought's struck me? But he knows I am only full of administrative anxieties, and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

On, on, on, that's what I say to myself, isn't it?, W. says. There are always more boxes to fill in, more forms … I'm an administrative machine, an administrative maniac, W. says. I find the meaning of my existence in my administrative labours, he knows that; he finds it fascinating.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought, from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. – 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'.

What, for example, have I been doing all summer? What happened to the pincer movement we agreed to undertake on German-Jewish philosophy? I was to approach the mountain of German-Jewish philosophy from the east face, as it were (the easy slope), and he from the notoriously difficult west face (the difficult slope). He was to be a mountaineer of thought, and I – though no mountaineer – was to be at least something of a hill walker (of the low hills, the minor ones).

Heaven forfend that we would climb together! W. would never ask that. Never one reader-climber attached to the other by rope. Never two reader-climbers looking for handholds and footholds on the cliff face of Cohen's work.

He knows it lies beyond me. He knows I'm not his climbing-partner. It would only end up like Touching the Void. I'd have lost him down some cavern. He would have fell, doubtless trying to save me from some great reading-error, and I would have let him fall, disregarding both my error and his attempt to correct me. ,

Yes, he would have fallen, and I, cutting the rope, would attempt to find the easy way round, the simplest of routes. I'd be reading my Idiot's Guide to Cohen instead. My Cohen in Sixty Minutes. And I'd come down the mountain whistling. I've read Cohen, I'd say. And meanwhile, W. be lying there groaning.

Has our time come?, I ask W. – 'Ages ago', he says. Then what's keeping them? 'The judgement came too late', says W. 'There are no hangmen, no firing squad. The army have all deserted their posts. The very institutions of the law are deserted, their doors swinging open, files blowing about in the wind'.

Then who will pass sentence? – 'There's no one to pass sentence'. Who will lead us to our cells? – 'There's no one to lead us to our cells'. Then are we to strangle ourselves? – 'I'll strangle you, and you strangle me, and we'll see where that gets us', says W.

'It's not worth waiting for sentencing, nor for trial. You're living it out, your life sentence, in a way you're not equipped to understand. They're punishing you by letting you live', W. says.

'They'll shoot you like a dog', W. says. 'Actually, that's too good for you. They'll crush you like an insect. No, even that's too good. They'll simply let you live, a living humiliation, humilating yourself and others to a degree you'll never understand.

If I survived the current cull, as he did not, W. says, I shouldn't be proud. Why do you think they're keeping you around? To laugh at you. To poke you with sticks. Now and again, they'll look through the food slot of my cell to see if I'm eating my own shit. Look at him!, they'll say. He's eating his own shit!

Turn toward the light, that's the advice to the departing soul in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But he sees no light, W. says, only darkness.

A double suicide – is that the answer? But who would stab whom first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?

Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn't the end already overdue? Shouldn't it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We'll close our eyes at last. There'll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …

Hope. What is it that keeps us going? Why do we bother, in spite of it all, in the face of it all? Sometimes W. thinks we sense a duty to Old Europe, a duty to the thinkers who have preceded us. We have a sense of the dark times, and of the need to preserve something, to hold on to it. 

But then don't we also have a sense of a duty to ourselves, to cultivate ourselves, to hollow ourselves out in service? There is a great deal wrong with us, to be sure – almost everything – but there's also a sense that something's missing, that if we don't quite measure up, the world, too, doesn't measure up, and in our inadequacy – in our awareness of inadequacy – something of the world has become conscious of itself.

We are signs, W. says, symptoms. We're the way something is wrong, not the disease itself. Or we are only part of the disease, its augurs, its prophets – if prophets are allowed to be barely conscious of what they prophesise and already touched by the apocalypse – its mystics – if mystics are permitted to wander dazed through their revelation, unsure of what it was they saw.

That we know our limitations is our strength, we're agreed on that. We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness. At least we know it passes above us, like migratory birds in the autumn sky.

