The New World

Stillness

A kind of tranquility is said to come to those afflicted with total paralysis; they who can only move their eyes are claimed to lack the input from their paralysed body that would disturb them. If they weep, this is not because of their mute isolation (they can only move their eyelids), but because of the sweetness of their solitude.

Is this true? Who was it who told me this, and how would they have known? Perhaps what I heard was the correlate of my own dream, once upon a time, to withdraw altogether from the realm of action. Then I imagined it, the world in which others moved and acted, like a bank of snow, pure and simple. Why would I want to make my mark on a world that was perfect as it was?

I imagined wishing it well, the world, from the perspective of total paralysis, as if only my stillness would allow the world to be pristine. And who were they, who acted? Ones who had a right to act, who were gifted with the capacity to act from the first. I was not to act, but to redouble what I saw as the non-action of the world – as its stillness beyond the movement and the actions of others.

Or was it that that movement was also part of non-action, and the swarming of others through the world was similar to the labours of the ants in their ant-hills in the woods? How quickly they moved, but how still were the trees. Action was only part of a great non-action; the world turned through light and darkness and everything was the same.

When was it that I changed, and wanted to act? When money came to the city; when I knew I’d have to force myself back into the world’s hubbub. Soon, I would have to rejoin it, the world. But how could I? I was already lost in a kind of fog; the world was hazy to me. In the mornings, I wandered along the street to the cafe; instead of returning, I would make a small circuit of the town. There were the alcoholics, drinking in the morning sun. It was the morning, and they were ready to greet the sun with a drink.

Where was I? Where had I found myself? This was Manchester, and I was doing nothing in particular. How old was I? Young enough, I think, to know the pressure to deliver, to make good on my potential, had not yet arrived. I had a couple of years left, that was my alibi, and in those years I would have to discover a voice to speak and hands with which to act.

I was having an affair. She said: I would like to put to you in one of those houses. I looked: a paved street of small houses, no cars allowed. House turned to house across a few yards of pavement, ivy on old brick, gardens with potted plants and basketed flowers – how pretty! I would have liked that life. She drove me to the countryside in the summer haze. What was I supposed to be doing? I’d forgotten.

The Gentrifiers

In those days, the house prices hadn’t risen; my town was still an obscure boondocks on the edges of the city. Who could come there? No one who did not had a deliberate purpose. So the days passed dreamily, as though I’d fallen outside history. The drug dealers in the house opposite were part of this world. When they left, and the curtains were open at last, I knew this was the beginning of the end.

Sometimes, car-radio thieves would come round the back of our house and knock on our kitchen door. ‘I brought these’ – and they’d open a sack of car stereos. ‘You’ve got the wrong house, mate’. In the early hours, burglars would use our garden as a run-through. This, too, was just.

Then one day, they came, the family from London. They began to do up the house opposite. The curtains were opened, the rooms painted, the floors sanded. From my upstairs window I could see everything. Waking one Sunday morning, I heard the woman of the house speaking to another woman, another Southerner. What was happening to our street?

I knew this was no place for me. I, who’d moved North to escape the gentrifiers had been discovered by them. No longer was this town a dreaming arm of greater Manchester. They had come; I was discovered. I didn’t belong here, I knew that. Were there any obscure places left? How far would I have to go? Or was it that I would have to act and make my way in the world?

I brooded in my room above the world. I could see across the rooftops, but what could I see? Prime real estate. What would happened when the tram line reached us? I shuddered. This was the end. Wasn’t this the part of the city where all the bands had formed? Wasn’t this where they came, the bands, living on the dole, passing years in rehersal studios and local pubs?

One morning, I blanked the woman from the house opposite when she greeted me. How rude! Everyone around me was talking, acting. It was time to do something. I knew the country was changing, that gentrification was spreading from the North to the South. (And when I moved further North? It followed me here; everything was happening. Where was a suburb in which to maroon myself? There were none.)

Action, non-action: what had happened to the old inefficiency? Where were the dossers and the skivers among whom I could hide myself? They liked me at the Job Centre because I was polite and others were impolite, but what would happen, now the world was changing and perfecting itself?

Refusal

Was it then I saw the protest by the quadriplegics? They allowed their paralysed bodies to be lifted from their wheelchairs. Dangling heavy and opaque, they symbolised non-action. This was their protest: anger at a world which defined ability as action. Refusal – but a refusal of the measure of ability. Their bodies inert and dangling. Marvellous reproach! For who remembers the density and heaviness of their bodies? Who remembers what they are unable to do and the darkness of a body that closes itself from light?

No doubt it is a lie, what is said about those who endure total paralysis. But what is known of the world on which action loses its grip and its measure? Back in Manchester, an old man called out to us as we passed. He had fallen on his doorstep, and we helped him up. Back he went inside, frail and vulnerable. He died a few weeks later, and the house was sold. Then they came, another family, sleek and ready. They arrived, the second family, to open the curtains and let sunlight into the house.

I watched them from my room. An era had finished; a new world was completing itself. It was irrevocable: bodies were no longer to be heavy and inert. Bodies were no longer allowed to be sick or unable. The fog was dispersed; sunlight reached everywhere. But the light was merciless. I knew it would spread across the world – what horror – and I dreamed of a protest of refusal and inability, of Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’.

Letters arrived; we were summoned for retraining. Each of us was called and separated from the morass. We had a name, an identity, and we were assigned a Case Worker. The light was reaching us. One by one, it would reach us, and shine into the darkness of our bodies. We were to awaken, we sleepers. A new day had come. And what were we to do, we who’d banked on structural unemployment? There were no corners in which to hide; down into the cellars snaked the probe-heads of the new order.

We were sought, found and rounded up. The world was moving, and we were to move with the world. Manchester had been the galaxy slowly turning in the dream of its industrial past, turning in the blight of drug addiction and petty crime – and now? The city had awoken; regeneration had come; the city centre was changing and change was spreading from the city’s heart.

Paperchase

One day, by chance, I found myself in Paperchase, a new shop in the city centre. What was this? Luxury pads, luxury pocketbooks, a whole shop, upstairs and downstairs, for luxury notepads. What was this? Upstairs, a coffee bar. Luxury pads and luxury wrapping paper. What was this? What kind of shop was this? What did people do here?

When I left, they were doing up the area around the river. The river – what river? I never knew there was a river in Manchester. But there was a river, and high walls kept us from the regeneration. What was happening inside? What was to happen? New Paperchases. New bars and new walkways, and perhaps a new tramway. The Corn Exchange, where you could buy herbal drugs and pocketknives, bongs and comic books had become the Triangle, a luxury boutique. What had happened?

European money, they said. But where was it, Europe? Where did the money come from? And was this to happen everywhere, in every corner of Europe? There’s a new world coming, but not for us. There’s new light shining, but not for us. But we will be remade, there’s time. As the sun reaches you through your closed eyelids, so will the new light know the inside of your body and Paperchase open in our hearts.

Then I sensed it: Manchester was only drawing in breath. Manchester was only beginning to draw deep on the lungs of Europe. What would happen when it exhaled?

Passage

Outside. Why did our encounter always take place via a movement out and away from others, from the school where we were taught and the houses where we lived? Was it by chance that the night we went to a party, we left at once for the woods? We moved side by side, two bodies in the darkness.

By what chance had we been stranded there, in the suburbs? But they were necessary, those streets, those houses, if we were to move against them – if, that is, they were to fall back as the backdrop of our movement, which allowed it to be escape. And wasn’t it our fortune that that a part of the world had not yet been completely developed – that there were still empty spaces owned by no one in particular upon which houses had not been built?

You were always surprised by them, the open spaces I was able to find. By the fields, and beyond them, the railway bridge, and beyond that the path that descended along a brook to a private road, along which were paddocks where horses were kept. Then the long path to the forestry plantation: I’d found all this by chance, it was my gift to you, and you always said you could not find it without me.

From time to time over the years – how many years have there been – we would meet and pass through the same open spaces. And wasn’t it by way of that passing – unexpectedly opening in suburbia, in the streets full of houses – that we knew one another? Exceptional days! Exceptional nights, on the path, on the private road, in the plantation!

We were the exception, and our friendship exceptional – and wasn’t it so by the distance that did not fail to hold us apart? Friendship by way of distance, the opening of distance. But it was time, too, that was opened thus. Yes, as though distance first had to be thought in terms of a disjunction in time.

The wind was always still when we met, you said. There’s never any wind, you said. Still, that was your word. Yes, always a gap in the weather – no wind, and stillness, and it was as though the day had gathered itself up, that it was paused at the brink of something massive, some vast event. Who knew it but us?

Do you remember, the night of some football victory or another, how they shouted at us when they passed in their cars? The windows rolled down, they shouted, victorious. We had won. And who were we, who had not seen the match? But we had seen other things; a brown moon above a clearing in the plantation, where the foresters had come. Everywhere, tree stumps fresh cut and the brown moon above. That night – I remember – we crossed a golf course. The sprinklers were turning and the path passed between green dunes of grass. Through to the road and the train station, where we’d catch the last train back to town. How did you know we’d get there in time?, you asked; I didn’t know; I gave the decision to fate. Did I think we were blessed?

The exception. What did we have in common? When we with were with the others, we knew we were different to them. Irony – we were among them! Us – among them! And when we were outside, away from then? Solemnity. Silence. We were already outside and away: that was a given. The old world had fallen away, but where was the new world?

We did not talk of the future. Always the threshold, always were we at the threshold. Had we found jobs? We’d work, yes, but these were not yet our jobs. Nothing had begun, not our real lives. What chance was there for us? We were exceptional only for ourselves. You were a dental technician, and what was I? A finder of lost boxes in the warehouse. I cycled one way to work and would pass you cycling the other.

Long gaps would pass – months, years. But this was not a test of friendship; those gaps were part of its movement. Some friends are on close orbit, some on more distant ones. Where are you now, friend, behind the sun? Never mind; time passes but it is unjoined by friendship. Time passes, but it does not touch us, we whom friendship gathers at the threshold.

Page 250

The book is not the book. How could it be? At first, in the morning of reading, I read carefully, impassionedly. And when morning became noon? I thought: the book is strong as I too am strong. At page 90, I can leave it for a while. Page 90, and the book is the book and I am I, and we can be apart.

That was noon. And now? Many more pages have turned. I reached page 250 today. It’s the afternoon of reading. But isn’t it in the afternoon that reading loses itself? A sign of loss is to read more, to read intensely. Reading becomes voracious. But voracity is anxious, as if the hold of the book has loosened. I read quickly, intensively, but that is a sign of the failure of reading.

The book is not the book; that much is sure. When did it fail me – or did I fail it? Or was it another book I failed – the book behind this book? Yes, that book – the one my reading always sought and which I’d thought, this time, I’d found. I’d lost it, that book, and this book, the one I was reading, became a book on the way to the book, a book among others.

Have I failed the book? Did it fail me? Or have we both turned aside, disappointed in one another? It is there on my bed now. I am halfway through. Page 250. Halfway through, its spine cracked open, generous, my place in the close printed pages kept by a pencil. It is there, a book like other books, readable, finishable and in which I will not approach the book all books are hiding.

How, I ask myself, did its author let himself be carried away so! Why did he think he could write an epic, why a book of this length! Perhaps, I tell myself, the book will heal itself; perhaps it will come together. But I have read enough of this author to know no turn will occur. This is the way it will be.

The book runs on, but it does not bear me. It runs on, and I am not borne. Am I reader? No; I am a watcher; the book is a spectacle. It was the book of life, and now it is a book like any other. I am a spectator; it is not essential to me; I read to see how it will turn out; I read because I want to have finished the oeuvre of this particular author.

Now the book is attached to a name – failure. Now it is part of an oeuvre – failure. And who am I, the reader? The one thrown back on himself, refused – but called anew by a book beyond this book. What name will it take, the next time it is born? What name will it bear, this book, in its next incarnation?

The Last Irony

And the day when you’ve had enough, when you done enough reading, enough writing? When the day comes and you’ve had enough, when reading is impossible – the words mean nothing – and writing is impossible – the words mean nothing -? It’s over – but what does this mean? It’s all over – what does this mean?

How did it seize me these past twenty years? Why did I spend twenty years in one room or another? And what would it mean to say, it’s over? To read from the book of nature? To disappear into manual work? To emigrate to a new country and a new life? There is nothing on the other side of reading, of writing. Unless this ‘nothing’ could be thought as a push or pressure within reading, within writing. As if it is experienced as a disjunction, as absent meaning, as the withdrawal of the measure of sense.

It’s all over. But wasn’t it over from the first? Wasn’t this ‘it’s all over’ what pressed against you in what you read? Pointlessness of reading, reading’s disinterestedness – was it at that point, exhaustion, that another kind of reading became possible? An exhaustion wherein it was still possible to read, but where what was read emerged as against the background of non-meaning and disjunction.

I’ve read everything, you could have said to yourself. I’ve read it all, and I’ve worn reading out, you might have said. I’ve followed reading everywhere, from book to book, and it’s led nowhere, I am where I began. I’ve followed it, reading, I’ve followed book to book, but what is it I read? It comes from the same and it speaks the same – not what is signified, but what withholds itself from signification.

It is the same with writing. What is writing except what is held against non-meaning? What comes forward as the written except that braced against the absence of sense? Completion: it was over from the first. There was nothing to say, but everything to unsay. Nothing to say, but this ‘nothing’ was not the ineffable.

Bear it in speech, that infinite murmuring. Bear it, that humming along the edge of non-sense. As though it were the trace of the first explosion. As though, like the cosmic radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang, it was the remnant of the origin all around us. What is that reading, that writing that is able to bear absent meaning?

It belongs to the origin, not to the first appearance of signs, but to the appearance of the one to whom signs could mean nothing. Isn’t it by the withdrawal of meaning, the withdrawal of sense that we should know the human being? There they were, the first ones, who knew the pressure of non-sense beyond sense and whose sentience was hollowed our by nothingness?

Non-sense: meaningless suffering, meaningless events: crucible from which everything was born. But first of all non-sense, as though the Big Bang that distributed the marvellous galaxies and star-systems was also the nothingness which burned at the heart of galaxies and stars. The galaxy turns around the black hole; the star collapses into the black hole; all around us, in every direction, and as far as our instruments can chart, there is the first radiation, the darkness without significance and against which significance emerges.

So too the nonsense in our language systems and sign systems; so the breakdown of sense, that cancer that has devoured sense from the start. What’s it all for? What is spoken by language, what signified? Everything, but also the nothing of nonsense. Everything – but then, too, the ‘there is’ which speaks the undoing of everything. The cell does not obey; the signal does not reach it: cancer is the evacuation of the sign, spreading everywhere. It speaks; it undoes speech. It signifies, but as the withdrawal of sense.

What trace does it leave, by reading, by writing? By what does it mark itself and its withdrawal? Evacuated speech, speech of no one: wasn’t this the old claim for music, and for a musicality of language? Rhyme, onomatopoeia: signs of Benjamin’s pure language. Signs of the first language, that was spoken by Adam, humming and singing along with the humming and singing of Eden.

But what music can hold itself out into nonsense? What music can let speak the backdrop of nonsense, the cancer which devours splendorous sound? I think of the contorted music of Shostakovich, of an ‘irony’ that turns on itself and devours itself. What hatred there is in his music! A hatred turned on itself and devouring itself. A cancerous hatred that maintains itself by destroying every classically musical gesture. The motif from Rossini stretched across the 15th Symphony and worn away. And in the 15th String Quartet? And in Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn?

Suspended sense – sense held into its suspension: is that what repeats itself as written irony? The irony of reading, the irony of writing – so is the great work of the book suspended, and the culture of the book. Irony: of what does it speak, writing, reading? What does it mean to read when as though at the end, after everything has been said? Exhausted cosmos. Entropy. Cancer that has devoured the stars. What is there to read now? What is there to write?

Europe 2050

Out of use – Unemployed, out of use, the rustzone of old Europe. Was it to a nation of Liverpools to which West Germany was reunified? A nation of rust and misery? There will be nothing left of it, the rustzone; already the investors are buying property. In Poland, in Slovakia, the regeneration is underway. Perhaps there is nothing that can be put beyond use. But what of the irradiated zone around Chernobyl (didn’t I read of a ‘danger tourism’, where Chernobyl – even Chernobyl – becomes spectacle)?

A  vision: Europe 2050. Rome has become an image of itself; Berlin is its own image; Madrid resembles itself. The history of Old Europe is finished; old Europe is over. Europe has stung itself to death. Europe has hollowed itself out with self-hatred. ‘What happens here?’ – ‘Nothing happens. It finished long ago’. – ‘What happens here?’ – ‘You’re too late. Old Europe dreams of itself. In its boulevards and arcades, Europe dreams of what it was’. – ‘What happens here?’ – ‘Nothing will happen; Europe dreams of itself, that’s all. Europe is asleep and dreams of itself, that’s all’. Through Museum Europe, the tourists come and go.

Academic Broth

There are so many of you and so few of us. So many, and then so few of us – or is this only how it seems? Does it only seem thus, that there are so many of you compared to us, who are few? Does it appear that way because of your strength and because of our weakness?

How quickly you move, from here to there, and how many of you there are! Hundreds of you come through the doors, this way and that way, and waiting for the lift, and going up and going down the stairs. How many of you there are, and how young you are! How young, how strong compared to us who are weary and have to rest every few steps! Yes, we rest, there is dust in our eyes, but you pass us by, moving quickly, speaking gaily.

There we are, by your feet, resting, doing all we can not to curl up and sleep, doing what we can not to give up, and you pass us by, you do not notice us, the world is one of transition, and you are going to a better place. This world – these rooms , these corridors – are only zones of transition for you who are on the way. And who are we? The ones who are not on the way. The ones who will stay where they are in these rooms and corridors.

What home have we but here? Where else do we belong, in these halls through which so many of you pass? We are the stay-behinds and the left-behinds; we remain while you do not remain. You pass; we do not pass. The way is closed to us, but what way could be open? In truth, it is all open, nothing keeps us from passing out of the gates and into the city; nothing keeps us here but our weariness, we for whom the gates are already unreachable, and the city infinitely far.

You will pass into the city, but we, who prepare you for that passage, will remain here, outside. You will pass, and we will stay. Ah but there are so many of you! How many more of you can there be? Every year, always more. Every year, more of you. And who are we who are supposed to guide you? Who are we who are supposed to teach you? Every year more of you and less of us. Every year we have to make do with less and there are more of you, streaming down the halls and in and out of the doors.

The halls are full of your chatter. You pass, you chat, and we sink down in quiet weariness. What future is there for us, who will never leave these rooms, these corridors? What hope is there for us, who are supposed to provide hope for you? Should we live vicariously through your triumphs, through your strength? Should we congratulate ourselves for the strength of those entrusted to us?

But in the end, we cannot understand it, your strength. In the end, our weakness is not commensurable with your strength; it cannot be measured by the same unit. In the end, it is not merely a deficiency of strength, our weakness, but the withering of the measure of strength. How many there are of you, and how few of us! How strong you are, how clear-skinned and clear eyed! Were we ever young like you? Were we ever young and strong like you?

We are lower than you, lesser than you, and we always were. How can it be otherwise, when you are the sons and daughters of the rulers of the world, of the rulers of the new world? Everything awaits you and nothing awaits us. Everything awaits you, who will leave us behind, and leave these rooms and corridors behind, and nothing awaits us. How is it that we’ve been entrusted with you, you whose strength is that of the new world and the new order?

They bring you, your parents, and they will take you home. You have come here from the city and you will return to the city. Like a great wave each year, you come, and in a great wave you depart. What would these rooms and corridors be without you? What would these halls be without you, you who come from the happier places in the world?

In the end, these three years are the last gap you are permitted in your life. A few years break, a few years holiday, and then back. What does it matter what you do here? What does it matter what you study? I speak, but I speak from old Europe. I speak to you, I hear myself speak and think: what does it matter what I say? What does it matter, when I am already outdated? What matters are competencies and competencies that are transferable. What matters are outcomes of competency and not disciplinary knowledge.

