Lars Iyer's Blog

He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters … Why aren't our souls restored as we wander out to Jericho? This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Because our day is a mockery of the Sabbath; it laughs at it. Because our day is the day that unmade the Lord …

Ah, what do we know of rest, real rest, as would come after real work?, W. says. What of righteous tiredness, of the satisfaction of a good job done? Not that we're lazy – not that he's lazy, at any rate, but we don't know how to begin.

W. dreams of smoothing down a page, picking up his pen, and writing – what? What is he supposed to write? Sometimes he dreams it has been revealed to him, the secret of the universe. He wakes, scrawls down some notes, but in the morning? Nothing, just nonsense, W. says.

We need a realitatpunkt, W, says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But all he can be certain of is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.

Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by reality, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it.

Still, it's good to be out of the city, we agree over our pints. Why, almost as soon as we arrive in Oxford, do we try to escape it? But the answer is obvious. What do we see that others do not? It's finished, it's all finished, and never more so than there: in Oxford (though Jericho, too, is in Oxford, the periphery to its centre).

The sky has become a great door shut against us. And the earth, too, is a shut door. We live in two dimensions, not three. Our world is a thin film, a kind of stain to be rubbed away. And it will be rubbed away.

And in the meantime, our non-Sabbath, our parody of rest. Meanwhile, our pints, and pint after pint. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. Consider the idiots of Jericho, how they drink …

Manchester was good to us, W. says, back at Piccadilly Station. It was good. We gave our talk, fielded questions, didn't get lynched …

Did we convince anyone? We convinced ourselves, at the very least. We even moved ourselves, talking about the transformation of work. The transformation of time.

For us, for people like us, there's no more time, we observed. Time has been broken up, sold off. Time has been broken up into short-term contracts. Time is for consumption, and commercialised leisure. There's no long term, not for the worker, nor the consumer. Nothing connects. Experience no longer accumulates. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships dissolve into the air …

The Manchester postgraduates seem to understand what we meant, we agree. They understood Manchester!

There's no long-term, for the worker, not now, we said. Deferred gratification need bring no reward. For the new elite, it's all about contacts, about their network, not about the firm. Self-discipline without dependency: that's what they show, the editors of the new media, the advertising creatives, living in converted warehouses. Free-wheeling initiative: that's what they exhibit, the floor traders in brokerage firms, the internet entrepreneurs who buy apartments redeveloped by Urban Splash …

And for the rest of us, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing?, we said. For those for whom work means constant insecurity, the constant re-engineering and restructuring of their workplaces, constant delayering and outsourcing, constant downsizing and networkisation? Casualise your labour pool: that's what the consultants recommend. It's what the market wants, they tell their clients: labour flexibility impresses the investors.

So what is to be done?, they asked us, our Manchester audience. What are we to do? We didn't know, we said. They didn't know. But all around us, we could see from the window in the winter afternoon, the city was being rebuilt.

'And then you fell in with the monks …', W. says. It's the most mysterious of episodes to him, W. He's never had it satisfactorily explained to him how I ended up living with the monks. What drove me to them, or them to me?

How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among the monks as their guestmaster? Why, out of all the other candidates – and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my job – was I the one who became Guestmaster to the community?

He sees in his imagination, W. says. I was the opposite of one of Dostoevsky's holy fools. A Prince Myshkin without humility and saintliness, an Aloysha without goodness, a Saint Francis without mercy. I was a Saul who never converted, a Judas after his betrayal … Maybe they wanted to reform me, W. says of the monks. Maybe they wanted to test their spiritual strength.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says.  He sees the unholy fool standing between the monks and the world, letting in their guests, preparing them lunch or dinner, and showing them up to their rooms, which he had carefully prepared. He sees it, although he doesn't understand what he sees: the unholy fool making beds and running his cloth along the dado; the fool in the supermarket fetching food for dinner; the fool taking coats and hats and making pleasantries in the oak-parqued reception room; the fool arm in arm with a monk he's escorting across the icy pavement. He sees the unholy fool sitting in attendance on nut-brown Copts with twinkling eyes at ecumenical dinners and calling taxis for white-robed Dominicans heading to the station.

How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? What recommended me to them? What, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean?

W., by contrast, has every idea of what living a spiritual life. He, too, lived among monks, and for a time -over a long summer on the Isle of Man - even thought of becoming one.

Ah, but he can say little of it, not to me, who puts everything up about him, W., at his blog. A veil has to be drawn over some things. A kind of silence has to observed – and W. took a vow of silence, back when he was thinking of joining the Trappists. But he came to know what it meant, a spiritual life. He came to understand the essence of religion.

And isn't that where it began, W.'s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this world? Isn't that where he understood that the question of religion wasn't to be left to philosophers and metaphysicians, and with the philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?

W. was silent, he says. He spent days in solitary prayer. In the time between services, he wandered the beach, meditating upon religion, the essence of religion. He'd begun to understand, he says, that it was the world here and now to which religion attended. To world as it currently is! As it is, and insofar as it harbours its redemption.

And what did I come to understand, from my years with the monks? What did I make of the icons on my bedroom wall, and of Athanasius's Life of Saint Anthony on my bedside table? That, too, is a mystery to W., for whom it has always seemed clear that I know nothing whatsoever of religion. There I was, nonetheless, a Guestmaster, and for several years. There I was, masturbating in my attic room as the monks around me prayed unceasingly for the world.