We've written. We've even written a great deal. We've spoken. We've addressed learned audiences. We've tried – can't we say that? No doubt I'm a little lower than W., he says, a little less advanced. I have a lower IQ, for one thing, that much is clear. I lack his linguistic abilities, his depth of his scholarship. And I lack his sense of old Europe, of the libraries and archives of major European cities.

But for all that, haven't I lent him something of my shamelessness? Hasn't he learnt from me the power of pathos, of saying very little, but with great feeling? He's acquired a sense of urgency, W. says. He knows what he's up against. He's a man of the new world, this world, W. says. He's emerged from the archives. Without me, would he have written anything at all? Would he have spoken?

But then, too, he wonders whether he hasn't fallen from them, the libraries, the archives, old Europe. Whether the light into which he emerged was like the milky lens of a cataract, and he sees nothing but his blindness, my blindness. What is real? What is good? Perhaps he no longer knows, W. says. Perhaps I've led him astray, terribly astray, and he no longer knows the way back.

Our friends, what has happened to our friends? W. dreamt we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all; that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamt we'd mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs. But he was wrong, terribly wrong, for news has come that they are turning on one another, our friends, just as we, one day, will turn upon one another, W. says.

To be betrayed by your friends: what worse fate is there than that?, W. says. To know your friend has betrayed you in the name of cynicism and opportunism?

It had to happen; he sees that now. It had to fall apart. Wasn't his dream, always, that we could save ourselves from the end? But we will not hold it back; the disaster will begin with what is closest to us. And what's my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand? Et tu, idiot?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs. Et tu?, as he sees my face is only that of the apocalypse …

How many times have I betrayed him?, W. wonders. I'm on every page of his Book of Betrayals. He's always taken detailed notes. And there are pictures, too. W. wants to remember everything. Everything! One day, he's going to read his notes to me and show me all his pictures, he says. One day, standing at the head of the bed like the Archangel Michael, he's going to read me the great list of my betrayals and show me the pictures.

The end is coming, W. says. He's sure of that. Our end, or the end of the world? Both!, W. says. The one is inextricable from the other. Do I see it as he does? Is he the only one who can read the signs?

He can see them now, even on this sunny day in Cawsands. He sees them in our honey beer, W. says. In the dog who wants me to play with him, dropping a stone at my feet. In the narrowness of the three-storeyed house opposite. In the name of the pub in whose garden we drink: The Rising Sun. And in me, too? – 'In you above all', W. says.

The Rising Sun: what sun is going to rise over us? A black sun, says W. A sun of ashes and darkness. He sees the image in his mind's eye: the man and boy of The Road, pushing a shopping cart down an empty highway. Only in our case, it'll be two men, squabbling over whose turn it is to ride in the cart. Two men with ashes in their hair, exiled from the cities and all cities.

At the busstop, W. speaks of his dream of a community, of a society of friends who would push one another to greatness. Where are they now, our absent friends? Far from us! Scattered all over the world!

If only they were closer! Of what we might be capable! They would make us great!, W. says. We'd make each other great! Or perhaps that is just our last temptation: the thought that something could make us great.

Whitley Bay, walking among the boarded up sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. But at least they haven't begun the regeneration yet. They're going to turn it into a cultural hub, imagine that! A cultural hub where there was once the funfair and the golden sands.

A search and rescue helicopter hovers over the sea. Someone must have gone missing. Someone's disappeared. As we draw closer, we see an ambulance on the beach, and bodysuited lifeguards running into the water with floats.

We gather with other spectators along the railings at the edge of the beach. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore where the sand gives way to rock. The currents are very strong, the man next to us says. You never know where a body will end up. A teenage boy, head bent down, hand to brow, sits on the steps of the ambulance with a towel around his shoulders.

The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression in the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards, spread out over a few hundred meters, paddle out on their floats. Sometimes they dive and then reappear. Much higher up, rising at an angle, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe it has special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.

Two men run out onto the beach and take off their clothes. They're drunk, we can see that. They splash out into the sea, nude, laughing and shouting, the helicopters hovering above them. But when they turn and see the long line of spectators looking out at them, and realise they are in the midst of the search for a missing swimmer, they become suddenly embarrassed. Shamed. They wade back to the beach, hands cupped over their genitals.