What do they matter, the books of this thinker and that writer? Old Europe is spread before you. Old Europe is made to spread itself before you. Everything can be learnt, everything known. So is Old Europe, its thinkers, its writers, mashed into that paste which can be fed from one to another. So is Old Europe regurgitated for you to swallow.

And what have you swallowed? Only stories of legendary, vanished worlds that sugar the pill of transferable competencies. Old Europe – what was that? The rest of the world – what was that? What matters is now and the eternal now. Brave new world! You will forget them, the stories of old Europe, even as the competencies harden your bones and brighten your eyes. Forget it, old Europe, its stories, its adventures; you belong to the bright now, you in your hundreds and thousands. Yours is the brave new day!

And who are we, exponents of old Europe, of the thinkers and writers of old Europe? A new page is turning; our page is done. A new page, a new chapter, and our chapter is done. For a few years, they will let us remain here, in the borderlands around the city. Yes, for a few more years, like a museum, like living artefacts in the museum, will we be permitted to remain here.

And then? They will record us; everything we have said and written will be recorded and archived. Everything recorded, everything written, and it will be accessible to all. Then we’ll be frozen into an icon on the monitor screen. Then all we have said and written will be instantly accessible to the ones who come in the next wave, and the wave after that.

Strip them down – strip down philosophy to a bare frame! Boil the humanities down to a simmering broth! Spoon it into the mouths of the young! Boil the bones of the big books and make them soft! Dissolve them, the big books, into indifferent mush! All is the same, everything is the same, it is a matter of competencies and a portfolio of competencies. Everything the same, and nothing must stick in the throat. So we chew that you will not choke on old Europe. So we chew that the thinkers and writers reach you as the same indifferent paste.

There is no history. There is no past, it’s been boiled away. Man isst, was man isst. Broth of the humanities: the big bones boiled to mush. Pass us, leave us behind, now we have fed you. How many there are of you and how well fed! You are leaving us for the city. You are going to the city, but there are always more to come, always more on the way and more academic broth to prepare.

What powers of digestion you have! And isn’t that your power, the power of digestion, of the conversion of the thinkers and writers of old Europe into competencies fitted to this brave new world? And doesn’t it occur there, in your bellies, the miraculous conversion? Yes, that is your strength, and that is our weakness, we who can digest nothing, we who can only choke and are choking on the bones of old Europe.

Cosmic Shit

Last night in the pub was like the night before; a double toastie for dinner, tuna and peppers and cheese in white bread and then Speckled Hen. A double toastie for dinner, the Speckled Hen and the music on the free jukebox: The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Joni Mitchell, The Scissor Sisters -. But we are restrained; the night before had been a long one, with blind tastings of different whiskeys – we had lined them up, and only I knew the identities of each one, lined them up, and then drunk from each, ranking our favourites. Why did Lagavulin do so badly, and Talisker so well? Tonight we are restrained and leave before closing time. Tonight, enthusiasm. Books and directors. Bela Tarr – have you heard of him? My companion had heard of him – he has two DVDs. Would he lend them to me? Yes, yes.

Up to the office to lend him my reissues by The Fall from the great period, 80-83. There we were, in my office, our bikes downstairs, listening to Slates, Slags, etc., and I was showing him books. Appelfeld! Josipovici! Bernhard! I tell him he must read Roubaud: you’ll love this. And I tell him of the Bela Tarr interviews W. sent me to earlier on. Incredible! W. had said. Bela Tarr is our leader. How long we’ve been waiting for a leader! But Bela Tarr is our leader. Earlier in the day, W. and I sent one another excerpts from Bela Tarr interviews. Extraordinary! We have a leader! We should have become film directors, said W. That’s where it all went wrong, trying to become philosophers rather than film directors.

What’s your latest escape plan? asked W., earlier. What’s your latest line of flight? he said. What’s your new plan? I tell him, the plans are entirely for his benefit, that he is the spectator of my plans to escape. – I remember your Hindu turn, said W. And your musical one. What is it now? No more philosophy, I tell him. Oh yes, and when did you start doing philosophy?, says W. I think it would be nice to write a comic novel, I say. Like Tom Sharpe?

There are two problems, said W., the word ‘comic’ and the word ‘novel’. You’re not funny and you can’t write. Then he says: a comic novel – why because people laugh at you? Here he comes, the buffoon, bells on his cap. Here he comes, jingle jangle, let’s all laugh at him. Meanwhile, there’s Bela Tarr. He’s a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about ugly, poor people. The ugly and the poor are always with us, that’s what he says, says W. You’re a bit poor and I’m a bit ugly, says W. You’re poor and I’m ugly.

He’s like Tarkovsky without God, said W., only slower. He says Tarkovsky made bad films when he left Russia, said W. But what about Nostalghia? I say. No, that’s your failing, said W. Nostalghia‘s no good, said W. It’s great, I said. Bela Tarr’s great, says W. Then W. goes online and buys some DVDs by Bela Tarr. I’ll send them to you, W. said. Maybe we should make films, said W., oh but you’re writing a comic novel, he said. I like that idea, a comic novel, I said. There’s two problems: you’re not funny and you can’t write. And you never finish anything. When did you last finish anything?

W.’s book has come out. The editor went down to dine with W. He sent W. 20 copies of his own book. The editor proofread the manuscript several times and sent it out for proofreading. It looks great, said W., and it’s in paperback. I don’t want to be in paperback, I tell him. God, that’s the last thing I want. My book looks great, said W., except for the ancient Greek, that looks terrible. The Hebrew is okay, but the ancient Greek looks like a child drew it. It’s hilarious. But the cover’s terrible, I say. He agrees.

Have you seen the cover of my new one?, I say. He hasn’t seen it. Green splodges, I say, now that’s hilarious. Quite a nice font, though, don’t you think? The font’s shit and your book’s shit, says W. Later, W. tries to convince me he’s clever. He sends me his notes on Spinoza. See, I’m clever, says W. I read them. Yes, pretty clever. What are you going to do with them?, I ask him of his notes. Nothing, says W. I’m not like you. I don’t try and publish everything I write. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine writing something you didn’t publish? Can you?

Bela Tarr, now he’s serious, says W. You know what he said: ‘We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos’. Cosmic shit. The interviewers ask him what this shit is that’s coming from the cosmos, and he says, ‘I just think about the quality of human life and when I say "shit" I think I’m very close to it’. That’s genius, says W.

W.: So what are you reading? Nothing, I tell him. I’m going out a lot. What happened to you? says W. It’s either everything or nothing, isn’t it? Then he says his publisher want to publish me. What are you going to write on?, says W. We think of a few ideas. You ought to do something, says W. Oh yes, you’re writing your comic novel, aren’t you. What’s it about? I don’t know, I say. What happens in it? What funny things are you going to relate? Then: you know what your problem is … – What? – You’re shit. – No you’re shit. – We’re cosmic shit, the shit’s hit the fan, it’s all over. Then W. says, ahh, and I say ahh, life! What happened? When did it all go wrong? We should have been film directors, shouldn’t we? Bela Tarr, he’s our leader. We are agreed on that.

He only makes films with friends, says W. And he hates cinematographers. He went through seven of them when he made Satantango. He says they complicate things. Like Mark E. Smith on musicians, I say. Bela Tarr wanted to be a philosopher, says W., but when he started making films, he stopped wanting to be a philosopher. And he doesn’t believe in God, says W. Bela Tarr’s seen too much to believe in God. He takes years over each film, says W. Years. And they’re full of drunk people. Full of drunk, aggressive people. Like you, says W. Drunk and aggressive like you, says W. And mud. His films are full of mud. That’s where you belong, in the mud, says W.

Bela Tarr is everything you’re not, says W. He’s serious, he’s committed, he works hard. What are you doing at the moment? What are you writing? Your comic novel? Oh you haven’t begun it yet, that’s a surprise. You don’t know what it’s going to be about, that’s a surprise. You shouldn’t think because people laugh at you that you can write a comic novel. You shouldn’t think because you are a buffoon that you can write anything funny.

So how fat are you now?, says W., you must be really fat. Are you eating now? What are you eating? I tell him I’ve been cycling around. Cycling, he says, that won’t help. Where did it all go wrong? It’s all going down, says W., the whole thing. The world’s ending, and we’re done for. I’m not like you, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. You’re not escaping, says W. You’re going to drown like the rest of us. I’m going to make sure of it. You’re going down, says W.

The 90th Page

Reading, Not-Reading

It is true I do not want to disappoint the book; I am reading it slowly, and even reading other books when I think I am not quite able to attend to the first book. Yes, on my trip down to London, I took other books with me, in part because the first book was too large for my rucksack, and would weigh me down on my cycle trips through the parks of London, but also because I knew that a long train ride would give me too much time with the book.

Too much time: I would read too greedily; I would not pause when the book paused and rest when the book rested. I would not, in short, allow the book to bear me according to its own rhythm, which is to say, its own wisdom, in the time it allotted me for reading and for non-reading. I took another book to read on the train; I finished it quickly. It was done in four hours, in the four hours of my journey and I knew I had read it too quickly.

Fortunate that I didn’t bring the first book! For that, too, would have been finished too quickly. Then, leaving London, I bought another book in a secondhand shop; it was by an author I had long wanted to read: Gombrowicz. Sarraute on the way down to London, and Gombrowicz on the way back up. I read half of Pornografia on the train. I was tired; sometimes I dozed. I coughed and sucked Tunes for my cough. I spilt tea across the table and on my jumper, but Gombrowicz was with me, and when I awoke from dozing, I read on.

This, too, was not reading. There must be a kind of strength for reading, a preparedness, and I knew, even though I was not rushing Gombrowicz, I was failing it by my tiredness. Was I reading closely enough? Was I sufficiently alert to remember what happened in early chapters to follow what was happening in later ones? My worry was that I would later have to read a summary of the book in order to understand what had happened. Betrayal: I would have missed the book I was reading. And what of the first book, which I was not reading? What of the book open in my flat, open, still at page 80?

Constellations

This morning, stuffy with cold, I began to read it in the early hours. What use was getting up? What use was writing? I would read instead, although Gombrowicz was only half read. I would return to the ur-book, to the first book whose coming was an advent I had awaited in the late summer and the autumn. It had come; I would not read too quickly, I said to myself, but let the reading guide me just as sailors once were guided by the constellations.

Book beneath which I would pass! Book by which I would know my passage! I read, this morning, as workmen hammered next door. I read; the day was mild. I read a few pages; I passed from page 80 to page 90. And that is where I am now, page 90. The book is open on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom (the bed is still dismantled from when the floor was sanded and varnished; so too the wardrobe). I read, but was I borne by reading? Had I not let too much time elapse from when I last read this book? Yes, I was a little lost; I was disoriented, for what, after all, was happening? Who were these characters? And the narrator, who was he?

I read, and annotated in pencil passages to which I thought I might return. I read, and put little marks in the margins to pages to which I thought it necessary to return. By these marks I will have known my passage through the book, I thought. Yes, I will have known I passed once through this book, and by way of this book. But by what mark would I know how this book steered me through the world? I’d waited for this book by this author for I knew his work would steer me through the world. I would be steered; the book, covers closed, would nevertheless be the constellations by which I navigated; my wandering would find orientation; where I drifted, the book was firm and clear above me. Yes, the book would watch over me. The book was the night, above me.

But it was not a stifling intimacy I sought; the book, I thought, should give me freedom. I would be oriented, yes, but the path I made was a wandering. There would be guidance, but only that which would allow my wandering to be propitious. I would pass through the parks of London; I would cycle through the roads of London, but still there was the book as there was the sky, distant from me, but present. Still the sky and the hard, clear stars, just as we saw them on Saturday night, when we left London for the country.

The stars! I steered by them even as I wandered. Chance was propitious; what happened was not blind, but fateful. The random was itself fateful; by chance I let myself be led towards my future. The book watched. This morning, returning to it, I thought: but is this the book I was reading? Is this the book for which I waited? Or is it a proxy, a substitute for another book and another reading? I thought: there are those for whom Heraclitus or John, Thucydides or Dante wrote the book that surrounded them. And who was I, who wanted such a book, who wanted to be surrounded?

In the Meantime

This book, an attempt, perhaps, at an epic, was not the book I sought – how could it be? For the age of trust has passed and the age of suspicion is here. Yes, trust has passed, and this is a suspicious age, and age without belief. How I distrust permanency and enrootedness! How I dislike the bookshelf and the CD shelf! I took the CDs from their cases and put them in big folders. I moved the books, the tools of my trade, to the office, and dispersed the others. Now the flat is bare. The bed and the wardrobe are still dismantled, but this is appropriate. All must be transitory.

And the stars, what are they? The firm, clear stars, which I can barely see for the orange street lights, what are they, in their permanence? I am reading my book in the mild day. Yesterday, rain, and today, mildness. Sunlight rests on the walls of the houses opposite. Above the little yard, the blue sky. And above that? Darkness and the stars which were once icons of order. I read. The book book speaks of voyages and movement. This is appropriate. The book speaks of relationships made and broken; this, too, is appropriate. Movement is all. Migrancy is all. And I know that this epic is the opposite of an epic, that what it gathers it does so only in order to disperse.

Then what do I seek from it, the book in the flat, the book that is now open on the mattress? To be watched? But only as I passed from one place to another. To be steered? But only as I wandered. Sometimes philosophers dream of the ones to come, those who will live with the new god or with the new earth. That will be life: to come, to come, nor here, not today, but at another time. And today? And today, in the meantime? A mild day; I read ten pages of the book cross-legged on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom. Curtains closed, and I read a few of the big, close-lined pages. Of what do I read? Of the meantime, of the stretch of time before the gods return and before the return of the earth. Meantime, between times, after the gods and before them.

Second Innocence

Why do I read you, book? Because you, like me, are stranded. How many days did I spend unemployed? A million. And how is it that I am still borne by that same unemployment? It is as though I’ve waited for something, but for what? The day is coming, but for what? As I read, I know this mild day is the way the coming day hides itself. Reading, I know of the day behind the day, of the coming around which all days are turning. Non-event, incompletion, these words, like the word unemployment, allow me to speak only by way of privation. How to speak without the ‘non-‘, the ‘in-‘ and the ‘un-‘? How to affirm what will not let itself be affirmed?

Read, and by this book affirm what has happened. Read this book, in which nothing happens, and affirm the non-happening of your life. Who is going to live? Who are the ones to come, that will live for us? But perhaps the meantime is all time, perhaps every day will be today, mild day that turns in the greater day, mild day that wears itself away to reveal the night without consolation. Perhaps it is that the stars have fallen, and there is only darkness. Perhaps it is that the array of stars are scattered without meaning, and offer no guidance. But isn’t this ‘no guidance’ already enough?

The three metamorphoses: there is the one who works and who passes in the desert to work. There is the one who falls outside of work, and says ‘no’ to work. And then there is the child who knows nothing, and knows nothing of work. Second innocence: the reading-child I would like to be. Second innocence: the child who reads beneath the sky and stars.

The Academic Engineers

True life is elsewhere, but we are in the academy. True life is elsewhere, but the academy is all around us.

When I ask myself about the effects of mass higher education, this first of all: what of those who could have been arists? What of those who could have written otherwise than academic prose? When I see them, the million students, the student-hordes, I ask: what could they have become, given a few years on the dole? Then I know what has been captured: would-be artists and would-be writers. The clever, whom academia is so adept at capturing. The clever can be clever in academia. There are difficult books for them to read, those who are clever. The books will reach them, the clever ones, and have been prepared for them.

Introductory books lead the way, the clever ones. Introductions and critical guides prepare them for the difficult books. So are the clever captured. So do they enter the university they will not leave. And so does affect wither in them. So does intensity drain away. What of those years on the dole that saw bands form in cities like Manchester or Sheffield? What of the dole-culture and those groups who formed because there was nothing to do? Now there is everything to do; everything is interesting. Now there’s everything but affect.

If you want to write, enroll on a creative writing course; if you want to make art, there are art-schools and government-funded cultural regeneration schemes. Every region must have its art; every town its government-funded bohemia. Now the artist must paraphrase and explain her work. Now in advance must it be paraphrased and explained. Now must the introduction precede the work and void the work. Now is the day of the explainers and paraphrasers, who make funding bids as artists and create as civil servants. Now they come, the fund-raisers, adept at explaining and introducing their work, their own introducers. M.C. and performer in one; agent and artist in one, one and the same. With the right hand, I create and with the left hand, I introduce what I create.

So is creativity doubled and voided; so is it made to explain and justify itself. On what are you marked in the creative writing programme – on what you have written, or on the reflective commentary you write on what you have written? This is the day of the commenters; this is the day for introductions without risk. Everyone reads everything, everyone knows everything. Knowledge without subject, without object: everyone knows, everything is known. It is known what X. said and Y. said; the introductory book knows for us. Knowledge that is spread everywhere! Knowledge of everything spread everywhere! Nothing need be fought for, nothing won. Nothing need be struggled for, it’s already won, the path is prepared in advance.

I’ve read the introduction, you say, and blink. I’ve read the critical guide, you say, and blink. You can quotes chunks of X. and Y. and fit them together. You can quote X. and Y. and Z. and spatchcock their work together. X. sits happily with Y. Z. sits happily with X. and Y. Context does not matter and idiom does not matter; what matters is regularity, what matters is the common measure. X., Y., and Z.: you’ve brought them together in your commentary. You’ve brought them together in the expression of your creative practice. You’ve explained yourself; X., Y. and Z. are brought together in your explanation. You’ve explained yourself via X., Y. and Z. – how marvellous! What labour! What erudtion! Admirable work that passes via X. and Y.and Z.!

The introducer-engineers are coming. Everything must run on tracks of the same gauge. The train of academia must run along a standardised track. Every thinker must fit and every thought must be made to fit. Never mind, the introducers are busy. Never mind, they are working for all of us, for the whole, for the Dyson Sphere of academia as it encloses the sun of creativity. Everything will be enclosed, don’t fear; not a chink of light will escape. The academic engineers construct the sphere which will enclose the sun, and upon whose inner surface we will live. Not a scrap of energy must be unaccounted for.

The remark on religion will launch a thousand books on religion. The remark on sovereignty will launch a thousand books on sovereignty. Paraphrase is all; paraphrase and introduction is all. Nothing will be missed; not a scrap will be lost. Negentropic academia! Deniers of drift and randomness! All is caught and the nets are pulled in. Everything is caught, and the nets are pulled in, full of strange fish and creatures of the deep. Out went the nets until every thinker is caught and weighed and measured and then returned to its natural habitat with a tag so we can track them.

We need to follow the great migration of the thinker-beasts; we need to know what depths they plumb. We will not dive or travel; that is what they do, the thinker-beasts upon whom we live. We track them, with our tracking-devices. Not a scrap they write will escape. Not the most occasional of occasional scraps will escape. Every remark will be recorded; every performance videotaped. Truly we will follow them to the ends of the earth! Truly, just as the record companies understand maverick figures as boutique artists who sell to a particular group will we known out thinker-beasts as maverick figures who will appeal to a particular group.

Ah, you’re that kind of person, well go and read her. Ah, that’s the kind of thing you like, go off and read him. And just as Amazon will tell you what other customers who bought book X. have bought books by Y. and Z. thinker X. will lead to other such thinkers, Y. to Z., until you know the thought of all, until all is grasped and understood and you are part of the work of all, sun-encloser, academic engineer. All is grasped, all understood, and you will do your part to track the movements of another thinker-beast, another ur-theorist upon whom an introduction can be written.

The far sighted and long eared spot them – the new thinker-beasts. There are always more, it seems, always new things to be brought ashore. How profound is the deep! How deep and dark is old Europe! Always new thinkers to be caught! Always the new, one after another, one thinker after another, to be caught and introduced! What sport it is for the far-sighted and the long-eared to spot the new thinker-beasts! And how they rush when one is sighted!

