‘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.]

Thrashing on the Line

The Voice

Come close to someone and they may speak to you in the voice in which they speak to themselves. That voice, never heard out loud, by which they goad and orient themselves – allowing them to press forward or sink back, to strive for something or to give up. Come close to another, and you’ll hear it, that secret voice in which they speak to themselves.

This is the way to learn what another is like. Live close to them, live alongside them, and even if you dislike them, that voice will let speak the integrity of their lives, the way it binds itself together. But also that which that life seeks to bind itself against – you’ll learn what threatens them, and how they have made their way through the world.

Perhaps this is why Kafka and his father were set against one another: the father let the son hear the voice which allowed him to lift himself from peasantry. And what a voice! So savage and so raw! Kafka’s voice was different; perhaps you could say it had been claimed, that it was literature’s – only it was Kafka who claimed himself for literature. It was he who set aside, with a determination that was the echo of his father’s, a few hours each night, to write.

Each night, every night, he would experience the claim of what claimed him, reaffirming it in turn. He heard a voice, but it was one which said nothing. A voice as privation, to which he joined his own voice that we hear sometimes in his letters. He said to himself – but also to literature, for what was he, as he asked Felice, apart from literature? -: I will set the hours aside for writing. I will wait for writing and write as I wait.

But what voice was it that told him to put aside The Trial and then The Castle? Perhaps it was literature’s voice again, this time saying: do not trust false idols, not even those I, literature, allow you to make. So the peculiar demand to cease work. So the manuscripts disappeared into the drawer and he sought to follow other stories across the days and nights.

Monologers

It is true, much to R.M.’s consternation, that I like very much to hear the voices of others. Nothing better than the pub in which others speak in great gales and floods. Marvellous to hear long anecdotes and long thoughts-out-loud. Then does something emerge that is new, because it does not come from me.

I hear it then, another’s voice, the one that would direct their life. I hear it: not fate, exactly, nor necessity, but a sign of that freedom which runs up against fate. The voice which says: I will make myself; I will make something of myself. Which lets speak that self-relation by which each of us lifts ourselves above the given.

Wonderful to be close to the voice as it knits life together. To be there as what is spoken turns round that self-relation which makes of life a coming back to oneself, a movement of return. Yes, that is what is common to my friends: the capacity to speak, the capacity for certainty. And I, who am uncertain, am caught in the great movement of their return to themselves, the sweep of their voice.

But what of those who cannot speak thus? What of the ones whose voice never raises itself against the hand they were dealt?

The Ones We Left Behind

As a child, to come across a new housing estate on our bikes was infinitely exciting. Another world, another labyrinth of roads and paths: where had we found ourselves? Perhaps there would be other children like us. Other children on other bikes in houses much like our own. Joy that our lives were doubled thus! Joy at the vastness of the world!

When we were older, those same housing estates trapped us. One after another, from here to eternity – who wouldn’t feel trapped? It was time to move away. Our friends who stayed drifted into drugs. Work, then drugs in the evening. Work all week, and drugs at the weekend. They were either doped or speeding, one or the other. That’s how they accommodated themselves to those estates and to the vastness of suburbia.

What, after all, were they to do? In the end, there was no rebellion, only accommodation. They adjusted themselves to life; they were reconciled to it. The voice that spoke to them was capital’s voice; it supplanted their own. With what voice did they speak, the ones who’d hollowed out their adolescence? The same as the one I heard in the alcoholics I would come to know – one that lacked itself, that had withered from itself. And in the end, like the alcoholics, it was as though they were possessed, those friends. Only now it was capital that spoke in them, not the bottle. It was capital that spoke and stared through their eyes.

Oily Fish

What happened to those friends of ours? Nothing happened; years passed, they are still there. And what has happened to us, who were able to lift ourselves from that place and go elsewhere? I admit I feel guilty about the voice in which I speak to myself, and that sometimes I hear when talking to those close to me. Yes, there is guilt, which is why I like to hear others speak, and not myself. For who am I to speak?

You were a dominant child, says R.M. looking at an old photograph album at my parents’ house. Dominance – it’s true I wanted to achieve something, to make something, but what? I never saw anything through until I came to academia. But then what have I seen through? There is that voice which breaks against necessity. How is it I find myself here? By a formless desire to do and to make. A desire that found form.

Up early, never late. Up early, at work before anyone else and then the whole day ordered. Up early, plenty of oily fish, carefully regulated caffeine intake – isn’t it capital, still, that orients my days, which have no room for error? I tell myself it is the fear of capital that orients me thus: the fear that I will find myself back on the dole, having fallen from that high place in which I find myself.

A fear of capital – fear born of the deregulation of labour which forced me from of the suburbs. Then unemployment, from this perspective, was my good fortune. Deregulation was my good fortune – and so was capital. I was afraid of unemployment, afraid of recession. I chose a different direction. But how, in turn, not to resent that choice? How not to thrash like a fish on the line?

Unemployed Negativity

I said to R.M. once she was full of ‘unemployed negativity’ (Bataille). Was I speaking of her or myself?

Most often, Bataille says, it will direct you towards religion, or towards art. Those are the temptations. But what happens when religion and art offer you no purchase? Then you thrash like a fish on the line: you’ve been caught, and you can do nothing. You’ve been caught, you allowed yourself to be caught, but what can you do? Resentment: because you escaped, you ended up far from home in a world you cannot really understand.

You escaped, but the world in which you find yourself is not your own. You’ve escaped, but you can’t go back, either. You’ve escaped, you struggled to gain the high place where you are, but you don’t belong there, or you do so negatively, not positively. You are there by default, by a kind of default.

But where are you, and what are you doing there? Look around you in the canteen. Am I like them? Am I really like them? For them, this world is theirs by default; they belong here. For them, this world is continuous with Oxbridge and then a fee-paying school. It is one and the same; they deserve to be there; it is their milieu. In the end, they are on the inside, and you are on the outside.

This a travesty, of course. It is fantasy. For a time, you try to turn away from the place where you work, surrounded by a circle of charred books, written by those who escaped the university. But what does it mean to teach those charred books in a university? In the end, you tell yourself, it’s laughable: you are a domesticator just as you have been domesticated.

But even this is naive, for the old patriarchy is collapsing. It is pure naivety, for no one minds that you teach Bataille. No one is bothered that you teach Bataille. You can publish what you want. You write whatever you like, and teach what you like. True, you have to bring in income, but as long as you do that, the university is indifferent. There is no rebellion and no domestication, either, since the old patriarchy is disappearing.

Perhaps the university where unemployed negativity finds itself accommodated. It is where it finds itself corralled not because of restraints but because everything is permitted. You cannot turn away from the university; it is everywhere. Wherever you turn, it is there. The world is training; everyone is training. The university is only part of a world that is perpetually in training. The content of what is learnt does not matter. Only skills matter, and skills that are transferable.

And you, who work in academia, for what do you work? To write another article? another book? So does unemployed negativity puts itself to work. So is it eminently obedient. Unemployed negativity, if it becomes anything, becomes academic. This is what Bataille missed in his ‘Letter to X’.

Thrashing on the Line

What became of our friends in the suburbs? The same as became of us, who escaped the suburbs. We have been captured and drugged in a different way. We’ve been caught, we thrash on the line, but in the end we’ll go still and that will have been our lives, that thrashing.

The Silver Age

We even disgust ourselves. How is this degradation possible? In Well’s fantasy it took thousands of years for the Morlocks to separate themselves from the Eloi, but it has happened to us in the space of a few generations. We never had a chance, we know that now. Why did we even think we had a chance? Why did we think things were opening up? Nothing was opening up. The same walls, the same doors as were there for Jude the Obscure. The same walls, the same doors made solely to keep us out.

What place did we have inside? What place could we take there, when the inside was constructed precisely to keep us outside? In truth, we know our place is outside. In truth, we know that it is best for us that we remain outside. Yours is the kingdom, ours the wandering about. Yours are the feet square on solid earth, ours the sore feet from wandering here and there. Don’t listen to our moaning, insiders, don’t mind our wailing, we know where we belong. We lament not our position in the world – it is just, it is right – but the cruelty of fate. How could it be that we were destined to remain outside even as you were inside?

That’s what we lament, the whole situation. We lament the whole, we do not wail for ourselves. How did we think we could get in? But there was hope! Hope, once upon a time. Hope that we could take our place among the other insiders. Hope that by some oversight, by some loophole we would be permitted to gain entry. That is youth: hope, the gift of hope. How difficult it is to grow old! How difficult it is to acknowledge, at last, that the last of youth’s potential has drained from us! Only then do we look around ourselves and acknowledge where we are.

So we are outside, we tell ourselves. So this is where we are. Before then, it passed by us in a blur. We were too busy moving from place to place, trying to get inside. Before, we were too busy, we had no time to see where we were. And no desire, either. Who wants to see where they are? Who wants to accept their station in life? That only comes with age, and with the enfeeblement that accompanies age. One day, age says to you, enough, stop this wandering about, stopping bashing your head against the walls and the doors, there’s no point. Age says, sink down against the wall, acknowledge you are beaten, accept your place. You failed, but you were destined to fail; the grounds of your hope were bogus.

Once, it is true, you had the gift of hope, you searched for signs in the world outside – you thought: if I am alert enough, quick enough, I might get in. Once you possessed that great hope in your guile and cunning to think you might separate yourself from the others and get in, but in truth, there was never a hope, never a chance, never a clue. What signs you saw were bogus signs. You came back to the other outsiders, ashamed. And they came to you, ashamed. For they had had the same dream as you. You had all shared the same dream, the same delusion.

Now there is at least comfort in your shared predicament. Now there are others to slump down besides, to whom you can say, we gave it our best shot. There would be a kind of glory to this slumping down if you had the energy. But listless, drained of hope, you sink to the ground, you lie there wandering if that ground is also a wall. The sky spread above you. How distant it is! As far as the far interior, where the insiders are! As far as the dreams of your youth!

They have the right skillset and you have the wrong skillset. They have the right connections and you have the wrong connections. They are taller than you, they walk upright, not hunched over, their eyes are clear and their skin shining. Look at you! How did you ever think you had a hope? Why did you think you could sneak in when it was stamped on your face from the start? The face of a failure. The face of one who had failed in advance. The stooped gait of one who had dreamt of escape. The dull eyes of one who studied in the evenings. The grey skin of one who had not seen the sun.

Now are growing old. We are slumped together,  growing older, seeing in the others only our own grey and ravaged faces. Why did we think we could get inside? It would be comic if we had the energy to laugh. But we have no energy. Our gaze surveys the world indifferently. The greyness of the outside, as grey as our own skin, as grey as our studies and the grey sky. What hope was there? Our joy, once, was in moving too quickly to see the greyness. Our hope lay in the dream of outdistancing the world, of going inside. We had no eyes for the world, then. No time to see what would later fill our days and nights.

Do we even dream of the inside anymore? Is it there, that hope, even in our dreams? Morlocks and Eloi – which are which? We’ve forgotten. The one high, the other low, the one tweedy, the other non-tweedy. The one with elbow patches, the other without elbow patches. The one with a big car his mother bought him, the other without a car, either big or small. The one with references from the good and the great, the other with references from the bad and the mediocre.

And if you managed to get a reference from one of the good and the great, as I did in my distant youth? If it happened by some miracle that one of the good and the great wrote you a reference? It was written in a single line, a single sentence. It was written as a single sentence, with a clear message. In one single line, it said, in effect: keep him outside. Let him remain outside. Let him pass his days outside. Do not let him in. How could it be otherwise?

In truth, the same was written in every line of our CVs! How we laboured over them, our CVs and letters of application! How carefully we pored over every line, rocking our heads like talmudic scholars! We went through every line of job adverts to make sure they were echoed in our letters of application! Over and over again, night after night, we reread our applications and our CVs. We printed them out on vellum, we printed them on special gold stationary in imperial blue ink, but it made no difference. We folded them into golden envelopes and sent them by registered post, but it made no difference.

They could tell, straightaway, the search committees, the recruiters, that we were not one of them. It was obvious from the start. What hope did we have? What chance did we have? On the face of it, we had every chance. On the face of it, it is a meritocratic world. But what chance did we have to earn merits? It as clear right away there was nothing to distinguish us from the other huddled masses. It was clear on what side we belonged. The outside, not the inside. The outside, the grey world, and not the inside, the world of colours and flavours and joy.

What chance did we have? What hope did we have? We clutch them still, our CVs, our letters of application. Still our computers are full of drafts of letters of application. We would laugh if we had the strength. Yes, if we were strong enough, we’d laugh at our predicament. But who has the strength? All that running about drained us. We were here and then there, taking part-time work here and then there, rushing about. They threw a little work to us, here and then there, on condition that we move here and then there, on condition we were ready for work at any time, at all times, that every day was a work day.

Yes, there was something for us to do then, in the old days. We thought we had been chosen, thought we had been selected from the masses, called forward for special favours and special attentions. But in truth, we were all the same to them. The same mass, the same magma, each interchangeable, all exactly alike. How could they tell us apart? We were, as a whole, marked apart from them. From the first, we were different. From the first we looked different and no doubt smelt different. We lacked the manners, lacked the right way of talking, lacked the vocabulary. No doubt we lacked the right gestures and grace.

Occasionally they threw us some work. That was generous. Occasionally, some work here and there – what generosity! We thought we had been favoured, by in fact it was only chance that favoured us, as, on another day it would withdraw its favour. For in truth we could not be told apart. We were all exactly alike, and it didn’t matter to them which one of us was called forward for a little part-time work. There were no special favours, no special attention. None of us was special, none of us favoured. Favour fell on all and none.

What chance did we have? If I could laugh, I would laugh at our youthful folly. If I had the strength to laugh, I would do so at our early optimism. Did we really think we could pass among them, as one of them? Did we really think we pass as insiders, when from the first it was clear that we belonged outside? For that is where we belong, outside. For a time, it is true, a few outsiders got inside. For a time, it was possible. Those were the golden years of which our elders spoke. A marvellous time, when there was a real meritocracy, and some among us found admittance. But then the door closed shut again. It shut tighter than ever.

And what of those who had found their way inside? They send signals to us, we are sure of it. They send signs in what they publish, in the publications which reach us outside. Signs only we can read. But even those publications are becoming rarer and the signs no longer reach us. Did they ever reach us? Did we dream those signs, those signals? Was it another of our youthful delusions? Who of us can tell? Who can remember? We’ve no strength left for memory.

Every day is the same, every night is the same. Sometimes, a cry goes up. Sometimes, a wailing. But we do not wail for ourselves, for our particular case, but for the whole situation, for what the ancients called fate. It is an impersonal howl, more of a whimper than a howl, more a mewling that a whimper, and it soon dies down. Every day is the same, every night. Dawn comes with the promise of a beginning, but we are not fooled. There is the sun above the horizon, but we are not fooled. What is light but a lie? We have been made too many promises to believe. Too many promises, too many hints that there might be work here and there, that our contract might be extended, when in truth the work had already dried up, and the contract would go to insiders.

Night comes with the promise of an end, but we are not fooled by that, either. What is darkness but the time before another day? What is the day but the time before darkness? Night brings nothing to term, nothing is completed, nothing finished. What does not begin does not end, either. What failed to begin fails to end. What returns is only the failure of the beginning, the lack of firm ground. You take it for granted, insiders, the ground beneath your feet. But there is no ground for us to stand on, nowhere to take a stand. How can we find our footing? How could we dream of beginning? The beginning is over, having never begun. The end cannot come, because nothing has happened.

Our early scurrying was the imitation of beginning. Only now do we understand it. Our activity, our job applications, the part-time hours we willingly took on: all this was a imitation of action. Sometimes a great ululation arises from the plains. We lament not for ourselves, but for everything, for the division between the inside and the outside, and for the walls and doors which keep us out and keep them inside.

What would we do if one of them came outside? What would we do if through some great error, some lapse, one of the insiders found themselves outside? Tear him apart? We haven’t the energy. Ask him for favours? But what is the point? Feel his tweed jacket? Perhaps. Touch his elbow pads? Maybe. Ask him for stories about the inside? But we have heard everything, all the rumours. Of great tables and great feasts, of bottles of port refilled every night, of cloisters and lawns and the sound of choirs and organs. We have heard it all and we’ve heard enough. Do not disturb us, we would say. Find your own corner in which to lament. Or lie down and be still among us. Lie down, take off your tweeds and join us.

But in truth, such a mistake is no longer possible. The walls are being built yet higher and the doors are being made yet stronger. New fortifications are being made. New procedures are in place. One day our descendants will speak of ours as the time of hope, of the time when the young still had the luxury of hope. They will regard us as indulgent, we who had some little hope from the start. How indulgent they were, our forefathers, they’ll say. How sentimental, with their wailing. Our descendants will be harder than us, more immured than us. They will be blind and stooped from birth, from the outset. Nothing will ever begin for them, even the dream of beginning. What youth will they have? They’ll be born straight into old age. Elderly from the start. Half-dead from the first.

In their blindness they will know neither night or day. In their deafness, only an impersonal roaring without cease. They will read nothing and know nothing, all will have been forgotten before they begin. Compared to them, we are strength itself! How lucky we were to have known hope! How lucky even to see a job application! How lucky to be able to draft a CV! How lucky to receive a rejection letter! How lucky to hear our name spoken by one who called us for some part-time work! Yes, this is a silver age, not the golden age, it is true, but not yet the desolate age without hope.

Scum

Day 1000 of our non-careers, coffee in the autumn sun up by the station. We speculate, as ever, about jobs. There’s a job coming up at X. There may be something at Y., but not for a couple of years. And isn’t there a research post at Z.? And the ongoing decline of our kind of philosophy. ‘Basically, we’re fucked’. And those who work around us in our department become like gods. What do they expect from us? What do they want? What are they thinking? And we’re getting older. ‘I’m 35 for fuck’s sake’.

Caffeine in the bloodstream, new hope. But you’ve got that article coming out, haven’t you? Why don’t you try and get something in sociology? I’m publishing in religious studies. I’ve got something coming out in cultural theory. We should got to a sociology conference. Who’s paying for coffee? I am. No, I am. Who of us can afford anything, let alone coffee? Small rebellion against the state of things: I’ll pay. Small potlatch.

Who of us in a position to understand whether we’ll be hired or not this coming year. If A. gets a sabbatical, then … If B. gets research leave, then … Autumn sun. The year is turning towards the new term. Who of us will get hired, and if so, for what? The sun falls equally on each of us. But who does the department favour? They might give the teaching to D., she’s just finished her Ph.D. No, they’ll probably give it to E., it’s his turn to get teaching experience. Yes, but F.’s very close to the head of department.

Then there are the wild cards, roving bands of part-timers who pass locust-like from university to university. They are pared down, hungry, hyper-efficient, the shock-troops of the new contractualism. They see a chink in the department and they are there, enlivening the research forums, attending the colloquia, joshing with the head of department in the corridor. Damn it, F.’s from Oxford, as well.

