Category: W.

What would our revolutionary names be, the equivalent of Lenin and Stalin?, W. wonders. Fatov, I’d be called. Twatov, he’d be called.

W. recalls Deleuze’s legendary seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander off the streets. People did! Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in the cloud of cigarette smoke. When the hubbub from the audience became too much, he’d pause to take questions from the floor – mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Or he would simply pause, his tender eyes surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.

Idiocy is always unwitting, W. says. It doesn't really know itself. It doesn't really suffer itself, that's its lightness. The idiot is an innocent, a child.

Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks. Great! He even laughs at himself – but what does he understand of what he's laughing at? Everything's funny. He's an idiot – and that's funny, too. Everything's funny! Everything's hilarious.

Do I think the former Essex postgraduates would publish a single line?, W. says. Do I think the former Essex postgraduates would seek philosophical immortality? Do I think they would care about what posterity made of them?

Do I think the former Essex postgraduates saw themselves as thought-archers, firing arrows ahead for others to find and shoot on? They shot their arrows upward, into the sky, upwards to the stars. They shot them into impassable thickets, into the surging ocean, into the deep desert. Or they held their bows at arm’s length and shot them into their own breasts …

Ah, the former Essex postgraduates wanted no legacy, W. says. They'd seen too much to want a legacy. They knew the end was coming. The knew the end was nigh. They knew that there was little time left, that the disaster to come laughed in the face of any endeavour of thought.

The former Essex postgraduates took the long view, W. says. The very long view. The view from eternity, from the other end of eternity, when everything was dead and the stars burnt out. They've seen it, W. says, the former Essex postgraduates: the end of all things, the great dispersal. It was going to end, and endlessly to end, that's what they knew.

Anxiety is the moment, W. reads from his notebook. Anxiety is the Øiblikket, the eyeblink, the moment: We have to understand what this means!

The key, of course, lies in the way we exist in time. Everything is about time!, W. says. There is the time that passes — this moment, then that — which we merely endure, which merely carries us along. Then there is that time touched by eternity, according to Kierkegaard, in which past, present and future assume their true role as phases in our development.

In the moment, when time is touched by eternity, our relation to time deepens. We must learn to deepen and grow in time. We must learn not merely to persist in time, but to exist temporally, living towards a future that we earn by our deepening, earn by our growth.

That's what W.'s trying to achieve, he says. That's what he's been searching for, as he works each morning, before dawn. To be carried along by the propitiousness of work! To be borne along by a sacred task … No, by sacredness as a task, like a waterwheel turning in glinting water … What idea do we have of that? What of sustained and patient labour without thought of reward?

We need fear anxiety only when we fail our humility; when we have yet to achieve self-realisation. But when we discover, through our patience, the ability to determine ourselves, to liberate our possibilities — when we separate petty concerns from profound ones?

Then our anxiety will no longer be called anxiety. Then the eternal bows down from the sky to kiss our forehead. Grace: is that the name for what anxiety becomes? God: is that a name for the eternal?

Did he really think he could escape the end of philosophy?, W. wonders. Did he really think he could make a philosophy out of the end times, when the end times means: the end of philosophy?

I'm not capable of sadness, W. says, not really. The apocalypse doesn't really perturb me.

Death is calling us, W. says, he can hear it. The waters are calling us home. Will I jump first? Will he? Will we hold hands and jump together?

But the river wouldn't want us, W.'s sure of that. We'd be pulled up from the waters, our stomachs pumped of the polluted water. They'd slap us round the face. Wake up! Wake up! And his eyes would open and see me. And he'd retch up the black river water from the bottom of his lungs.

We must live with the foreknowledge of death, Montaigne writes, W. says. We must live with death in our mouths: that’s how he puts it.

He knows the end of times suits me, in some way, W. says. He knows it might allow me to come into my own. My dreadful smile: that’s what W. sees every time he closes his eyes. My smile, which says, everything’s over. It’s all finished. My smile, which says, very simply, We’re all dead. We died some time ago …

His man bag is an ark, W. says. We’re carrying the most important ideas of old Europe into the desert of Britain. Somehow, the task’s been entrusted to us. Somehow, we have become the priests of the temple.

What could be a stronger sign of the eschaton, of the very end?, W. says.

The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction.

Somehow I'm on the same side as the apocalypse, W. muses. I'm on the same side as everything that is wrong with the world.

There's my smile, my dreadful smile. As though I were taking some kind of revenge, W. says. A revenge on life!, W. says. A revenge on existence!