Over here, away from the deep and the dark of old Europe, they become boutique thinkers, these thinker-beasts. They attract experts and expositors; they thought is paraphrased and introduced, and then the next stage of assimilation can occur: application. For the introductions and paraphrases serve the great academic commentary mill, where the oldest books and made new with the newest techniques. So does academia receive fresh blood! So does it come, the blood and meat of these great beasts! The academic whalers carve up the greatest beast! The whalers carve and dissect the greatest carcasses! And then they come, the appliers of thought. Then come those who take thought and apply it elsewhere, the adaptors and engineers of thought.

A Block of Extraordinary Despair

Admiration for those who can sustain a strong affect over the course of an artwork. Syd Barrett’s song ‘Opel’ is the work of one who has seen everything – or for whom everything has been seen as it is given in a single, streaming affect. Who has been called forward to sing? Who called forward to play? When I hear this song, I am frightened. ‘I’m living, I’m giving, I’m trying’, each verb stretched and attenuated as if what he was singing was ‘I’m dying’; as if he sang from the crucible wherein everything boils itself down to its essence and in which he, too, is boiled down to his essence.

What had he lived in order to sing like that? What had he seen? He is dying; he is living in dying. That is the authority of his song, and what carries it in its raggedness. Syd Barrett and guitar; a song unreleased, but when it reached me, in the late 80s, I think, I knew what I know now: these are those who can endure a region we cannot – those who endure and make art in that endurance, and bear the whole work of art there where we could not bear to be. How hard it is to bear a strong affect! How hard to live and die in the event!

Last night, I let Newsnight run on into The Culture Show. How foolish! I admit I was curious to see Houellebecq talk; I was not disappointed. His skin is grey. He speaks slowly, as one who has seen everything must talk. I have read one of his books, and am in no doubt: respect is due to one whose work is a block of extraordinary despair. A ragged book, Atomised, and no matter – that raggedness is a sign of the affect and its ravages. It turns, slow whirlwind, in the pages of the book. It is there and unmistakeable.

I read the copy W. lent me in a single sitting. I thought: Houellebecq is a man who has lived and died in the event. I saw it on his skin last night, the same waxen grey as that of Mark E. Smith, whom I saw with the Fall a couple of weeks back. These are half-destroyed men, very different it is true, but those who are able to carry themselves in a zone most of us will not know and most will not bear. These are the late men, the ones who come after the world, those who have seen everything and know everything.

Of course Mark E. Smith is not a man of despair, but a man of fervour. Only a cold, insectoid fervour, like that of Francis Wyndham. The song is fractured with Mark E. Smith; lyrics, sung by no one, speak from no position. Mark E. Smith is the conduit, the medium. The phrases come; they are sung from no centre, but from the dispersal of the centre. They belong to the shattering of the world and come from all directions.

How hunched he is! How wizened! How tiny! How waxen and grey his skin! But he has already lived several lifetimes! He’s already used them up, nine lifetimes in a row! When did he die first? After the year of Hex Enduction Hour and Room to Live? After the year of Perverted by Language? He has died many times since. Dead man, it is fervour which binds him to himself. What power of will and ferocity! He reminds me of another Francis – Francis Bacon, who drank away each evening, champagne and oysters, and rose, hungover to paint like an insect. Vision from the other end of the world!

Did I see the same in the Frieda Kahlo exhibition at the Tate? Was it there too, in the waves of extraordinary pain she set forward in painting? She depicts herself riveted, stamped by pain. Never melodrama. But pain is here – pain which is the whole world and a life. Pain that reveals the whole and sings the whole. Unimaginable torment! Death throes without cease! And she depicts herself, animal caught in a trap, trapped animal who is only pain and waves of pain. In truth, it is time she experiences – the nakedness of time detached from tasks and projects. Time that insists in the measurelessness of pain. Pain without measure, time without measure: Kahlo is riveted to what destroys her body. Promethea bound. Promethea to whom the vultures come each day again to devour her liver.

On came the academics last night’s interview with Houellebecq, to defend him and to praise him. What horror! What have they felt or lived? They are fleas and fleas of fleas: busy nothingness, the hopping of those who are too alive. Where is death in them? Where is dying? They have felt nothing and lived nothing; there are books behind them in their offices; we see them, the books – but what do we see? Nothing worse than a bookshelf full of books. Nothing worse than the conservers and mummifiers for whom oeuvres are to be pored over with magnifying glasses. Do they know nothing of awe? What of that sacred pause before affect? What of the pause and the silence before the magnificent strength of affect? I dislike them with their books. Set fire to your books! Better that they are charred and useless than they are processed by the introducers and paraphrasers!

I was sickened; I knew I could save myself only by listening to another who sustains an extraordinary affect. No surprise that when Bill Callahan releases songs, it is always as part of a suite. A River Ain’t Too Much Too Love is a block of … what? And this is the sign of an artist of affect: no words will do; all words are synonyms. There is only intensity, and one without form or limit. Only the block of affect that is the molten lava over which words congeal and are melted away.

And isn’t this why we go to see an artist like Chan Marshall, even as we know how erratic a performer she can be? She is the crow who has broken herself against heaven. That breaking is there in the songs, in their frailty. Always a suite of songs, always songs bound together with so much strength! Always the are strewn across the night! When she records, she discards songs she has written and writes new ones then and there. She discards the long-worked-on songs, and writes new ones in the moment. This is because she knows the fragility of the moment, and has the strength to let herself be broken in the moment.

Fragility’s demand: she must sing along, with a piano, with a guitar, crudely played. There is no room for talent here. No room for musicians. She begins; she rewrites – songs (The Covers Album) are broken from their choruses. What has ‘Satisfaction’ become? And ‘A Salty Dog’? The reversed image through which darkness shines. The reversed image like the night window, through which what is seen reflected, the room in which you are sitting, is filled with night.

On come the academics, and always too late. On they come, the academics, when the life they celebrate or dismiss is like the shadow blasted on the wall of one caught in Hiroshima. Do they know what it is to have been blasted out of existence? Do they know, latecomes, assessors and judgers of work, what it is to have died and left a shadowy trace for a life? Somewhere Houellebecq is drinking. Night and day he is drinking and his teeth are rotting. Somewhere Mark E. Smith is drinking and his teeth have dropped out. The academics are gathering. The academics are coming to assess and to judge. Look at the fleas! Look at them hop! Fleas on fleas, commenters on commentary.

The Liar

Morning. What to write about? The double-glazed window that separates me from the yard. The cone of light from my desktop lamp, my keyboard and my monitor. The backyard, the damp concrete, the weed growing out of the wall, the dying plants. What will I write? Begin with nothing, or nearly nothing. Make a beginning. Mark your presence in the day. Make a mark to show you have been there in the day, as the days that open behind you each bear a mark.

I thought once that every day was the last day – thought there would be no more time, and the end was coming. Once I was one of the unemployed and the early retired, one of the sick and the stay-at-homes, each of us stranded in a world upon which we could find no purchase. I tried to forget the eventlessness of the morning in the eventfulness of television. And now?

With what confidence now do I rise each morning expecting to write and that there will be other such mornings in which I will write! With what temerity! I wonder if I have become what I would have once despised: bourgeois writer, the marker of days, confident that each morning he will stand once again at the head of the day. But I wonder, too, if it is only for such a bourgeois that writing is possible.

Bourgeois, liar, I am braced against non-eventfulness; soon I will roll my bike onto the pavement and cycle to work. Liar, faker, I will let the memory of unemployment return to me, rolling it around in my writing as a drinker rolls brandy in a glass. Vacant days, I know you, I remember you, but I am braced against you, and you will not find me now.

Vacant days, stagnant days, I could never have written of you then; you were too close; you were everywhere. But now you and I are not close; now I am separate from you and, in the morning, possessed of equal strength to you. In the afternoon, true, you will find me. The afternoon’s fog, my vagueness is your revenge. But understand that I will already have had the morning; I will already have marked my place by writing at the head of the day.

Today

Leap into writing, write of this and that. Leap, and the day is only the occasional for writing. You push the day back; it is your launchpad, your anchor. You write, you blog, and the day is what bears you, the day is what allows you to begin. But what if the leap is interrupted? What if the power to leap withholds itself and there is strength only to mark the failure to begin?

What does it want with me, the day? To attest to itself? To summon a blindness correlate with its own blindness? To fog the glass of writing so that nothing is communicated? Breath on glass, opacity – you see what you once allowed you to see. The medium no longer mediates; the glass speaks, invisible surface. It speaks, boundary, of what separates the world from writing. It speaks, the mirror is fogged, a kind of blindness spreads across the surface of writing. So does it signal across signification what cannot be brought to speech.

Writing: remembrance, conservation. Writing remember and conserves, but what would I conserve? This yard, the drain water, the dying plants, this cup of coffee, this monitor, this keyboard: the same ‘facts’, the same as is present every morning? Or the act of writing as it is braced against these facts and against the blindness of the day? Does I summon the day, djinn, to write of it, or does it summon me, asking to be witnessed?

Every morning, the same; every day the same: rise, a cup of coffee, sit at the table, turn on the computer. The same, until the same is worn away by repetition. Until it is as though it tore itself apart and tore the day apart. The same frayed, the same torn across the sky. Then to fray the sky in turn – to write, to mark the happening of the day, the non-happening of the day, to write of what happens by not happening.

What would I conserve by writing? What would I remember? Or is it, by writing, a kind of forgetting might happen, not happen? Is it that nothing conserves itself, and marked in signs is what signals by not-signifying. The word today becomes an infinitive – the to day, the daying of the day – and the infinitive is attenuated as the day attenuates itself.

The not to day, the undaying of the day. The day as non-event. The day that did not happen. Nothing happens, but this non-happening is marked in writing. Nothing happens, the day resembles itself and I am called forward as one who would remember this nothing-is-happening. I summon nothing by writing. The day is not mine, it does not grant my wish. Not mine, it refuses my desires, it turns them aside.

I look through the window. The same yard, drain water in pools, drain debris, ill plants and the wheelie bin; two clothes-lines and the plant that grows out of the wall. Through the window, until the window mists. Until what I see is the misting of vision. Until it becomes the mirror that does not reflect me. And I am the vampire who cannot be reflected.

What do I see? The world as what I am not. Mute opacity. What do I write? Anonymous words, even as what I write here is gathered under the unity of a name. Now the words themselves seem arbitrary. Why these words? Why these words to name what I see – what I don’t see? How to name not only the things of the world, but the verb that bears these things? And how to name not the verb, the ‘to be’, but also their becoming, the infinite attenuation to which they answer?

Nouns dissolve, just as things dissolve. But now that dissolution will not let itself be named in the verb, or by being. Becoming, the becoming of being: now this is not a word, but a river, in which it is impossible to step even once. River in which what streams is the attenuation of the world. River of the nothing-is-happening.

Today, what has happened today? What does the day call for, today? Say the word today until it becomes unfamiliar. Write the word until it can provide no anchorage. No longer is the day the beginning place for writing. No longer does blogging anchor itself at the outset of the day. No longer can blogging summon the day as event; nor can you brace yourself against the beginning in order to launch yourself into writing.

Nothing begins. Writing, too, does not begin; it cannot clothe itself in incidents, it searches in vain for what would give it substance. But writing still says, mark what does not begin.  Mark the non-beginning of the beginning.

The Absolute Child

Last Toy

Why did I give you a toy like the last toy of mine, we who were about to leave school? Why that gift, which was the double of the toy I carried in my pocket? As though I would give you an icon for what you were losing – the last of your childhood – or was it that I would give you your childhood again, that it was innocence I would give, but a second innocence, one which would restore innocence to itself?

Then the gift was one of childhood. Or was it that I gave what retreats as childhood in childhood – the secret which is known only in its withdrawal?

Too Young For You

As a child, I smarted at the idea that some toys were too young for me, even as my toys gradually disappeared to the loft, uplayed with. Even as the stuffed toys sat in plastic bags alongside the suitcase of lego in the loft of my parents’ house.

Too young for you – I did not like the phrase, although I never really heard it, because it already pointed to what was already lost by childhood and lost by my own childhood. Toys in the loft: keepers of the heart of childhood – the heart buried outside you like those of ogres in fairy tales. The child is getting older – toys, one by one, disappear to jumble sales and to the loft. But they are in the loft nonetheless, icons of loss, waiting – but for what?

Transitional Objects

The open arms of a teddy bear. The family of woollen sausage dogs my grandmother knitted. The soft-toy puppies made by Andrex. And the holy of holies: that box in which I kept Christmas cracker gifts. Worthless items, but sacred for that worthlessness. A pink plastic angel fish in a finger puppet inside a box: the holy of holies. Worthless, and up there beside the old cot, mine and then my sister’s, and the framed pictures of a stork flying through the blue night with a swaddled baby suspended from its beak.

Winnicott calls them transitional objects, these toys. Transitional objects: as if one should pass from one to another, and then away from childhood altogether. But it is us who are in transit, and the toys which keep place what is already lost.

Double Loss

As I grew older, I knew what was lost by age. But did I know, too, the irredeemable loss at the heart of childhood? Did I know the secret that lay buried in childhood?

Loss redoubled: what happened when they were accidentally lost, the toys? The youngest of the family of sausage dogs lost on a plane, his older brother lost on the roof. Then the bean bag dog whose felt eyebrows were ripped off by a friend of my sister (my outrage, my mourning). Now a part of my childhood was scattered and unprotected. Childhood evacuated, living outside of itself, outside the loft, which is the archive of childhood. Loss must not be lost, but kept.

Toy, Witness

A parent will watch as toys go unplayed with. And the child? Does the child know what has been abandoned when a toy is abandoned? Does the child know the childhood never lived, but concentrates itself in the absolute past?

Childhood mourns because it is too late for childhood. Innocence is too late for itself; that’s why it mourns. And is that why I gave you the toy? Is that why I gave what cannot be given: the gift that would give innocence back to itself? I thought: last toy, guard my friend and guard me. Toy, witness, might it be that our childhood has yet to happen?

Eggs Benedict

Subtracted life, life subtracted. Life minus life: what did I do this Sunday? What happened yesterday? I would like to have written, but that’s not what I did. I would have liked to have written, but I wrote nothing. I wrote nothing – but it was also that all I did was to wait to write something. Nothing happened, twice over: there was no writing and there was nothing done while waiting for writing. What happened? Nothing, twice over. What happened? Nothing, once and again.

I had an espresso. Half an espresso after lunch. And waited for the caffeine to cross the blood brain barrier. And waited for the caffeine hit, and the rash that opens on my hand. Caffeine and then the rash, because it is toxic. Caffeine, drank in order to write, drank in order to work, is also toxic, whence the rash on the heel of my palm.

Espresso – just a half, but that was enough. Eggs benedict and espresso for breakfast, and then work, I said to myself, then writing. Espresso and eggs benedict, and then it can begin. What happened? Nothing – twice over. Nothing redoubled. No writing, and then a whole day in which ‘no writing’ devoured the day. Life minus life. Subtracted life.

Before the day, nothing, and after the day nothing. And the day nothing, nothing could began. Then there was espresso. Caffeine was to cross the blood-brain barrier. It crossed. What began? Nothing began. The day, which was wearing past three o’clock, was already over. Nothing began. Everything was over. Then there was the caffeine, which made nothing happen more intensely. Nothing happened, but more intensely. Life minus life, but more intensely. Life subtracted itself from life, but more intensely. What happened? Nothing, but more intensely. I surfed the net more intensely. I read idly more intensely. I wandered around town more intensely. I thought about working, more intensely. I did nothing, but more intensely.

I read an article about caffeine in The Observer. It said scientists were divided as to whether its effects was adverse. I read the article more intensely. I read the stupid paper more intensely. I thought about how stupid it was more intensely. Meanwhile, nothing happened. There was no writing, nothing done, and nothing happened while I did not write.

Other people in the world were at D.I.Y superstores. Other people in the world were reading papers in cafes. Other people were on weekend breaks to Antwerp. Other people were gathering ingredients to cook a big meal. Others were walking hand in hand round the shops. Couples were walking hand in hand up and down the river. Others were wandering through the art gallery.

I wasn’t working in the office. Nothing was happening in the office. Everything was happened everywhere but the office. The world was turning everywhere but in the office. The afternoon was progressing nicely everywhere but in the office. Everything was happening everywhere except the office. The office was where nothing was happening. I was waiting for something to happen, but nothing was happening.

Nothing was happening while I waited for something to happen. Nothing began, nothing began to begin, it was finished from the first, the day’s destiny was mapped out from the first and it was finished from the first. Nothing was to happen and nothing happened. Everything was happening everywhere else, the weather was getting milder, I opened the window, it was a mini-Spring, couples walked up and down in town, couples walked up and down along the river, everything was happening except in the office, where nothing was happening.

What was happening in the office? Nothing. I was waiting for something to happen, but nothing was happening. Eggs Benedict, which I’ve never had before in my life, espresso, which I have very sparingly, and then nothing. Only nothing happened more intensely. As the caffeine crossed the blood-brain barrier, nothing happened very quickly.

I surfed the net, but no one had updated. I surfed, nothing had happened, I was the only one surfing in the world, everyone was outside, except for me, who was inside. There was only the outside, where everyone was enjoying themselves, and me in the office, who was not enjoying himself.

Eggs benedict, eggs in Hollandaise sauce on a muffin. Eggs, sauce, muffin, then espresso. Eggs benedict, eggs, sauce, muffin and a long herb-blade across the the benedict. 1) Eggs benedict (should benedict be capitalised?), 2) espresso. 1) Eggs benedict, made of i) eggs, ii) Hollandaise sauce (should hollandaise be capitalised?) and a long blade of some herb, I don’t know which one, probably a chive, then 2) espresso.

Only half an espresso, but already too much. I had had an elderflower presse, thinking I wouldn’t have an espresso, but then it came it upon me, I wanted an espresso, I wanted to work, I wanted to get something today, I thought: it would be nice if I got something done today. 1) Elderflower presse, 2) eggs benedict, 3) espresso, and I thought, I’ll get something done today, I’ll write something, but in fact I wrote nothing. In fact, nothing was written, nothing was done, the whole world was doing something, but I was doing nothing.

Lone chive across three eggs, served yolk intact, three eggs, in a row on a muffin – was it a muffin?, or was it a long piece of bread, a long half-roll? Long chive, and then sauce, and then eggs, below the sauce. The sauce, made of eggs, on the eggs. Plenty of eggs, first of all in the Hollandaise sauce, of which I know nothing, except that it was made of eggs, and the eggs themselves, three of them, in a row, yolks intact, white intact, no spillage, no messiness, and the half roll below, toasted.

I took my knife and cut the surface of an egg. I cut the surface – yolk ran into the white and into the Hollandaise sauce. Then my espresso, a taste of espresso. Then it was the turn of my espresso, which had arrived in a little but, as espressos should, but I knew not to drink too much. Then the espresso, I drank half of it, and thought: I’ll be able to work now. I drank the espresso, having drunk an Elderflower presse, and thought: I’m in a position to work, I’ve had a good breakfast, all I need do is go back to the office, and I can begin.

I went back to the office. Everything was in place. Leaving late last night, I’d tidied u; everything was ready; there was no excuse. The office: pristine, and here I was, full of eggs benedict and half-an-espresso, and ready to begin, no excuse. And do you know what I did? Do you know what I did? I wanted to write, but I wrote nothing. I tried to write; I failed, my head was full of nothing, and I could not begin.

Do you know what happened? Nothing. There was 1) the desire to write, and 2) no writing whatsoever. Doubly disappointed. Disappointed once and then again. First the desire to write, and then thwarted desire, nothing written. To write, then not to write, thwarted desire, nothing began, and nothing happened. It was happening everywhere in the world except here, where it was not happening.

Nothing, then nothing. The desire to write, then nothing. It was a mini Spring outside, but nothing was happening inside. Stains on the windows, and nothing was happening. The plants watered, the office tidy, but nothing was happening. Everything was happening except something. Something was what was not happening. In fact, nothing was happening, and nothing was beginning.