How much time do we have left?, we consider, on the way to the station. You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about the credit crunch and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.

But it could come at any time, that's the horror, says W. The end could come tomorrow, or in another thousand years, we have no idea. The time of reality is non-linear, W. says.

Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders sometimes. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. In some important way, it's all our fault. – 'The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?', W. says, quoting some Bergman character. 'You', W. says. 'Your stupidity. Your immense ugly face'.

Before the law sits no gatekeeper, W. says. No one guards the gate that would allow you gain entry into the law. It stands open. It's nearly falling from its hinges. And beyond it, other doors, or empty walls where there were once doors, or rubble where there were once walls, or deserts where there was once rubble. And beyond that: empty space without stars. Nothing at all.

No one comes here, although the law is accessible to everyone. No one, and perhaps that is why: there are no more secrets. Nothing is hidden, not anymore.

Why do I think we're going to be caught out?, says W. Haven't I told him that: no one cares anymore; no one's on the look out. There's no one could regard us as interlopers; there was no guard on the door. It's like Rome after it was sacked by the Barbarians, says W. They've come and gone, the Barbarians, the wreckers of civilisation. There is no guard; there's nothing to protect. We're inside – yes. But that's only a sign that there is no longer a distinction between inside and outside.

In the end, we have to understand that we got away with nothing; our stupidity is in plain view. It doesn't matter; it's irrelevant to everyone. No one's worried about our credentials, because there no credentials. There's only luck, and opportunism. Luck – that we were there, then; that we were young at the right time - and the opportunism that allowed us to seize upon what advantages we had. Were we lucky? Of course. And stupid? Yes – and especially me, W. says. And no one minds, W. says. No one notices.

It's not as if we're a threat. We hold out our hands so we can be handcuffed, but no one wants to arrest us. We pack our suitcases and leave them by the door in the hope that the secret police will come, but no one batters down our door. No one's going to shoot us, W. says, more's the pity. No one's going to put us up against the wall. We're not going to executed as traitors. We're not going to be sued for our seditious writings. We're not going to Siberia for twenty years. We're not going to live out our lives as dissidents in exile.

He sees it, W. says, like an enormous fact. A great fact, like the wide sky, that says, it doesn't matter. Over the Bodelian, it says: it's all over. Over the college quadrangles, it says: it's finished. You're too late. Over the gowned academics, it says: it is all as nothing. 

We're conflicted, there's no question of that, W., says. On the one hand, we have a natural fear and loathing of our contemporary culture, of what our culture has become. But on the other, a Messianic sense of what it might have been, a wholly impractical sense of what it had been and what it could be again, and of our role in bringing it about.

On the one hand, a knowledge that our careers, such as they are, could only have meant the collapse of contemporary culture, and, on the other, a simultaneous and wholly unearned sense that we are part of a glorious European past, and indeed part of the glory of Old Europe, that we have a legitimate share in the world which the philosophies we teach was born.

On the one hand, a knowledge that we are connoisseurs of nothing, that we've come too late, that nothing we take to matter is of any importance – that the only reason we've been allowed to teach and speak on such topics is precisely because they matter to no one, and, on the other, an improbable sense that we are the last of the scholars, the last archivists, the last custodians of thought; that the preservation of Old Europe, all that really matters, has fallen to us.

On the one hand, a certainty that our learning (our enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophies) is of complete irrelevance, complete obsolesence and on the other, that it bears upon what is most important and riskiest of all; that we're like secret agents hidden in deep cover, and our cities on the peripherary will be like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, that is, the only place in which the old knowledge will be preserved. Or that we're part of a secret cell, the secret police everywhere and our teachings samizdat, our reading is covert, clandestine, and that we're about to be taken away by the authorities.

Of course, when he says us here, he means him, W. says. And when he says we know nothing, he really means I know nothing, because he at least knows something, W. says.