New term comes. F. hoovers up the hours. I’m given one hour a week’s teaching. One hour. F. is given several hours. The Head of Department, ‘He’s more experienced than you’. ‘He’s got more publications than you’. I’m going to write a letter to the Head of Department I tell my friend in the sun. Will I write it? The sun falls equally on each, but we are not all equally favoured. If I write a letter, what then? Will the department look upon me less favourably?

In truth, by this time next year, the Head of Department will have forgotten everything. It will begin again, all over again. For this year, F. is teaching in our place. F. who buys his own white board markers, his own chalk. F. who makes his own handouts. As part-timers, we are given neither white board markers nor printing privileges. The secretaries and administrators know we are scum. We know we are scum. In we drift and out we drift, like scum on the tide. But F. has bought a packet of new white board markers in several colours. F. has a packet of coloured chalk and a packet of white chalk. Damn it, F. even has transparencies.

Where did he get them from? I ask my friend in the autumn sunlight. Then we hear he is bringing in videos and arranging screenings. He wants to start up a philosophy and film society. He wants to get the students involved. How does he do it? He teaches – what – 8 hours a term. 8 hours for 20 weeks a year. How does he live on it? Independent means. They all have independent means. He’s come down from Oxford with his independent means. And then he has the Oxford manner. A bit of tweed.

He really does wear tweed. He wears tweed and what do we wear? We look like scum, we dress like scum. Dress for the job you want. What job do we want? We are scum on the tide, drifting in and out. The trouble is, we know we’re scum. How is it F. doesn’t know? He has the right attitude. He’s dressed for the job he wants. Here he comes with his briefcase. Don’t talk to him. He comes up to us, all friendly. Shall we kill him? God, he’s pleased with himself. In he goes with his briefcase full of transparencies, videos, coloured markers and coloured chalks. He’s got it all, the bastard.

Of course he gets a job elsewhere a few weeks into term. Of course he’s lined up a job somewhere else, he’s off. In a year a volume of The New X. has appeared, which he’s co-edited. In another year, he’s edited a special edition of a journal. Meanwhile, the department has rung us. Do you want to split F.’s hours between you. F.’s hours! Of course! We divide them between us. Coffee in the autumn sun, a few weeks into term, you have five hours teaching and so do I. It’s all turned out pretty well.

The Welcoming Day

Constancy

For a time, she cleaned the house, the Scotswoman. For a time the house was hers and we were hers; the house was her territory. ‘I walk it like I talk it’, she would say, ‘not like you’. ‘You live in an ivory tower, the pair of you’, she would say, and I would nod. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ and now we were children too, children with her children, but this was welcome. Just as a washing cat, when you offer her your hand, will think for a moment and then lick you, too, the Scotswoman became our mother, the mother of us all.

Who was I, amidst this activity? I have photographs – there I am, with the children, with the husband and wife, who would divorce soon after, there I am, healthy at last, sitting on the sofa with the others. How was it that a year before I had been so thin and pale! How had I made it from a succession of brown rooms to the light of this house? Shared life; open days turning first in the Spring, then in summer.

The children played and she moved about our house. How much mess there was! How much chaos to order! Constancy: the family was part of our life; the days turned; there was a pattern, a time to be in one place and then in another. Was it to escape the house that I went to the cafe? Rather it was part of the rhythm of my life, the turning of the day. It was necessary to go out in order to return; necessary to make a voyage so to come back to them all eating lunch. Then I would greet and join them; we would eat and talk until the afternoon would call me back to my room to work.

The Regulars

Past the alcoholics to the cafe each morning. I was a regular, just like the man who each morning would put pen to the cafe newspapers, underlining this word and then that. For what was he searching? Whatever it was, it is was with a method known only to himself; when the papers reached me, they were already annotated. There was a fellowship between us, he and I. Both knew the other needed order, regularity; both in the cafe and in the quietness of the morning when the cafe was nearly empty.

And we found it in each other, I in the markings he left in the newspaper, and he knowing the newspapers would come to me, that I would rise and ask for them politely and he would pass them to me politely. Later, when I was busy with the last book, I would recognise his stoop in my own and knew now as then that my fellow regular was engaged in a vast and secret labour.

Broken Mirror

It has changed now, that town at the city’s edge. Back then it was nowhere. Obscure life! Boondocks at the edge of the world! But I wanted obscurity; it was necessary, I knew, to bury myself for a few years.

In the first days, I thought I might return to the world one day; to emerge as out of another dimension and say, here I am! I would return to the world. Meanwhile, I thought, anything might happen; I was ready for adventure. I passed through the supermarket to behold the simple beauty of one of the assistants; I exchanged CDs at the secondhand record shop to hear the shop owners with their Manchester burr; I searched for books in the bookshop. I would visit the library and the delicatessen; I was content, calm, after years at the edge of life, years on my guard.

What I had said to myself, then, before I moved in? I am moving through that part of myself called Manchester. For a time, the Spring and Summer of that first year, it was no longer my world through which I passed; the mirror had broken. What had it showed, that mirror? The desolation that required from me a great act of imagination. But who has the strength for such mythmaking? Mirror of nothing; closed door against which you sank. I was moving through nothing; ‘Manchester’ was the name for my defeat.

How can I forget the lad with the scars on his shaved head following me home and asking for money for a chippy? How can I forget the crack addicts who broke into my house and held me a knife point? They came from my street, said the police, though they could prove nothing. I turned through files of photographs in the police station; what did matter – as soon as one gang was caught, another gang formed; ‘steaming’ happened again. I moved; but a month later, they burst through the door of another house. They held a knife to the throat of my flat mate. ‘I’ll kill her’.

They all moved, my housemates, but I stayed in the house on my own. I covered pages in my handwriting. I read. Without television, without computers, life became simple. Silent days! But who can live on their own for a life? I worked too hard, but I was working on nothing; how could I believe now in the power of myth-making? How many stories could there be? The final metamorphosis: the world become stone; the world become glass. What chance was there against that hardness? There is only one story: the becoming-opaque of what was once transparent. The becoming-obstacle of the world.

I would like to have written, but writing had soured. And how could I read, I who was only able to see the ashes of books? The only drama: there was the day and there I was. The days turned; no one was with me in the house. I passed from room to empty room: no one. Outside, the wide day, outside, too, the  burglars and muggers. I was paranoid; I saw the crack dealers and the drug runners; I saw the muggers with their eyes on our bikes. There were enemies everywhere, indifferent eyes, eyes which looked only for opportunity.

Watching eyes that when I saw them returned my gaze. Some were hateful, they stared and you were to look down when they stared. Some entreated me, asking me for kindness, but in a second, they, too would be fullof hatred.  I followed a crack zombie, arms flailing, walking quickly among crowds in town. He begged from one and then the other. For a few moments, he was wheedling, entreating, and then, refused, his eyes would go cold and he would flail over to his next target.

Some were desperate, like the weak addict who tried to entice me down an alleyway. I almost went, curious about his desolation. He was not a man but a wraith and he was weak from addiction. What new saint could love this man? What power of love could enclose him? He was damned and he passed among the damned. I stepped towards him and then recovered myself. Perhaps he was hiding a knife. He was weak, yes, but perhaps he was holding a knife behind his back. In the end, he had fallen below need like others. Damned men came and went; as I passed through the day, I passed by them, zombies of the day.

Living From …

But now another world had extended towards me like a hand in friendship. Come Spring, and I moved. Come Spring, and the offer: move in here, R.’s gone, there’s a spare room. To that spare room I brought my books; to that room, I brought the CDs I had been left. I thought: I’m ready to give up the world. I want an obscure place to recover. And so over the weeks, through Spring and Summer, I rediscovered my relation to need; I began to eat regularly, I spoke to others, I was no longer devoured by the madness of work.

Nothing happened – the world turned into light and as it turned it was as though it reached more deeply into itself, that it drew on great and secret reserves and made them present. I ‘lived from’ the world, as the philosopher would say; I ate and took pleasure in eating. Before, I boiled noodles and poured powder on them from sachets: that was my lunch, that was my dinner; at teatime, I ate packets of stale gingerbread men from Greggs.

Now, great and elaborate feasts were prepared each evening; I would be given a twenty pound note and sent to the supermarkets: ‘make a magnificent salad’. I discovered errant and distracted time: an hour in the garden drinking tea in the sun, an hour wandering from one delicatessen to another. ‘Have you tried X.?’ my landlord would ask, and when I said I had not, he would buy X., just so I could try it. Shopping became a delight; by day to town and then to the sales in the shops for the rich. I looked for bargains; I found them – coloured ties I have never worn, the velvet jacket I still keep in my office. To live from the world: there were no addicts here, no zombies. Only colours and flavours and the welcoming day.

Sometimes, it is true, the world withdrew into itself; it refused me, it became the surface which spreads indifferently around me. World of addicts, world of enemies. Because years had passed and I was known, there were people to avoid; I was known; I had enemies. Avoid him, avoid her, move furtively, secretly, trace paths on which you would see them before you are seen. Merciless day, I thought, you always found me! You found me in the record shop and the bookshop. You found me in the cafes and in the evening when I drank a glass of Leffe in the bar over the bridge.

I thought, I am becalmed; the town was the ocean and you, the day, were my companion. You were patient, and you waited. The street drinkers knew you; the crack addicts knew, and I came to know I could not escape you. At those times, I went out to escape the house and came in to escape the world. My bedroom was the threshold poised between the inside and outside; it was not a place I could remain. Perhaps that was my life: eternal threshold, poised between the possible and the impossible.

The Welcoming Day

But life was expanding. Champagne before dinner in a hotel restaurant, guest of a rich visitor; Lagavulin in the evening, saffron in the rice. Delight of the world! In the evening we came home from restaurants along the wide pavements on the street. How is it that at night you move more quickly? Satisfied, replete, we came back to the house whose lights blazed into the night. Happiness, was that the word? Steady contentedness in what fruits the hour brought. Round oatcakes, slabs of Lancashire cheese, thick ham, each slice resting on separate papers: the fridge was full, the cupboards were full.

What was it to live in a house where food was forgotten in the press of new food? Amazement that the cupboards hid out-of-date tins and jars! Amazement that great plates of food were thrown out: last night’s dinner, remants of yesterday’s lunchtime feast! Chicken in sauce, pork in pliau rice! Dishes of salmon cooked in milk! When my landlord came in, he would always bring food. Collaver from the church. Communion bread and holy water. Pillow bread from the Arab delicatessen; dolmades and olives from the Greek one. Black loaves of Polish bread, German Pumpernickel; in the morning, we were asked, what do you want to eat tonight?

At night, our garden would become a run through. I would hear them, the burglars, coming through our garden. Sometimes I would look in the dark to see if I could catch them. Why not grow the hedges really high?, I asked. Because then they could work without being seen, prising open our windows and our doors. Then they could break their way into the cellar door and rise up into the house. When they all went out and I was left along in the house, I could not settle. What was a house uninhabited? I switched lights on and switched them off; who was watching, outside? I left rooms and entered others; I made sure the curtains were closed. The house was too vast. Then, at last, they would all come home. Relief! Life was close again. Life was close around me.

Sometimes, walking out at night, I would hear muttering behind me. Sometimes, I saw figures standing behind windows, shouting out. I thought: I am being followed. I thought: they are looking for me. Who was there? For a long time, I stayed in at night. I feared the darkness, or rather it was darkness that what I feared seemed to hide itself. When scaffolding came up round the house, the burglars would call taxis out at 4 AM to see who was there. After all it was easy to scale the scaffold, to climb to the first floor and then the second … I slept with my light on. I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn; morning, for me, never existed. How to sleep when sleep was darkness? My landlord would go to the door when the taxis came to show he was there. A big man, unafraid of the dark at 4 AM. A man whose house was all around him, and whose tenants, except me, were asleep.

Megalapsyche

What is it to be enrooted in life? To send deep roots into the earth? I knew what it was to live among those who were so enrooted. Old furniture in each room, the Jacobean chest in the hall, the oak parque, the plates around the picture rail: the house was rooted not just in the world, but in history. How deeply it was rooted! What it must be to stand at the doorway and think, this is mine! It’s many rooms were filled with tenants. In its rooms we lived, each of us, in retreat from the world. Obscure life!, but that’s what we wanted, obscurity.

The house had found us, as it found the taxi drivers who would sometimes leave their cars and come in with my landlord. I would find them in the dark room by the fire. Builders who visited to work on the house would lunch with us in the sun. One would detach himself from the others and speak to my landlord. Long and private conversations on the bench in the garden. Of what they were speaking? The grass was long around their ankles, but still they sat. The sun went down, but still they were sitting. Then he left in peace, the builder, having spoken and been listened to.

He died a year ago now, my landlord. In a dish in the living room, there was money for anyone to take. If you asked, you would receive. What does it mean, to be a man of God? What does it mean to be gathered by God as into the house and its many rooms? I do not know. But for my landlord, God was there in the house as he was everywhere. He waved incense into the garden. Bless the plants and the trees, bless the animals. It was an old Russian practice, he said. In the corner of the room, there was the icon, with a candle burning in front of a saint’s face alongside a bottle of holy water.

I saw his photographed face, my landlord’s, a year ago in the church. Many of us were there, former tenants, visitors, guests. The disgraced doctor. The man who wrote letters of hatred to my landlord. The woman who left five messages a day on his answering machine. Where were the taxi drivers? Where was our roofer? We had not known how to get hold of them. They had come and they had disappeared. I thought: now we’ll be scattered, all of us. That is what death does, it scatters us, we are given back to ourselves, we who were in steady orbit around the one who died. But to whom are we given? One without you, friend, one minus you, which is to say, to a new isolation.

Day Companion

In the Meantime

Frost the window with your breath. That is our everyday, breath on glass, the becoming-opaque of what was once transparent.

First, only one cafe, rather scruffy, but then others appeared – a handful, each more pristine, then a dozen in one small town and cafe life was born in the North. Where did they come from, the cafe regulars? From where did they materialise? That’s where I met you. That’s where we began to speak one afternoon. We spoke; we sat at the same table and four o’clock became our kingdom, and we met there to see out the afternoon, to celebrate another crossing of the day.

You will never understand, you who have not known yourself stranded and becalmed, you who found employment and success, you whom the day helped to ignore its blankness. You will never understand, you whose sky is not scratched out, whose roads bear your cars and the pavements your three-wheeled prams, you for whom the street is a bridge between one place and another and not the desert you will never be able to pass! 

What do you know of the afternoon? What do you know of the day which for you is just rest, a day off from work? And what of that friendship between those who inhabit the day? What of its unsteadiness, between those who share first of all that day? You will not know it, you couples who meet other couples for breakfast in the sun. Then I turn to the other ‘you’; I reserve the word ‘you’ for my daytime friend, the companion the day gives me.

I cross the day; the afternoon is open, the sky is blind, what can I do? I knock on your door, day companion, and sometimes you answer. I knock on your door and sometimes you come to the door. Yes, I knock and I wait and sometimes you open your door and sometimes you step out with me and walk to the meadows. Sometimes we go out, out into the day, along the path and into the meadows, you and I, speaking of the life we do not lead, speaking of life before and after us, but not here, not today.

Your father died; he left you a house – this was your fortune. Your father died, you were left a house – this was your misfortune. Now you will never you need to work. Unemployment benefit, then sickness benefit will see you through the months and years. Why work? Your house was an enclave in the day; you were curled up with your cat and your tabs and your TV. For a time, you had tenants, but then, when they left, you enjoyed the peace of your house, enjoyed the pace of a day which asked nothing. You did not fear it; years passed, it is true, but you never lost faith in a life which had not yet begun. This was your interregnum, your long afternoon; soon you would live again, but now, today, in the meantime …

Day Companion

You who work will know nothing of this. Only you, day-companion, friend of lost hours, will understand. But where are you now? How could we keep in contact? What of us was left to keep contact? For the day spins you to nothing – we were frayed by empty time until there was nothing of us left. How could we keep in contact? Sometimes I knocked on your door, sometimes you answered, sometimes we stepped out into the kingdom that was ours.

Everyday: kingdom that is ours because nothing is ours, because we have no purchase on the world. Everyday without foothold, unbreakable glass, we see what others look through; we hear what sounds in the air through which sound is supposed to travel. But what is mediated for you is immediate for us; what you cross we cannot cross, do you understand we lack the strength that is so masterfully yours?

Today, but what day is it?, there are two of us, and for a time we gather at four o’clock. Weak joy of companionship! Happiness of weakness shared! At five, the cafe becomes a restaurant, and it is time for us to leave. What right have we to sit among the workers? We leave and part in the night; you go this way and I that; you pass into the crowds and I too disappear. Who were you, friend? What happened in that hour we just passed together?

Fragile friendship. Who turned from the other? True, you rarely visited; you rang me often, it is true, but I would always make the journey to your door. Perhaps the strength which allowed my journeying was that which brought me again to work. I broke through the glass. And you, what happened to you? I stopped knocking at your door; how could I knock at night, when I’d known you only by day? I know you stayed in and smoked, that every evening passed for you that way. I knew, and though I saw the lights, I did not knock.

Bit Players

Monks

The monks are coming; the monks are always coming, some on great, slow orbits, appearing once or twice a year, some arriving more often; a knock on the door, a friendly greeting, and there he is, one of the great company of monks with his long beard and his rasam. This one we moved from the other side of the country; this one is visiting the church in our city; always there are monks – Orthodox monks, but Copts, too, sometimes Dominicans in white, sometimes Benedictines who, it was said, were allowed stereos in their monk’s cells.

They visit and bring their novices with them; they come, and we prepare great feasts. Travelling monks are allowed to break the rules of the fast, and so, even in Lent, we are allowed to eat meat when we eat with them. We are grateful! A feast, in the long days of Lent! Who are we? The head of our household, of course, and then those of us who are living there.

We eat, we are expected to eat as a household every night, those of us who live there. Out of curiosity will I serve the monks. I want to see what monks talk about, and I would prefer to serve them than sit amongst them. And so I serve them, bringing in a dish of this and taking out a dish of that. Meanwhile, the monks are talking; they are gregarious, even the hermits. They gossip; they are terrible gossips, and they speculate about movements in the church. And then, too, they talk seriously of projects undertaken. A translation; a transcription; a new website – yes, they have a great deal in common, a mission. They are a cadre, a club and belong together.

So our house sees their assemblies. So our house allows them to come together, staying monk with brother monk in our many bedrooms. In the mornings, I will often find a monk on the great sofas. ‘Oh it’s you -‘; I offer them some tea, ‘tea, father?’ Sometimes, in the evening, a blinking novice in an armchair. Today, tomorrow, five hundred years ago, in the house it doesn’t matter. It could be the middle ages; it could be 1850, but the monks are here and the monks are coming.

Bit Players

R. and I order the monks according to their helpfulness. We serve them; they sit, we bring them things, still they sit; the hours pass and they are sitting: these are the unhelpful monks. And the ones who help? Very few of them, it is true, but they come to the kitchen, they wash up, they never rest, they’ve guessed we are not part of the church or of any church, that we are out of their orbit and are here only by chance, strange meteorites. They do not ask what marooned us on this island; they respect our privacy. But now for a time, we are here together, so let us talk.