Others would have abandoned the day; others would have bailed out, but I am no quitter. Others would have quit, but I thought, the caffeine will get through the blood brain barrier pretty soon. I thought: soon enough, the caffeine will move from the bloodstream to the nervous system, and so it did. Hours passed, and caffeine had passed from blood to brain, from vein to nerve, and there it was. Only nothing began. Only nothing happened, more intensely.

Subtracted life, life minus life. Life not yet life, life unwavering non-life. Life without distraction, life without achievement, life subtracted. Do you know what I did? Nothing. Do you know what I did while waiting for nothing? Nothing. Nothing once and nothing twice; nothing happened.

I looked around for someone to blame. What, was this life? Was this how it was supposed to be? Was it life I was living? What, was this what living was about? How, I thought, had I taken the wrong turn? How had I ended up here, with the heel of my palm itching? How here, with an itchy palm-heel and nothing happening?

The 11th Page

Given Time

I’ve read it, but when? I’ve read it before, but when did I read it? I can’t remember, but it is as though I’ve always read it and always spoken as it speaks. Essential book, which gave me my own past! Essential reading which gave me my past!

I read. The reading bears me. I read, and it is as though everything I live is borne by that reading. The book is open in my office. My life is lived against that book, its backdrop. The book, a heavy hardback, is open in my office, and what I live it gives me again. The power of living is mine, but that power now reveals itself against the backdrop of non-power, of what I cannot do, but what the book gives me. Now, with the book, I see the world anew.

Now, because of the book, my eyes rest on the world in a new way. What do I see? What do I hear? Or is it that the book sees and hears for me? Is it that the book gives me what I cannot give myself: a second sight, a second hearing, a second way to know the world.

Book, I prop you up beside my monitor. Prodigal book that cradles my life! Prodigious book that opens my life as I open your spine! By your pages will I know what I’ve lived. By your sentences will I have known what I am. You, book, give me the future. You give me the future in which I can know what I’ve lived.

After the Book, Before the Book

What was my life before I read this book? But there was no ‘before’; it is as though this book ran back upstream to the source of my life, and what I lived was always lived within this book. What I lived was already enclosed by the book. Wise book who knows what I have known! Wisdom of a book that lived in advance of me, waiting for me! How did you know I was coming, book? How was it you waited for me at the moment of my conception?

After I read you, there was no before. After I read you, there was no before the book. You were there at the beginning, watching over me. You made the appointment I would keep by reading you. And as soon as I began to read, I knew. By reading I knew another knew me, benign deity!

It is there on my office desk, although I am at home. It is there, just begun and waiting for me, and I am here, at home. I did not bring it with me, because I know it is with me. I did not bring it back to read last night, because I knew it would be with me less time by my reading: knew that to read will have been to have spent less time with it than I could have spent. Knew that by spending time, I was given time, and that to be given time was to be given a future in which to read the book.

Rather than read greedily, finishing it in a single, breathless day, I will read slowly and slowly will the future come to me. Slowly will it come, the future and the dreams the future allows. Slowly, then, comes the open space for dreaming in which the book dreams beside me. I will rest my head on this book, and it will dream with me. I will sleep alongside its sleep and the dreams will come.

I will not name you, book, I will not give your title. And your author, book, I will not speak of your author. Just that it is a late book, a rarefied book, which speaks by way of its author’s early work, which speaks as though that early work had gathered the single wave that bore it. Speaks as though by the pressure of the forward-movement of those early books. Reward for the reader who has traced the course of an oeuvre! Reward of the reader who waited for the late books by reading the early books, and now receives his reading again!

The 11th Page

500 page book, you wait for me at the office. Hardbacked, 500 page book, freshly arrived from America, I have propped you by my monitor. I am 11 pages in. 11 pages, and the book opens its great doors. 11 pages, and already the book is opening great doors to me. Let me pause for a while at the threshold. I want to pause, knowing that the books which follow this one have not yet been translated. Will pause and look around me, at the world behind me and the darkness of the book. The great doors have opened, doors of a new earth and sky, doors of a whole world, which will soon shut and enclose me.

Soon, the 12th page, and then the 13th. And when will I reach the 250th? I know when I read it that it will have been I had read it long before. Know when I reach page 500, I will have known that page since my most distant childhood. You waited for me book, you were patient. You waited for me book, first, latent in the author who wrote the book, and then in a language I do not know how to read. You waited for me, in the translator who turned the book into English, and then in the foreign country from which you would reach me.

And then, one morning, you were in the package in my mail; there you were, imposingly thick, freshly arrived from overseas, in my office. You waited for me; you were there in my office, still waiting for me. As I read page 11, I knew the book was waiting for me, just ahead of me, as it will have always been waiting. Knew that by page 250, it will be waiting yet father ahead, and when one unimaginable day, I finish the book, it will be waiting further ahead than ever, waiting, now, to fill my dreams, to dream with me. To dream and give me the future by its dreaming, and then to give me my past, too – that life I will have lived in anticipation of the book.

Daddy Long Legs

Rooms

I have seen too few Daddy-Long-Legs this year, but here is one now. From Handke, I learnt that such creatures belong to the threshold. But over what do I cross? The world as threshold; this room – the flat – is exchangable with any other. The thudding of music upstairs, the sound of music next door the same as always, the same as last year and the year before.

I play music to drown out music; I speak on the phone so I will not hear them speak. This has always happened as it happens now: this is but one room in a sequence of rooms. They are all the same, and with the same disappointing view: a grotty backyard, pools of drain water, dying plants. Today and tomorrow, the same view.

Can you reach me here, friend? I imagine the Daddy Long Legs is your embodiment – that you have come to me in this form to witness me and allow me to witness myself. Then the Daddy-Long-Legs is an emblem of writing. Sign of incompletion, sign of not yet beginning, mobile threshold that makes this room a threshold.

The Threshold

Friend of the threshold – friend who brings me to the threshold, just as you told me I bring you to the threshold – in what body do I come to you? How does it reach you, the address from the threshold, which says, this room will be one of other rooms; you will move from here to there, and the world will be unloosened by your movement? How do I reach you as a sign of the threshold?

What did we speak of then, at that time? We never said anything, that’s what you said. Nothing said, everything unsaid. But as though that unsaid was the unsaying of the world, and there were no more lies and hypocrisy. Propitious silence, that was the world’s intake of breath, the taking of air to the bottom of its lungs. Silence in which the world drew back to its birth, and so was the morning through which we passed the first morning of the world.

Silence, unsaying. Silence – the unloosening of everything spoken. But there was a saying by this silence. Saying that unspeaks – saying that yet speaks the word that cannot be spoken. Incomplete word! Word that never begins! But to share speech thus – speech that passes from one to the other, speech that begins without completing itself – is to lighten the world.

Lightened Speech

Of what did we speak? Our world was too small, too confining. What were we going to do, we who were to leave school? Truancy: we wandered to the park in the schoolday. Who was there? No one; or perhaps a mother with a pram. We were there, but there was no one else there. Restlessness first of all, that’s what bore what we said. What was to happen? The old life was coming to an end – this was welcome, we were never satisfied with it, and the new one was beginning – but what was to begin?

Lightened speech. What was lightened was the past, and the burden of the past. Newness: not, now, the life we would pass in the suburbs, nor the life in the new companies that were appearing all over the Thames Valley, nor the life of our friends who were to disappear into those companies, but of what gave itself as we spoke of this life and of our friends. Newness: to speak of the world, of a past shared and a shared present, was already to lighten it.

Now our truancy was redoubled in the truancy of saying. The lies of the world were unsaid. Corruption became innocent; the world was born again and we passed in the first morning of the creation. The first morning: dawn, over the suburbs. And the first night: dusk, over the suburbs. We met at the threshold, the dawn and the dusk and by our speech, the world was lightened.

Daddy Long Legs

I haven’t seen for you for many years. How did you know to send me a Daddy Long Legs as your envoy? Through my window and drawn by the light, a foreleg twitching before it in the air as it flies, it is your emissary. But how do I reach you? What creatures are for you a sign of speech?

Rush-That-Speaks

The Image

The ambition, here, is always to generate writing as though from itself, out of itself. To write to mark only the act of writing, to say, today writing was possible. Palliative of blogging: writing is allowed to write itself. Writing marks itself as event, as achievement, and can then die away. There is no need to detain writing in a book; no need to round off what is written – to draw it into an essay or a story. The post is complete because it is dated – because it was what was written on this day. But is it complete?

Was it in a story by Borges that there was a mirror that called what it reflected into existence? The image came first, I remember that, and then the ‘original’. So does the event of writing call for more than an enigmatic signature to say, I achieved myself. Writing asks to be made flesh; it calls for an event to relate. Something must be related – writing is not music, it is not painting. It must speak, and speak with words. Something must be said. But with blogging, what is said stretches itself much more thinly over the event of writing. ‘Beneath’ what is recounted, there is the marking of the event of writing. As if to say, I was able to write today, writing was possible today.

What is it that was marked? in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, there is an explorer far ahead of the adventurers of the story. He leaves his signature here and there. He leaves his name, his mark. Something was possible – I was here. I was here, and I am ahead of you, you who follow me. So with blogging. I was here. Only now, the blogger is not ahead of you, but behind you. Nearly every day was marked, not so the blogger could lay claim to it, but to himself. To say simply, it was possible, writing; I was able to sign my mark across the day.

Crusoe

Sometimes I dream of sustaining what is written here over the course of a book, or at least an essay, to be published elsewhere. To be borne by the momentum of what is written here to make a whole book, a sustained piece of writing. But I know I would miss what is most important by doing so: to keep my appointment with the day, to put my mark on the blank surface of the day as on a clean page.

I imagine myself as Robinson Crusoe who makes a calendar to mark the passing of days. Crusoe who fears he will lost in time if he doesn’t make his mark. But there is always the hope that I will do more than leave a mark: that writing will need details with which to clothe itself, that a small narrative will be possible. But what is there to narrate? Only that I have spent a great deal of times in rooms like this one trying to mark my presence in the day. That I waited for the surplus of strength that would bear me from boredom and dissipation to mark the day.

The mark is a struggle, I know that. The strength to write raises itself against the day. How do I meet the day at its own level? By lying down. By giving up and wandering the streets. By leaving any particular task and letting the day carry me. How do I struggle against the day? By leaving the dated entry that will mean it will not pass without me – that the day will not have carried me too far from myself.

Rush-That-Speaks

Is this why the most imposing theme at this blog is stagnancy and lassitude? Is it because it is over stagnancy that I have triumphed in order to write? Then to write of stagnancy is to stand over the body of the loser. I am the victor; I won – what did not allow me to write is now mine to write about. I, the victor, can write of my defeat.

But defeat is waiting for me again, I know that. John Crowley’s Engine Summer is narrated, we learn at the end, by a construct, a little machine, who is kept filed away until one comes to ask his story. He speaks (his name is Rush-That-Speaks), but all he is is speaking, and when he finishes he will be switched off again. So it is here – speak, write, and know by doing so this is your chance to struggle against the day. Speak, write, but time is drawing short and the story will find its end.

Unless there is a way to tell the same story over and again. Unless the story of stagnancy can be begun anew each day. And now I am Sheherazade, who must come up with a new story each day lest she be executed. Speak, write, because otherwise the end will come. But of what is there to write? The ‘there is’ of writing, that is true. The address.

Sheherazade

To write in a notebook is not enough, although what is written there is already public. The notebook does not open widely enough; its pages are fixed in size and shape. Dream of pages without dimension, of a writing written on the sky and earth. I was here: speaking of itself, writing of itself here, at the blog, clothing itself in this or that little story, writing reaches unknown readers straightaway.

You are found right away, reader. The pages open as wide as the internet and can be found on those searches which pass through every webpage. Now, as Crusoe, I do not write to keep my place in time, scratching a mark on the wall so I know the date, but have placed a message in a bottle without knowing who it will find. There it goes, out to sea – but where does it ago? Across the day, as though opening the pages of the notebook as broadly as the day itself. Across the day and doubling the vastness of the day.

Writing resembles itself. It speaks itself, and resembles itself. But in this resemblance, it passes through all the things of the world. Writing passes through everything in order to give substance to itself. What is writing apart from the materials it gathers to itself like a dresser crab, which augments its shell from what it finds on the ocean floor? But writing has no shell; it is made from what it does not own. To mark itself, its address to unknown readers, it must borrow what it is from elsewhere, must tell a story.

Writing is Sheherazade, speaking only to survive. And who am I, who writes? The means writing has to speak of itself. It borrows me; it borrows my life and my body; it writes with me. Then who is it who writes here? Is it I who leaves my mark? Or is it writing as it makes that mark tremble? Writing takes what I write away from me. I know it by the experiences from which it deprives me. I was allowed to speak – I wrote – but what I write was lost by writing.

Then I am not Crusoe who marks the day, or even Crusoe who throws a message in a bottle in the ocean. Writing is the ocean, and to write is already to have lost oneself. I am not the victor; what I take to be my triumph is not mine. Writing has already laid claim to what I have written. Who writes, who speaks? Writing brings us forward, each of us, as Rush-That-Speaks. And then we are switched off and filed away.

The Double

Who writes? Who speaks? Writing marks itself. Writing leaves a trace of itself. But what about the one who would, by writing, leave his mark? What about the one who marks by writing his triumph over the day, over the stagnancy of the day? Writing is also stagnancy in which it is impossible to begin. Writing, stagnant in advance, is the invasion of the beginning by what does not begin. Then the beginning, the event of writing, cannot complete itself, and this is the lesson.

In the most elegant and well-rounded post, in the post which forms itself, like Schlegel’s fragment, into a curled up hedgehog, there is already that opening which spreads it across everything that exists. As though writing, by resembling itself, had to pass through all the things of the world. As though writing lived by transforming the world into its own image.

Then writing borrows the body of the world as it borrows my body. Writing, double of the world that by writing calls the world into existence. Writing, reversal of image and original. Writing that swaps one for the other and makes of the writer a double of himself.

Abstract Writing

Writing, non-event. Writing, which signifies by way of withholding signification amidst signification. What would an abstract writing be like? A writing that is the equivalent of the abstract painting? Magnificent peace! Peace without words! But impossible, for all that. Writing means and must mean; it signifies and proceeds by way of signification. Then the task is to interrupt writing in writing; to render abstract what appears to be most concrete.

So blogging, in which the concrete (the story that is related, the blogger’s musings) wears itself away. Blogging in which the ‘there is’ writing speaks by way of the concrete and in the trembling of the concrete. The story, the musing, is worn away. Writing affirms itself. Writing says: you, blogger, are only Rush-That-Speaks, and I the one who has switched you on. Writing that has borrowed your body and given you writing, but on condition that you relinquish your hold over writing.

Readers to Come

It is the 27th October. It is 10.32 in the morning. I listen to Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall and look out over the yard. The plants look ill; a drain is overflowing. Perhaps they are ill because their roots, in their pots, is being nourished by overflowing water. 10.33, and the students upstairs have gone to the university. I am Rush-That-Speaks. What time is it, what day is it? Only you, who are reading, know. From where have you come? From what corner of the earth?

It is upon you that writing depends, as it speaks of itself. What time is it? What do you see, beyond your monitor? Writing depends on you. But there are always other beyond you. Always other readers, readers to come, readers who chance on this site by searching on Google for Team Aniston or Team Jolie tee-shirts, or by asking how tall is Brad Pitt?, and others who have just set out from the far corners of the world.

Corpse of the University

The Long Rot

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water. We are all poking it with sticks. Is it really dead, the university? Is that really its bloated, blue-faced corpse? Yes, it is dead, and there it is floating, face down. In the end, there is no point pretending, not anymore. The university is dead and there is its corpse.

Now the swelling and the rotting. Now it will swell and will rot, devoured from the inside. Now begins the rot and the creatures of the rotting, the maggots who will hatch into flies and leave the corpse. Now come the maggots, the managers who will devour what is left to feed themselves and fly away. How their salaries are rising, the managers! How much money they earn!

The lid has been taken off their salaries, that’s what is said. The lid has been taken off to encourage competition. Now there is no lid and no limit. Now begins the rot and the creatures of the rot, who live off the corpse that rots. Now the rot, the long rot, how long will it take? Now comes the long rot, and really it could take forever.

Now the long rot, now comes the eternal rotting and the creatures who live from the rot. There it is, the corpse of the university, blue-faced, swollen. But this is only the beginning. There are creatures who live from death, who are drawn to it. There are parasites who live from death and are produced from death. For the corpse, in truth, is a breeding ground. The corpse is where Capital comes to leave its eggs. The university is that rotten place where Capital deposits its eggs. Eggs in rotten flesh. Spores in zombied flesh. They are here, the ones who live from death and the long rot.

The Old Elite

But was it ever alive, the university? Isn’t it the worst kind of nostalgia to think it was once alive? After all, wasn’t it over ever the breeding ground for State-Thought, for State-Philosophy and State-Criticism and State-Sociology and State-Political-Science? Wasn’t it only ever a breeding group for the State and for Capital? The old professor said, it wasn’t always like that. The professor said, it wasn’t always like this. Once the meeting rooms were full, once the senior common rooms were full, once there were seminars everyone attended.

But is that how it was? Is that really how it was? Who were they, who filled the meeting rooms and common rooms? Who were they, who filled the seminars, the old crowd? The old elite, no doubt of that. The old elite, who are disappearing now. The old elite, who, stunned at what happened, are disappearing to the countryside and to their houses. The new breed replace them. The new breed, harassed and harried, take their places. But who have they replaced? The power of their predecessors has gone. The power they might have had is gone. The power is in the hands of the management, there’s no doubt of that. The power has passed out of the hands of academics and into those of the management.

Who have they replaced? No one at all; they have no ancestors. For it was then that the university died, in that gap between the old and the new, between one breed and another. It died – but wasn’t this death something liberating? Wasn’t the dispersal of the old elite something marvellous? Wasn’t there at least an afternoon or two when the university seemed to open to a new future, a future of the non-elite, a future welcoming those who would never have belonged in the university?

The dinosaurs had gone, and now the new breed had come, those who would never had had a chance in the old system. Then the death of the university was welcome, for this death was only that of the old elite. This death was welcome, and even the capitalisation of the university was welcome for a time, because it meant courses had to be offered to students outside the old paternalism and the old canon.

Yes, for an afternoon or two, a breath of wind passed through the university. The university had died; capital had killed it, but this was welcome, for the king was dead and there was no king to replace it. Capital swelled in the corpse. Capital ran in its veins, which meant, for a time, students had to be appeased: if they wanted to be taught Nietzsche or Hegel, that was at last possible.

In the late 80s, in most university philosophy departments, it was impossible to study Nietzsche or Hegel however much we wanted to, but now, in the mid 90s, it was possible, because the students brought in revenue and the students had to be appeased. Capital ran in the dead veins of the university, but this was welcome; it was novelty itself. But what happened? Capital was captured. Capital lent itself to new forces of accountability and quality.

Sublime Capital

There is no question but that there is a sublimity to Capital, a deathly beauty. It commands awe, like a starry sky. So the starry sky opened for a time over the dead university. The old elite were now irrelevant; whether they knew it or not, their time was up. The old paternalism was defunct. Students had a voice because they brought revenue to the university. Now they had to be appeased, whatever the old elite wanted. It was the new regime; the former polytechnics had research money for the first time.

This was welcome, at first: the former polytechnics, which were soon to become the new universities, had money to give to staff for research and to potential students for research. This was the new regime. The university had died, but it was opening and transforming and becoming something marvellous. Granted, it didn’t last long. It barely happened, but there was a moment when something marvellous began to open. Staff grumbled, but they were forced to widen participation. Staff moaned, but the university had to reconnect to the local community, if only to attract students. People who would never have gone on to postgraduate study were given grants to study. People who never would have gone onto academic jobs were permitted to do so.

The New Elite

Yes, the university was dead, but this was welcome. The chance of a new kind of educational system opened. No longer the divide between one institution and another, between school and university, between college and university, but a new whole. But what happened? The old universities organised themselves to make sure they would get all the money from government research funding. They quickly put together departments responsible for drawing up funding bids, and attracted money to themselves. The old elite, shaken, began to reform, albeit without the old set of values, the tedious old conservatism.