We have to watch Stroszek to prepare us for our trip to America, W. says, and read Marx. You have to read Marx, W. says, if you're going to the heart of capitalism. The heart of capitalism, the heart of darkness, W. says.

What Marx should we take to the USA? Perhaps we shouldn't take any at all, W. says. We might get arrested at customs. We might get sent home for Unamerican activities.

W. forwards the DVD to the famous sequence of a chicken dancing in an amusement arcade booth. Bruno Stroszek, the film's protagonist, puts a few quarters in the slot and wanders off to shoot himself. The chicken dances – how it is made to do so is a mystery – bobbing on its claws. The chicken dances, its comb bobbing, its wattle swinging, its black eyes manic …  

Herzog speaks of finding images adequate to the world, to the state of the world, W., says. The chicken is one of those images, do you see? I see. Everything is there. Everything, the horror of it all, concentrated in the image of the dancing chicken.

Stroszek: didn't Ian Curtis watch the film just before he killed himself? He saw the chicken, W. says. He really saw it, and it was too much for him. The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand, W. says. It's a bit like that statue I have in my flat, W. says. Who is it supposed to be again?

Shiva,  I tell him. The highest of the gods. Shiva as Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. Shiva's dance shook the foundations of the world, I'd told W. His locks, whirling, collided with the stars, his steps split mountains asunder and his arms whirled through the full breadth of the universe. The gods descended from heaven to watch him. They saw the very dance of the universe, the great cosmic cycle of creation and destruction.

'What's your cosmic dance like?', W. says. 'Do the funky chicken. Go on, fat boy. Dance'. W. likes to watch me dance, he says. It's so improbable. So graceless.

The chicken won't stop. That's what's etched into the runoff groove of the last Joy Division album. The chicken won't stop: it's like a mantra to W. – 'You won't stop, will you?', he says. That's part of the horror: I show no signs of stopping. But it's part of my glory, too. Who am I amusing? Not even him. Certainly not anyone else.

In my best moments, I do resemble Bruno Stroszek, of Herzog's film, W. says. In my best moments, he emphasises. Otherwise I resemble no one but myself, more's the pity.

But sometimes I achieve a kind of pathetic grandeur, W. says, almost despite myself. There I sit, in the squalor. There I am, a squalid man, amidst the squalor, a bottle and a glass close at hand, some discounted sandwich boxes lying empty around me, and I'll say something truly striking. I'll make some pronouncement. I'm like a savant. It's like a possession.

Sometimes W. thinks it's from me that a thought will come that's adequate to our civilisation. This is what he hopes will happen in during our American trip. – 'It'll come to you', and by extension, to him, too. This is why he accepted our invitation. It's why we're going to America.

If I resemble Bruno Stroszek, W. supposes he can only resemble Bruno's elderly neighbour – what was his name? Scheitzer. Scheitzerhund. Just Scheitz, I tell him. Scheitz had an interest in animal magnetism, W. remembers. He bothered people with it. He confused them. That's how it will be with his interests, W. says, which are equally improbable, equally irrelevant. We're off to bother the universities of America!

W. dreams of a thought that moves with what it thinks, follows and responds to it, like a surfer with a wave. A thought that inhabit what was to be thought like a fish the sea – no, a thought that would only be a drop of the sea in the sea, belonging to its object as water does to water.

Pure immanence!, W. cries. Being thinking itself! What does being think in us?, W. wonders. Don't let these monkeys think about me!, being says. Especially him, monkey boy supreme!, that's what being says, says W.

A fold of order in chaos. A pocket – temporary and fleeting – in the formless void. That's what he dreams thought to be, says W. Thought, the pocket thought forms, would itself be temporary, fleeing, and open to change.

Thought would ride along chaos, not resisting it, not holding itself back, but riding with it, belonging to it as water does to water. And when it is finished – a thought, a life of thought – it should be turned back inside out like a glove, and it will have been shown to have only been made of what it would think.