Yes, these are our favourite kinds of monks, jolly and bright eyed, ready to speak on all matters. But the other kind – those who accept without helping – we avoid them, we flee upstairs, we take refuge in the rooms of my friend the drunk where he surfs for porn and I play computer games. How did we end up here? I ask him, but here we are, regardless, scenery shifters, bit players in a drama that is not ours and that we don’t understand.

Aunts

Around the house, watching over it, the aunts. How many were there? They were the long deceased sisters of my landlord’s father, seamstresses and spinsters all of them, who watched over my landlord when he was young, and of whom he always spoke. Aunts in league with saints who, when they wanted something, would find the right saint and pray; so would what they wanted by given them.

Ask and you will receive, my landlord would say. He lived in a miraculous world, a world of miracles. He lived in a world where he was watched by God and by angels and saints. There were icons on our walls; the saints were there. And then the big icon of Jesus which my landlord gave to me, but which I never put up. My landlord was watched, he was seen and rested in the gaze of the divine.

Marvellous it was to see him stretched out at church, this big man. A tall man, a big man prostate before the altar. God was watching him, he knew that. God saw all, and when he could not sleep, he told me he had a discussion with God. How wonderful to be accompanied thus, I thought. How bereft we felt, R. and I, how unwatched!

Orslem

Guests passed through our house. I took a young Turk to the hills one sunny day. She had rediscovered her faith; it was becoming deeper. Fearing her arrival – she was known by all to be fearsome – we scrubbed the flat clean. But she knew us; she came with cleaning things and cleaned it again. Then she came down and spoke with my landlord about God. I remember, that day we went to the hills, buying a celebrity magazine. Why did you buy that trash? she said. Why do you need it?

As we walked she told me she had rented her body from God. ‘That’s why I have to look after it’. We reach the brow of the hill, and she speaks of her old life, her old romances. That is over now, she said on the top of Kinder Scout, and when I saw her again, years later, she was veiled and arrived with the husband she married six weeks before after the death of his wife in childbirth. They brought with them twin six week old boys and spoke of God to my landlord.

Eternity

How long did I live in the house? Long enough to know those changes that occur only in deep time – the cracks that appeared in the driveway, the door to the garden that sealed itself one day so it could never be opened, the caving in roof of the old stables at the back of the garden. Long enough to have felt my life entwined with the life of that house. I passed from room to room; I lived in most of them, I met every visitor, even those who appeared once a decade.

What happened? Everything. What happened – nothing at all; time passed – there was too much time, as I tried to finish a thesis and then publish papers, as I tried to find a job. I worked in the South for a year, but I came back. Years passed. Would I leave? Would I ever make my own life in the world? But the world was distant; it was as though I was falling in time, growing older but without knowing my age. I thought: inside I am old, but outside, I look the same as I ever did. Yes, inside I am aging, time is falling inside me, my age is incalculable.

Monks came and went, guests appeared and disappeared, each year the students would come round for dinner. We held a party when I got my Ph.D. and a grand dinner when I left first for a job in the South and then my job in the North. Everything happened; nothing happened. The icons watched me; monks came and went. Imbroglios in the church; new parish priests, new scandals. D. M. gave up church for a long time. His godsons visited daily and then visited no more. X. and Y. were divorced, now their children stayed with us everyday and my landlord walked them to and fro from school.

Whose life was I living? Too much God, R. and I agreed, too much church. How tired we were of hearing about the aunts! We wanted to live life on our own terms, but what could we do? So the years passed. We lived outside the world. How could we tell them?, R. and I said of those we knew outside the house. Who would believe us? No one would believe us; no one knew. When friends visited, my landlordwould dominate the conversation, showing off, speaking in great monologues. Friends would come and he would take over. Some would become friends of the house, which meant friends of my landlord Some would never come round again (‘that guy’s crazy!’).

Who could get a word in? The house was a stage and my landlord was the star. We were bit-players, backdrop to the conversations over which my landlord presided. Sometimes we were allowed to say a word; sometimes a tiny gap in the monologue would appear, but for the most part we were silent. What was there to say? And so we retired to the stables at the bottom of the garden. My landlord wouldn’t come there; we moaned and sighed and complained. What we said was what we were not allowed to say, so we blasphemed and swore.

The Phonecall

One night a phonecall, very late. A phonecall in the hall downstairs that my landlord answered, at about two in the morning. It was for me, from X. How many years had I waited for this phonecall! I had waited with a waiting that kept me young somewhere, that was still youth inside me. Youth amidst age and aging. And that waiting came forward in me then, that night. I listened out, as I always listened at that time. Could it be her? So it was, and after many years. But it was late and my landlord made his annoyance known. ‘We’re all in bed! You’ve just woken all of us up!’ From where had she rung? I didn’t know. She didn’t ring again, not for another few years, as I knew she wouldn’t. I thought: I’m not even allowed that phonecall. Even X. couldn’t reach me, not here.

My landlord didn’t like the sound of her, he said. Of course not; I was not to be allowed her; foolishness in love was not to be permitted. My landlord told me I would lose touch with my friends and lose touch with everyone. There was the house, only the house. Monks came and went, the students came once a year. Stories of the aunts were told and the saints venerated on appropriate days. The priest would come with his incense to bless our rooms. Great feasts were cooked, and in the summer we ate every night in the garden. Cracks appeared in the driveway and the door that use to open sealed itself shut forever. Eternity! How had we found ourselves, R. and I, living in eternity!

3 Cats

Gracchus


In the dust, a cat is writhing. It is already blind, and it writhes, not dead, but not alive. It writhes in the dust between life and death. Let’s take him to the vet, I said. She – my partner then, a long time ago – said the same. But her father’s wife said, he won’t let that cat be put down. He’s coming back from work later and he wants to see what he can do for him. But he can’t do anything for him, it’s too late. We are in the garden of my girlfriend’s father’s house. It is a big house, in a prosperous area. He’s done well to own such a big house, with a wide lawn. But he makes his wife live in another, smaller house, down the road.


His wife – and this is his second wife, still young – lives down the road. But she is here, today, to oversee the current crisis. The cat writhes in the dust; he’s had a stroke; he’s not dead, but he is not alive. The cat is an embodiment of pain. It is pain, this cat, and remains on the threshold between life and death. The vet has already been out. Put him down, said the vet, he’s not going to get any better. He’s had a stroke, said the vet. He writhes in the dust at the edge of the wide lawn of my girlfriend’s father. But the father loves the cat, who sleeps beside him every night.


The father, a vast man, a strong man, sleeps beside the cat every night as he has done since the cat was a kitten and he was ten years younger. His wife sleeps down the road with the young children, but he sleeps with the cat at the heart of his big house. You should have him put to the sleep, the vet said, when he left. It’s cruel. You can’t do anything for him. The cat is pain, pure pain, but the father is out. He wants the cat to be alive when he returns. He wants the cat to be there, beside him. But the cat’s incontinent, I said.


The smell was bad. We were with a dying animal, an animal at the brink of death. The smell was already bad as though the cat were dead. But the father wanted to be with the cat to the end. He wanted to accompany the cat all the way to death. Because he was tender with the cat as he was tender with no one else in his life. This vast, brutal man, king of his house, king of his lawn had found a tenderness in his relation to the cat. And this tenderness would disappear when the cat disappeared. He would lose his tenderness.


Every night he would drink heavily at the pub. Every night, he would stomp home to his big house, where the cat was. And they’d sleep together, the cat and he. All night together, sleeping together, traversing the night together. For he was afraid of the dark, the father. He was afraid of many things, but most of all of the dark. For a time, he was in a mental hospital. He feared the dark as he feared madness. What had happened to him to make him fear the dark? No one knew; he spoke to no one, though perhaps he spoke to his cat. Perhaps his cat knew his secrets.


But no one else knew them, not his ex wife, who’d left him a long time before, nor his new wife, who, we could see, was scared of him. Who wasn’t scared of him, this vast man, this taciturn man with great hands and a great, broad back? Who didn’t fear him, the one who drank pint and after pint every night, who panicked if he could not drink, and stomped home to his vast house in his vast lawns. He was the king of the house; what he saw, he owned.


Sometimes his son and daughter would come to him, asking for money. Sometimes he would give them money. But they came because they wanted more than money. Never mind, money would do, he gave them money. He never visited them, or anyone. Everyone had to come to him, to his house. He met the world on his terms, and his son and his daughter were part of the world.


True, when they were younger, they played pub gigs together, they’d had a covers band, and he made sure they studied musical instruments. True, he loved music, and he had pictures of the covers band in his house. There she was, his daughter, my girlfriend, and there he was, his son. Both could play a dozen instruments. Both were involved in the music business, one with a studio, one with a band. He loved music, playing it, singing it, and loved coaching his children. They sang and played with him for a time, and then stopped. He was a bully, that was clear. And after a time, it was not worth seeking the love of a bully, even by singing and playing with him.


So his son and daughter became part of the world. So they joined their mother, who had already left. Now he was alone, there was his new wife and their children, to be sure, but they were made to live down the street, away from him. He was alone with his cat, which meant he wasn’t really alone. A cat was there with him. The cat was entwined around his life as it entwined itself around his legs in welcome when he came home from work.


There was the cat, there was his house, there were his lawns, and there was the pub, where he would down pint after pint, nervously, quickly, as if there were no time to waste. He was a man of ritual, that was clear. A man who held himself together by rituals. A man who had woven a cat into his life, just as the cat had woven himself into the man’s life. They lived together, man and cat, and perhaps he hoped they would die together.


But the cat had preceded him. The cat was going ahead of him, and he wanted at least to accompany the cat all the way to death. He’d left instructions: the cat must not be put down. The cat had to be alive when he returned in the evening. So the cat writhed in the dust. So the cat blind and mad writhed in the dust, at the brink of death, no longer living, but not yet dead.


I have dreamt of you, anonymous cat; in my dream you spoke from where night touches day. As your stillness, totem, set itself against the memory of your agony I learnt of the agony which will one day separate me from everyone, sacred being, man apart. You spoke to me, cat, and I learned of a dying unto which we will all be delivered. You spoke, cat, your address reached me from the dawn and from the dusk. Lesson of margins, lesson of thresholds: I am still your student, I live beneath you, knowing that one day I will meet death with your face and I will know your agony in my own.


Henry


I would like to have been there when R. discovered Henry’s body. Henry was his cat, after all, or he was Henry’s man; there was a rapport, that was clear, and there was something at stake in their relationship, that mattered to them both. When Henry had chosen to live with us, he was already old. He had lived in a house on the other side of the road, but his owners had bought a dog. So he sunned himself in our garden, rolling full stretched in the dust and, one day, came into the house and stayed.


His long white fur was always matted and dirty, his nose, too was dirty. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine if you passed your hand down his back, and from his tail, great tufts of white sprouted irregularly. He was sticky, too, never quite clean, but sometimes R. would comb all the dirt from Henry’s coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood and up arched his tail, ragged plume.


He was already old, it was true, but it was with us that he elected to spend his last years, this old tom, who we called Henry. R. had moved back into the house at the same time; cat and man recognised an exile in each other. Both were transient; they moved between places; this is what they recognised. Both were on their own and both, for a time, had experienced the luck of a house that welcomed them. Good fortune in the vale of tears! Happiness of a last home in the wilderness!


You asked for nothing, Henry, and you came to us, asking for nothing. Happy we were to discover you asleep in this room and then in another. You passed through our rooms, Henry, and our house became a place of transience, and I knew again the impermanence of the world and the fleetingness of good fortune. I knew it, Henry, and R. knew it, he who would fall from the world even as I returned to it. That is why I wanted to be there when R. found Henry’s body stretched out dead on the kitchen floor. There was no one in the house; two exiles – one dead, one alive. A dead cat and a man who was now without witness.


Petruskha


She had only one word, but it was a word that could be inflected for every occasion. Like a little bear she prowled our house, getting older and more tiny. At twenty-two she could still climb the sofa and meow her one word. If we ate, she hunted what we ate; we shared it with her, buying an extra fish from the fish-and-chip shop, or a cooked chicken from the supermarket. She ate very well, but she was old, and deserved to live well.


She had been my landlord’s mother’s cat, and like his mother had lived into great old age. She had survived the tenants and guests who passed in and out of the house; she was there, growing more crotchedly as she grew older, as the house turned around her. She was its centre, its mobile, vocal centre, passing from room to room on her inspections, and sometimes playing like a kitten on the stairs when your fingers became creatures who popped through the railings. So she indulged us: she was no kitten, though she knew we liked to think of her as a kitten. So she indulged us, for she knew we’d need playing with. She passed from room to room, seeing all, impressed by nothing. All would pass, she knew; all would change, but then nothing would change, for her gaze rested equally upon all.


Her one word: ‘n-gow’. her one word, by turns imprecation and complaint, by turns the frustration of the ‘one cat protest committee’, as my landlord called her, and a greeting. ‘N-gow’: word addressed to the world in general or to herself, word for all and for no one, register of frustration or crotchedly joy. Speak, Petrushka (that was her name), you have the right, for all that you have seen, and for all your eyes have rested upon! Speak, cat of another enchantress and survivor! For you know, Petrushka, what rests in the turning of the world! You held the resting-point at the heart of that house; it was yours, your threshold, your reserve! You watched us pass and the world pass, watched the doors swing open and close, watched guests and tenants stay and then leave again. The house was yours, cat-witness, and you rested in its secret.


When did she die? When she was swollen with a cancer. Three days before, she sat with us in the sun. There we were on the patio, eating our dinner, and there was a chair for her, where she sat approvingly. Then her abdomen began to swell; she was ill, we knew that. She was twenty-two and it was time. The vet injected her, she struggled and was still. There were perspiration marks where her paws touched the leather. Now the limp body of a Manx cat, a little bear, born without tail and as small as a kitten.

Barbarians

The Stork

My friend the drunk said she looked like a stork. He didn’t like her; he had just moved back in, and went with me to the cafe every morning. She would come too, but unbidden and uninvited, taking a seat with us although she had no reason to be there. Who was she, anyway, to be sitting with us, with her car and her big house and her husband and her job? Who was she to think she might join us, who had fallen from life, and came to the cafe at that time to try and hold ourselves together? We were braced against the day, but she rode on top of it; we sought rhythm, regularity, but she was greedy for novelty. We were her toys and baubles, but she unsettled us.

This was after the affair – after it was agreed we would not see one another, that I would not seek her (but when had I ever sought her?) and she would not seek me. It had ended; she had told her husband, now he knew, and they were to move so they could leave the old memories behind. They were looking for a new house in the winding streets of the former Quaker village; soon they would move there; soon, champagne socialists, lecturers and consultants in business, they would hold a party to celebrate the election of New Labour. It was 1997; they were Blair’s people and I was not, and nor was my friend the drunk. It was enough for us to cross the day, enough to arrive at the other end intact.

The day stretched ahead of us, but there was the cafe, which opened at 11.00. Half an hour there, then back to the house, full of espresso. Then the long wait until 5.00, the second visit to the cafe. But there was J., who haunted us there. J. who lay in wait. She’s like a stork, said my friend the drunk, and by this he referred to her height, her sleekness. She was tall, sleek, gym-toned – why wouldn’t she be? And around she drove in her car. Into work and back again, and then into town. In the days of the affair, I went with her. Her husband, much older than her, did not care for the new places in town she liked to visit. So she took me, and that’s how the affair began.

How could I feel guilty about deceving someone who liked Shed 7? The first time I visited their house, I thought, so this is how they live, the champagne socialists. This is what it means to have money. And I thought: I would like to defile this house. I thought: I do not belong here, I was brought here, and I would like to defile it. What did they understand, the champagne socialists? They had two cars, they drove all around town, the town was theirs, the world was theirs, and what did I have?

Now I would defile their world – and how I delighted when the secret was out, when he, I was told, smashed up the house in rage. I don’t believe it, though. He wouldn’t smash anything. The world was his; what he had lost was not the world; he kept his place. It was a temporary setback. An excuse to move house. And so they prepared to move. And in their new house, when New Labour won, they held a great party to celebrate. Back together, affair over, they had their party.

She had said to me, I want a child. Her husband didn’t want a child, but she wanted one. I met her sister, who had a child, but not a husband (he hadn’t wanted one either). I met her mother, who did not want her husband.

Socialism or Barbarism

This was in the months before my friend the drunk had moved back in. No one in the house but my landlord and I. No one but he and I, and he liked to harass me. No one but my landlord and I and the monks who visited, and my landlord’s sport was sexual harassment. Go and get yourself a fella, he said. Can’t we have a half-and-half relationship?, he said. Monks circled the house, some on a far orbit, appearing once every few months, some arriving every night. But there was my landlord and I, and my landlord was unhappy when she appeared at our door in her gym lycras. She was running home, she said, and was just calling in. There she was, calling in.

She’s an elf, said my landlord, meaning she had just one side. She’s made of tin, said my landlord, meaning she had no depth. But she had a friend whom we introduced to my landlord, who was happy to entertain a young Canarian monarchist. Happy to talk of the Royal Houses of Europe with the son of a rich family who found himself in a Salford highrise, studying something or other.

The affair began. I’ll never leave him, J. said of her husband. But later she said, I want to leave him. Why had she sought me out? She found me on a train; she told me she had walked up and down the train to London to find someone to sit next to, and there I was, in my yellow shirt. She sat next to me. She sat there, and I knew she wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to talk. But she talked, and I, reluctantly, talked to her of celebrities and fashion. We enjoyed ourselves; the hours passed, talking happily about celebrities and fashion.

It was 1997. K. had already said of New Labour that it would make no difference. Socialism or barbarism, he said, and this is barbarism. Blair was young and Major grey, but it would make no difference. So I was young and J.’s husband grey. So was I novelty and he routine. And I who wanted to escape from my house found my escape and the days blossomed in the countryside around Manchester. We passed through the halls of summer and she said, I want a child. Let’s have a baby, she said. I want a baby like my sister, she said.

This was in the woods around Manchester, to which we drove. For me, this was already magic: driving from one place to another, driving out of the city and to the woods. For me, it was enough to escape from the house, from the city, to the woods. Here I was in the woods, in the halls of summer, I was driven there, a car took me. I was picked up and taken to the woods: this was already a big deal. How else could I have taken myself to those woods? How else could I have made my way? But there I was, in the woods.

Her husband didn’t want a baby, she said. She had been his student; he found her a job, she worked in his department. He didn’t want a child and she was in her thirties, and tired of her life, of her house. Let’s move away, she said. Let’s move south, she said. They had a house on Gran Canaria. Let’s move there, she said. She owned a house of her own, let’s move there, she said. Three houses they had between them and two cars. Three houses, two cars and they took half a dozen holidays a year. She said, I want a baby, and I liked that their happiness was caving in and that I was the occasion of their unhappiness.