Wily professors, marginal in the old elite, came forward. Wily professors linked with wily administrators drew research money to themselves. The old distinction between old and new universities was reinforced; the old distinction between Oxbridge and the rest confirmed itself. But it was too late: the myth of the old elite had dispersed, and there was nothing to hold anyone staff but competitive bids for research income. The old elite was dispersed, staffing had been significantly reduced, student numbers were increasingly rapidly, and nothing held anyone together.

Now was the time of great movement and no achievement. Now there was only the long decay, the decomposition of the corpse and of the creatures of the decomposition. How quickly they came, the flies, to lay their eggs. How quickly they hatched, those eggs. Until the university was full of maggots, blind and wriggling. Until the university became a hatching place for the maggots who would grow fat from money. Now maggots appeared wherever there was surplus value. The maggots, non-academics, managers appointed from industry, soaked up all the money. And the academics, those who were left, were full of resentment.

Now the two great forces of the university were capital and resentment. A few wily professors were left, and a few of the new breed, who would exploit the chaos and open up small departments in the midst of the decay. New disciplines appeared here and there, operating very precariously. This was welcome; it was impressive, but these were local operations and very precarious. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, there is the great hubbub, the great activity. Meanwhile, there is only activity, albeit the activity of the decay.

Recourse to the Pub

What did you do today at work? What happened today? The philosopher bids for research money and the historian bids for research money. The political scientist bids for research money and the historian of art bids for research money. What happened at work? A little teaching, but that was nothing. Some teaching, pleasant enough, but that was nothing. Some teaching, some administration related to teaching, but what was that, really?

First of all, there was money to be raised. Firstly, the attempt to raise money. Then the attempt to consolidate your position as a teaching unit. Secondly, the attempt to lodge yourself more deeply in the rotting corpse of the university. Secondly, the insecurity, the contract you are on, which demands you lodge yourself more deeply in what-calls-itself-a-university.

Of what else do we speak, we the new breed? Of the insecurity of contracts and rsearch funding. Of the impossibility of any security, and the impossibility of attracting research income. And of our resentment, and the resentment of others, as it turns on those who attract research income. We would like to be the little-department-who-could, but in reality we are the little-department-who-can’t. We’d like to succeed, but in fact we are failing, as we must fail.

For, in truth, what’s in it for us? Paid on the lowest possible point on the scale, publishing as much or more as the professors, nothing matters but income generation, but who can be bothered. For a time, the quantity of research counted for something. I am of the generation in whom it was drilled that a great deal had to be published, and I published a great deal. But I am already antiquated, for this no longer matters, in fact it is irrelevant. You can publish whatever you like, but that’s something you do in your leisure time. Publish whatever you like, that’s up to you, but it is an activity for evenings and weekends and no longer the concern of the university.

What does it matter what you publish? What does it matter what you read or write? There’s no incentive to read and write. Reading? I’ve given up reading. Writing? Why bother? I prefer the pub to writing and the pub to reading. After work, to the pub, and to laugh at the impossibility of reading and writing, and the folly of those who thought we might survive in the new regime. For in time, we’ll go to the wall. In time, it won’t be long, we’ll be put out of our misery, and we’ll take our place on the dole. In the meantime, the pub, the glory of the pub. In the meantime, work’s over, so let’s go to the pub and laugh about the money we haven’t raised.

Corpse of the University

The corpse of the university floats face down in the water. I’m glad it was murdered. But why couldn’t it have mutated into something new? Why has it reorganised itself in a ghastly parody of the old elitism? Sometimes I dream of the great privatisation that will allow capital to loosen up the rigor mortis. But this is only a symptom of the disappearance of the old socialist dream – of the government that would force the university to connect with the region in which it is based and with the people of that region. And perhaps the government that would dissolve the university-form and the school-form and dream up a new educational system. (This is not idle utopianism: think of The Open University …)

No More Universities

The Topslice

The university is over, everyone agrees with that. The dream is over, the university is finished, everyone says the same thing. There are no universities; there are money making machines, that is true, but no universities. There are no universities, and there are no students, that’s clear enough. There are units of resource, but no students. And there are no lecturers. True, there are still some old professors, still a few left, but there are no lecturers. No one teaches. There is no teaching, just as there is no reading. Students don’t read, staff don’t read, no one reads, the university is finished.

Some old professors, stunned by the changes, wander about, but in truth they are lost, they don’t know what’s happened. Where is the university?: that’s what the look on their faces says. Only the most wily professors survive. Only those immured to change. The rest founder: where is the university?: that’s the look on their faces. What happened? Where am I?: that’s what their faces say.

Are there students? No doubt for themselves there are students. Students who say to themselves, we are students. But they are barely taught. The students are no students, but units of resource, and are barely taught. So too are subject areas units of resource, they barely exist. There is no Philosophy, not any more. There’s no English Literature, not any more. True, there are professors of Philosophy and professors of English Literature, there are still a few people who remember how it was when there were universities, but they are coming up to retirement. There are a few professors around, but the university is keen to pension them off, to get rid of them, so the takeover can complete itself.

‘The university’? I refer to what-was-a-university. What was a university and is a university no longer. They are leaving, the professors, stunned and bewildered. What happened? When did it occur? Get out, they tell themselves, and get out. Meanwhile, the new breed are taking over. I am one of them. Rat-like, desperate, looking to earn revenue, to bring money into what-was-a-university. Rat like, desperate, running along in the maze as quickly as possible and dreaming of ways to bring money into what-was-a-university.

For we have to earn money, we know that. We have to bid for money, we know that. What matters is to bid for money, to bring money in, and to swell what-was-the-university’s coffers. What matters is money, is revenue, and what-was-the-university’s topslice. Because the what-was-the-university has to make a little profit, there has to be a topslice. You teach to make a profit and your research must be tied to profit. Forget Philosophy, forget Literature, those are long dead. There is no Philosophy, no Literature. No Philosophy, no Literature, no Political Science, no Sociology, nothing.

Overteaching

It’s over, the university’s over and we live in the aftermath. It’s a numbers game. It’s a profit-making game. If it can’t be quantified, it did not happen. If it does not bring in money, it has no occurred. Nothing happens unless it makes money. The auditors will tell you you’re overteaching. You’re overteaching. A hour and seminar a week for the students: that’s overteaching. You should be concentrating on other things. Income generation, for example, or preparing paperwork.

Teaching is always overteaching. That’s why there are no students, not anymore. No one is taught and nothing is happening. There is no teaching, only income generation. Countable bodies, each a unit of resource, in what used to be called a lecture hall, but no lectures and no students. There is no university. No Philosophy, no Literature, no Politics and no History: there is nothing. It’s a smokescreen. Everywhere there is activity, but nothing is happening. The university is finished, and the takeover is nearly complete.

Do you remember teaching, do you remember that? Do you remember studying? Do you remember how it was, once upon a time? The older staff looked stunned. The wily ones survive, but the rest are stunned. It doesn’t matter what they write, not anymore. They can’t quite believe it. All their work for nothing. Everything they did, for nothing. For what matters now is only countable bodies. What matters is revenue, and the generation of revenue. What-used-to-be-called-courses have to be as popular as possible, that’s the criteria. What-used-to-be-called-courses for what-used-to-be-called students in what-used-to-be-called-a-university.

Resentment

You’ll be okay as long as you bring in student revenue, says W. That’s true, but what about the other great force of what-used-to-be-called-the-university, that is, resentment?, I say. You’re okay as long as you’re making a profit, says W. But what about resentment? Anything interesting and difficult must be hunted down and closed down. If they scent something interesting and different, they’ll close it straight down, there’s no question of that. Interesting? Difficult? Then resentment builds up. Resentment sets out to find you.

You’re enjoying yourself, they decide and in the wrong way. Your units-of-resource are enjoying themselves, and in the wrong way. One solution: to shut you down. The solution: get rid of them. Resentment spots you, and then sets out towards you, with one intention: to spoil your fun. You’re having fun, your units-of-resource (students) are having fun, so you’ll have to closed down. It happened to Cultural Studies in the UK. It happened to the CCRU. It was hunted down and closed down. They spotted it, the resenters, so it had to be hunted down, and then closed down.

Communist Russia

It’s like communist Russia, says W. If you don’t go over the top in your reports, someone will get shot. It’s like communist Russia, says someone else who lived in communist Russia, it’s exactly the same. I escaped to England from communist Russia and now it’s exactly the same in England, the same as communist Russia. If you don’t go over the top in your reports, says W., someone will get shot. This is no time for doubts and hesitations and constructive criticism, says W., it’s like communist Russia, where unless everything is fantastic and peerless and exemplary practice, someone will be shot. Of course they won’t be shot exactly, but there’s always a way of getting rid of people, of freezing them out. Take that professor who complained and was moved to a tiny office. He had a nice office with a good view and he was moved, when he complained, to a tiny office with no windows and no view.

Never complain, that’s the answer. Do everything you can to go unnoticed, that’s the answer. From the first, attract no attention, let them busy themselves elsewhere. Attract no attention, do everything you’re told, no matter how arduous it is, and maybe they won’t notice you. Because the way they’ll get you is through quality. That’s the way they’ll attack you, through academic quality. You may be the best department in the world, your units-of-resource might be happy, your staff might be happy, but if your paperwork is not up to scratch, they’ll get you.

Yes, that’s how they’ll get you, that’s how they’ll hunt you down, through your paperwork. Through the minutes of your meetings. Through your reports and minutes, they’ll go through them one after another. That’s why, as in communist Russia, you have to go over the top in your reports. Everything is improving tenfold. Every year it’s getting better, its all improving, your operation is becoming more and more streamlined. Every year, it’s getting better. Every year you’re learning and growing. Every year, quality is enhanced. Every year, quality improves. Every year! What a miracle! Quality is going up just as A-levels are going up and everything is going up! The world is improving, it gets better and better! We are already in paradise, and paradise is improving! It’s getting better, everything is improving!

The Probehead

It’s only a matter of time, says, W., and we’re out. We’ve not long left, says W., and we’ll be kicked out. It’s all over, says W., and we’ll be kicked out. Because they’re hunting us down. Because they’ve caught the scent and we are the quarry. Because they’ve set out towards us, they know something’s different, something’s interesting, they’ve caught the scent and now we are the quarry. What chance do we have? We can lie low and hope they don’t notice us. We can hope there’s trouble at the top, a change of governments, confusion, and they’ll have great concerns than us. But what chance do we have, really?

It’s all over, the university is over, there are only money-making machines and resentment machines. The double whammy, money-making and resentment. If it was down to money-making, we’d be okay, but there’s resentment as well. Resentment and quality. Quality is the probehead of resentment. Quality sends out its probehead like the Martian machines in War of the Worlds. Infinitely subtle, infinitely adaptable, the probehead is looking for us. Keep still. Hopefully the paperwork will be good enough. Hopefully we’ll survive another round. The probehead is winding through the corridors. Hopefully they’ll get someone else. Hopefully it’ll be someone else’s turn and not ours.

In the end, they’ll see us. In the end, they’ll know us. Capital is the all-seeing, all-knowing eye. Capital is looking out for us, as Sauron looked out over Middle Earth. Sauron and the Ring-Wraiths are looking for us. The auditors are Ring-Wraiths and in the service of Sauron. The auditors are made of resentment, they are nothing other than resentment. And they are great counters and scrutinisers. They’ll riffle through your minutes in a second. They’ll be through your paperwork all at once. They’ll have scented you and come for your paperwork. If your paperwork is not in order, nothing can save you. Then resentment has its day. Then resentment laughs, for it has triumphed.

Rats

Meanwhile the rats are swarming. Rats like me are swarming through the corridors. Look how quickly we run! Look how much we do in a day! Everything, it’s done, we do it, we can do more, there’s always more to do! Rats in the service of quality. Rats crawling over one another, rats crawling over the dead bodies of other rats, in the service of quality. Rats who know they will be hunted down if they keep still. Rats active because they know they are the quarry.

The rats are frantic. I am one of them. I am another rat, a rat among rats, and I scamper over rats just as others scamper over me. I disgust myself, I am a rat, but what matters is to keep going and not to stop. How I disgust myself! Has it come to this! But no matter, I am a rat, and I must keep going. Is this what it was all for? Is this what it’s come to? No matter. I am a rat, I have adapted myself, I am fast and I am frantic. Perhaps I won’t be caught. Perhaps I’ll run faster than the other rats, and I won’t be caught. But we know, each of us, that we will all be caught. We know the end is coming and we’ll all be caught.

Writing Unworked

Morning Writing, Night Writing

Morning writing, night writing. Morning writing bears with it the old misery, but disgust is still lively, disgust can set out to seek and destroy, disgust is on the hunt. So is morning writing a kind of falconry. Disgust seeks its quarry. Disgust goes out to find its quarry, and so does morning writing carry with it something of the old misery. So does the old misery trail behind it like the tale of the comet. But the comet’s head is disgust, active and youthful, born to itself again and seeking its quarry again. Yes, disgust, in the mornings, is on fire as the sun is on fire. Disgust is the morning, the song of the morning.

Evening writing is wearied. Evening writing, wearied, is emburdened by the day, and all that has happened. Evening writing, enwearied, emerges, if it emerges, from what is crushed. It speaks of what is crushed. Disgust is tired; there’s no comet and no comet’s tail. Sometimes, it is true, there is a kind of wisdom. No longer falconry, no longer despair’s leap from your arm, no longer the seeking of the quarry. No more seek-and-destroy. But wisdom, instead, the days’ wisdom. As though you’d grown old in the passing of the day. As though by that day you had grown old with the day.

Tonight, disgust lies down in me. Tonight, the old misery is already asleep. Then I am always up too late – up too late, outliving misery and outliving disgust. No falconry. Disgust does not leave my arm. No comets; misery does not trail behind disgust. Today, the whole day spreads out before me. There it was, a whole day. What happened? This happened, that happened. What happened? This and that; the day turned, the planet turned into light and then dusk, and then, too early, into darkness. It was night too early. Night, at seven o’clock. Night at seven bells, too quick.

And now I wonder whether the events of the day, the whole comedy, happened only to bring near to me, signifying across signification, the night where the sign would be lacking. What happened? A great deal – and in the end? What happened, in the end? The sign lacks. It is night, and night brings forgetfulness. I’ve forgotten what happened – or it is that what happened happened such that something failed to happen. As though what happened as the events of the day failed to accomplish itself. Or that the day itself was incomplete, that it had been worn away, and what I come into contact with now, what draws me towards itself, is the non-event around which the day turns and every day turns.

The turning of the everyday. I would like to say, I learnt something today, I learnt something of the day and what happens when the day is over. I would like to say: night-writing comes after the day is complete and there are lessons to be drawn. But I know this is an alibi, and the day has not finished. I know what happened was the non-event of the day, its non-finishedness.

What began did not end. What began, in truth, did not even begin. What began did not begin; there was no event, or no event that completed itself. What began did not began, and what ended did not end. Night, but nothing has ended. Night, but the day has not completed itself. Night, and the day remains stranded, and for this reason, the night is also stranded. The day is stranded, it has not found and completed itself, and so too is the night stranded, because it cannot mark itself in its difference from the day; it is as though night lagged behind itself, and was too late for itself.

Dilatory night! Tardy night, incomplete and uncompletable! Tardy night, tardy day, how I can measure you? But I am measured by that delay, by that dilatoriness. It measures me, that delay; it is the wearing away of my day and the wearing away of my evening. It measures me, but only because it is without measure. It measures me, the measureless, as I am worn from myself. For the day does not support itself. What happens as the day does not support itself. It is incomplete and does not finish itself. The day does not round itself off. The day runs into the night, without completing itself. Day, night, both incomplete.

Measureless day, Measureless night

Measureless day, measureless night: who knows this, who experiences this? I have always known it and always experienced it. Write to mark time in the day. Write to stamp an hour on the night. Write to say: It is 9.52 PM, and I am writing. Write to stamp time on the occasion. But know that by doing so, what is night is already lost. As though night could only be expressed in the infinitive, the ‘to night’ and writing only as the ‘to write’. As if the ‘to night’ and the ‘to write’ were entwined, each in the other, each incompleting the other, each unbecoming the other.

So is writing likewise measured by the measureless. So is writing likewise the unmeasured, as it accords with the measurelessness of the night. Both unmeasured, both in lieu of themselves. Both in lieu of themselves, but by writing you have a way of measuring the night. For you can end the flood of signs, as you cannot end the night. That part of writing ends, as you cannot end the night. So do you come to terms with the night. So does the night offer itself to be written, and writing becomes your game with the night and your game with the day.

In the morning, it is different. The whole day opens before you. There is too much day ahead of you; it is still undiscovered, still the repository in which events might complete themselves. But later, at night, the whole day is that which incompletes itself. The whole day is unworking, and unworks itself in writing. The whole day is unworking, and the night is the unworking of the day. Night and day, unworking and writing the unworking of night and day.

Writing unworked and unworking: but this is a way of coming to terms with the non-happening of the day and the non-happening of the night. I know it as such; blogging is a transparent alibi. Blogging is already the attempt to stamp being on becoming, to stamp time on the timeless. It is 9:58; it’s dark; it’s been dark for some hours. 9:58, a glass of Cava, the heating on, clothes drying on the radiators. 9:59 – time has passed, but time is immobilised here, as I write.

Time arrested by writing. Time arrested, time recorded as though I were in control of time. I could say: nothing begins here, not at this blog. I could say: nothing ends here, not at this blog. But what I write is written in the box called ‘Post Introduction’; it begins and will end. Yes, it begins – it will end. But this is my alibi, this is my ‘why I write’ and it is a lie. Why blog? to mark time; to divide the infinite from itself – to substantiate the ‘there is the day’ and ‘there is the night’, or rather to allow that ‘there is …’ to resonate in writing.

There is writing

There is writing. Perhaps. There is writing – but only if it is a writing unworked, a writing unworkable. Yes, it happens – there is an event, but only if this event parts writing from itself and suspends writing, the happening of writing. There is writing. Writing attenuated. The ‘to write’ stretched across the day and the night: yes, this is the dream. Infinite attenuation, writing incomplete and unworked. Writing that unworks writing and wears it thin.

10:06. 24 minutes until Newsnight. Night; only the reflected room on the window. I can’t see the ugly yard. Blackness and then this room reflected in blackness. Blackness and this room, this little cube in the glass, reflected. The room, reflected. I do not see myself. I keep the curtain half-closed. I do not see myself, but what would I see? The darkness and then my reflection. Darkness and first of all the night, and the night’s darkness. As though I were Narcissus, but Narcissus, now, who saw what he was not. Night-Narcissus who sees what he is not, and loses himself by writing. Narcissus who resembles himself and resembles the night across which he sees himself. The night that does not complete itself. The night unworked.

The day does not support itself; the night does not support itself. Do not immobilise it in the form, ‘the day’, ‘the night’. Do not immobilise writing in writing. But this is what you have already done, which means your writing is always your writing. So do you betray the day, the night, and what fails to complete itself as the day, the night. So do you betray the ‘there is writing’ by writing. Begin, write, but know that by writing there is betrayal. Begin – end writing, end your post, press the button marked ‘save’, but know you’ve betrayed writing by writing.

Contentedness

What is this bland contentedness? The last thing I expect to experience is bland contentedness, and the satisfaction of a job well done. Absolutely no desire to write, not here, nor elsewhere. No desire whatsoever. No misery, and therefore no hope of the ‘merciful surplus’ that would lift me out of misery by giving me writing.

Too content to search around in my memory for another of the great list of humiliations. Write an anti-‘esteem indicators’ said W., referring to that section of the R.A.E. form where you write about your invitations to speak at conferences, the number of articles published etc. Write indicators of your humiliation, said W., write how you dragged yourself down and dragged others down. W. is thinking of himself. Write about that bloke who says I’ve been going downhill since I started hanging round with you, he says.