The thought of God would be made of God, the thought of time made of rushes and pauses; the thought of space would ache with the distances between stars. The thought of tears wet with tears, the thought of thirst parched with thirst. A hungry thought, a dying thought, a thought of feeing that is all feeling …

A thought of the disaster that was itself as disaster: will that be our contribution? Will our catastrophic thought be a temporary enfolding of the catastrophe of the world?

W. is unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called public art. So-called public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It's inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.

W. is an enemy of art. We ought to fine artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He's never doubted we need some kind of Cultural Revolution.

The real art of the city is industrial, of course. Spiller's Wharf. The four stories of the flax mill in the Ouseburn Valley. W. likes to imagine the people of Newcastle, the old working class, coming to reclaim the quayside. What need did anchorsmiths and salt-panners have for a cultural quarter? Why can't the descendants of the keelmen, who ferried coal down the river, of the rope-makers and waggon-drivers come and redeem the new ghettoes for the rich. In his imagination, they're coming to smash the public art and tear down the new buildings.

W. points out the building in which Eca de Queiroz, the famous Portuguese writer, used to work. How did he end up in Newcastle?, we wonder. Was he happy here? Did he miss the cramped streets of Bairro Alto? Did his heart yearn for the fado of his homeland?

I've always feel a spiritual connection to Portugal, W. knows that. Hasn't he always seen something of Bernardo Soares, Pessoa's great creation, in me? A Soares without the intelligence or poetic ability, granted. Soares as a disgruntled ape, snuffling through Newcastle streets.

Of course, it annoyed W. that I went off to Lisbon without him. Without him, W.! And to some daft conference! I told him later of the Portuguese Professors lounging like great walruses; I told him of the European flags they had lined up in the conference hall, as though we were delegates at some European summit, but it was no good. I shouldn't have gone there without him, W. says. Without telling him, regardless of the copy of O Livro do Desassossego I brought back for him from my trip.

Newcastle almost became a car city, I tell W., but it avoided this fate. I take him to see where the famous T. Dan Smith lived, who wanted to turn Newcastle into a Brazilia of the north. An unlikely ambition! But he persisted, driving a motorway through the centre of town. He wasn't a traffic Canute, Smith said in his autobiography; he didn't think he could turn back the great tide of traffic.

Whole swathes of the city – including the whole of Jesmond – are accessible to the pedestrian only through a number of underroad pathways, which W. particularly dislikes. My part of town, and this is its glory, has no such restrictions. He would undoubtedly be a traffic Canute as a town planner, W. says, turning back the tide of cars.

Last night, our taxi driver told us how T. Dan Smith used to pick him up as a paperboy, driving him back up Richardson Road to his home. He was a kind man, he said. He didn't deserve jail for what he did. Smith was the fall guy, said the taxi driver, as he pointed out the towerblock flat that became Smith's when he came out of prison. He must have lost his three-storeyed house that looked out over the Moor.

I show W. where I'd been knocked to the ground by local youths. They kicked me in the head, I tell him. – 'It's only what you deserved'. And I show him the route to the pubs in the Ouseburn Valley that I had travelled so many times in my lost weekend, as W. calls it.

I was out every night, W. remembers. I lived in pubs. I was drink-sodden, but happy. I came late to drinking, W. says. Mind you, so did he. He studied Hebrew and played classical guitar. What was I doing? Writing, W. says. Locked up in a room and writing like an idiot, though I had nothing to write about. - 'What's ever happened to you?', W. says. Why have I never understood I'm not Kafka?

Still, I made up for them latter, my reclusive years, W. says. I came out of my room, ready for the pubs! I went straight from my room to the pubs, Didn't I? He's forgotten my monk years, I remind him. Ah yes, my monk years, W. says. My Manchester years. He had forgotten them.

We find the spot where the Ouseburn re-emerges from the wooded cliff of the filled-in valley. How could have the river, a trickle in its wide channel, have formed such a valley? The Ouseburn was, of course, fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. Factory buildings – many of which are still standing – line the river as it opens into the Tyne. They used to make glass here, W. says, as we pass gaily-coloured boats marooned on mud banks. The Toon-tanic, W. reads on the side of one of the boats.