Efficacy

Efficacy, I said to my friend the drunk when he moved in, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to feel real, I told him, to know I could make changes in the world. I wanted to put a dent in New Labour I said. I wanted New Labour ruined, I said. It was 1997. Those who had grown fat from Conversatism wanted to assuage their consciences. New Labour arrived and it was already clear they were a continuation of the same. New Labour arrived and still the rich would live far above us, still their world was far above ours. Socialism or barbarism, said K. and this is barbarism, said K., and he was right. What money there was in the world! How well they had done, those sixties radicals! How well had they done, those radicals! How many houses they had! How many holidays they could take!

Their lives streamed above us; we watched them. Soon, the drug dealers disappeared from our part of town. The dealers opposite were replaced by a family who transformed the house, opening it to the light, sanding the floors, minimalising everything. Next door, another family moved in, then another, until the whole street was full of them. What had happened? This was the time of the property investors. This was the time of profiteering from property, unabashed and unashamed. Now property was bought and sold by everyone. What began under Thatcher completed itself under Blair. What was despised by socialists under Thatcher was completed by those who called themselves Blairites, and without shame. The world was bought and sold, and without shame.

We haven’t got a chance, I said to my friend the drunk. We haven’t got the shamelessness, we haven’t got the money. So the world of the rich arched above us. So they crossed above us, the rich, it was magnificent. The street was transformed, unrecognisable. Floors were sanded, closed curtained windows which for years had hidden drug dealers were opened; yards transformed into gardens. The takeover was happening, and faster than before. Big new cars outside the houses. Hanging baskets from the lampposts. What had happened? Derelict parts of town were redeveloped. City lofts appeared. Cafes spread across the city. Tramways. It’s finished, I said to my friend the drunk, the takeover is complete. There’s nothing left, I said.

He, meanwhile, had decided to join the enemy. He bought a suit and briefcase and went to work. I received an invitation through the mail to the party at J.’s new house in Chorlton village. I didn’t even dent their relationship, I said to my friend the drunk. Nothing changed, nothing happened. Look at this I said, waving the invitation, nothing happened, don’t you see?

Poison

Long after the affair, J. and I walk through Chorlton Ees. Are you happy now?, I said. You should see our house, she said, it’s beautiful. Then she said, I don’t really want children, not anymore. Maybe I never did. I thought, the affair didn’t happen. Nothing happened, and nothing will happen. It’s over, nothing will ever happen again. Barbarism, I thought, it’s the unashamed reign of barbarism.

J.’s husband was consulting in Bulgaria again. They don’t know anything about business over there, she said, it’s hilarious. I remembered the stories the husband told me. They don’t wash, he’d say. It stinks over there, he’d say. And it’s so inefficient!, he’d say, but so cheap! He was there to advise them, to bring them the good news. We’re buying a place over there, said J., it’s really beautiful. Unspoilt. It’s really cheap. Then she said, he’d thought it was hilarious, when I said we were going to move South together. What will you live on?, he’d said. He’d thought it was really funny. You like holidays too much, he’d said.

I thought, it’s the end, we’re living at the end. Nothing will happen, ever again. Barbarism, I thought, the barbarians are not at the gates, but they’ve passed through the gates, and now they live among us, I thought. It’s finished, I thought, we’re the barbarians. We’re turning into barbarians, I thought. The colonisation is complete. It’s like the X-Files, I thought, but no conspiracy was necessary. And I knew it was hatching in me, too, that one day I would fall away and a barbarian would step forward in my place. But I thought, I’ll do my best to destroy the barbarian inside me. I thought, I’ll poison him with my poisoned thoughts. I thought, I’ll drip poison in his ear. I thought, I’ll poison him by the sheer extent of my hatred.

Sketches For My Friend the Drunk

King of the Day

Pink light of an autumn afternoon, we play tennis and between the courts, upright but staggering, here he comes, the leatherjacketed drunk with a six-pack in a plastic bag. Here he comes, the drunk who likes to wander among us, up and down the courts, asking for a light.

He likes to be one of the players, he likes to feel he’s included and to be greeted in recognition. Don’t look at him, I tell my tennis partner. Don’t make eye contact. The Indians next to us have to suffer him; he asks them whether they have a light; he admires their tennis and shouts his approval. Then children on bikes call out to the drunk. He ignores them, and they set themselves up at the other end of the courts and shout at him.

The children shout at the drunk, the drunk at the Indians; we’ve been put off our tennis; it’s begun to rain and the court is slippery. Time to leave. The drunk leaves with us, and I see he is young, though his face is ruddy and hard. He does not speak to us, but to himself, beatifically; he is content; to himself, he has been watching the lads play tennis, he was one of the lads, one of us. One of us, and with a crowd of children around him. He was the king of the day and we, the tennis players and the children, were his subjects.

My Friend the Drunk

Later that evening, what usually happens when I plug my phone in and keep off my dialup connection happens again: he phones, my old friend, the drunk. He must phone me several times a night, for I am rarely there, and when I am, rarely accessible. Now, because it has been two or three weeks since we spoke, he is polite. ‘Have you got a minute?’

We shared a house for many years. It was a dry house; there wasn’t a drop of alcohol there. Before he moved in, I used to pass him in the streets, the drunk. I’d pass him as he went round the off-licenses in the morning. He liked red wine; I think he still does. He always drank good red wine. I used to meet him in the streets, he smiling, but vacant. He would talk to me about Massive Attack remixes. About the Mad Professor. We spoke; it was a ritual; I went out each morning for my coffee, and he went out to buy good red wine.

When I moved into the house in Chorlton, I took his room, which was still full of his things. The plays he’d tried to write. The journal he kept. He had been drinking again, and had been evicted. Drunk, he had bothered the tenants in the flat above the house, had wandered up there one night and scared them. He went; I took his room next to that of another alcoholic, another drunk who was trying to give up the drink and would lapse himself, a few months later. He, in turn, had taken a room of the drug addict who had set himself on fire. The addict’s pretty face was burnt to charcoal; the tip of his nose was missing – it is the hardest thing to restore in burns victims, said the plastic surgeon. He was gone; someone else moved in just as I moved in.

The drunk, who would become my friend, used to visit my landlord. Without compunction, and knowing where the money would go, my landlord would give him a a couple of twenty pound notes. Then he would go, the drunk, through the back door through which he came. Sometimes the drunk would find himself in another city, lost and without knowing where he was. He’d phone and my landlord would arrange a hotel room for him. Of course he would move in again, the drunk, we all knew it; a year later he brought all his stuff around, determined to give up drinking.

At that time, the house was nearly empty. Another drinker who had relapsed had been expelled. It took us two weeks to evict him, he was well built, violent, a man used to fist fights and intimidation. He scared us. Every morning he would rise and drink a few cans in the garden and then stagger off to the pubs. Sometimes I would go out to find him in the evening and he’d be bothering other drinkers in the pub, swaying, beatifically but absently, entirely given over to the happy streaming of drunkenness. Then he left one morning, still drunk. His room was empty; I took it, and later my friend the drunk took my room.

He arrived with a mess of possessions. He had joined the Hare Krishnas recently and been expelled. He had joined the Buddhists and been expelled. He was a seeker, he said, an environmentalist. A documentary had been made about him on Dutch television: there he was, bearded, a young Adonis speaking about the turtles he was trying to save on Greek beaches. But now he was with us to dry out.

Two twenty pound notes came my way. Take him out, said my landlord, so we went to the Chinese restaurant and he ate meat for the first time in years. That night he said he had decided to become a yuppy, to shave his beard and wear a suit. So he bought a suit and shaved; he was handsome; he never looked like a drunk; his olive skin was clear and unlined; older than me, he looked younger, bright and strong and handsome.

Months passed. He moved to the flat on top of the house. Now he was away from us, away from the household who would always eat together every evening, he began to drink. Soon, he never came down during the daytime. Only at night would he venture downstairs. At night, at three AM, to sit out in the outhouse to have a smoke. I barely saw him, but we would speak on the phone. Each of us had his own phone; the rule of the house was that no one should knock on the door of anyone else. There were phones, and if someone was trying to call you for dinner, you were phoned, not called down. For there was no shouting, no calling, but there were telephones.

We spoke; he slurred, just as he did last night. By the time he was evicted again, he slurred so badly I couldn’t hear what he said. He couldn’t form a word. He used to leave slurring messages on all our phones. I visited him. His new flat stank of piss. He had lost control; he slept in the sofa in his lounge and wet himself. The flat stank – he could barely talk, he mumbled to himself, day and night were the same for him; when he phoned he just moaned, not a word could form itself.

For a long time, that’s how I knew him: answering machines full of moans from my friend the drunk. Months passed, then a whole year, and we heard very little. He moved again; he was arrested several times and, since he’d given our house as his address, the police visited us. We said there was nothing we could do, and so my friend the drunk spent nights in the cells. Months passed; we had other tenants, other adventures. Everything happened; nothing happened.

Why did we let him move in again? We knew he’d drink again; my landlord knew it would happen, I knew it would happen, but he was our friend the drunk. Sober, he was funny and intelligent and gentle. He was a Chorlton celebrity; for a while, he dressed like a dandy; he wore red crushed velvet trousers and spent his money on beautiful suits. He was handsome; everyone admired him; he was gentle and funny, but when he drank, the temper would come upon him. The temper would come and he would take the car and drive long miles on the motorway, looking for vengeance on those he blamed for his drinking. Where he could he finish but in prison?

He asked me to send him FHMs while he was inside. They were a prison currency, he said. All day he would lie in his cell, smoking dope. He was tough, he could look after himself, and when he got into crack cocaine, he found he won respect for his drinker’s courage, passing easily among the drug dealers of Moss Side. After a long and violent night he found himself at dawn in Platt Park with one of the biggest dealers, a man feared and admired. My friend the drunk had saved him that night, smashing a rival dealer armed with a machette with his bicycle U-lock. How do I get out of this life?, the dealer asked him that morning, but my friend the drunk wanted to get into it.

Now they would hang out, watching films together and taking puffs on the crackpipe. They visited the crack houses of Levenshulme, smoking with others. He was liked; he was generous; he would buy crack for everyone and they would watch University Challenge and he’d get all the answers right. One prostitute took a shine to him, sitting on his knee and telling him about the paintings she liked. One day she brought him one round to show him. It was by Stubbs, of all people. Was it an original?, she asked.

Stubbs

I’ve long since moved away, but my friend the drunk still rings me. Write down my exploits, he said, I want it all written down. He intended to write himself, he said. Have I read Trainspotting?, he asked. We spoke about Burroughs; he loved Kerouac and for him Leonard Cohen was the greatest of all drunks. Then he turned to the music he had loved as a child when he lived with his divorced mother. They would listen to Kris Kristofferson and the Highwaymen. Now when he phones he sometimes holds the phone to the speaker. Not a word except, listen!

Last night, he was meek. He had no friends left, he said. No one rings him. Instead, he has to ring them, and he knows they don’t trust him. We speak of our great mutual friend. She doesn’t trust me, he says. It was 11.00; I was tired. You don’t want to speak to me anymore, he said. Alright, I’ll just go. I said, it’s good to speak to you, I’ll give you a ring sometime. He said, yeah in six months or something. I put the receiver down and he is still speaking, half-resentful, half-aggressive. And I’ll come and see you, he says.

He speaks of the woman in the burkha next door. She has beautiful eyes, he says, but it’s not enough. He plays cricket with her sons and sometimes she invites him in. It’s not enough, he says, but her eyes are beautiful. Write that down, he says, everyone should know about me. He always asks for that – for his life to be recorded and for me to record it. One day he will write it all down, he says, but in the meantime, I should record it and share it with others.

He speaks about himself, his business. It’s always about to fail, but there is always hope. He speaks about golf, and then football in which he knows I have no interest. He speaks about music, and finally, just when I show signs of leaving, he asks me about myself. But he’s not interested; he cuts in, he becomes aggressive. You think you know everything, he says, but I’m pretty clever. I may not be as clever as you, but I have a great general knowledge, he says. Then a name I don’t recognise. Do you remember that name?, he says. And then, it was from that game of Trivial Pursuits we played, do you remember? The pole vaulter.

I was a legend, he says, and I’m still a legend. Are you going to remember, he says, are you going to write this down?, he says. I’ll write it down eventually, he says, like Burroughs, do you remember that line, "Me and the Sailor were working the yard", he says. You should keep a record, he says. Do you remember when we went out to that restaurant when I first moved in, he says, when you made me eat meat? You should write it down, he says. Do you remember how we used to dress up, he says, and go out to the cafes? Do you remember the party at X.’s? You should write it down, he says, it would make a good story. Someone should write it down, he says, it’s worth remembering. You think you’re so clever, he says, but you should try and live my life. Go on, write it down. That’ll give you something to write, he says.

You wouldn’t last a minute inside, he says. X. (the dealer) respects me, and do you know why?, he says, because I’m hard. It goes back to when I was inside, he says, I handled myself. I used to trade cigarettes and FHMs, he says. They respected me, he says, the lads. I used to trade cigarettes with them, he says, they were so stupid. Write it down, he says, you should write about real things, he says. I’ll give you something to write about, he says. You wouldn’t last a minute in the crackhouses, he says, but they respect me. I talk to crack whores about Stubbs, he says, what do you think of that? Write it down, he says. You should write about real life, he says. I’ll tell you about real life, he says.

Did you think crack whores like Stubbs?, he says. She didn’t know it was Stubbs, he says, I told her it was Stubbs. She showed me a painting and I said, it’s Stubbs, he says, and they were really impressed. They had this painting and they thought it was an original, they thought it was a real Stubbs, "is it worth anything?" they said, he says. So I picked it up and looked it over very carefully and I said, I – think – it’s a copy, he says. But they were very impressed, he says. I always buy enough crack to go round, he says. We all smoke it, he says. It’s not like you think, he says, actually it’s not that addictive, he says. Not like drink, he says.

You should write this down, he says. Real life, he says. Not middle class life like yours, he says. And I’ll tell you what, they were so tight in that house, he says. They wouldn’t buy proper Coke, only Panda cola. They used to buy Panda cola because it was cheap, he says, it was really funny. I told them to buy real Coke, he says. It’s the real thing, I told them, he says. They didn’t know how to take it, he says. They’re not used to having the piss taken out of them, he says. You couldn’t have got away with it, but they thought I was okay. They trusted me, he says. I’m quite hard, he says. You know me, I can handle myself, he says. One day I’ll write it all down, he says. Have you read Trainspotting?, he says. Like that, he says. You wouldn’t understand it, he says, it’s in Scots. I love bagpipes, he says, they make me cry. They remind me of the old country, he says. You never cry, do you?, he says. You don’t know anthing about life, he says, real life. It’s going on under your nose, he says, and you know nothing about it.

Stubbs, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", he says. It doesn’t give you enough, the burkha, he says, you can only see her eyes, he says. But she has pretty eyes, he says. But it doesn’t give you enough, he says, you can’t see what she’s like, he says. I play cricket with her lads, he says, and she makes me dinner, he says. She likes me, he says, but then I’m a good looking bloke, he says. Always was. Not that you aren’t good looking, he says, but I was the good looking one, he says. It’s because I’m tall, he says. Women like tall men, he says. Can you hear that?, he says, it’s Leonard Cohen, he says. The greatest drunk of them all, he says. Can you hear that?, he says. It’s Kris Kristofferson, he says, Sunday Morning Coming Down.

No one trusts me anymore, he says. You don’t trust me, do you?, he says. I have been drinking a bit, he says. Business isn’t going too well, he says. Haven’t worked for months, he says. Been playing golf, though. You have to play golf for business, he says. Anyway, he says, I’ll let you get on. I know you don’t want to hear from me, he says. You’ve never rung me. How many times have you rung me? Twice?, he says.

Stubbs, though, he says, I knew you’d like that story. Write it down. I’ll write it down one day. I’m reading again, he says, I knew you’d approve, he says. Vonnegut, he says. Have you read him? he says. Hilarious, he says. And I know you don’t like Kerouac, but Dharma Bums, it’s great that, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", do you remember that?,  he says. Burroughs, he says. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it, I’ll let you get on, he says, I can see you want to go. What are you doing? Turn the television on, he says. It’s Dylan, he says. He’s great, Dylan, he says. Shall I tell you who the new Dylan is?, he says. Shall I tell you?, he says.

You don’t know anything, he says. I’ve got the answers, he says, I’ve lived, he says. I’ve seen life, he says. Stubbs, though, funny that, isn’t it?, he says. But I won’t keep you, I know you’ve better things to do, he says. You never want to talk to me, he says. No one wants to talk with me, he says. I know I ring too often, he says. Three times a night? Yes, sometimes, but I just want it to be like the old days, he says. Do you remember?, he says. No one has a sense of humour anymore, he says. The Highwaymen, he says, listen!

So my friend the drunk. So my sketches for My Friend the Drunk.

Myths of Capital

Ryan’s Brother

My happiest days this summer were steered by the O.C.; it was the O.C., on every morning at 9.00, that gathered the day and I to ourselves. Watching the O.C., the day and I were on equal terms, equally fascinated. I like the theme tune very much, I like the characters, I like that Julie didn’t give her husband the poison she prepared, that there is a kindness in her as there would not be in other, similar characters in other soap operas. I like confused and angry Marissa, and I like Summer and her love triangles. But when they brought in Ryan’s brother, when he was introduced to the show, I thought: now the day and I must separate; we’ve caught out the O.C.; it’s secret is up; at its heart is a non-event it has tried to hide; the O.C. is a cover for what does not happen and cannot complete itself.

Ryan’s brother is from the wrong side of the tracks, like him; he is brutishly good looking, like him; he takes up with Marissa – or rather, Marissa takes him up, coming to his door with gifts, driving him from here to there; they are to be friends. Only Ryan’s brother abuses this friendship; unlike Ryan he has not been redeemed. So, according to the law, must he disappear from the O.C. But not before his doubling of Ryan, the guy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks all over again, has exposed the first Ryan for what he is: no different from the one who doubles him, caught in this play of mirrors in which, now, the whole of the O.C. is implicated. What is real? I cannot trust this programme and its makers. They are throwing events at me, replaying Ryan’s story, playing it again in a kind of desperation. For they know there are no events and the O.C. is empty, that in the O.C. emptiness knows itself and speaks of itself.

So does the O.C., which carried me in strong and generous arms, let me fall. Gradually, the series winds to an end, but my faith was already lost. Now 9.00 is to be confronted without the strong arm of a soap opera. The day and I part, no longer reconciled, no longer gathered together at the head of the day as the puppy lies with puppy. Now the day and I fall back from one another; I am the earth and the day is the sky, and we are turned from one another. So is the cosmos set apart and the great dualism returns. There is no dwelling place; the O.C. is not as Holderlin’s The Ister is for Heidegger, it is not the river which bears us all in its streaming and I am sad as though I had lived my whole life and were at its end. Premature death! I do not want to die because I’ve never lived!