Write about that says W., and I told him I thought of that a long time ago, but I’m too content, life is pleasant, all is well, there’s nothing in me that wants expunging, there’s nothing that asks to be written, there’s not the eternal return of memories of old humiliations. All is well, the light falls equally on everyone. All well, the light falls gently on each and on me as one of the others. I detest this contentedness and everything written out of contentedness. I hate even-handedness and patience.

Where is it, the old misery? Where is the old misery and the old desire for the ‘merciful surplus’? I could certainly count on that, the old misery. In the morning, there was always the old misery. Rising, I thought, there it is again, the old misery, so I’d better have a coffee and write about the old misery. Yes, that’s how it was up until a few days ago, up in the morning, another day, white and bland, so I go into the kitchen to make coffee and turn on the computer and open up the ‘Post Introduction’ box.

Until a few days ago, yes, not so long ago, that was the beginning of my day, always early, always too early, because I wake up too early, I can never help that, I never sleep well along, I’m always up too early, and then I think, I might as well begin, and I go and make coffee. Up early, too early, making coffee in the dawn, making coffee in the half-light, there’s the yard, the ugly little yard, and my damp little kitchen with great patches of damp on the walls and damp in the air.

Yes, first thing, up and to the damp kitchen and then coffee and the same old misery, the same happy misery, because it is always the beginning of something, because from misery, there is at least the peculiar energy of disgust. Out of misery, yes, there is the need to give disgust its head, to allow it to find its target, its object, and to set it on its way. From the first, misery, the same old misery, and then the desire, by writing, to give disgust its target and unleash disgust and let it run by writing to its target. The old misery, the old disgust, and then the quarry it tears apart. Joy of that tearing apart. Joy that misery will allow humiliations to arise from the past. Joy that there are always other reasons to feel excluded.

Yes, that’s how it was, day after day, week after week, the evening and night spent in the pub and the next morning, wake up too early, the old misery and the desire to escape that misery, but always the faith in that escape, which passes by way of disgust. In the morning, arise, misery, then disgust, then writing, then the happiness of having written, then the happiness that misery had been put to work.

First of all, misery, bountiful misery, the riches of misery. From the first, misery, reliable, dependable as it bore within it a kind of energy. Nothing better than that first, energetic misery, disgust tugging at the leash, coffee by the window, computer on, Post Introduction opened, then disgust unleashed, disgust running to tear its quarry apart. Disgust off the leash, off by writing to tear its quarry apart. Beatitude of disgust, beatitude of misery. Beatitude of misery-writing and disgust-writing.

But today, contentedness; today, a new tranquility, there’s no need to write, nothing asks to be written, there’s no disgust. Today, no disgust, except that I’ve worked up because there is no disgust. No disgust except at the absence of disgust. No disgust except that there is no disgust, only contentedness, that vile, stupid contentedness in league with the vile stupidity of the world. No disgust to carry me from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph. No bridge across the morning.

Already I’m failing, already, the post is giving way as I write. Find your way to the end, I tell myself, find the end. You can always do that, you know it’s coming, but you’re not there yet, not this morning, I tell myself. Find the end of the post, I tell myself, it’s not far off, but find it by way of writing and the energy of writing. The end is there, waiting to be written, but only as it was born at the inception of writing. The end was there, but you’ll discover it only by writing, by impatience. For the way opens by impatience and disgust.

Impatience and disgust, that’s how it opens, that’s how it begins and how it is carried forward. Impatience, disgust, so does the bridge open, so does sentence bear to sentence and paragraph leap across blank space to paragraph. That’s how it begins, leaning out of itself, depending on itself, trusting only disgust, launched in misery and calling out to misery. But contentedness is creeping back. Contentedness is holding out against misery.

If it’s not written in one sweep, it’s no good, I know that. If it’s not written in one single movement, in a single gesture, it’s failed, I know that. A single gesture, given out of itself, given in writing by disgust, otherwise nothing. No pauses, no let-up, no surfing, no breakfast, no brushing of teeth and no showering, none of that. It’s dawn and time to work, and work is everything, disgust must be unleashed. No getting up to wander around, no television, no food, just an empty stomach and bile.

Write about the history of your humiliations, says W. Write your humiliation-indicators, says W. Write about that, says W., and whine, I like it when you whine. But my memory is not working. My disgust does not roam into my memory, looking for humiliations. No quarry for memory. Nothing for disgust to seek and destroy. No cross-hairs on the quarry. Write about your humiliations, says W. Write about dragging the rest of us down, says W. I’ve lost it, I say. Oh yeah, says W., what did you have?

The old misery, the old discontent, the old disgust and the bounty of disgust. You’ll never understand it, I tell W. You just don’t get it, I tell W. Who do you think you are, says W., Thomas Bernhard? Why do you do it, you’re not Thomas Bernhard, says W. What, so you think you’re Thomas Bernhard now? That’s funny. Write about your humiliations. Write about dragging the rest of us down. That’s what I was planning, I told W., I thought of it straightaway. But I can’t get going, I’m too content.

The Ouseburn Valley

The Trent

Winter! All my friends behind the doors of their houses, no one coming out. Home instead of the pub, imagine that, home instead of the pub, who would have thought it would have come to that? The evening was for the pub, that’s how it was, that was how the evening was to proceed. Work, and then the pub for the evening and, likely, the whole night. Work and then pub, the first taste of beer, the first pint going down quickly and the second more slowly. Work, pub, the first pint quickly and the second less so and the third slower still, and after the third a pint of tap water to keep you hydrated.

Work, then pub. Work – everyone has to work – and then the pub. Work, pub, it’s very simple. First of all, work, and then the pub to follow. Around six-thirty: meet at The Trent House at seven. Yes, that’s how it should be, The Trent at seven. The Trent, with its free jukebox, then one pint, see if anyone wants a drink, buy a round of drinks and go back to the table, and then another, bought by someone else, delivered by someone else, drink that, back at the table.

Happiness of the pub! What is life without a pub? First one pint, then another. Conversation: how has the day gone? It was a day like any other, but there are conversations to be had about the day. How I like to listen to other’s stories about their days. I have few stories; I’m quieter. I wait until the innuendo starts, after the third pint. Then I am on home ground. Innuendo: yes, that’s happiness. Quick thought, but thought about nothing in particular and least of all philosophy. That’s the last thing I want to run up against, philosophy. Anything but philosophy. Innuendo, yes, philosophy no.

Three pints and all is well. The world turns around us, but we are at its centre. Three pints of Speckled Hen, and all is well, especially if the barrel is new and the beer is fresh. Three pints, and the world turns around us and we are at the centre. The world turns around us, others join us, but we are already at the centre of the world. Three pints, and I text the ones who are not here, at the pub, I text them: come, come now to the pub, we’re missing you and you’re missing this, the pub, for there is only the pub.

Three pints, a pint of water, and it’s time to text those who are not yet here. Perhaps we can pick them up on our journey to the other side of town to the other pubs. Perhaps we can arrange to meet on the way to the other pubs, in the Ouseburn Valley. For after three pints, it is time to take a journey, not a long journey, to the Ouseburn Valley and to the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley.

The Cumberland

What wondrous pubs are there in the Ouseburn Valley! What happiness there is to be found in the Ouseburn Valley! Past Morrisons, over the roundabout, past the Big Opticians and down the slope to The Cumberland Arms. What happiness to pass through the doors of The Cumberland Arms. My happiest hours are spent there, at The Cumberland Arms. No music except music played by folk musicians. No music except those played in the other bar by the folk musicians. An array of beers, new each time. A new array, new beers to try, each time.

Happiness of new beer! Happiness that there are new beers to try, each time! Spread before us, taps with logos of beers from different breweries. The breweries are old friends. A new beer from Wylams! It must be good. A new beer from Jarrow! It must be good. And it is good. And if it isn’t good, there are always other beers. If one beer isn’t good, you try the beers of your friends, which may well be good. The rule is: never order the same beers. Sip the beer of your friend. Say: mmm, that’s good. Then you can order that beer next time. And they can sip your beer and say, mmm that’s good, and then they can order that beer, next time. There’s always more beer to try. And there’s the cider, too. Prizewinning cider. Prizewinning beer. Always beers and cider, the full array, spread about before you.

Beers, ciders. But my friends are behind their doors tonight. My friends are behind their doors as I am behind my door with my Cava. I am watching a documentary on North Korea with my Cava. I listen to The Fall with my Cava. But it is not the same. There’s only a couple of glasses of Cava, and there are pubs out there, pubs in the winter, pubs in the darkness. For it is dark, and shouldn’t we be in a pub? It is dark, and we should be together in the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley.

Even the words, Ouseburn Valley, lift my soul. What marvellous words: the Ouseburn Valley. What a marvellous name: The Cumberland Arms and The Free Trade Inn. Nothing in life is better than The Cumberland Arms and The Free Trade. What could be better than The Free Trade, with its view of the Tyne. There is the Tyne, there’s town, and you are in the beer garden of The Free Trade. Tyne, town, and you are in The Free Trade, looking at Tyne and town. Looking along the river towards town. Along the river, the lights on the river, the bridges, and town. Along the river, lights on darkness, the bridges across the river, and then town.

The Free Trade

Beer at The Free Trade, in summer, there is nothing better. A sundowner at The Free Trade. And yes, the sun really goes down. The sun really goes down, beyond the Tyne, beyond town. And darkness falls. Darkness falls over the city. Darkness falls, and we are at The Free Trade. Darkness, and The Free Trade is ours, superlative beers, a marvellous view, and, if we want them, baps. Beers, a view, and baps, if we are hungry. Baps, if we are so inclined.

Where else do you go to watch the sun go down but at The Free Trade? There’s the Millenium Bridge, the Sage, where The Fall are playing on Wednesday, and the Tyne. Of course there’s also the pub called The Tyne, just a couple of hundred yards from The Free Trade. A couple of hundred yards down and across from The Free Trade, there’s The Tyne, the pub, that is, and not the river. But there is the Free Trade and then, not too far away, The Cumberland Arms. Cross from one to the other, it doesn’t matter in which direction, from The Free Trade to The Cumberland Arms. Go across, cross from one to another and you are blessed in that crossing. Go across, and the gods are looking down and demigods rain flowers on you. Go across, cross, and all is well in the universe, everything is passing and you are passing. Go across, and the universe, too is passing, everything is passage! You are on the way to The Free Trade from The Cumberland Arms! You are on the way from The Cumberland Arms to The Free Trade!

There is nothing great than this! You are suspended between one great pub and another. From one pub you pass, to another. One pub, then another, first that one, then that one. First The Cumberland Arms, then The Free Trade. Or the other way round, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is more than one great pub. True, there are also The Cluny and The Tyne, but these are not quite as fine. True, there are the other pubs, which are fine enough, but they are only waystations, and we are passing. What matters is passage, and we are passing from one pub to another.  Do you know such happiness? Do you know what the happiness is of passing from one pub to another?

We take newcomers to the city to the Ouseburn Valley. We take them there, it’s our gift. What more is there to give? We take our guests there. We take them to the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley. For it gets no better than the Ouseburn Valley. My Cava has run out, but I am thinking of the Ouseburn Valley. Two glasses of Cava and a handful of peanuts, and I am thinking of the Ouseburn Valley. It’s cold outside, it’s dark, my Cava’s run out, and I think only of the Ouseburn Valley.

The Youngest Day

When did we meet, on what day? And when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? The first time: but did we meet, then? Who met? I’m not sure we met, I’m not sure it happened, but perhaps that non-happening is also our friendship. Perhaps it was the incompletion of what happened then, its failure to come to term, that is the life of our friendship. Or perhaps that is what deprived our friendship of itself, making you less than a friend and our friendship less than friendship.

With you, apart from you, I no longer know what the word friendship meant. Or perhaps I learnt of another sense of that word as friendship seemed to attenuate itself between us, to wear itself to nothing. Perhaps I learnt of what friendship must be, if it is to be anything at all.

But this is not right; I had other friends, and with you, I thought, it was different. Ours was an exceptional friendship, a friendship with the exceptional. But how many times I was disappointed because it was not friendship enough! Perhaps it was the same for you. Then for us both the word friendship echoed in a direction it could not reach. Unless one can learn of friendship by experiencing what it is not and it is when friendship breaks down that it reveals what it is.

What did we share? I remember, then, we disliked the same things, that our retreat pushed us together. I found you outside the house where the party was. No: you found me there. Outside – as I would find you again, on other occasions. In fact, I think whenever we met, by chance or design, it was outside. We were driven outside, each for our own reasons, and that was where we met, and continued to meet.

But now we have made our way in the world; we are settled in our lives, albeit in different parts of the country. I can remember today because I am so far inside – because, now, the life outside has become a spectacle; I remember because I am safe, and will not find myself exiled. And you, what do you remember? You turned to me – a letter would arrive, or the phone would ring – when you were exiled from an affair. Why, with a kind of ceremonialness did I feel I had to seek your blessing when I began a new affair of my own?

Perhaps it is that we need witnesses to our lives, and this is what we are to one another. Witnesses, distant now, but watching still. Distant, but watching with a great and benevolent love. I am here today, tomorrow and the day after that. Constancy: the whole sky – the great night with its stars and contellations, in its great, slow movement. So you to me – so your life moves slowly and vastly like the whole sky. So is your life to me even as it watches me and is turned to me, in its own way. And what is my life to you? A similar sky? A similar turning-as-a-whole, the sky that turns in its entirety?

What is it to live life watched! What it is to have elected a watcher, as I was elected your watcher! But I wonder, still, if this is not too much. It is not that I am watched or that I watch you. What is your life, after all, to me? What do I know of your days and nights, and what do you know of mine? Is it, rather, that your life must be exemplary to me, as one who came in from the outside. That we met when, outside, we had not found a place in the world. That we met so that this same outside would always be between us; that what we shared was just what what we could not share with others. We met outside, and we turn now to the other when we find ourselves close again to the outside.

What is it we share? Each is a sign to the other of the condition that was once their own. And the other to be called forward as witness to that first exclusion, the one that set us apart at adolescence, at the threshold of life. To be called forward by a letter or a phonecall, witness to the bare life that was once ours. But who is called forward as the witness? Not one who lives in the world, who is comfortable there, but the adolescent at the threshold. The outside calls you. Bare life calls to bare life.  I heard your voice on the phone, but what did I hear? I heard myself speak, but who spoke?

When when will it come again, that day when we met for the first time, at the brink of adulthood? On the last day which is also the youngest day, when the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. On that day to come which is also today, the day that does not complete itself today and whose non-completion is our life, our living.

Truancy

At That Time, in That Place

Hesitant speech, speech yet unsure of itself, speech that does not know the decorum of speech, of what might be said and the way it should be spoken: I remember how we spoke, then, as adolescents. I remember a speaking at the brink of itself, a searching-speech which was never resolved, a speech tentative and half-formed, as though it were looking too quickly to clothe its nudity. A speech in which what mattered was not the content of what was said, but the fact of speaking, in which speech, all of speech, spoke of itself.

It was not a matter of personal confession, of anecdote or intimacy. True, there were confidences, that’s how it began; I learnt about you and you about me, we spoke of ourselves in trust and sincerity. But such speech is magnetised by what it would convey; it was not yet indifferent, it did had not come to speak of itself and only of speaking, the fact of speaking; it was not full with the wonder of speech where each word is strange because it is addressed to another, where each word is wondrous because it is unsure as to where it is travelling, and to where it will bear speech and its speakers.

How quickly we wore speech away! Almost at once, there was nothing to say and speech was worn down like a pebble. But that was the condition of speech. It was then, wasn’t it, that speech spoke and we were dispersed even as it seemed we were brought together? It was at that moment, wasn’t it, that speech interceded on its own behalf?

Perhaps this is to idealise what might have been, after all, only fumbling and idiocy. How could we speak, we who were so young? What had we to say, adolescents on the outside, at the brink of life? But what happened, I maintain, did so because of inexperience; inexperience was its condition.

‘But We Never Said Anything’

We never said anything, that’s what you said later. Then, it was though we were present only to accompany speech, to let speech remember itself and lighten itself by passing between us. Yes, it was as though our presence allowed speech to lighten itself, to offer speech a new direction. Curious that we seemed to come to ourselves after everything had been said, that we were always too late.

But what, after all, had been said? We never said anything. That was true; you always seemed comfortable with that silence, though later you told me you were never comfortable. I was always uncomfortable, I tried to say too much, as if ashamed at the nudity of speech. But in a sense, everything had been said, and silence was the speech of what remained.

Sometimes we drank, we took bottles of Thunderbird into the woods. We drank and we were warm by drinking though the woods were full of ice and snow. We drank and it seemed necessary to drink, as if drinking was another way to assist speech. Then there were silences – many times, we walked home in the night without a word spoken between us. Silence – but that was speech; speech happened by our silence.

We never said anything, yes that’s true, nothing was said, speech was worn down, and it was as though everything we’d said and heard had been the river that wears pebbles into roundness. Nothing was said, we never began, because it was as though we came too late and there was nothing left for us to say.

Truancy

Dusk: I would meet you at the roundabout. Dawn: you’d pretend to be staying overnight with a friend and we would go into the wood and through the fields to see the sun rise. And we were together in the day, too, when we bunked off school and went to the woods and drink beer and skim stones across the lake.

What did we seek? Escape – from school first of all, but then from everyone, everyone else. To face one another? No, never that – we walked one alongside the other, we passed through derelict land and the new golf courses, we passed through the new estates and the land reserved to build more estates, we passed through the last woods and the last fields. We went, truants, and bore between us the truancy of speech, speech as truancy, that demanded we pass and always pass.

Later, when we had learned to speak of many of things, we sought to reckon with what we said and did not say then, so many years before. Later we decided to speak of that we had omitted to address then, in the dusk and the dawn and in the days truant from school. We never said anything, you said, but we knew, didn’t we, that speech had happened, even though nothing had been said. We never said anything, you said on the phone.

Lightened Speech

Then, we had used phones then only to convey the minimum of information: let’s meet at X., see you at Y. We had always written, that is true, but only to seek a writing loose enough to let speech speak. How seriously we wrote! But it was not a pretend-seriousness, there was a lightness to speech, we gave speech lightness by giving it another direction. Speech spoke of its lightness by our seriousness. Speech, between us, playing between us, became light even in the seriousness of our words.

I waited for letters from you, and sometimes they would come. I wrote to you, and sometimes you wrote to me, sometimes letters would reach me. But we never phoned, we distrusted phones, for years I never heard your voice, and that was right. We distrusted phones; my voice was too heavy and yours too light, I was too quick to speak and you preferred silence. Letters came, a flurry of correspondence and then nothing. Years passed, but their passing was marked by letters or by the absence of letters.

Later, we decided to reckon with speech, to speak and to meet. Later, when we had learnt a great deal, we thought we’d chase speech down, to track it all the way to the source. I phoned you – or did you phone me? – we spoke, we arranged to meet. Much later, when we were already old, speech laughed and disappeared – how could we expect speech to be punctual? We lost speech by searching for it. We lost what came of itself and by itself, like the deer that crossed the fields before us in the dawn.

We never said anything, you said, but now we said too much and spoke as adults. We never said anything, but that was because we had not learnt to speak, not then, we had not asserted our rights over speech. And today, what is left for us to say? Too much; everything – but now to ‘catch up’ is no longer truancy, no longer our passing from the world.

‘They Hate Us’

Do they hate us? Have they even noticed us? After all, the battle has been won, we’ve been driven out or driven under. The battle won, and they are everywhere and we are nowhere, so why should they hate us? Most are unaware there was even a battle. The takeover happened without appearing as such; the battle was over before they knew it began.

What battle was there, what takeover? There is no one for them to hate, after all, we’ve been driven out or driven under, driven outside or crushed by great wheels. We’re already out, or if we are inside, we are too busy, too wretched, in too marginal a position, they’ve forgotten us, and we’re being crushed by great wheels. What hope is there for us? But there is infinite hope for them; they have won; but the victors have been so victorious they don’t even know there’s been a battle.