We stop for a pint at the Tyne, and for another in the garden of The Free Trade, looking downriver to the city. Why did the monks take me in, W. wonders. What did they see in me? W., too had his monk years. He joined a Trappist order as a novice. He was marooned with his brother monks on the Isle of Man, but he could never really surpass his own atheism, W. says. My atheism never bothered me, of course, W. says. I fitted right in with the monks. I was right in the thick of it, saved from poverty …

W. admires the view. We look upriver to the Millennium Bridge. You need to leave your city periodically, W. says, if only to understand how much you are part of it. How much it is part of you!

Moving to Newcastle was my great opportunity, W. says. Prior to Newcastle, in my Manchester years – my monk years – I was full only of a sense of life's impossibilities. That's what had drove me into the arms of the monks, W. says. His monk years were entirely different, W. says. He wasn't fleeing from the world, he says. He was looking for it.

W.'s always had a messianic faith in the figure of the walker. No one is more annoyed than he at the channeling which forces the pedestrian through a predetermined route. For this reason, W. has always hated airports. There's only ever one direction in an aiport, he says. And if you're allowed to wander away, it is only to buy things from innumerable shops. Doesn't Newcastle airport channel every traveller through a shop floor? It scandalises him, W. says. He wants to knock every bottle of perfume from the rack. He wants to smash every overpriced bottle of wine. But here, today, in the meadows? Every direction is available to us, he notes. We can travel in whatever way we like.

Mandelstam was a great walker, of course. He wrote poems in his head and then went home to write them. And when he had to destroy them, his wife had to carry them in her head. A precious cargo. He knew I was a man of culture when he saw Hope Against Hope on my bookshelf. It didn't matter that I hadn't read it, or had no idea, really, of what it contained. The title itself excited me. The title, and the myth of Mandelstam, who died so dreadfully. Hadn't I carried a book of Mandelstam's poems on my Greek adventure?, W. say. Wasn't it the last book I was ever going to read?

Ah, but what sense could we have of Mandelstam? He's beyond us! Far beyond! Poetry mattered then. It mattered that it was committed to memory. It mattered that it wasn't forgotten. And now? It doesn't matter, and we, who fancy that we love poetry, though we really only love the myth of poetry, the myth of the world-historical importance of poetry, are even more irrelevant.

There's Walser, too, the patron saint of walkers. Walser walking in the Swiss Alps. Walker who'd long since devoted his time to being mad, rather than writing: he knew his priorities. He was mad, and the mad walked. And one day – 60 years ago – they found him dead in the snow. He'd walked his way to death. Which is to say, says W., he'd met death on his own terms, far from his mental asylum. And that's exactly his point, W. says. The walker meets the world on his own terms. The walker – the slow walker – meets the world according to his measure, W. says.

Ah, if only we were as wise as Walser, which is to say, as mad as Walser. If only we understood our duty is to walk, not to write, merely to walk and not to think. To give up thinking! To give up writing! To give up our reading, which is really only the shadow of reading, the search for the world-historical importance reading once had. But we go on, don't we? We collect our books. We surround ourselves with them, the names of old Europe, when we should have been walking, just that, all along.

Poland. That's where it all began. That was the crucible. Was it my Adam Ant dancing? W. remembers my Adam Ant dancing with special fondness. He could see I was a man of limited self-awareness who barely knew of the existence of shame. He admired my exuberance. W. sensed I had something he lacked, he says. And no doubt it was the same with me: I sensed he had something I lacked. Scholarly prowess, W. says. The respect of others.

It was a bit like what Hoelderlin said about the Greeks and the Germans, W. says. The Greeks had the divine fire, but lacked the capacity for rational thought, and the Germans had the capacity for rational thought, but lacked the divine fire. Was that it? It was in the letter to Boehlendorff, W. says. Anyway, he says, he had the capacity for sustained and sober scholarship, but lacked the shamelessness of the truly ignorant, while I lacked … well, it was clear what I lacked, W. says.