The Red Carpet

9.00, the beginning of the day, the head of all waters. Without the O.C. there must be new albums, perpetually new sounds to listen to; and then there are the celebrity blogs, then the events with I will hold the eventless everyday at bay. These events – Renee Zellweger’s marriage, its breakdown, the sting that caught Kate Moss snorting cocaine – are my sheld. I am afraid of time, which is to say, afraid for myself in time. Events are my sustenance; I write here only to mark the day. What seems occasional (it is the 19th September; I see the plant outside my window whose roots drown in overflowing drain water, and beyond the plan, the bins, then the wall) is in fact a plate of the armour I need to construct.

Happily, the celebrities live for me. There is always a premiere, always new dresses to admire. There are celebrities in dresses, the trial of the red carpet, the judgement of fashion successes and fashion disasters. Happily, there are celebrity blogs and celebrity magazines. Their very proliferation is a sign of a great need for myths that would allow us to cross the day. New myths, the new sustaining puranas with speak of our crossing life, which accumulate the wisdom that would help us to cross.

We knew Renee Zellweger’s marriage would end; we knew, and the marriage played out as we knew it would. We knew, we looked on, but with infinite compassion, with infinite wisdom. So we can turn back to our own lives and those around us with the same wisdom and the same compassion. Reassurance – we all want the same things, we need the same things, the celebrities are like us, only larger than us and more beautiful than we are. They are gods, or the avatars of gods; they live and die before us in order that we learn of ourselves and our world. They instruct; we learn from their failures and their glories.

They are gods and goddesses, that is not in doubt. This is why we resist the elevation of reality TV stars to the status of celebrity. Oh, some of them are admitted into the pages of the celebrity magazine; where would be without Jade, magnificent Jade? But the others … how can they but fail? How can they cross from our world to theirs, the world of celebrities? But there is glory in their hubris, and Big Brother is tragic to the extent that the freedom granted to those in the house runs up against necessity, that is, the failure of their bid for fame, its great withering. But there is Jade! Jade who is set against the other celebrities in the magazine, who is the night to their day, the backdrop that would allow them to shine more brightly.

The Gods

I have said it before, and it is worth saying again: celebrities, television are the dreams of the sleeping body of Capital. Dreams of Capital, which can never wake up. Capital which only slumbers, which will never rise from itself because there is no ‘itself’; Capital that dissolves all forms and releases them to their streaming, Capital that is fate and necessity.

For Capital is time and Capital is ruin. I saw you, Capital, on Kate Moss’s face. Cruel Capital that would ruin Renee Zellweger’s marriage (or would have allowed to think that it might work)! Ah, but that cruelty is what we call fate, what we live as fate and know as fate. The gods are watching, but the gods are blind, the sky is blind and indifferent to us and to all but the streaming of money and its equipollences. Capital time, myths of Capital, this is our wisdom.

Nihilism: the introduction of Ryan’s brother into the O.C., the breakdown of a marriage we would know would break down. It breaks in, then, a kind of nonsense that sets us apart from the day we traverse. The gods are leaving, having never arrived. Celebrities are leaving, having never come to us. Jade, concilator of the terrestial and the heavenly is leaving us. And who are we who are left, bereft of myths, of heroes, of heroines?

The Deserter

On the Way

Walking between my flat and the office is always a trial; I am tested by the sentences which form themselves in me as I walk. Sometimes they are from books; sometimes they seem to have come together all by themselves, forming by their own initiative phrases I would never have been able to come up with by myself. Sentences, phrases, which I will have forgotten by the time I’ve reached my destination, for there is always something which makes me forget them, just as, in the morning, I forget the dream that a moment before seemed more real than the day into which I had awoken.

These phrases often take the form of absurd questions, a child’s questions. Where am I? But I know where I am; I am passing from one place to another; I am on the way – but then it is as though my walking had found an infinite space in which to wander, that I was crossing a desert greater than the Biblical one, and I will never find the other side. As though, then, a slackening had occurred, a stretching of time and of space, so that what was once passable has become impassable, so that to be on the way is to wander forever.

Where am I? Nowhere in particular – lost in time, lost in space and lost to yourself, that first of all: this is what I hear inside me. Who am I? But I know who I am; I am the one employed by the university; I am to cross the field and then to follow the road past the medical school; I am a worker; I am a son, a friend, a brother, a partner: a network of relationships hold me in place. But then it is as though those relationships slacken, that they give so much I cannot remember who I am. I pass, but this passage consumes me; what should take fifteen minutes now takes all eternity; I pass, but this passage requires I give up my identity until I become only a shapeless drifting without a past and without a present, and one whose future is simply that of being unable to begin, unable to pass, unable to find my way across the bridge of the moment.

Drifting, dispersal: to lose hold of space and time is not to float through time and space, detached body, but to disperse the body itself, to allow it to be torn apart as Orpheus was torn apart by the Maenads. But still to survive that dispersal, to remain aware in some way, as though dispersal were at once limitable and unlimitable, unlimiting itself even as it returns to itself; returning such that the unlimited is once again limited. And indeed that is what must happen for memory to happen; it is the condition of memory and recounting. I am writing here, after all, of what happened to me then; I have remembered; I have retrieved a memory from forgetting.

But in truth, the power to remember thus is not mine; it is not a power I possess. Then am I possessed like the child in the Exorcist? Or is it that I am dispossessed, that what is remembered comes unbidden, that arrives as though from itself, as if it were not a memory but a call, as though I were being asked a question, as though an answer were demanded of me. But what answer can I give? Perhaps it is given in my dispersal. Perhaps it is for dispersal that the questions call. I respond; I am dispersed, the questions come, Where am I? What time is it?

I Can Speak Now

Yes, what time? It is the 18th September. I’ve just written that. It is 11.20; I have just written that. Hungover, I am fit only for writing. But I am fitted to writing by my hangover, by my tiredness; they are what allow me to approach writing at the level of writing. As though my tiredness has delivered me into that trance in which everything can be said (the opening of Mirror, when the cured stutterer says, loudly and clearly, I can speak now). But I am not sure. I can write now: no, I cannot write that. Of what am I writing? Of barely anything at all. Barely anything; writing spins itself from itself, asking to be written.

How pretentious! How vague! I have always dreamed of a gossamer-writing without theme, without incident, without anecdote; I wanted to write with a tiny palette of words, with barely anything; to engage a writing in which nothing was at stake and which spoke only of itself, of the ‘there is’ of writing. Of the nudity of writing even as it sought to clothe itself in what was related, even though it were made entirely of details. This is why the occasional seizes writing, and why to write of nothing in particular is to write of everything. Is there a way of telling, of blogging, which would remain at the threshold of the occasional?

There is writing, there is blogging; so does the occasional ask itself to be marked in writing. This morning (it is 11.27; I am listening to Vespertine) wants to be remembered. But what is it that remembers itself here? The day recalls itself, its slackening; the day sags, the day forgets its self-relation and comes to rest here, in these words. Yes, in these words, by means of them, the day is resting, it lays down its head.

The Deserter

I always wanted to write with the word deserter. Of the one who left the world behind, who deserted the world. Recall Bob Hoskins’ character in 247; recall how he passes through the woods. Recall how he arrives and then disappears; how he loses himself, how he is lost in advance such that when he first appears it is as though he were the day coalesced! Bob Hoskins motivates the unemployed to open a boxing club. He has the gift of hope; he gives hope to the long-term unemployed. Gives them hope, but then hope is lost and he must lose himself again. He disappears. When he is found again, he is dying. That is how it should be. He is the day, and the day which knew itself in him dies with him, it dies in his death.

Peter Handke will sometimes allow hymns to telling and to the power of telling to break into the prose of his narratives. So too would I like to sing a hallelujah to what allows the day to write of itself here; so would I want to die from these pages as Bob Hoskins dies in 247; I do not need to be here; hope was given through me; the day spoke of itself, but now it is time for my desertion.

Where goes the one who writes here, writer born of the merciful strength of a hangover? Slowly the caffeine is being absorbed by my bloodstream and strength begins to fail me. It is the 18th September, 11.43: I write these words to mark the one I was when I wrote, to mark myself the day’s servant, the one who came forward like Hari in Solaris, the messenger who does not understand the message she is.

HARI: Am I a lot like her?

CHRIS: No, you used to be a lot like her, but now you – not she are the real Hari.

HARI: You know I’ve got a feeling that I’ve forgotten something … I can’t understand …

The Judgement

Fear of Time

Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those wounds no one suffered, for I was hardly there to suffer them? Because I would turn there to discover the secret of the same everyday I see through my window; I would smash the glass. Why look back and not forward? Why back and not through this window before you? Because I am employed, busy, even when I try and write on the everyday. I have betrayed it; the everyday escapes; it flees into what I take to be my past.

Why does it flee thus? It cannot be otherwise; if unemployment allows me to witness the everyday, it does not permit me to seize it. The word, trauma echoes feebly in a direction it cannot reach, for I am writing not of a wound or a wounding, nor even of a suffering, unless it is possible to invoke a suffering suffered by no one, a suffering with no one at its core, but which returns, ghost of what cannot complete itself and cannot come to term.

Suffering, then: name of that pathein which attunes, that mood which will henceforward sustain your life, that vagueness which returns and which you fear. Vagueness, suffering without subject, cosmic boredom: there is no name for what amounts to a fear of time. Agoraphobia is already misnamed, for where is our agora, our common space, such that it could be feared? There is no shared life; no life lived in common, and perhaps this is already a clue as to why the everyday flees even as we look for it. At the exhibition of the everyday life of the Phoenicians at the British Museum, I thought, only we today, we moderns experience the truth of the everyday; only for us is it presented and hidden, both at once. We have lost what we think we have found in another civilisation, but in truth we’ve found nothing, not even ourselves.

The fear of time: I am not sure what to call this new condition and I know I have mistaken it for what is so poorly named agoraphobia, for that dislike of open spaces, of the square in front of the town hall or the development by the quayside, but above all, for me, those roads on which I used to cycle when I was young, roads exposed, roads which exposed me mercilessly to the sky, as if delivered unto a celestial judgement.

The Judgement

And what was decided with respect to my case? What judgement was handed down? Ah, but there was no judgement and no one to hand down a judgement, I knew myself, cycling, to be seen, by the sky, by the white light as it saw me and was indifferent to me.

I was not a child. Perhaps that was the point; perhaps that was the first experience of the fact of the world that would not indulge me. Was that the judgement delivered to me: you are not a child, you are no longer young, what you are is what you will be? Was that the judgement: you are what you have become, there are no potentialities left to unfold? Nothing will happen that has not happened; the pattern is fixed, your future known: that’s what the day said to me. A child is everything and I was nothing. A child has potential and I had exhausted my potential. My time was up; what could I become that I was not already?

Was that the content of the judgement? I wonder. Because it was also the case that the one I was, the cyclist, was already dispersed. Who was I? I cycled across the Thames Valley, going nowhere in particular; I cycled, going nowhere, for where was there to go? And so was I dispersed in that cycling, so was my attention claimed by nothing and everything – claimed, but so that attention emptied itself out, so its gaze surveyed all but saw the same in all, the same, but behind the same, hidden by it, as it can only be hidden, what I will call the ‘there is’ of the everyday.

There is the Everyday

There is, il y a, es gibt – the German is best because it speaks of what was given, of the ‘there is’ that is also a giving. But a giving that abandoned me to what was given thus, which said: this is fate. Not, this time, my fate, measured in terms of what I could or could not do; not the fate allotted to me, but to a time, to my time, to the epoch of the everyday, the great noon when the everyday came to itself and knew itself in the bland white indifference of the sky.

A judgement was delivered; I received it; I bore it. A judgement was delivered; I wrote to transmit its lesson. The book called The Judgement wrote itself. 160,000 words; 500 pages. Unpublishable, of course, unreadable, of course, and gradually, over the months cut down, distilled until there were only 5,000 words left; and then I saw that those words, too, were no good and would have to go. The Judgement: a blank page. Blank, ruled page of the W.H. Smiths diaries in which I used to write. Blank page on which nothing was written, but which bore, so it seemed to me, something like the judgement of the blind sky on what lay beneath it. I was judged; we were judged; the Thames Valley was judged, and by the Thames Valley the world as it in turn would be transformed into the Thames Valley.

I had seen enough; I had seen everything. What use was cycling now? I had seen enough; my education was complete, but in a sense I had learnt nothing, or rather, my education had only begun. For I was not there to suffer what I suffered, I was not there, which is not to say it did not happen. Oh it happened, it was ever-present; I experienced it as I watched Neighbours, as I rose at ten-thirty, but it happened such that it was never completed and determined as an object of my experience. I was haunted, not by the ghost of Hamlet’s father who would spur him to vengeance, to action (but Hamlet vacillates; he does not act), but by vacillation itself (redoubled in my vacillation, in my non-action). Only indecision attested to the coming and going of the judgement.

Indecision

I studied; I learnt a great deal and forgot a great deal; I thought I had come up against the roof of my intelligence; I gave up studying and sold my books. I was back on the dole, back where I was at the start. But returning to me, despite everything I had forgotten, was a memory I am not sure I can call mine. Returning, then, out of the depths of a forgetting that was in no way the opposite of remembering, I knew the same judgement; it was passed again, over and again. How could I but misunderstand it, despite my learning, or, perhaps, because of it? I hadn’t the tools; I hadn’t the ability to speak of what could not be spoken not because it was ineffable, but because it carried speech away.

Years pass and I find myself here, this Sunday morning, surrounded by the debris of last night’s entertainment – sucked lime quarters, Corona bottles and empty cans of Guinness – find myself tired and hungover. Tired, hungover, but with a great deal of work before me – papers to write up, books to read – but I am fit only to write here at the blog. What do I write? Suddenly I remember the phrase from the poem, ‘in the end is my beginning’ – perhaps I should begin with that, I say to myself, and see where that takes me. I begin; I open the ‘compose new post’ screen; I write without deciding what to write.

But in that indecision lies the truth. In that indecision I turn, I am turned; by indecision does the judgement return to me and I remember, even though it fled from memory. What had I seen? What had I been given to see? I am Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt, for what have I seen? What I did not see, the seeing of the sky, the day’s gaze, the everyday as it saw me then in blindness and knew me in its blindness – yes, only now does it turn to me, that same blindness, only now does it return, the experience that, when it occurred, immediately set itself so far back into my memory that it became something like its condition. The condition of memory, but also its content, as though it were a priori and a posteriori at one and the same time.

The Threshold

Why turn back? Why remember, after these years, those tracts of unemployment, those open wounds of time? I am frightened of time, that is true; there is too much time, not too little, and it is not my death that encircles my awareness, distant horizon, but infinite time, the infinite threshold between one moment and another. Today, what is today? Today, who am I today? I remember that scene in Mirror where the boy who, we learn, lost his parents in the siege of Leningrad, is questioned by his drill-sergeant. What is he asked? Specific questions which need specific answers. How does he reply? Without specificity, at once vaguely and determinedly; he speaks with firmness of what has no firmness. So too does the everyday ask to be remembered here. To be remembered, which is to say, to remember itself by way of my memories. By way of them, but not contained by them, the everyday having judged them and become their condition.

The Other Side of the Glass

The Other Side of the Glass

Unemployed, fallen from work, from the chance of work, the day leads nowhere, the dole is the bridge across the days and the weeks; you are the object of crackdowns and tightening-ups, you receive home visits from the housing officer. Then your payments are delayed and you travel on the bus you cannot afford to town to wait in line, but what a line, to see the civil servants about your housing claim. You are on the other side of the glass, you can barely make yourself understood, you speak loudly to be heard and asked to be spoken to loudly so that you can hear, but the separating window prevented you from understanding and from being understood.

They know you, in the dole office. They know you, at the council. They know, and that’s why they separate themselves from you by a window. They know, they are prepared, they’ve taken measures, you are made to take a ticket from the machine and wait in the foyer, wait at the margins, wait in the corridors between rooms, wait in those spaces that are not quite rooms, wait in the chairs each set aside the other, wait and shift seats when others ahead of you are called, they are ready for you, they don’t want to be touched by you, they don’t want physical contact, or to breathe the same air as you.

Violence will not be tolerated. Attacks on staff will lead to prosecution. Yes, it’s understandable, some of us are violent, some too impatient, I’m frightened of them sitting beside me with WHITE written each letter across the knuckles of one hand and POWER on the knuckles of the other, I don’t want to sit near them with the tattoos that curl up from their teeshirts and around their necks, I wouldn’t want to be as close to them as I am, I wouldn’t trust them, I wouldn’t want to deal with them – listen to them talk, they can barely talk, they threaten and they growl, they brood and they resent, and you, civil servant, I know you want to be pleasant and patient and kind, you are sympathetic and empathetic, you want to help us, those who are called your clients, you want to help the job seekers find jobs and make the payments to those who want housing benefit, you want to run through the long forms they have fill out, you want to make sure everything is okay, even as you want, at the same time, to be separate from us, your clients, from those who are on the other side of the glass.

Ah, civil servant, for all your good will and attentiveness, for all your training and people management, you sense our stagnancy, you sense in us what has not begun, you sense what cannot begin, what is deficient or excessive, you know in us what you must not know. You know we are stagnant, and that our stagnancy threatens to run into the streaming of your life, the cool water of your life, its cool streaming. You know with what we might infect you, that our disgusting lives might run into yours, might pollute your days and your nights. You know our stagnancy is close to running into the clear stream of your life, you know if you came closer, you would say to your partner when you came home from work, it’s all too much, you would say it because you had come too close to us, not like Icarus with the sun, the opposite in fact, not like one who tried to rise, but one, rather, who was compelled to sink, who could do nothing but sink, who fell without wanting to fall, who was infested and invaded, befouled and besmirched, whose clear stream of life was flooded with our stagnant waters. Oh I know you, civil servant, I know and understand what is happening on the other side of the glass.

Beneath Time

The Blind Sky

Simone Weil: God’s great crime against us is to have created us; it is the fact of our existence. And our existence is our great crime against him.

Unemployment’s great crime against us is to have made us; it is the fact of our existence. And our existence is our great crime against unemployment. Unemployed, we are beneath time, subjected to it. That is why routine is so important. Wake up at a set hour, never later than ten, if you wake at ten-thirty, disaster, but before ten and you are okay, better still if you wake before nine. But before ten is sufficient, there is the whole day ahead of you, but at ten you are not yet beneath time, you do not fear time, you take a stand at the head of the day. Before ten, and you have a chance to get something done, the day still holds promise, outside, faraway, the world is working, a great deal is happening, but for you, nothing has begun, you are square in the time before the beginning, ready for the day.

After ten, and around ten-thirty, you’ve lost the day, it’s already too far ahead of you. How can you catch up? The day will have to be endured rather than lived. You will get no purchase on the day; time does not offer you a foothold. You will suffer from time and you will not cease suffering from it. But before ten, you still have a chance, there’s still promise, the morning leads up to lunchtime, and lunchtime finishes with Neighbours, and then’s the afternoon, always too long, but in the evening, the workers come home, it’s time for the news. True, there is the afternoon, but if you get up early, the afternoon can be dealt with, there’s always a way of bracing yourself against it, always an activity you can invent for yourself.