The times are against us. History is against us, W. says. Life is against us! The cosmos is against us! I’m against him, for God’s sake, W. says. He’s against me!

The end of times suits me, in some way, W. knows that. And he knows that it might allow me to come into my own.

My voice is changing, he’s noticed that, W. says. It must be the spores. It must be the mould entering my lungs. Inside, he imagines, my body is black with damp. Deep inside, changing me, changing my voice: black spores od damp.

I’m changing, W. says. I’m becoming completely new – a new kind of person. Amphibious. A skin-breather. In his imagination, gills are growing behind my ears, like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

W. thinks of the young in Robert Bresson’s films, full of life, full of beauty, but hopelessly lost in the devil’s playground of the world.

He thinks of the young suicides of Bresson’s films, driven to death because there is nothing for them in life, choosing to die by their own hand rather than live under tyranny.

They die of the truth, W. says. They die because of what they see in themselves of the world. They die because of the sense of the corruption of their innocence, because they are angels and because they’re tarnished, W. says.

We need to reverse the polarity of our despair, W. says. To change its direction. To transmute it into hope.

He remembers what Wittgenstein said about madness. 'It comes to you perhaps as a friend and not as an enemy, and the only thing that is bad is your resistance'.

We will have to plunge more deeply into our despair, W. says. To experience it.

Something was supposed to happen, W. says, as we watch the chests of the sleeping postgraduates rising and falling. But nothing happened. Someone was supposed to take notice, W. says, as the postgraduates sigh in their sleep. But no one noticed.  

Messianic politics: doesn't that describe our commitment? What did W. write on his Facebook profile under religion? Messianic. What, under political persuasion? Again: messianic. What, under interests and hobbies? The messianic epoch. But W.'s never been sure what messianism really means. What does it mean to talk about the Messiah when neither of us is in the least bit religious? And what is the meaning of political messianism?

He knows that the figure of the Messiah is always accompanied by the apocalypse, W. says. 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 we are at the end of politics, he says. Politics really is over.

We've never been too sure of our politics, W. admits. What's our position? Are we communists or anarchists? Socialism or barbarism: is that our motto? Or is it anarchism or barbarism? Is Marx our master, or Bakunin?

Of course, it's never really mattered. We know what we're against! Isn't that what matters? We're anti-capitalist! Of course we are! We're full of anti-capitalist pathos! We feel very left-wing. Very revolutionary!

He feels the hatred of the generations of the past, W. says. Of our philosophical ancestors who felt that something good might come of their struggles on the slaughter-bench of history. He feels their disappointment, those who expected something better to come.

But it's nothing compared to the hatred of our philosophical descendants!, W. says. They're not yet born, they've yet to appear on their scorched and burning earth, but he can feel their hatred even now.

Some of them, of course, will never be born. Some will be denied even the chance to appear. They hate us even more for that!, W. says. They hate him even more! 

I'm exactly the kind of person who would be drawn to Manchester, W. says. Who would make the Mancunion mistake. 

Oh, he can see why I romanticised Mancunion despair. But didn't I realise that such despair was only the desire to leave Manchester, the same city in which I had now marooned myself?

Of course, I was closer to the state of things in my Mancunion existence, W. says. I was closer to the truth of the world. I understood the honesty of the city, W. says. He admires that in me.

There's a terrible kind of Mancunion gravity, W. says. A kind of Mancunion tractor-beam. I was lucky to escape, W. says. Did I escape? W.'s sure I carry something of Manchester in me still.

He knows you can see the hills from any tall building in the city, W. says. He knows you can see all the way into Cheshire. He tries to hang onto that thought as he walks the streets, W. says. He tries to remember that there's something outside the plain of Manchester. Something apart from Manchester, other than Manchester.

W. sees me as a young student, quite lost in the city. He sees me: a speck, an atom, rucksack on my back, trying to find my way around. Didn't I understand that the city was no place for me? That it was hard enough for those who belonged there?

Postgraduates, lying in the grass, with dew on their faces. – 'They followed us to the end', W. says. 'Beyond the end!'

W. searches goes through my rucksack. A packet of corn nuts, and a packet of peanuts. Two packets of pork scratchings. And some obscure Indian snacks, sent over by my relatives. – 'Do you think you brought enough snacks?', W. asks.

W. loves to watch me filling my face, he says. He loves to watch me gratify myself. There's something innocent in it. Something charming.

He looks like Kim Il-Jong, I tell W. It's his grey trousers and grey top: he's a dead ringer for the Dear Leader. 

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.