The bus stops at Whitesands, high on the promontory, holiday bungalows built into the steep hillside. A group of young Poles comes up the stairs to sit down. They talk calmly, amiably, while they look out of the window, boots propped on the window ledge of the double decker. Plymouth has been enhanced by its migrating Poles, W. says.

We were served the other morning at the cafe with grace and tenderness by the gentlest of Poles. She was from Wroclaw, she said. We know Wroclaw!, we told her. We discussed the way the city changed hands over the years. We discussed the intact medieval centre and the communist-built suburbs. We discussed Solidarity and Poland joining the EC and the great migration of Poles away from their country. We told her how much we'd enjoyed our long train journey west from Warsaw to Wroclaw. It was the highlight of our lives, W. told her. That's when we peaked. – 'You should find yourself a gentle Pole', W. says. Oh but he forgot, W. says. I'm incapable of love.

You have to court women, you can't just hop into bed with them. That's my great mistake, W. says. He courted Sal for 8 months, W. says. It involved a lot of gin, a lot of drunkenness. It involved mixtapes – made by Sal for him, W., and not the other way round. W. only listened to Mahler and Gary Glitter before he met Sal, he said. Women can improve you. A gentle Pole would calm me down.

We were struck, left for dead. Struck, knocked over, and our assailant zoomed away, and we wander in the wake, dazed, white-faced. What happened? Who did this to us? But we have no idea. We're out of ideas, and dying of internal injuries, our insides pooling with blood …

Our last words: is it time for them? Last words, but it's only bubbles of blood that speak; only blood trickling from the corners of our mouths.

He's falling upwards, W. says. Is this the Rapture? But would angels really be carrying cudgels? Would they really have glassed out both his eyes?

Death slowed down for us. Death slowed down to pick us up, a maniac on the highway. And who were we, two hitchhikers? Where were we going? Too late now, anyway. Too late: we're bundled up in the back, wrists bound, ankles bound, a sack over each of our heads. 

You can scream all you like, no one will hear you. Scream your throat raw, and it will only join the other screams, of the victims locked in the boot of every car as it roars on up the highway. 

'What do you think is wrong with you?' But W. knows already. Is it the plaster dust, continually falling from the ceiling? Is it the filth on the kitchen counter, or the cans of stale beer? Is it the fact the whole flat is tilting sideways like the deck of a ship in a storm?

Sometimes W. is sure it's the yard. The shore of concrete, at the same level as the window, covered in algae. It's like the end of the world out there, W. says. Dead plants, no more than sticks in pots. The long crack in the kitchen wall, that lets in the rain. The mold encrusted hopper, overrunning with water. My God, he says. It's no wonder I'm always depressed, W. say. 

But then, too, there's the damp, the omnipresent damp. It's no wonder that I cough constantly. Even he, W., has a cough, and he's only been visiting for the weekend. He's staggering around like Widow Twankey. How can I do it to him? How can I do it to myself?

It's fate, that's what I tell him. It couldn't have been otherwise. But it could!, W. says. It could have been different. Why do I know nothing of hope? Why do I refuse it, hope, when it burns so ardently in W.? Do I really think we're at the end? Is this it: the incontrovertible end?

The concrete shore: planes have crashed against it. Suicide have dashed their heads against it. Tragic heroes with torn-out eyes have wandered across it. Antigone led her father, the blind Oedipus across the yard, looking only for a place to die. The corridors of Elsinor gave unto the concrete over which Hamlet wandered like a ghost.

To be, not to be … Neither one of them. Neither/nor: neither death nor life. Neither the end nor a new beginning. Concrete: the end, but the endless end. Death, but deferred death, dying without term.

Death, death. It's time for the kill. We're upside down, hanging from butcher's hooks, our throats bared. Death is sharpening its razor. Death is going to slash our throats wide. An explosion of blood. Two strangled cries, blood on the floor …

Help me, W. tries to say, but no words come out. Help me: a bubble of blood and nothing else. But death never comes. Death isn't there to help us. Do we lack even the power to die?