Unemployed, I would cycle to town to do nothing but wander. Unemployed, town was the place where wandering was possible, where attention was absorbed sufficiently that you did not suffer from time, where there was enough variety, enough events to occupy you. True, they came from without, those events, they happened to you, you were not their origin, but at least something happened, which it does not in the suburbs. Town is for events; passing through town, inventing errands for yourself, you experienced the forward movement of time, time passing.

But eventually, before rush hour, you would have to go home. Eventually, it is time to cycle home and there is the risk of that terrible passivity which brings time towards you. Eventually, you find yourself not above but beneath time, in the eternity of the everyday, in the eternity beneath time as beneath the blank, white sky. You had no chance! Time was waiting for you, it knew you, the whole sky was its eye, looking for you.

But this all-seeing, all-knowing eye is a blind eye, its whiteness whiteness of the sky is the whiteness of blindness. It sees without seeing – it sees and you are seen by no one; no one sees you, no one is watching out for you, it is not even that you are alone, you are not even that, for what is witnessed is your disarray.

Now there is no boundary between you and the everyday. Seen is your dispersal, as though you had fallen like snow across the whole of the Thames Valley. The sky sees the whole Thames Valley and sees you spread across the Thames Valley, the whole Thames Valley that you are, the spreading-across that is all you are. Just as Prufrock was spread across the sky, so you are spread across the Thames Valley and the sky is spread above you. As you are spread across, so is the sky spread above you. And you look up to where you are seen, and the sky sees you, even as there is nothing to looks and no one to see. Even though what is seen is only your nothingness, your scattering. So does nothing see into nothing. So does unemployment see itself and see too much.

Who am I? Who was I? The one witnessed by unemployment, the one in whom unemployment saw itself. I was not made by unemployment in its image, but unmade in its image. I was undone in its image, the image of unemployment. Who was I? The one undone by unemployment in the image of its perpetual undoing. Who was I? Undone by unemployment, dispersed by unemployment, unemployment sought to know me as it knew itself. So did unemployment suffer from me as it saw itself in me. So did it suffer as it saw its truth. Unemployment tried to pass me, to void me from its body. I knew I was to be voided; unemployment suffered from my existence. It suffered as it knew its crime against me was to have created me; my existence was my great crime against unemployment.

Ten Thirty

It’s ten thirty, I’ve woke up too late, I stayed up too late, and now I’ve woken too late. Ten thirty, this is a bad start, the world’s already left me behind, time’s left me behind. Ten thirty and I live in the wake of time, and there’s no catching up. Should I rush? Should I go quickly downstairs and go out? Should I get the cycle out of the shed and ride into the day? But it is too late; I’ve missed my appointment with the day, I’ve missed my chance, the day and I are no longer on equal terms. The day knows this. The sky is white, but when I look up at the sky above the trees, I see that it is moving with great, imperturbable confidence. It has won, it knows it can only win, that eventually I slip and rise too late.

The day is a glistening surface without purchase. It is the smooth wall of a pyramid without surface. I cannot climb, I cannot ascend, there are no footholds. Should I read? Should I take down a book from the bookshelf and begin to read? But I will not be able to read a line. The sky is already in the page, waiting for me. The sky is already looking up at me from the page, I am seen, I am scorned, I am laughed at. The imperturbable day is already there in the white page.

What chance do I have? Always the effort to rise earlier than the day, to wake early enough to discover its ruses and its secrets. Always the dream to catch out the day, to observe the celestial takeover, to see night as it changes into the day (the day did not come first!). That’s why I used to stay up, past three, past four, to the dawn. I used to stay up until dawn and then sleep after dawn. Until I discovered that to rise late was to have no chance, that to rise at twelve, at twelve thirty, was to destroy all hope of resisting the day, that the day would win and could only win.

The Great Destroyer

Neighbours is the hinge of the day, its articulation. Neighbours, from 1.30 to 1.50 is the true noon; noon lies at its centre. To watch Neighbours is to know the morning has become the afternoon. Neighbours is the turning point, it is fate. The afternoon has come; it opens after Neighbours. True, there are other programmes to watch after Neighbours. But who wants to watch Columbo in the afternoon? It’s too old a programme, it comes from the past, and you should never watch old programmes in the day. It comes from the 70s, and you should only watch contemporary programmes in the day. It takes enough effort to remain contemporary without watching programmes from the past.

Neighbours is contemporary, and so is This Morning. Watch and you are up to date, you are up on current affairs, on the lives of the celebrities, on actors and actress doing the rounds, on authors doing the rounds, on pop stars and film stars doingthe rounds. With Neighbours, something is always happening, there’s always a cliffhanger. Always suspense, always events which lead to suspense, to the brink of the next programme. The new episode of Neighbours begins with the last moments of the previous episode; it orientates you. Aha, you say, that’s what happened. You never think of Neighbours when you are not watching Neighbours, but when it returns, when another episode begins, you are orientated, prepared, you remember what happened in the previous episode and in the last run of episodes.

Neighbours remembers itself in you. At the turning point of the day Neighbours sets itself back into your memory. Neighbours happens; Neighbours unfurls out of itself. Neighbours emanates from itself, and it is only emanation. Perpetual event, perpetual unfolding, Neighbours is always hungry for new events, for new sensation; it is unstable; it is instability itself; happiness must be destroyed, the ‘solid’ family at its heart must be torn apart. Time is merciless in Neighbours. Time, the thirst for events, is the great destroyer. But what is it that destroys? The same everyday that destroys me; the same non-event that seeks to hide itself in events; the turning over of the great non-event of the everyday.

It is the everyday that is the navel of Neighbours, its centreless centre. The need for the events in Neighbours is the need for the everyday to give form to itself. It is the everyday that holds itself as a kind of reserve in Neighbours, which holds itself behind every event that comes forward. But the everyday cannot happen; it calls for events, but cannot occur. The everyday is non-event, it is unemployment which seeks only itself as non-event. All the events of Neighbours turn around this same non-event, the event which cannot come to completion, the happening which cannot round itself off, but always returns to happen again.

The everyday is the navel of Neighbours; Neighbours is the navel of the everyday.

The Desperate Ones

Desperate Need

October 2000, and I am on the dole for the thousandth day, the hundred thousandth day, for the millionth-and-first day, on the dole, working, but still on the dole, working a few hours for the university, but still on the dole, still claiming council tax exemption and housing benefit. Working, it is true, but not enough, there are never enough hours, so you’re on the dole. Working a few hours here and there, picking up what hours you can, but on the dole, on benefits, visiting the job centre, signing on every couple of weeks, standing in line and signing on every fortnight.

Working, yes, but you know you won’t get paid until February, that this is the deal, you begin working in September, you teach in good faith, you prepare your teaching, you get the bus to work, you attend the lectures on the courses you are supposed to be teaching and then supply the seminars. Working, but on the dole, because there is always the timelag, always that the university cannot manage to pay you for many months, always the six month lag, always that length of time when it cannot, for some reason, may a payment to you.

So roll on February, you say to yourself, February can’t come too soon, you say to yourself, because although you sign on, you are not entitled to full benefits, you work after all, though you are not paid for work, not until February, but you work nonetheless, which means you are not jobseeking, not entirely, so there’s always the suspicion, always non-comprehension, you have to make your case again each week, over and again, and they search each week on their database for lectureships in philosophy, no, nothing’s come up, they say, have you thought of anything else, they say, and you think to yourself, I’ve thought of everything else and that’s the trouble.

October 2000, housing benefit isn’t being paid, the City Council are months behind, and helping only those who are in desperate need. Those in desperate need are told to come to the Council to make their case. On the bus, up to town, across the squate, into the City Council, along the long corridors, through rooms which are only corridors, and there it is, the waiting room, but it is really a corridor, and the chairs lined up, take a ticket and take a seat, you will be seen, just be patient, so I take my place alongside the others, we sit, minutes pass, then hours pass, and we are asked to fill in forms about our desperate need, then to wait a little longer, and so we fill in forms about our desperate need and wait a little longer, and then we are told to submit our forms about our desperate need and come back another day, so out we go into the sunshine, another morning gone, another half-day wasted, we queued, but we were not seen for all our desperate need, this is the way of things, we are unemployed or half-employed after all, and the City Council is doing its best to sort out the mess, after all, and there is a great deal of good will in the civil servants we meet, everyone wants the best for us, everyone sympathises with us about our desperate need, no doubt they’ve been on courses on sympathising and empathising, no doubt they’ve also gone on courses for negotating and managing, no doubt they know how to deal with us and our about our desperate need, the long term unemployed, no doubt they are prepared to be tough, if necessary, and that they do not and cannot tolerate violence or verbal abuse. Out we go into the sunshine with about our desperate need. Another day, back on the bus, back home, moneyless, rentless, back home with no money and no chance of money, on the bus and wandering about those whose need is so desperate they never made it to the bus and to the City Council.

In desperate need, skint, cashless, rentless, hopeless, I phone the university, but nobody’s there, no one will take my calls, they’ve heard my whining before, they’ve heard my carping, they know what I’ll say, I always say it, the same lament, the same wailing. I go to the library to write a melodramatic e-mail, I’m in desperate need, I write, but am I in desperate need, not really, if I was in such need, I couldn’t write, I’m in desperate need, I couldn’t have made it to the library, couldn’t have logged into to my e-mail account, couldn’t have typed a line, nevertheless, I’m in desperate need, that’s what I write to my employers in the department of accountancy, I’m in desperate need, I write, and I need an advance payment, but it’s university policy not to make payments before February, that’s that. I know that, they know that, my silent correspondents. The issue’s been raised before. I raised it, they’ve heard me raise it. They’ve explained, they’re helpless, it’s structural, what can they do, they wish they could help, but they can’t help.

Should I go on strike? Should I withhold my services? Should I just not turn up to teach my Libyan students English? Should I just not get on the bus and not go to work to teach the students whose company in Tripoli is paying £16,000 to the university in fees but who are taught accountancy, yes accountancy, which is to say the English vocabulary used by accountants in England, by me, who knows nothing of accountancy, not a thing, who is the least qualified person to teach accountancy at the university, but I have to make a living,

I’ll teach anything, and so I teach in the business school, I take on those students who pay enormous fees to be taught by me, an hourly paid lecturer who receives £23 an hour, a fair amount, it is true, but then that includes preparation and marking and everything else, it includes the ride on the bus and the trips to the library, in I come, away I go, without an office, without a room, but in I come, away I go, promptly and efficiently, not overstaying my welcome, another of the ghosts of the academic world, another of the living dead of the academic world, the desperate ones who haunt the university, the ones no one wants to see, the untouchables and unpalatables and we might as well be unthinkable, we who barely exist, who exist only enough to deliver a course, who can be trusted only when all the other teachers have disappeared, only when they’ve vanished and can’t be contacted, then as a last resort, as the last of last resorts, always in a panic and at the last minute, I am contacted, they reach me by phone, after all what else was I doing, what else could I do, but wait by the phone, day after day, hardly existing, in which was never really desperate need, but what was need nevertheless, one day after another lived in need, a half life half-lived in need.

So the day passes, so another day is wasted, so another day am I too cross and frustrated to work, another day in obscurity, another day in vague if not desperate need, another day on the other side of the glass, another day dreaming of February, another day dreaming of payday, when will it come?, and of housing benefit, when will it come?, another day unemployed, but the unemployed have days to waste and time is on their side, all time is on their side, they have all of time, they can do what they please, their time can be wasted because they have time to waste, because all their time is wasted time, because they waste time and soil time, because time is wasted and soiled by them, because they destroy time, and especially work time, the time the civil servants spend at work, the time they spend working to process claims by those of us who do not work, yes we have all day everyday and all the hours of each day, and time stretches before us without markers, each day the same, pretty much, and each week the same, only the fortnightly signing on to mark time, only that fortnightly visit to the job centre, only that vague need that is never yet desperate need, only a vague need that fills the sky and fills the streets we see from the bus, only a need for the world not to be the world but to be something else, only that need which barely knows what it wants, but only that it refuses everything, loathes everything and wants done with everything.

It’s Good for Your CV

And meanwhile, for me, a few hours teaching here and there, a few hours teaching accountancy and economics, a few hours teaching business and politics, a few hours filling in for absent lecturers in philosophy, a few hours, sometimes unpaid – ‘don’t tell anyone about this’ – teaching in philosophy – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good for your CV’ – a few hours, sometimes unpaid, sometimes they don’t pay you, because it’s for your own good, it’s good for you – ‘we can’t pay you, we simply don’t have the resources’ – a few hours, they can’t pay me, they are victims just like me, we don’t have enough money, but still, it will look good on your CV.

And what do I teach my students? What do I teach my students in accountancy? I teach them about the fees they pay and where the money goes. I tell them where the £16,000 a year their companies pay in fees goes. I tell them I earn £23 an hour, quite a lot of money, but that includes preparation and marking, and of the conditions of my labour. I tell them this, they sympathise, and we go to the canteen because they like to feel life all around them, I tell them all about it, we talk about life in Libya, and we buy each other sandwiches and sit in the canteen and waste time, the time their companies have bought and paid for, the time for which the university pays me, I tell them about the secret lectures I give for which I am not paid, which are supposed to be good for me, for work experience, and how I am offered these hours as though they were a favour – ‘we can’t pay you, but it’s good experience’ – and that I spend several hours in preparation, several hours writing these lectures to impress, to make a good impression, I am not paid, it is true, but perhaps I can impress the students who will tell the lecturer for whom I’m covering that I was a good lecturer.

Yes, it’s important to impress, I tell them, to be seen to be one of the gang, to attend everything I can, to come to research forums and colloquia, to comment on papers and to drink with the others in the pub. Because there might be a job coming up, that’s the rumour. Yes, there might be a job, in the new year, that’s what we’ve heard. Not a full time job, it is true, but what they call a Teaching Fellowship, half-time, but quite dignified, a monthly wage, no having to wait until February, a monthly wage, not a bad one, considering, £9,000 will get you a long way, by comparison to what you earn now, yes, a Teaching Fellowship might be coming up, it’s a new rank, a new kind of post, ideal for the new academic, ideal for those looking to build a career, £9,000, you can live on that, it’s not a lot, but it’s a wage, and perhaps you can use the time to build up your CV, give a few papers, write a few papers, get a few publications, and then you can go on to another job. Yes, it’s probably unfair, but you’ll be in a better position than you are now, we wish we could offer a full time post, but you’d be unlikely to get it or even to be shortlisted, what you need is to build up your CV, to publish a few papers.

But the new academic year is a long way away. It is October, and I haven’t been paid. October and I haven’t been paid and I won’t be paid for a long time. We go out for a departmental dinner. The head of department: ‘we should do this more often’. The bill comes to £40 a head. I get £50 a week from the dole. It’s October, I won’t get paid by the university until February.

The Library

Conversation with K. Should we think of leaving, of giving up? We earn so little and for what? It is not as if what we do is creative. It’s not as if what we do is in any way creative. His book has sold 224 copies. Mine, he thinks, something similar. If you sell 400 copies in two years, it will go into paperback. Paperback, I think to myself, that’s the last thing I want. Paperback! Then the humiliation would be complete, I think to myself, then humiliation would complete itself. Then would I be linked to every bookshop that carried the book, I think to myself, then would be bound to wherever the book appeared as by a thousand spider threads.

What have I written?, What did I write? Excuses, you come up with hundreds of them, every kind of excuse. I was writing under constraint, you tell yourself, how could I do otherwise? I had no time, you tell yourself, and no opportunities, how could I do otherwise? I had no leave of absence, no stretch of time, I had too much administration, there was too much bureaucracy, you say, I hadn’t time enough, I wasn’t educated enough, I wasn’t taught enough grammar, I wasn’t taught how to write a well formed sentence, I wrote in a rush, I wrote too quickly, I had no time for revision, the copy editor didn’t revise my book, the proof reader missed all the typos, how could I do otherwise?

Hundreds of excuses, none of them plausible. Hundreds of excuses, but you are your own victim, it’s your fault, how could it be otherwise, what else could have happened, it was your fate, it was necessity, it was known in advance, you were born to write badly, prepared to write badly, everything in your life pointed to that, every prior failure prepared you for that, you had all the signs, all the evidence and how could you have expected otherwise. You knew it was coming, you were prepared in advance, but you still hoped, hope burned in you despite everything that was done in advance to crush hope. How could you have hoped it turned out different? How could it have turned out but the way that it did? How could it have happened otherwise? You knew, you knew, your life failed in advance, it had already failed, and how could the book be anything but failure?

What hope you had, what youth, was illusion. You were old before you born, hopeless before you could hope, unfree before you dreamt of freedom. Nothing was possible for you from the first. Why did you hope? What was hope in you? Your hope means nothing, it’s absurd, it laughs at itself, hope laughs at itself in you, what hope opens it also closes, what it makes possible it makes impossible from the first. No, there was no hope, not from the first and even before the first. Before anything was possible, it was impossible. Before it began, it could not begin. Hope rotted in you. Hope laughed at itself in you, that was your youth, but then it stopped laughing. Then, trapped, hope went mad.

Didn’t you always take corruption for innocence, senscence for youth? Didn’t you take the end for the beginning, the failure for the deed? You mistook one thing for another, and your life is this mistake. Your hope is a mistake and your life is a mistake. One thing does not lead to another, one thing leads nowhere, it is always a misstep. The first step was a misstep. Faux pas from the first. False steps, wrong steps, pseudo-steps.

You thought you could step forwards, but this was denied you. You thought you could begin, that there was a place from which to begin, but this was denied you. Only the non-place from which nothing could begin. Botched, from the first. Chanceless, from the first. You would live belatedly, after the disaster. You lived after the catastrophe, not before it. The shipwreck of your life. The storm from which nothing issues. The turning of nothing in nothing. Defeat, from the first, and from before the beginning.

Why did you think you could write? Why did you think writing was possible for you? True, you surrounded yourself with books, you read, you spent days and nights reading. You wanted nothing but time to read. But as you read, you dreamt of books you would write. Why did you overstep the mark? Why did you think writing was possible for you? Why this mistake, this overreaching? Why did you suppose you could add another book to those shelves? Why did you think you could finish a book, and place it up among the others? Why did you suppose the bookshelf would make a space for your surname, for your first name, that the Library of Congress would prepare an entry for what you had written, and that your hardbacked book could be borrowed as other books might be borrowed from the British Library?

Oh, I know your secret, I know your false modesty, I know you wanted to slip a book into the library, to write your book and have it published and then to find it tucked between all the other books in the library. Yes, to have found tucked in between other books surreptitiously, as if it had always been there. As though it had grown there, as though it had sown itself, long before you appeared. As though it had materialised from the other books around it. You thought it was your due, your reward. But you thought, at the same, that it was a modest reward, that you were asking for very little. But in truth, you were asking too much. In truth, you wanted too much from the start. In truth, you were too hopeful, you always were, and you should have understood that the library is the place you cannot be even though the library stretches around you, and all you can think of are books and of writing a book. Even though the library is the wall around your whole life, and your life will have been lived in the same library.