What battle?, they say, and blink. Was there a battle? It felt like one, but in truth we were so unmatched to our enemy we hadn’t a chance. Did the enemy notice us as they rolled over us? Or was it that they could only roll thus, that the great wheels must turn thus, and we were only that which was in their way? In truth, they paid no attention to us, we were not worthy of attention. In truth, we were brushed aside as an annoying fly was brushed aside, temporary irritant.

What did they have on their mind? Getting on with business. They were strong and we were weak; what could we say to ourselves but, they hate us. They hadn’t noticed us, we were nothing to them, they were already fearsomely strong, but we said to ourselves, they hate us. The great wheels rolled over us; what else could we say but, they hate us, they sought us out and hunted us down, the great extirpation was systematic, they deliberately drove us to the margins or drove us out, it was their plan from the start. But they didn’t notice us, we were nothing to them, there was no battle, but how could there be when we had no power, no voice.

The great wheels rolled across us as wheels roll. They wheels turned, we were crushed, but they didn’t notice. How could they notice when we were so small and insignificant? They hate us, we said to ourselves. They hate us, which is why they’ve sought us out, but in fact they never sought us out, the wheels turned because wheels turned; they were strong and we were weak, and their strength, which increased daily, meant we could not endure.

Do they hate us? I’ve looked into their inscrutable faces and can see no hate. I’ve looked into their eyes and I see no malice. How soft and pudgy they are! How unstrong they appear! But their softness is a sign of their strength. They can allow themselves to grow soft because of their strength. I do not understand them, but I know there is no hatred, only strength, only certainty. They know the future is theirs. But they with a knowledge that is benign, their sense of their rightness is absolute; they are in possession of the right methods, the right techniques, it is obvious to them. They are on the right path, but for them it is not even a path, it is the broad day, it is the morning of the world, it is the still-new morning. They have the right techniques, but to them they are not even techniques, but the expression of what they are, the gestures closest to them.

How I admire their strength, and how I fear them! How I admire and fear them! I am drawn to them, it is true, I love nothing more than certainty that is unaware of itself, I love those with a sense of the inside and the outside, I love those who can divide night and day. But I fear them, that is also true, and I want to say they hate us, even if that hatred is as vast as their strength, and even if they do not know they hate. I have know them well, have studied under them and worked beside them; I know them and am drawn to them.

What certainty! What direction! What strength! One wheel of the great juggernaut, a forewheel of the great vehicle, part of a vaster ensemble that drives itself across us. A wheel, one wheel of the juggernaut, a plate of the caterpillar tread as it flattens us: they belong to the new industries and the new techniques, they speak of the new world and of the flattening of the old world. What chance could we have?

They hate us, we say to ourselves, but like the juggernaut, the great bulldozer, theirs is the movement forward, theirs is the drive forward, theirs is the expansion to the far limits of the horizon. Who are we to them, unbraced against the future? Who were we, unprepared and dreaming? The battle was over before it began; in their histories they will not remember us. Their histories, the epic poem of their victory will have no room for us. We are forgotten, but in truth, we had never been remembered; no one set their sights on us; no one sought us as a target, we were only part of the foilage, part of the world to be conquered.

In the end, for them, there will never have been a battle, the world was theirs before they noticed it; there was no battle and no frontier, there was only the inside, which was to stretch across the horizon. In the end … but there will be no end, they belong to the morning, they are machines of the dawn, and have only begun, one wheel of the juggernaut, to flatten the world. Where runs the line between inside and outside? For them there is no line, no frontier; there was no enemy. Victory is theirs and it was not even victory. The battle was won, but there was no battle. They hate us, we say, but we were always unnoticed, they looked beyond us, their gaze was fixed on the future.

2.

Ours is a pluralistic tradition, they say, all are admitted, they say. We are tolerant, they say, and all can be admitted. Just speak as we speak, and speak to us. Learn to speak like us, and to speak with us, and you will be admitted. Speak as we speak, learn our tongue, and you will prosper in our kingdom, we’ll make a place for you. Translate yourselves into our tongues, make it so we can understand you, and we’ll give you some room, you’ll decorate our world. Who was not more open to debate than we are? Who was not more welcoming of discussion? We have time, all of time, to walk with one another and to talk. We have all of time, it is still morning, to walk with you and speak. Only learn our language, learn how to speak, and you will be admitted.

For a time, some of us tried to speak, some of us went over to them and tried to speak. They spoke; some went inside, some disappeared there. But the rest of us never learnt to speak; we were too weak. They hate us, we thought, and what chance do we have. They hate us, we thought, and it is not worth our time to learn their language. For how could we make ourselves understood? How when the conditions of the debate were theirs from the start? How when the rules were in their hands, even though they didn’t know the rules were in their hands?

Happy victors who held everything, who possessed everything in their great hands! Happy victors for whom the day was still young and the horizon wide! They hate us, we said, but in truth they were like clumsy beasts who wanted to play with us. They hate us, but they came towards us like great and clumsy beasts who would tear us from themselves as they played with us. They were curious, that was true. They bounded towards us, we were new sport, new curiosity. They were not cruel; there was no hatred in them. They came towards us, curious at their new playmates. But how could we play with them, we for whom it was not a game? How could we but watch as those who played thus were torn apart and scattered to the wind?

There was no hatred in them, that was true, but there was a fearsome strength that was the strength of the whole world. They hated nothing; they were pleasant, amenable, but in truth they were at one with the strength of a new world and with the morning of the world. Conquerers, they didn’t know themselves as conquerers! Conquerers, they didn’t see us as the conquered, as panting and exhausted from the first! They hate us, we said, but we spoke of the hatred their world had for us. They hate us, we said, but it was their language which hated us. How could learn to speak? How could we translate ourselves into the new idiom?

Back and forth they went all day; back and forth, with seminars and colloquia. How busy they were! How feeble we were! Back and forth, busily, they spoke here and spoke there, and invited others to speak here and speak there. How marvellous, that activity! For a time, we tried to imitate them. For a time, we lived by imitation, we tried to do as they did. But the strength failed us; the measure of strength was denied us – were the losers; we had lost and sank down in despair.

3.

The inside was inside and we were outside. It seemed we were inside, but in fact we were outside. In the offices and lecture rooms, we were already outside, we knew we were outside, we were held into the outside everyday. We who had worked ourselves inside, we in fact outside from the first. We who were inside were in fact outside, we belonged outside, we had no place inside.

The inside was inside, the great wheels turned, the juggernaut rolled forward and we saw it brought a whole world. The inside was inside, it sang of itself and perpetuated itself. The inside sang in the podgy faces of our colleagues. How could know their stare but as an accusation? How could we know them but as usurpers? In truth, they had always been there. In fact, they had always been there, the inside had always been the inside.

True, for a time, rules were relaxed and a kind of opening had occurred. For a time, it is true, they allowed others to come, others were allowed to join the party. But those times were passed, those times had already passed. Who were we to think we had a place in the new world? We were men and women of the past; we were men and women of the exception. We did not belong and could not belong, for how could we belong?

They belonged inside and we were outside. They belonged inside and were continuous with the whole history of the inside. Theirs was the inside and they embodied the whole history of the inside, its great tradition. Who were we, who were outside? Who were we, who were the outside inside? Sometimes they would sniff us curiously. What is that smell? they would ask themselves. Sometimes, they would step back, confused: who are they? what is that smell? They would narrow their eyes for a moment, but only for a moment.

The enemy, they thought, who was not even an enemy, was vanquished. The battle, which was not for them a battle, was over long before. They, the new breed, had conquered the world. It was immediate and obvious, it was the air they breathed and the wide morning. What were we to them? What could we be? They passed over us; they ignored us. They were busy with the seminars and colloquia, and who were we to them?

They hate us, we said, but this was a lie even to us. They hate us, but who were we to them? They were on the side of the inside. They were on the inside of the inside, theirs was the kingdom. Inside, they feared nothing, for they brought the inside everywhere, and what had they to fear?

4.

Slowly our last strongholds fell. Slowly, the last kingdoms fell. Some were conquered by a show of arms – just a show, that was enough. Some converted, some went over to the inside, even though they would always remain outside inside. Some, exhausted, dispersed to the four winds. Slowly we lost the battle, but was there even a battle? And what did we embody, we who were outside? What was it we were to defend, what tradition was ours?

Only pathos was left to us. Only a feeling of defeat and strangulation. Only pathos was ours. Only the pain-filled knowledge that the inside had confirmed itself as it had always confirmed itself. Only the pain-drenched knowledge that the inside was at one with the tradition of our country and that nothing had changed in that tradition. Who were we to think we could change anything? Who were we, outsiders, who thought we could change anything. The inside confirmed itself; the law confirmed itself. The inside was the inside, and we were the outside. The inside rolled its great wheels across us and broke us.

Some of us were grateful to be so broken. How they had hated themselves! Now was the judgement enacted. Now was it passed, the great sentence, in the juggernaut which broke their backs. And the rest of us? We were too weak for hatred. Too weak but to say, they hate us. Too weak but for that to be our mantra, they hate us, as if they had noticed us. For what had they noticed? Who were we, such that we could be noticed? Laughter. Laughter of the whole day. Who were we, after all, to be noticed? And with our last breath, we breathed – for how hard it was not to be noticed, never to have been acknowledged as an obstacle or an enemy – they hate us.

The Last Neanderthals

What happened to the last Neanderthals, driven to the edges of Europe by the new breed? What happened to them, cave-dwellers, driven to their caves west of the invaders? They knew they did not belong and could not belong; they knew the world was not theirs. They were not hunted to extinction, I know that, but died of shame. No one tormented them, the new breed were kindness itself, bursaries were offered and scholarships set up, but the Neanderthals knew they were not for them, and that to take them was to die of shame. For all that, they still died, ashamed by their heavy brows and brutishness. They died even as the world was offered to them. They died because of that same offer, because of the shame in their hearts as they knew they were unmatched to the world, that nothing was possible for them, that their old lives had fallen away and the new breed was coming.

But they also knew, as they died of shame, that their successors, too, would one day die of shame. They knew the new breed would become the old breed and there were others on the way. And it is true, with our apish nostrils we can smell the change in the air, we sense what they, the new breed, cannot sense. A change is on the way, and as we are excluded, so they shall be excluded. A change is coming, the new breed beyond their breed has set out to find them. Will it always be like this, succession and annihilation? Will they always be be coming, the breed beyond the new breed? Will we always be outdated, we who are driven to the West, to the edge of Europe? They will come as they always came, with new skill-sets and new enthusiasms; they will come with a new sense of project and possibility; they come – faster than before, always more keen and eager than before, always wanting to involve us and to include everyone.

But don’t they understand that by their coming they condemn us to death? Isn’t their cruelty clear to them, they who come with their new enthusiasms? The day spreads all around us; we are comfortable here. We live and die beneath the wide sky. But the edge of our world is trembling; a new epoch is beginning and it will reach us even here. The old world is rotting and the new world is coming. The old world rusts but the new world will regenerate us. The unregenerated will be regenerated, the new world is opening. But how can we be regenerated? How will acquire knew knowledges and new skillsets? There will be courses, we know that. There will be fees and bursaries to help us, we know that. There are funds set aside for the transition, schemes to get the sick and the tired back to work, we are assured of that. The leaflets are dropping through our letterboxes. A new world, all of us, black and brown and yellow and white, in the pages of the leaflets.

But where are we in the leaflet pages? Where are the unregenerated, with their heavy brows and dangling arms? Where are the Neanderthals in the pamphlet pages? What will become of our swamps and still water? What will happen when they drain our marshes? Only the Neanderthal knows of the distance from instant to instant. Only the Neanderthal knows of the space which stretches between intervals and of a whole life as an interval. Only the Neanderthal knows interval-space and interval-time, of the holes in space and time that are like the gaps between the arches of the railway bridge.

How can we explain our anachronism to the new breed? How can we speak of days and nights beneath time? What do we know of the new, we who are barely our own contemporaries? What can we know of initiatives and certainty, we who barely coincide with ourselves? How can we tell them that today, for us, is never yet today? How can we explain that we are not here, we who face them, that our gaze wanders elsewhere, that our souls are lost over swampy marshes? How will they understand our magma, our indetermination, and how each bleeds into each, how each of us is everyone and no one, how each Neanderthal speaks for all and for no one and yet not even of himself?

Laughter as our names are called and we step forward. Laughter as we pass along the corridor to the interview room. Why bother with us? Don’t you see it? We’ll die of shame soon enough, but meanwhile midges buzz inside our heads and mosquitos hatch in our heart. Why bring us here? Why call our names, we who were never anyone at all? Why when our names let speak who we are not? Laughter in our dull heads as we fill out your forms. What has this to do with us? It’s over, you win, it’s finished. We’ll make way, we’ll die soon, we know that, but why don’t you know it? Look at us – we are the old breed, and you are the new breed. Look at us – there is an absolute distance, an absolute divide. Our heads are buzzing and our hands are trembling.

The great stagnancy! What will they know of that, the new breed? How certain they are, how keen. But one day a newer breed will come and the margin they occupy will become infinite. One day, the breed beyond them will come and the rustbelt they occupy will divide time and divide space, setting each apart from themselves. One day, they will come, the new breed and turn the pages of their flipcharts before you in small classrooms. One day you will sit as we sit, mute and incomprehending, your attention dispersed, your focus lost, as the new breed tell you about the new world.

The Outsiders

1.

Don’t give us a thing, we won’t be grateful. Don’t give us anything, we’ll spit it back in your face. There’s no point in bringing us into the fold, we don’t belong there. You mean well, you’d like to bring us in, you’d like to make it less exclusive, but really there’s no point, as we don’t belong inside. You are generosity itself, you want to help, to open things up, to allow a new group of people to get in, but it’s a bad idea, we don’t belong there, we’d only spoil things for you, we’d only throw what you give us back in your face, we’d only resent you for what you tried to do.

You say you want nothing from us, but in fact you want a great deal. You say we can come in just as we are, but you know, don’t you, that we don’t belong inside, but should stay outside, with our own kind. You want nothing from us, we can come as we are, but we belong outside, not inside, and to join you would mean we’d have to give up too much, because we’d have to give up everything we are.

You say nothing need change, that we are welcome as we are, that we bring our own insights, our own perspective, that this is valuable, this is already a contribution, but don’t you understand that this same insight, this same perspective is what confirms for us that we do not belong inside? You tell us it is about inclusivity, about new voices and fresh perspectives, but don’t you see that as soon as we cross the threshold our perspective is no longer fresh and that our voices are no longer new?

You want to include us, it is true, and we appreciate the gesture, but if we accepted we’d come to resent you, it would lead inevitably to resentment. At first, it is true, we appreciated your generosity, we liked the gesture, but really you shouldn’t give us a thing, we won’t be grateful, we’ll spit it back in your face. Because on the one hand, there is your generosity, your desire to do good, to include us at last, to take account of us at last, and on the other, there is the impossibility of taking account of us, the impossibility of admission. On the one hand, your generosity and on the other hand, our ungenerosity, on the one hand your grace and on the other, our resentment, our hatred.

True, some of us may look like we’ve fitted in, some of us, like well-trained apes, may look as though we belong, but this is only because we wanted to escape unemployment and temporary work, only because we wanted a resting place to draw breath and look around and see where we were. But how can this last when we know we do not belong, that the inside is the inside and the outside is the outside, and no one should have brought us in, no one should have granted us admission? How when the inside is there precisely to keep us out, when the inside defines itself by our exclusion, when the very sense of the inside depends on our being outside?

2.

The inside is inside and the outside is outside, this was how it always was, until that period, which thankfully is nearly over, when a few of us from the outside were brought inside. Yes, there was the inside and the outside, it was as it always was but for those few of us who were admitted, who were allowed to come in, though it was clear we did not belong, who were invited in and for whom place was made. Yes, there was a change in the academy, for a time the rules changed, we were sought after, and we were supposed to bring a fresh perspective to the academy, to open things up and we were welcome for that reason.

Why didn’t they understand it would poison them, those who were inside, and poison us, who were made to come from the outside to the inside? Why didn’t they understand that they offered us would taunt us, that what they gave we would throw back immediately, that we would only resent them for their kindnesses, for the grants they gave us? Why didn’t they understand we accepted the invitation only to pause, only to rest and catch our breath, and that as soon as we did, resentment would fill us and we would resent what we had been given and those who gave it to us?

Worst was that while we’d lived in ignorance of our exclusion, now we were aware of it, now that awareness was all there was. Worst that we knew our exclusion even as we were included, we knew our exclusion by way of that inclusion. Now the way in was the way out; the place of repose was exposed on four sides to the outside, there was only the outside into which we were held even though we were inside. For a time we were resentful, we hated everything, but over time, resentment fell away from us. Even resentment was impossible. We carried the outside with us, even here. Even inside, there was the outside, and here more than ever.

For a time, we consoled ourselves by imitating others, we would write articles and books, we could teach like the others and administer like the others. For a time, we were content to imitate others, content to do as others did, even though we knew for all that we were still apes, even though our labours were bent on imitation. But we knew one day that the ruse would be up, our imitation would be revealed for what it is, for what were our books and articles compared to the ones of those who belonged inside? Yes, for a time, it may have appeared we had promise, that we were producing interesting work, but one day we knew the game would be up, it would come to an end, we would be revealed for what we are, it would be revealed to us, as if for the first time, that we did not belong, that the inside was inside and we belonged outside.

How could it be otherwise? If it was by a kind of mistake we found admittance, that mistake would reveal itself to us, and to us first of all, we would know our station was ours only by mistake, and that the position in which we found ourselves was above all not ours, that it could not be ours.

How could it be otherwise? They knew as we did not know how to write and how to speak, they knew how to dress and how to hold doors open for others, they knew how to eat in public and how to drink in public, they knew what to say and what not to say, they knew how to walk without loping, they knew how to show polite interest and involve others, they knew how to speak in complete sentences, they knew all of this without knowing it, it was clear to them without their ever being aware of its clarity, except when, perhaps, we so obviously failed to dress properly and to hold doors open for others, except when our guard was down and we failed to show polite interest and to involve others, except then when we fell short of what had been asked of us, when we came up against the limits of our capacity to imitate, except when our apishness was revealed for what it was – then, perhaps, they knew what we were not and what they possessed, then, with disappointment, they had to admit the experiment was a failure and we had disappointed them, that it had been impossible from the first and we had no chance of fitting in.

They knew then, our benefactors, what they possessed and we did not possess, they knew what was theirs by birth and what was not theirs by birth, knew what they had, our benefactors, without knowing that they had it. Yes, they saw how every line we wrote and every line we read confirmed our non-belonging, that everything we read and everything we wrote confirmed what we were not and could not be.

Our feeble talk of ethics-and-politics was only our way of carving our name on the great edifices of culture; our half-Marxism was only our way of scrawling a resentful little signature across those great, beautiful edifices, whose beauty, in truth, we admired and aspired to, but that we could only spoil with our apish hands as soon as we tried to add our names to the great lists of professors and readers and senior lecturers, to those oeuvre-builders, to those of long careers and lengthy schooling who had all of Western culture at their beck and call.

How could we add our nasty little scrawl to that long list of professors and readers and senior lecturers? How could we add our resentful mark to those who by their modesty and meticulousness, had built great oeuvres? How could we think our portraits would join the portraits of others who worked patiently and meticulously, who worked step by patient step, pausing to make sure the first step was taken, that a step was secure, before a second step was taken?

In truth we who were once too wild, would be shown by our portrait to be only dull-eyed apes, diminished beasts. How difficult it was for us to cross from instant to instant! How difficult to muster our thoughts! We were scattered across the day, our attention was caught and held by a million things, our apish attention was hypnotised by our many tasks and we conserved nothing of our strength. How disappointing we were to our benefactors! How ashamed they were of the way we turned out! They gave up and turned from us; our office doors went unopened and we laboured in obscurity. Years passed in dust and darkness.

3.