Did you really think it was possible for you to write? Did you dream you could join others in writing? Did you really think it was possible for you to write, for you of all people, for you who never had a chance, who was never given a chance, who never could have had a chance, who could never have begun, whose was made not to begin but to fail to begin, who was made so that beginning was impossible? Still you dreamed of beginning. Still, then the dream of beginning, still you were young enough to think it would all begin, that life was around the corner, that a new life could be lived, that your life would change.

But you know that you will always be here, that the same will happen over again, and you will never add a book to the library. You know that library is like the forest which will not admit you, that it says, in advance, that your books will not be kept here, that there will be no books nor even the hope of writing them, that every step is a false step, a step untaken, a step untakeable, a step for others to take, but not for you, that this is all there is and all there will be, you surrounded by books as you were always surrounded, you for whom books were a great deal, but who also dreamed of adding your own book to those many books, to write, to have written a book, to find a book with your name on it among other books, to come across your own book as if by chance, as if you had had nothing to do with it, as if you had not written it, as if it had just appeared, as if it had grown by itself, as if it came together by chance one night in the library, born from your dreams, born from all you wanted and all your life was not, born from the nothingness of your life which in truth was never lived, born from the negation of your life, from all that it was not, made from your failures, made from what you could not do, from what was never possible for you, from what would never be possible.

Who were you to drift into into the library without identification, to come through the turnstile, unnoticed, anonymous, no doubt taken for a student among other students, who went up the stairs until he found the third floor, until he found himself by chance between the books on literature and the books on philosophy? Who were you non-student, interloper, who crept into the library in the belief he had a place there, thinking he could take his place at the desks with other readers, with a pile of books and with his notepad, writing like the others around him, those who had a reason to be there? Who were you to to copy into his notepad great chunks of the books he was reading, copying fervently not to understand these books, but to be borne by those books into his own writing, in the hope of being so carried and so transported, copying not just books, but the idea of writing, of living to write, dreaming that if such and such a book could be published, then why couldn’t he, too, write a book like that and publish a book like that?

Why not?, you thought, why can’t I do the same?, you thought, why can’t I write from my life and transform that life?, why can’t I find my way back to that place where life should have begun and live again, you thought, but what you didn’t understand was that the library was your tomb, and what began there would also end there, that it had already ended even as it began, that the library was not Ussy-sur-Marne, that it was not the room between the bedroom and the bathroom in the flat in Prague, that it was not the upstairs room in Eze-la-Village, that it was not the rue Saint-Benoit in Paris, but the opposite of all those places, that writing was not possible there but impossible, that writing ruled itself out then and there, even before it began, that writing was ruled out for you, and especially for you, that it was your destiny not to write, that what was necessary was your non-writing, that the fate allotted to you meant the impossibility of writing and nothing other than that impossibility, that the path was blocked, that the way was impossible and no way would be cleared, that you might as well give up since writing had given you up, might as well throw it all in, even as you knew that this ‘might as well’ was impossible for you and that just as you could not write, could not begin writing, it was your fate to run up against the inability to write, that in truth you were nothing other than that inability as it ran up against itself, that there was no chance, no options, and you would always run up against the same wall, again and again against the same wall, never learning, always returning, always fighting your way back, but what for, always to that same wall without a door, to that featureless wall against which you had to break your head over and again?

Flies

One fine September day after another; summer comes each year belatedly, after it is summer, arriving only in that autumn which is never quite autumn, transforming all of this month into a threshold. And of course there is the start of a new term, which, as it comes, surprises me, because I never think I will keep my job, or, before, that I would find one.

I remember how I used to have to wait to the last minute – a week or so before term began – before I knew I would have work that academic year. How merciless they were, Marxists or non-Marxists, heads of departments, heads of teaching who would make me work thus! How dependent I was on their impressions of me! With what petty gratitude did I welcome a hour of part time teaching!

The lesson is clear: there is absolutely no relation between the philosophy espoused by these same heads of department, heads of teaching and the way they treated the proletariat, the part time staff! An obvious lesson, but difficult each time – the completely inconsistency of thought and life! The mismatch between what was said and what was practised! Head of department, I thought to myself, you have a million-pound house and a cottage in Wales, you’ve had everything, every chance!

Head of department, you found your job when there was no need to publish, no need for a Ph.D., it was the late 1960s, jobs were everwhere, jobs came to you, and you rose through the ranks. You rose, and no one ever asked you to raise income before you were promoted! You never had to raise three times your own income in research income before your promotion! Head of department, lecturer for whom I took seminars, lecturer who spoke on this or that philosopher upon whom I had published a clutch of papers! I was told: you don’t have enough expertise in this area. You just haven’t got a background in ethics. I said, but I’ve published these papers, here, here and here – papers on the topics you teach!, and thought to myself: and what have you published, nothing, not one line, not one line in your whole career!

What have you published, to have this swarm of Ph.Ds wanting teaching around you? What have you published that you would have power over us, that you can seize one of us as from a cloud of protons and make us real! What have you done that would have given you this power, property-millionnaire, you who have done nothing, who have lived in the golden years of our country, when work was plentiful and wages were high, you who brought that great house with five bedrooms and married and had children! You’ve done nothing of course, blinking man, kind man, amiable half-friend who would have us round, we paupers to your great house every year!

Every year, and you would bring up wine from your wine cellar, and speak of the wine you bought, the wine you collected, you who opened wine for our starters, a different wine for our main course and yet a different one for dessert, you who served us aperatifs before dinner and brandy after dinner! What marvellous taste you developed, what a marvellous cellar you keep, how wondrous that you give us a taste of what distilled itself from your life, not just the wine, but your great house, your cultivation, the books stacked up in your library, the views over open fields!

Ah, we part-timers are less real than you, we are like the flies who circle in empty rooms, one of us has died, one of us disappeared, what does it matter, for there are always more flies, there will always be flies, well qualified flies, each year with more publications, each year with more credentials, each year with more respect won from academic peers! Yes, we are flies and our job is to circle in the big rooms in your big house, you will have us round, every year, this is your concession to us, this is what we are given, it is a sign of your kindness, but your kindness is impersonal, we know that, it is bestowed equally on each, we know that, next year one of our company will not be here, but what does that matter, next year another will join us, but that still does not matter because you have been in this business a long time, racking up your pension, dreaming of your retirement, dreaming of selling up and moving to France, to the sun, speaking to us of your holidays and asking us about ours.

Holidays?, we think to ourselves – what are they? Holidays – who has time for a holiday, we have to write, we have to read, to graft, to apply for this job and then that one, to fill out this form and then that one, to contact this university and then that for a half-time research post, we’re busy, too busy to have holidays, for what would happen if we missed hearing about a job with a short deadline for application? what would happen if we were contacted for interview and they failed to find us, and another took our place at the interview for the job that could have been hours?

Holidays! Don’t you understand we are flies, circling and circling, faster and faster, flies without hope, but without time to think about hope, flies who move too quickly for hope, who will not allow themselves that luxury, flies who circle with neither hope or non-hope, flies without jobs who only want jobs, flies who dream only of jobs, who circle in search of work, who want only to survive year by year. Another year of work, that’s all we want. Another year, and we’ll take anything.

But when asked about holidays, what can we say? When we are asked about holidays, what should we say? We should speak of our holidays whether or not we had holidays. We should speak of our foreign trips regardless of whether we have been abroad. Why? Because academia is still upper middle class and the head of department is upper middle class. Because the upper middle class know only how to deal with the upper middle class. Because the upper middle class want reassurance from those they’ve taken into their houses that they too are upper middle class. Because the condition of visiting the upper middle class is to pretend you are upper middle class. Because the condition of their hospitality is the marvellous theatre of the upper middle class.

And so we vie, we flies, to speak of our holidays. To particularise ourselves, to make ourselves more real to him, our employer. To hypostatise ourselves in front of him, to give ourselves substance, to make ourselves less than flies or more than flies, to make him care about us, to pick us out from the other flies, to tell that we are not just a fly, but a fly who takes holidays, who has a life outside all this, who lives not for work, though we all live for work, but the holidays we take, the dreamy holdays, three or four weeks of holidays, that open to us every summer. Ah the holidays, our holidays to Provence or to Tyrol! The week we spent in Florence! Holidays!

Have you ever taken a holiday, have you ever had time to take a holiday, to think of holidays, do holidays ever cross your mind? But we must speak of holidays, we each of us speak of holidays and what we ate on our holidays and what we saw on our holidays, if only to make our host feel comfortable, if only to let him know that we are like him, that we have something in common, and this dreadful academic business is not all we have in common. For after all, he sympathises with us, he grants that times are harder, that he might not have got a job as easily as he did, that academia is madness, yes he agrees with us, he is sympathetic, he has some idea of what it’s like, but we shouldn’t speak of it we know that. It’s the last thing we should speak about.

We are flies, circling in his rooms, in the rooms of his house, but we must not talk about our circling, must not speak of what we have sloughed off in that circling, of the life we have given up, of the standard of living we have relinquished, of those great gaps of unemployment between term ending and term beginning, of the humilations of the dole and housing benefit, of the visits from dole officers, of our forced participation on training schemes, of the temporary work we take, a few days here and a few days there, no, we will not speak of this, we must not. It’s the last thing we should say, we who are gathered here in this vast house, we who have taken our place in a house in whose many bedrooms his children once lived – children who, now, have gone to university.

Children he and his wife brought up in the golden 70s and the golden 80s, children to whom nothing was denied, who were taken abroad, children who were shown something of the world, children who were sent to good schools, who have learnt a good deal, children whom they are helping out at university, who, no doubt, have had a flat bought for them, for whom a flat and a car were supplied. We are not like them, his children, he knows that. We have not been blessed thus. But what can we do?, he says, our host. Terrible times, he says. I’m glad my retirement is coming up, he says.

Ah, graciousness! His wonderful graciousness! And now the wine is going round again, he is the most attentive host, our glasses are being filled again, the food is going round again, and soon we will have to leave. Soon, yes, it will time to leave, time for the summer to open before us again, time for the dole and for training courses, time to work and apply for jobs and write, time to wander through this city that does not want us and through the university that is indifferent to us.

Time to wander without shadow, to circle around and around, time to swarm but without solidarity, time to swarm, each of us separate, each of us circling, time to disappear across this city, time to go home to our bedsits and shared housing, time to flee back to the rubbish from which we were spontaneously generated, time to return to the skips of thrown out library books, time to join the concrete and rubble of destroyed buildings, time to be threaded in paper threading machines.

For where do they think we go over summer, these heads of department? To where do they think we disappear? Ah, they know we are born from rubbish, born anew from rubbish each September, resurrected from the dead each September when they ring around at the last minute, knowing we are all waiting by the phone, knowing we are all dependent, waiting for the phonecall that will allow us to circle around once again, one more time.

Yes, we are born from rubbish, for them, spontaneously generated from the dross of the university, spreading like some vile cancer from mutated dross, spreading disease-like from university decay. Born from the residue of universities, from its foul excresence, we hatch and we circle, we are born, our sticky wings glisten in the sun, our compound eyes survey the world, our probiscii seek fresh nourishment, we come to ourselves in September and fly into the air, and fly around again, one more time.

Yes, one more time, around again, swarming flies, who can only ask one another about job applications and publications, flies who can speak to one another of interviews failed and papers rejected, flies who speak of what is real, flies who alone know what is real, proletariat-flies in touch with the real conditions of the university, fly-proletarians who know what the upper middle class do not know. Scum-proletarians who the upper middle class do not want to see, the beggars outside the gate, the mendicants in the alley, the prostitutes on the pavement, vile proletarians who are the living refutation of the upper middle class world of academia, flies who are born from dross and return to dross, flies adapted to the mad circulation of the world, flies whose movement is as one with the real movement of capital, flies hatched from capital and returning to it, flies who live capital, who know only capital, flies in whom capitalism dreams of itself, of its return to itself.

Flies stripped down to themselves, who know of nothing but circling, flies without rest, pared down, prepared, perfect vessels of Capital, fles ready for the new condition of labour, for the great casualisation, flies ready for the subcontracting of education to Microsoft, flies honed down for the great sell-off, flies who will teach this and that and that without expertise or preparation, flies who will move from this end of the country to another, flies who will take any job and every job, flies who will overload themselves with what needs to be done, because next year there may be nothing to be done, flies who arise when they are needed and disappear when they are not needed, flies like the nanobots who will one day repair our bodies, nanobot flies who ensure the smooth running of capital.

For we know, we flies, that the future is ours. The upper middle class know it, too. They want to keep their hands clean, but our hands are dirty. They want to keep their good conscience, but we are bad conscience through and through. They can see it: we’ll do anything.They can see what the system from which they lived produced. They can see the new breed, the disgusting breed, the everywhere-and-nowhere breed. Ah, they don’t like us, but that is okay. Ah, they have some little power over us, but that, too, is okay. Because our day is coming. We can feel it in our antennae. Our day is coming, we know that. When they retire, when they disappear to France, when they buy up cheap houses all over Europe, it will be our turn.

And we will rise and we will swarm. In us, scholarship is dead. In us, expertise is unnecessary. We will serve. We fly round and round and we will serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be online and we will facilitate and serve. Everything, all knowledge, will be owned by Microsoft, and we will work for Microsoft, after the great privatisation. Oh you upper middle class, reading Plotinus in Provence, what have you done! Oh you heads of department, to what have you closed your eyes! For we are coming, the know-nothings and the scorners of scholarship. We are coming, without knowledge and without culture, pared down and ready.

The Poisoned Gift

Tuesday evening. I had said to myself, since summer is over, it’s time to work in my evenings, and so I am here at my desk, back in the flat, watching the news. It’s only 7.00, but the sun has set. I have Josipovici’s In A Fertile Land beside me, and files with complete electronic versions of texts by and Deleuze open in other windows.

I should begin, but I’m too tired to begin. K. said he’s too tired in the evenings to work. Perhaps, he said, it’s because of his children. But he’s exhausted now even though he was once able to work. Not keen to work, perhaps, but able to work. Have we peaked? I ask K., and he laughs, was that it? Was that all it came to? But why should we have hoped that it would come to anything?

Intelligence is not enough. A modicum of education is not enough. The support of friends is not enough, but what would be enough? A culture saturated in philosophy, perhaps, a culture where philosophy is valued, where thought is everywhere, where everyone would think for themselves. No, that would not be enough, for there have been philosophers in societies indifferent to philosophy.

Some philosophers preferred that indifference; it allowed them to work in silence. Without speaking, with no need to speak, to answer to others, to rush to conclusions, they thought and wrote in peace. What need had they of a society that recognise their place, which allotted them a place? They thought and they wrote; sometimes they read; sometimes they walked out of their houses and into town, but always they were thinking and always the silence of their fellow bus passengers on matters philosophical was propitious.

Sometimes, imagine it, they would open their notebooks in cafes, scribbling a few notes, looking into the near distance, scribbling some more. Yes, these are my fantasy-philosophers, writing without publication, speculating in silence, not even waiting for a time when their thoughts could be shared. Writing, filling notebooks, but not even patiently – not even with the dream their thoughts would be published, not even dreaming of a future in which their name would be known.

What need would they of fame? What need did they have to see their words in print? Without masters (they were taught by no one but themselves) and without pupils (what pupils could they seek, the ones who were indifferent to everything but thought?), without friends with whom they could escape their thoughts (drinking, eating, enjoying the fruits of life) or with whom they could share them (conversation, correspondence, exchange of papers), they had no need but thought, the need thought had given them. The need thought has for itself.

But what would be enough for us, for us to think? Something else, some merciful surplus of strength, something – but what? – that lifted our eyes from our books, that looked back at us, something that interrupted our reading and our writing, something that addressed us and changed us. Ah, our friends would have seen we had changed! We would have changed, would have been surrounded by a soft light, our faces would glow, our laughter would become lighter, our movements more graceful!

How can I fail to think of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, indiscernible from the rest of us even as he passes among us! Passing, yes, but changed, changed from inside, radiant, for those with eyes to see it, profound, for those with ears to listen! But we have not changed, alas. We pass with all the others and are just like all the others; we see all they see and speak as they speak. All the while wanting to be transformed. All the while waiting for that merciful surplus that would make thinking at last possible, that would allow a thought to be born in us as it comes from outside, the thought from outside inside us, setting us on fire from within, shining from our eyes and in our words.

One day I would like to think. One day. But I know it is too late. When was it, the day I missed my appointment with thought? When was that day – how old was I? Seventeen, perhaps, like Schelling, sixteen like Shankara – eighteen like Serres, or nineteen like Deleuze? Years pass. Soon, I will be too old for that great age – thirty-seven – when Heidegger published Being and Time and Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit! But in truth, I am writing of a thought – of that thought that would precede all books, that thought that, as it happens, would set itself back inside me, retreating from my present into the past in which it would shelter itself.

Thought, star, buried not in my past, but in a past into which I will be henceforward set, bound by an excess of memory, a hypermnesis, by that thought that would remember itself in me, drawing me to it, pulling me up to its level, summoning me to itself and granting me its measure. Happy thought that would be like fate! Joyful thought that would grant me a life lived in the quietness of thought! There with me always, waiting for me, ahead of me, calling me ahead, giving me a future as the future of thinking, drawing me from the past into the future and allowing me to write to the future, to set down untimely thoughts, to think for another generation, for those not yet born, for thinkers yet to come, to fire an arrow forward for another thinker to pick up, just I had picked up the arrows of thinkers before me (happy the ones who know community in the thoughts of those long dead and in anticipation of thinkers to come! Happy that solitude filled with thought and with the knowledge that there are other thinkers)!

Once, I met one, a thinker, we spoke and I remember how marvellously he said, my thoughts are interesting but I’m not interesting. Marvellous because he knew he was a receptacle of thought, that thought had given itself to him, that he had been vouchsafed a destiny that was not, in some sense, his, that he lived in lieu of thought, behind it, attempting to catch up with it, sometimes capable of thinking, sometimes not, but always with the bliss of having had thought, of thought having been given to him, of having written from thought, of having written from what was given. We spoke. He said, I’m not interesting, but my book is interesting. Modest shell! Modest nova-husk, as if the thought had voided and exploded him, as though he were nothing extraordinary without thought, as though he were in lieu of the one he was once allowed to be, as though, ordinary, prosaic, here before me, he were no one at all but one whom thought had deigned to touch!

I would like to think, of course, of course. I would like to carry around my neck my version of the amulet Pascal wore in which he had folded that scroll on which he had set down details of his religious vision. I would like my journal to cry out the joy! joy! joy! Kierkegaard wrote in his at the age of twenty-seven. And if it never happens – as it will not – that I am one day given to thinking? If it never comes? Patience is not enough; nor is impatience. It cannot be expected; you cannot demand that it comes, like a genie who would grant you three wishes. Rather that thought will summon you to it, that you would be the genie from which things would be commanded! But I will never be that genie, I say to myself. I will never know what it is to be commanded. What, then? I cannot call myself a failure, for this would make an idol of that success to which thought is indifferent.

I have not failed thought, for thought has not been given to be to fail. How can I fail what was never mine? Could I say I failed what I thought thought might be? Another idol – but one, I think, speaks a kind of truth. The evening that spreads indifferently around me (it is 7.50, night; the news is ending) is, I know, the opposite of thought. Whatever thought will be, it is not this, and I am not its thinker. But what do I know of thought, I who know only what it is not? Curse and blessing: I have a sense of what thought is not, but not of what thought might be. The poisoned gift: I know that others think, and what it means that they think. I know the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary, know, that is, the bounty others carry inside them, even though they appear like husks whom thought has exploded. Poisoned gift: I know thought has not set out to reach me from the other side of the universe. I know others see in me some light of the thought of others, that I glow not like the sun, but with the reflected light of the moon. But to be a sun – what would that mean? To think and to experience the destiny of thought!

7 Jumpers

R.M. sensed it: the season changed two nights ago. We were in London; when I joined R.M. on Saturday it was hot and sultry, we took the umbrella when we went for dinner. It rained steadily, consistently, with a kind of patience. Flashes of lightning, thunder. Then the season changed; it was cooler, fresher.

Autumn, and a few weeks before I have to prepare to give papers again. I can write whatever I like. Pleasant to draw a breath here, to note the turning of seasons, the beginning of a new term, another one after so many. Am I looking forward to it?

Last night, friends return from hotter places. Tequila and enchiladas, beer and nachos in a south-facing garden. Where will I be by the end of the year? Still here in this city, or in another?

The turn of the seasons. Read Handke, whose books are always poised at the threshold. He is my companion at the threshold. Over the next few weeks, I promise myself to write on Josipovici’s short stories, on the origin of taste (inspired by Bergson), before I begin to write on music (an essay on Will Oldham) and film (Tarkovsky’s Mirror).

No more philosophy, I tell myself. Everything I write is to be completely contained in the object I write about. And the writing has to be as though dictated my that object, lending it an idiom.

No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns to me as a kind of dream, unless the whole of philosophy concentrates itself into the absolute density of a dream, meaning everything and meaning nothing, returning too full of itself, overfull with significance, but somehow without itself, stripped, vacancy in place of presence. Philosophy as it passes like the wind in the field at the beginning of Mirror. The doctor has turned, he’s walking away, he turns back, and then the wind passes through the long grass of the field. The wind passing like benediction, that great speech which speaks in the bending of long grass, in a wave that passes through grass. So it would be with philosophy: let it speak as it touches things, as it passes through them. Let it be no more than that passing.

No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as the dream in which everything is present, and nothing: whose saturation leaves as it were a gap between philosophy and itself. That gap is the thing, which speaks in the gasp philosophy must leave and depends upon. Wisdom of the thing, thing-teacher as it speaks of itself and only of itself. No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as a kind of prayer in things, that silent meditation in which they seem to think of themselves, resting in themselves.

As we walked up the path to the church, a drunk, faced flushed, squatting in the sun and watching cricket practice called out to us. A succession of jokes. He was a happy idiot. ‘That’s beatitude’ said W., who had been talking about Spinoza. Idiot, idiom: I thought: I would like to be as drunk as that, dreaming myself into things. I would like to be that drunk, where the gap between philosophy and itself, the turning of one season into another, would be the hinge, the point of articulation wherein the future could be seen. The future: what philosophy lives from and kills. The future as it is born in the epoche in which it is not the philosopher who sees the world, but the world that sees him. Epoche: season, suspension, and I imagine to myself, threshold and gap. The epoche is the future, I tell myself as we walk in the sun, the future is with us in this turning of seasons.

That was last week, still summer. Now it is autumn. The heating’s on. I listen to The End of Amnesia by M. Ward. The plants almost cover the bins in the backyard. I pile my jumpers on my chest of draws. Seven jumpers, seven colours, bought in a shop in the tropics that has since closed down (Triminghams). Seven jumpers, which I recall to teach the difference between particulars and universals, but also to speak of what is singular and different from everything else. But how can I summon them thus, as examples for a philosophy class? No more philosophy, I tell myself. Cezanne describes his working method as a reflection on things seen, and mine should be a reflection on being seen, called, by all the things in the world. Called 7 times by 7 jumpers, I tell myself. Called 7 times over by 7 different-coloured jumpers.

An Ape in the Academy

Honoured Members of the University!

You have done me the honour of inviting me to give an account of the life I have led as an ape of the University.

It is now over ten years since I entered the doors of the university, a short space of time perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at top speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors and good advice. Above all, I have been served by my own capacity for mimickry, my apishness, if you like. This was the trait has served me most well in the academy, and one which led me to attain my comparatively elevated position.

I still remember how I was captured. I was happy on the savannah with the other apes, sitting back on my haunches and looking over the expanse. Food was plentiful and life harmonious. I was not the alpha male, but nor was I the omega one; as long as I did not threaten my fellow apes, baring my teeth as apes will, I would not be threatened. But something was missing. But something marked me out as different from the apes around me. Was I more intelligent than them? Or was it simply because I sought a from of stimulation I was unable to find on the savannah? Now, having studied a few theories of intelligence and evolution, I am inclined to put it down to a kind of aberration. My soul had been hollowed out a little too deeply. For this reason, I willingly let myself be captured by the University.

Once I was a free ape, free to stand and look all around me on the savannah. But now, in the University, I have broadened the circle of my freedom. True, I became a prisoner of an office, bent over a keyboard, my sore eyes fixed on the monitor, but I was a happy prisoner! I steered my apish body through the halls of the academy. I knew if I was to survive in my new world, I would have to imitate those around me. I learnt to walk upright and wear shoes; I learnt not to holler and whoop. I still dreamt of great bunches of bananas and clear pools in the middle of the jungle. Sometimes I remembered my ape comrades who would pick the lice from my thick fur. But I was resolved to make a success of myself in my new surroundings.

Most difficult was writing. It was hard enough to hold a pen or to type on a keyboard (our fingers are stubbier than yours) let alone compose a string of words observing the rules of grammar. We apes employ much simpler means of communication. Often, a simple whoop will do. Our sensitive nostrils tell us a great deal about one another. We have no need to read and no need to write. Besides, apes are not too inquisitive; we are not given to abstraction. For the most part, we are happy to get on with our lives, happy to be free from immediate danger. Writing, therefore, was always a tremendous labour for me.

On what should I write? It was clear to me that only foreign thinkers were worthy of accolade, and only difficult ones at that. What mattered was to hitch your little wagon to one of these great lumbering beasts, and to follow the trail of the books which dropped from them like dung. One book a year was not enough, for example, for X., nor for Y. Two, three, even four books a year sprung forth from their mighty pens. How much they had to say, I wondered! How much there was to write! And how much for me, a humble ape, to read!

Happily, there were books to guide me through the wilderness. How many of them there are! The message was simple: the French thought and the British paraphrased. They were very good at that, the British. I learnt that everything can be expressed in a calm and measured prose. The wildest thinker can be tamed. All thought can be measured; philosopher can be placed alongside philosopher. Reading one series of commentary after another, I felt ought to commend the editor of each series for the uniformity of their pages. Truly I was in contact with the great minds of the age, and with little effort required from me! I was up to date with what was most radical and new in European ideas! Now I only had one problem: to which thinker should I hitch my wagon?

I found a thinker around whom the wall of commentaries still let in a chink of light and wrote a book to block out that light. Then I wrote another to make sure it really was blocked out. Nor a chink of light should escape! Truly, these thinkers burn too brightly for our poor British readers! So I commented; and I was proud of my contribution. I thought: I have done as others have done; my book has disappeared into the library, and if I have had no thoughts of my own, this is appropriate, for we are not thinkers here in Great Britain. Others think and we paraphrase. That is the correct division of labour.

A colleague often jokes he can still tell I’m an ape. It’s the way I hold a pen, he tells me. Your hand curls in towards your chest, he says. Once that hand was a paw, I tell him. Apes are not made for typing or for holding a pen, I tell him. And there’s that look you get, my colleague says, when you have to do anything. As if you’re going to tear open your shirt and whoop, he said. This too is common to all apes, I tell him. We are not made for seminars and colloquia, I tell him, but for the savannah where we whoop to express our joy and our strength.

Alas, I know my apish spontaneity has long gone. Sometimes I wonder, busy with my labours, whether I am any better off than my miserable comrades in the zoo. There is so much to do, after all! My poor eyes burn from the monitor and my clumsy fingers miss the keys I want to type. I have translations to finish and essays to write; if I am to keep my job, I must make sure a steady stream of books flows from my printer. But even now, my boss tells me it’s not enough. You will have to raise money, he says, covering your pay three times over. It’s a lot to ask! But already I’m looking around, watching what others do and imitating them, aping the way my more diligent colleagues have as they say put in for funding.

Sometimes I ask myself – but how is this possible? – what would it mean to do what I do for real; to write because I have something to write, to think only with the aim of discovering what it might mean to think? I laugh in my apish way as I think of all I have written – all my books and articles. What foolishness! I copy others who copy others. But what am I? An ape, an ape among humans, not yet a human and no longer just an ape. Sometimes I wonder whether others around me were not once secret apes who came out of the savannah as I did. Sometimes I wonder whether our British academia is full of secret apes!

Once or twice, I have I felt the shock of encountering a genuine thinker from within our ranks. A thinker – imagine! How is it possible?, I ask myself. Is it true? Do I dare say it? Yes, there she is. A thinker. At that moment before her I am ashamed of my apishness, ashamed of everything I have said and done and written. I am ashamed too for all those whose activity conceals indolence and pretension. I am worst of all, no doubt of that, but then I am an ape. Perhaps, honoured members of the university, it not only takes an ape to recognise an ape but also to recognise non-apes! Perhaps we all know, secret and not-so-secret apes who the real thinkers are!

Commentary

Too tired to revise my papers over again, I resign myself to a day without work. Just go to the office, I tell myself, and wait; after all, you can read this and then that, light reading, half-absorbed reading, where the surface of the page is merely grazed. And so I read, idly, indifferently, pages turn, and I think to myself – or is it just my tiredness speaking – what of pathos in all this? What of the sense of an experience gained and won, what about joy, what about the intensities of affect that attest to that gaining?

I am reading very good secondary commentaries, very clever and faithful, opening up the thought of X by discussing his relationship to predecessors Y and Z; it’s impressive, I’m carried on a journey the landmarks of which are familiar to me, but it’s pleasant to be reminded, pleasant because it’s easy enough, nothing has to be fought for and I can reward myself for a few years’ work that allows me to pick up this or that reference or to furrow my brow and think, I’m not quite convinced. The book reaches me as an expert; the book awakens an expert in me. Called forward is another inhabitant of the community of scholars, measured and calm, clear-voiced and versed well in a particular canon.

Because I’m tired, because tiredness leads to that kind of indifference Freud commended to his analysts, one resting on everything and nothing, I see what I might have been distracted from another time: if there is a kind of pathos of the primary text, a sense of a thought struggled for and gained, the joy of a thought granted, the grace of a thought that comes on light feet, whatever pathos, however warlike, however peaceable, it is one lacking in the secondary one. I am not bored by what I am reading; it engages, but it does so only with the expert who only half-lives in the world.

The old saying, before you study Zen, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, while you study Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, rivers are no longer rivers, and after you study it mountains are again mountains, rivers are again rivers: a world has been regained, reborn. The secondary commentary is the text for whom nothing has been regained yet, it lives as an abstract storm, a kind of fog; it is another of Job’s temptations, a challenge to his faith.

And to you, who would be faithful? Do not read me, says the modest commentary, read the original. Always that modesty. But a kind of reading has already happened of those same originals. Their secrets have been given up, you have a basis from which to read, a sound one, a scholarly-endorsed one, you can make an honest beginning, you were prepared, you know what’s to come, there’ll be surprises, to be sure, but nothing too surprising; the text has already been measured in advance, its length and its breadth are known, its weight calculable, its significance estimated.

What, then, am I advocating? The abolition of these useful stepladders? How else are we going to read what is around us? How else will we sort and catalogue? How else can an oeuvre be measured and a contribution assessed? How else might comparable worth be gauged? There’s a marketplace for ideas, said Johannes de Silentio in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and you can get everything for a knock down price. But at the price of pathos, too – that’s what you given up to enter that same marketplace. £8.99 will buy you Kierkegaard in 60 minutes or £10.99 the Routledge Guide to Fear and Trembling. This is valuble.

What have you lost? I could put it this way, once again like Kierkegaard: the discord between system and pathos, but this is too abstract. What have I lost?

His Majesty the Baby

And when you realise you’re no good at philosophy and nor will you ever be any good? When you realise you lack the brilliance? In truth, I could say I realised this a long time ago, straightaway in fact, that there was never any pretension and no matter how hard I work, night and day, week after week, nothing will happen in my thinking.

It’s hard to explain this to others working in different disciplines. Perhaps because they use what they call theory rather than try to grasp philosophy as such. On the other hand, because they use it and test it against some other area – music, say – their work is often more interesting than what, in the end, collapses in philosophy into interminable commentary. Of course the way I have described this model of ‘using’ thought is naive and objectionable – it is a matter, rather, of a double implication, the wasp and the orchid, where what is called theory changes as it meets the ‘object’ to which it is supposed to be applied. A double becoming.

But philosophy as philosophy – that’s difficult. Read Husserl, read Derrida on Husserl, reread Derrida on Husserl after reading Lawlor and Marrati. Read Deleuze, read Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson to get some grasp of his thought – read Simondon and Ruyer and Tarde … Or again, read Foucault, read Agamben as a reader of Foucault, or still further, read Heidegger, read Nancy as a reader of Heidegger, chart the differences between Nancy’s and Derrida’s takes on deconstruction. Read Badiou, understand the differences between him and Deleuze and criticise his accounts of them, read some set theory, assess his readings of the philosophers who precede him …

Each of these tasks will take five years. Five years that will take you through your Ph.D. if you’re lucky enough to have a background in this kind of philosophy rather than playing catchup. Five years and it is likely your understanding of philosophy will be so strongly informed by the master thinker (I am thinking of Adam’s recent posts at The Weblog) you’ve picked that you will have no real, independent take on philosophy itself. Then the next five years begins, if you have time for it, if you have a job which will allow it, if you have a family life which allows it and perhaps you’ll have some independence with respect to the thinker you studied in detail. Perhaps you’ll have suspended that conditioned reflex through which you respond to philosophy and the problems which confront philosophy in a Badiouian, Deleuzean, Derridean etc. way.

Ten years at best before you can philosophise in your own name. How old will you be? 37, perhaps – the magic age of Hegel and Heidegger and others. But it’s likely you’ll be older. 45, say. And if you never had the staying power, the fortune or the powers of concentration to sustain you through years of thinking? If you never had the time?

Philosophy allows you to be young until those ten years or their equivalent have passed. Sometimes, this is enough to sustain a lifetime of thought. Sometimes that lifetime is sustained in a awareness that nothing that you say has any philosophical worth, that it remains commentary, or a kind of pathos that lifts itself too easily from commentary, that flaps about weakly.

But what of those who are able to think? What insights have pressed themselves upon them? What force of insight? I have been in the presence of thinkers, real thinkers. They are different beasts, marvellous ones, serious and calm. They have the strength of thought behind them. They rest in that strength. They speak seriously, calmly. And I, too, rest in their strength as it resists careerism and academic politics. As it is so obvious, everyone can tell, even if it scares them, that they are in the presence of brilliance. The careerists are scared, it’s beautiful. Because they know they’ll never be brilliant and that what they take as to be their youth is already old and crabbed. That they are the dullards, the mediocrities who’ve always stood in the way of thought.

I’ve reread the two papers on which I’ve been working on all summer (well, all of August, which is as much summer as I get). Laughter: this is supposed to be thought? One, written in the DOGMA style, is pure pathos, lacking in ideas. Pathos without direction, enthusiasm without rigour, borrowing from all and making a mish-mash of all. Postmodernism in the worst sense. A paper that asks to be put out of its misery like a sick animal that must be shot. And the other? This is where real laughter begins. An ‘ambitious’ paper, passing through this thinker and then that as if I should think myself capable of anything other than bad commentry. Ambition! How funny! By what right have I thought myself able to write such a thing? In the end, there is only laughter: how did I think myself able to write on the topic I chose? What imposture! What stupidity!

An imposture, it is true, that was always mine. Why is that hope that I could one day write something estimable not dead in me? Why is it I begin again with fresh hope and momentum? Why is it I can begin again in innocence and hope? I wonder whether the best thing to write would be a journal of failure, an unpublishable book on the way I failed thought and thought failed me. Still hope – every summer, still the hope that, if I do not speak it, I think bears me in my writing. Still that hope which bears, that youth, that dream of youth and being young, that attempt to reach the point where it might have been that I was brilliant. ‘His majesty the baby’ (Freud), that’s who I am, in hope. It is that ‘his majesty’ who hopes in me and in my place, the child-narcissist.

Every summer I am young and grow old in writing. And in the autumn? The alibi of teaching and administration. As I dream all academic year of being young again. As I say to myself, if only I wasn’t so busy with teaching and administration. Laughter: why won’t hope be crushed? Why doesn’t hope crush itself inside me? Comedy of that hope for hope, for a youth upstream of youth!

Cider Chiasm

What was it I was supposed to be doing? The paper – again? But I was watching The Simple Life, and now I’m listening to Laura Cantrell. And the caffeine isn’t lifting me, no doubt because of the strong cider I drank last night.

I can still taste cider. Laura Cantrell is singing and I congratulate myself for having found the heart of the summer this summer. In the cider I can still taste. I think to myself: that cider – the taste of that cider – is the chiasmus of the summer. Summer crosses itself there. On the one hand, the sun, the sky and what withdraws as the essence of summer in the same sun, the same sky, and on the other, a cloudy cider and what withdraws in that same cloudiness.

That withdrawal which presses forward as you taste it not like the memory of Proust’s madeline which brought more memories in turn, but as a kind of forgetting, one which is no longer the opposite of memory. A forgetting which is the propitiousness of what sets itself back as summer, in summer, from which issues a kind of steadiness, the allotment of a kind of fate which steers you through the days of August.

What is it that sets itself back thus? What withdraws? There are experiences whose sense seems to withdraw as you have them – a sense that leaves a trace, a floating half-forgetting that seems to point enigmatically into itself. The cloudiness of cider says:  I am not, I am nothing in particular but I am also what forgets itself in you. That nothing jostles with the nothingness of everything, I decide to myself, which hollows out all the world, all meanings. 

Every day the world is reborn, and what can you do except walk down to the river and along the river and up to the pubs where you can drink cider? The condition of the summer is close by. It hovers in a kind of forgetting, in the haze on the roads, in the cloudiness of cider. You are very close to the source, but to what are you close? To the hinge, the articulation of a season. To its secret, its promise. To what outplays your work and your ambition and wrecks your papers against itself, laughing at them.

How do you meet it, the essence of summer? How does it lay claim to you? In the golden pints of summer beers (Wylams), in the cloudy cider which calls you from the other side of town. In the cider that called forward the summer-witness you were chosen to be.