The cleverest among us, the most cunning, argued our benighted position was everything, that our entrapment was also the condition of our release, the promise of our freedom. The cleverest supposed this promise lay in our forced apishness, in the imitation by which we lived; that ours was a position of critique, that we exposed the great lie for what it was, that ours was the living refutation of the great lie of the academe. Apes emailed apes, apes phoned other apes and for a while, a new excitement was felt: perhaps ours was the position from which something could be born, perhaps we, who had fallen so far below need, who remained outside, could draw on a freedom that was uniquely ours. The academe would have failed in us, it would have come to an end with us, that was our ethics-and-politics, that was our chatter of ethics-and-politics and the coming revolution.

But what we possessed we did so because of our weakness and because of our failure. What we had we had by way of weariness and boredom, and we lost it by way of weariness and boredom. Failure did not become victory, weakness did not become strength and we apes stopped emailing one another and greeting one another, and withdrew into mute apishness and mute despair. We hadn’t the strength, we hadn’t the initative. Who would rise from our ranks and lead us when our positions were so precarious and our contracts so short? Sometimes resentment would cross our faces, sometimes wildness would fill our eyes, but we were tame apes, and we dreamt not of the savannah, but of the books we would write in imitation of others.

Waiting for the Auditors

They are coming from the future, the auditors, prepare for them. They are coming, the auditors, turn your faces to the future. Soon, they’ll come, the auditors, the new barbarians. Soon, they’ll sweep over us, the auditors who have come from the future, soon from the future, they will come, the auditors, the new barbarians. They are coming, feared or unfeared, from the future.

The auditors are coming; be ready, ready your paperwork. The auditors approach, as they are always approaching. A surprise audit, a challenge audit, can happen at any moment; be vigilant. At any moment, a surprise audit, watch out, keep your paperwork prepared, ready it each day, make it ready at each hour of the day.

They are coming; your paperwork is vulnerable. Above all, what is written is vulnerable; what is said does not matter, what is written matters. They are coming, the future is bringing them, they will reach you from the future, so make sure your paperwork is in order, make sure everything you do is written down, make sure everything you write is written down.

The future belongs to auditors. The auditors are coming in great droves. We do not know what they’ll do. We don’t know what they are thinking. We have guidelines, it is true, but auditors are unpredictable.

They are coming, the auditors. From the future, they will come, the auditors, the marauders. Theirs is your paperwork. It is theirs from the start. Theirs are your minutes and your reports. There is no such thing as a private set of minutes; there is no such thing as a private report.

Coming, from the future, the auditors. Be ready. Prepare yourself, prepare your paperwork. When you meet them, be bullish, be upfront. Admit to no error, admit to no defeat. Show you’re prepared to learn, that’s important. Show you’re ready to learn, but admit no defeat. Show you’re ready to listen, but that you will not be pushed around. But in truth you have already been pushed around. In truth, you were pushed around from the first.

Quality is on their minds, the marauders. Every loop must be closed, they will search for open loops. Your paperwork is vulnerable, it is your soft and vulnerable flesh stretched out. Your paperwork is the sail spread and vulnerable, for the auditors can blow up a storm.

Be ready. Be prepared, spread your sail, but make sure it is patched up and enduring. Spread it wide, catch the breeze, but be prepared for the audit-storm, the storm of barbarians and marauders. Be ready, learn what you can of their language. Brace yourself against the future, catch the wind but not the storm.

Quality is all, quality is the sole measure, all is quality, the sun, the moon, the seas, your vessel: all is made of quality, everything is quality, and quality is assured. The cosmos is quality and asks to be assured. In the beginning, there was quality, and quality must be assured.

The loops must be closed, no that. Every quality loop must be closed, and nothing must escape. Quality must feed itself, it must flow, Ourobos, into itself, conserving itself. Quality circulates and returns to itself. Quality steers the moon’s orbit and the earth’s orbit, quality is the force that binds the sun to the galaxy and the galaxy to the core. Quality is cosmic or it is nothing at all.

Do not ask them to define quality. Do not ask for a definition. Do not press them, like Socrates, for a definition. They will only be able to gesture. They will only be able to say, quality is excellence, and excellence is quality. They will be able to speak only in great tautologies. For quality cannot be defined, just as excellence cannot be defined. They escape us; they belong to the gods. But even the gods are audited; even Poseidon is subject to quality reviews. The highest gods are audited by higher gods; and those higher gods, in turn, are audited by the cosmos itself. And who audits the cosmos? It is auditing; the audit audits, it gives auditing: formulations difficult because auditing does not give itself up all at once. Difficult formulations because there is something which withdraws at the heart of auditing, which allows the essence of auditing to be forgotten. But what is it that allows this essence to be forgotten thus? What, in auditing, hides the essence of auditing?

They come, the auditors, but even they do not understand auditing. They come to us, the auditors, but they are only its agents. Perhaps, beyond them, there are quality-mystics, great quality-seers and quality-prophets who look into the future and find quality there. Perhaps, at the heart of the Quality Assurance Agency, there are the great bodies similar to those of the Guild Navigators in Dune. Perhaps, half-blind, half deaf, but with great and swollen bodies, these quality-navigators steer the Quality Assurance Agency on its great path. Perhaps in their blindness, in their deafness, they steer the Quality Assurance Agency and steer us all on our celestial voyage.

The auditors are only agents of auditing, its minions, its worshippers. The auditors are only the servants of the audit, and are far from its heart. For the essence of auditing is nothing auditological. Its essence is such that it hides itself; it withdraws, even as its withdrawal is forgotten. Only a great seer, a prophet can know this withdrawal and speak of it to others. Alas, it is closed to us who know only the traces of this withdrawal as it reaches us in the vast forms we have to fill in and the reports we have to write. Alas, we do not know it, we can discern – but only in our greatest strength, our greatest ardency – the traces left by auditing. What would it be to stare the audit in the face? What glory! What roaring! But in truth, whoever sees the essence of the audit dies. In truth, no one can approach.

They have come, the auditors, and all around us is ruin. They have come, the auditors, the storm, and have left us with ruins. They have come like a great force, a great hurricane, and our ship is torn and leaking. Truly we tried to prepare our vessel for the storm. How we tried to make it firm, to repair any leaks! But we were vulnerable, our paperwork was vulnerable, we knew that. Our sails spread to catch the wind were what exposed us to the full force of the stream.

Be careful, voyagers on the high seas of quality. Be careful, you who cast out from a port and venture into the high seas, you great sails of paperwork spread to catch the wind. Caution, voyagers, look forward, know that a storm can come out of nowhere, know that surprise audits are now possible. Prepare, oh voyagers, mend your sails, go over them, inspect them to the neglect of everything else. What does teaching matter? What do students matter? For nothing matters that is not written down. Nothing matters that is not quantifiable.

A smile is not quantifiable; the time you give is not measurable. The time you are given, the time you give is not measurable, so do not give time. No smiles, no time given, for all time is the audit’s and all smiles must be smiled at the audit. Give no time; take it – take time and give it back to the audit. Take time from teaching, take time from teaching preparation, take the time you had to speak to a student you bumped into in the corridor and give it back to the audit. For time is what has to be taken back from your teaching, from teaching preparation, from anything that cannot be measured and written down.

Do not give time, be wary of giving time and those who would take time from you. For in truth, they are taking time from the audit, they are stealing the valuble minutes of the audit, they are preventing your from closing quality loops. Keep time, hoard time, take back a little surplus-value of time each day to feed to the audit and to quality. Do not give time, give nothing, but take time back, give the minimum and take time back. Take it back to go over your paperwork, take it back to prepare your reports, take it back to go over your minutes, for everything must be ready, do you understand?

The auditors are coming, and I’m afraid. I heard rumours, we are next, the auditors are coming, and I fear we are not ready. A storm is brewing; the distant sky is black, and it is from there they will come, the auditors. I am frightened. I fear for myself and for the others around me. I fear our vessel is not strong enough. We must tighten up the operation, I tell the others. Continual monitoring, continual inspection, we must be ready. Look to your paperwork, comrades, for that’s all that matters. Look to your paperwork, inspect your paperwork, scrutinise your paperwork, for that is what counts, and nothing else counts. If it isn’t written down, it does not count. If it can’t be quantified, proved and written down it does not matter.

Brace yourself, comrades, for they are coming, the auditors. Do not ask, why us?, do not ask, why did we deserve it?, for it was written that they could come and they are coming. It is fate, comrades, in truth, they were always coming and were coming from the first. Our fate, comrades, our destiny to brace ourselves against the coming storm. Be upfront and bullish, comrades, admit nothing. Be upfront and proactive, colleagues, look to your paperwork, give evidence of your vigilance. Give evidence that every quality loop will be closed.

Will I be strong enough? Will I be ready? I am drooping, comrades, help me up. I am afraid, comrades, for they are coming, the auditors, and I cannot understand their language. Help me, comrades, I pray to you, stand with me, hold me up, tilt up my chin so I confront the storm. Mind not my tears, comrades, mind not my protests, for they are coming and it is inevitable.

In my heart, I am afraid. In my heart, I know I care too little for quality and too much for everything else. My heart droops, I am weak, for I know there are others who speak the language of quality better than I, others, time-stealers, who can prepare without distraction! My eyes burn, comrades, but I am not ready. I am bent over my report each evening, comrades, but I am not ready. Teaching, comrades, what is that? It’s forgotten, comrades, everything is forgotten, everything forgets itself except for the audit. There is only forgetting and the audit, which is why everything has to be written down. Then at least there will be writing, forgetting and the audit.

Leave nothing to chance. Look to your paperwork, write, write, because otherwise it will be forgotten, otherwise we’ll have only our memories to rely upon, which are growing weaker by the day, for who can remember anything except that the auditors are coming. Write! Set it all down! Then at least there will be something that remembers, even if it is not us. Write, and what we write will remember for us. Write, and our reports will keep memory in our place, the archive will live as we will not. Write, above all write, set it down, let there be proof, let there be records. Nothing must be left to chance, for chance is on the auditor’s side, chance is what they possess, not us, initiative is theirs, not ours, for they can come at any time, the auditors, and they are coming.

Write, let there be writing, that is all initiative leaves to us, our freedom is only freedom to write and prepare, chance is theirs, time is theirs, they have everything we lack except our writing. Even they, the auditors, depend on our writing. True, they will pass quickly through our paperwork. True, they will pass quickly like a horde of locusts. How quickly they can read! How practised they are, how ready! They will read in the base room, and we will wait outside. In the base room they will read and we will wait, outside. Imagine them tearing open each box and opening each file! Imagine their eyes passing down our minutes and reports! I shudder, but I know the chance of such paperwork is their gift to us. I tremble, but such paperwork is the chance they give us, we are allowed at least this chance, this opportunity.

It is said that whoever sees the audit dies. I am dying, comrades, but not because I’ve seen the audit, but because I fear it will see me. Audit, eye, you sweep the horizon. Audit, I know you are staring up at me from my paperwork. Audit, I know you will see us in the eyes of the auditors. The all-seeing, all-knowing eye sees all, and all wither. Truly the eye of the audit sees all and measures all, truly this eye, this single, glaring eye, ever vigilant and never sleeping knows the measure and worth of all things.

We have spread our sails, comrades, and that’s all we can do. In truth, they must always be spread, must always be braced, for time is the auditors’ and chance is the auditors’ and we have nothing but our paperwork. Tonight, comrades, I do solitary vigil on the deck of our ship. You are asleep, but I am awake, as I know the audit is awake and watching me. Strange comfort, knowing it is out there, and I am seen! I am writing, it is true, but this is not a report. Is this permitted? I am seen; the audit-eye is watching me, and unlike Winston Smith I know there is no hiding place. Permit me this small writing, audit. Give me this small stretch of time, this midnight vigil. For tomorrow is the day you might come.

The Unregenerated

Old Europe

The welfare state recedes and we are beached on the great shore of the future. We are deprived of our element, our milieu. What are we to do now, on the new shore? What can we achieve, we who are stranded in the new world, in New Europe? New buildings are going up, but not for us. The rust belts are being regenerated, but not for us. How can we afford to live in the new buldings? How could we buy a flat in the regeneration zone?

We are the dross of the new world. They should leave us lying here on the shore, beached whales, creatures grown fat on the welfare state, creatures who passed through the great oceans of unemployment! It is a distant memory, but once they paid our housing benefit and our council tax. Once, but this is a long time ago, we were given an allowance for a cooker, for a television. Once, there was the fortnightly trip to the dole office for our unemployment benefit.

It wasn’t called Jobseeker’s Allowance, not then. Unemployment – the un was privative, but we experienced it as liberation. Unemployment, unemployed – we had broken ourselves from the world of the employed, we were cast adrift, but they made sure we had a fridge and a telephone. Cast adrift, but for our fortnightly giro and our rates relief and our housing benefit. Some of us were on the sick, some of the dole. But all of us went unnoticed under the same indifferent skies. Some of us cycled, some walked. Sometimes we gathered at the cafe in the sun. But that was before the regeneration. That was before they tore up the cafe and the squats and a new world was made.

What did we do in those long afternoons? Time was propitious; we had been given time, great swathes of time on the condition that nothing could begin. Time gave us everything because it was not yet itself, because we damned up something of time for ourselves.

Together we ate and drank in the sun. There were many of us, then. Many, because we hadn’t been picked off by the regeneration companies and the new supermarkets. What it was to walk the scruffy pavement by tower blocks that belonged in East Germany! What it was to lose oneself in the alleyways that resembled the great concrete labyrinths of Warsaw! We were lost, we knew that, but we had lost ourselves, and lived in squats in buildings long due for demolition.

Sometimes, it is true, the planners would come and squint upward at the towers. Sometimes plans for demolition would be announced, but it never happened. The city council was never organised enough. The Labour councillors were busy squabbling. The wrecking balls never came, and we were happy, rats in the maze, rats who’d lost themselves in long afternoons and winter sun. We hated politicians; but we could do – this was the time of Thatcher and Major. We hated them, but it was a casual hatred, one taken for granted. It was the backdrop of our lives, that hatred. It was diffused everywhere and we all agreed: Thatcher was the devil, Major was the devil’s accomplice. Happy alibi of hatred! Happy excuse for a life suspended!

In the long afternoons we read alone and came together at the cafe. Years passed that way. Years passed, one after another. A fortnightly cheque; our rates paid and our housing benefit paid, what more did we want? At that time, one spoke of structural unemployment. At that time, it made sense for some of the population to be permanently unemployment. True, we were not emburdened with children; we were still young; we were not like the miners who’d lost their livelihood, their way of life. In truth, ours was already a way of life. The long afternoon, discounts on cinema tickets and performances at the theatre, cheap bars and clubnights in condemned buildings.

Yes, ours was a lifestyle. Years passed; we read, we ambled, we cycled to and fro, we sat in the cafe in the sun. Those times will be forgotten, we know that. The long afternoon of Europe will be forgotten. Old Europe’s last summer.

Nothing stopped in ’97, the Labour victory. ’97 accelerated the change. Down came the towerblocks, down the condemned buildings. No longer was the city council lost in arguing with itself. Regeneration began; new European money came to our deprived area. Never mind us, the deprived who were happy in our deprivation. Orange-bricked housing appeared. The tower blocks disappeared, the condemned buildings disappeared and now spread estates of orange-bricked housing and the new supermarket.

What had happened? We were offered council housing, but away from the regeneration zone. We were to be dispersed, scattered to the four winds. We had lived there, we’d thought it wouldn’t change, we were happy in the rust belt and would have populated it until eternity, but it was changing around us. It changed, we did not change. We were rusting. Investment poured in to the rust-zones where we lived and we were moved away. Orange-bricked houses everywhere. Identical orange-bricked houses, decent accommodation, nothing to object to, everywhere. Not council accommodation, but private accommodation everywhere. Not for those who wanted a council flat, but for private owners and private investors.

House prices were low, it was said, but they were not low. Investors snapped them up, it was said, and the rents were driven up. How could we afford to live there? The regenerated world was not for us. Gently curving streets. Nothing above two stories. An orange-brick community centre. The cafe rehoused in an orange-bricked complex. The message was clear: leave. We left, what choice did we have? We were scattered to the four winds.

New Europe

Time began again. We’d lived outside of time, but now time recovered its direction. A new purpose filled the world, we could smell it. A new purpose, but not for us. European money, but not for us. Regeneration, but not for us. Now something else changed: a kind of despair descended upon us. We read, it is true, but there was no cafe at which we could meet. No cafe, no cheap pub. The old pub, all concrete and barbed wire, was demolished. A new orange-bricked leisure complex appeared in its place. A complex for those who lived in the new houses, and who shopped at the new supermarket.

Cycle lanes were painted on the roads and the new bikes appeared. Not the wrecked racers we used to cycle, not battered old machines with a rusty lock, but the new bikes, the hybrids and mountain bikes, with yellow-jacketed riders. With flashing rear lights and flashing front lights and yellow-jacketed and behelmeted riders. How efficient they looked! How purposeful! Even going about their leisure, they were purposeful! These are the new Europeans, we thought. We are the old Europeans. These are the new breed, the bargain city-break breed, the mountain-cycling-in-the-city breed, the property-investing breed, and we are the old breed. They’re probably scanning the new European countries in search of property bargains right now. They’re probably surfing on the net to find the new property bargains in Estonia, in Lithuania. They’re probably anticipating new E. U. member states in whose property they can invest.

New Europe was all around us, efficient and gleaming. New Europe was the new leisure complex, the new supermarket. And who were we? Perhaps we are the last of Old Europe, we thought. Perhaps Old Europe ended with us, we thought. Perhaps Old Europe was the secondhand paperbacks we exchanged. It was the compilations we made on cassette for one another. It was Gang of Four and The Raincoats. It was The Fire Engines and Magazine. It was Kafka and Canetti. It was that great tide of records and books on which we were borne.

Who wasn’t in a band? Which of us hadn’t moved here because of the example of bands that had come together from the long term unemployed? Who amongst us didn’t dream of being coalesced in this way, of finding ourselves in a band? Now you studied music technology at college. To be a musciain was a profession like any other: you were taught, there were lectures and modules. You were taught; everything could be taught; everything was a skill, and every skill was part of a skillset and the skillset was to be acquired to broaden your skills portfolio. Nothing was to be left to chance, we were all accountable. We were sent on training courses; we learnt what kind of people we were: motivators, team-players, facilitators or leaders. We learnt about quality and quality management. 

Slowly, before us, new Europe was opening, and we were invited to join the new Europe. Slowly, around us, a new world was opening, where everything could be taught, could be broken down into a school, where there was to be no drifting, no time unaccounted for, nothing that could not be gauged, measured and improved. All was optimisation, all was movement. Training was all; preparation was all. We were made ready, were braced for the new world. This will be a 24-hour city, we were told. Investment will stream through the city, they said, and it was already true. The old warehouses in the city were transformed. A new bar had been built in the wasteground beneath the railway arches.

The world was changing, and we were to be fitted to the new world, our skills would mesh with the skills required. Our skill sets would lock into those our employers would want. We learnt of our transferrable skills, of our skills portfolio. We learnt to construct a CV and to draft a letter of application. In truth we had been mobilised, we were part of the great mobilisation. Everything was ready, the world was ready, the city was ready. But we were already tired. How could Old Europe become New Europe? How could our bodies become New European bodies?

Our Old European heads ached; our Old European eyes were glazed over. The future had come; we were redundant in advance. The future was here, the city gleamed, and we were the dross of the past. How we prayed for a new recession! How we cried for a new wave of redundancies! Let’s go back to the rust belt. Let’s find a bolthole and settle there for the decade. Let’s find a small room to read our old paperbacks! But no sooner had we found another part of town than it was regenerated. Wherever we went, regeneration followed.

The more resourceful among us entered bids for community regeneration and art projects. The quicker and more able were able to seize and make good on some of the new funding opportunities. Community arts! Community projects! Oh dizzying activity! Oh new world, built with European money! All hail the new world, built with money from New Europe! Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the future broke over our tired bodies. We lay on the shore and the future broke over us. Here was the future, but not for us. Here was New Europe, but not for us.

[K-Punk has an interesting follow up. I’ve opened a new category to explore this topic further.]