We are altogether too pathetic for our Middlesex audience, we agree, on the train back to the city. Our vague communism. Our communist pathos.

They were looking for someone else. Something tougher. They wanted axioms. They wanted programmes of action. What did they want to hear of Marx and Benjamin? What of the additional thesis of the Theses on the Philosophy of History? What of Marx's messianism, or Benjamin's Marxism?

'In his conception of the classless society, Marx secularised the conception of messianic time. And he did well to', we said, quoting Benjamin. 'You won't say that I hold the present time in too much esteem; and yet if I don't despair of it, it is on account of its own desperate situation, which fills me with hope', we said, quoting Marx's letter to Ruge of 1853.

This is no time for finesse, the crossed arms of the Middlesex postgraduates said. Less scholarship, more strategy, said their pursed lips. The banks are collapsing, and this is what you have to tell us?, said their filed-down teeth.

We told them, sensing their hostility, about the religious core of Marxism and the political core of Judaism. We nearly wept as we sketched our dream of a new political theology, and a new theology of politics. But the Middlesex postgraduates were unmoved.

W. read to them from his notebook:

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That was Marx, writing in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, he told them, and we saw their mood change. They sat back in their chairs, unfolding their arms. The reference is to the book of Exodus, of course, W. said. – 'You probably know it. Actually, you probably don't. You look like heathens'. Hostility once again. The postgraduates leant forward, and refolded their arms.

We knew we had to speak as never before. We knew we had to reach new heights of eloquence and emotion. Our voices quavered as we spoke, but then grew firm, and began to rise to a crescendo.

Moses and his people left Egypt, where they were slaves, and, in obedience to God's call, headed into the desert in search of the promised land, W. said. The desert: who would go there?, I said. The great and terrible wilderness, the Bible calls it, with no grass for pasture, where thirst and starvation would drive you mad. A wasteland, a damned place, the refuge of the devil: who would heed Moses's call for exodus?

But heed it they did, hundreds of thousands of them, W. said, taking up the baton, pursued by the chariots of the Pharoah. Go they did, with God amongst them, for wasn't God, too, a pilgrim with the children of Israel?

For forty years they wandered, W. said. It was forty years before they reached Canaan. Why so long?, I said, taking back the baton. Because they had to rid themselves of the memory of captivity, the memory of Egypt. Because a generation had to be born and raised who knew nothing of slavery. The young: everything depended on them; the young who were the fruit of the years of tribulation.

'Do you think it impressed them, our hymn to youth?' Marx, too, dreams of the young, W. told them. To go under means to be reborn, remade. The proletrariat are young, fiercely young. The proletariat are the last born, with no memory of slavery, of the land of captivity.

Of course, we were thinking of them, our audience, sitting around us in a semicircle, W. says. We were dreaming of those who will come after us, after our going under. We were dreaming of the young of Middlesex, with a dagger in their hearts and ice on their lips. We're not young enough, we agree. Not ardent enough! Aren't we a symbol of what needs to overcome?

Ah, what do we understand of the militant demand?, we ask ourselves as we get off the train. What of the risks that must be taken? We need to be purged, we agree. Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries. And only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might the world begin to overcome its bondage.

We sit under the tree, a few of us, some smoking. Zizek is going by. – 'So this is where they exile the smokers!' he cries, with great vigour. W.: 'Yeah, it's shit, isn't it?' Zizek agrees, nodding vigorously as he goes by.

Where's he off to?, we wonder. He's got better things to do than hang round Oxford, we agree. He's probably going to see his wife, who's an Argentinian model, or something. A model-psychoanalyst. No, they got divorced, someone else says.

We remember the photograph of Zizek and his model wife the day they got married, which was circulated on the 'net. He looked hungover, regretful, vaguely surly. We felt he was one of us. How else would we look on the day of our weddings? 

W. won't hear a word against Zizek, he says. In fact, it's only the petty, small-minded and envious who speak against Zizek, and when they do so, it is only as an excuse to exercise their pettiness, small-mindedness and enviousness.

He's what we all should be, Zizek, W. says. He's a grafter, just as we should be grafters. He fills bookshelves with his publications, just as we should fill bookshelves with our publications. He has a sense of his impending end, which makes him work ever harder, with ever greater ambition, just as our sense of our impending ends should make us work ever harder, and with ever greater ambition.

They've set up twelve fan sites for him on Facebook, but he ignores them all. He's has 214 invitations to speak by email, but he doesn't even open his inbox. His voicemail's full. Ranciere's been calling him. Badiou. Laruelle is wondering how he is … But Zizek's busy writing his latest magnum opus – is it his third? His fourth? He's busy writing his 1200 page reckoning with Hegel …

W. knows why everyone hates Zizek so much, he says. Zizek's got their number, he says. Zizek knows what he would have been had he not be banned from teaching by the Yugoslavian academia. He knows he would have been 'a poor stupid unknown professor from Ljubljana, probably dabbling in a little bit of Derrida, a little bit of Heidegger, a little bit of Marxism and so on'. A poor stupid unknown professor just like all the other poor stupid unknown professors. A dabbler, writing on this and then that, lecturing on this and then that …

Zizek's off, possessed by the most urgent of philosophical questions. And where are we going, who sit smoking under the tree? What possesses us, we dabblers, we poor stupid unknown idiots …?

Oxford, again. Why do we come here? Why, year after year? W. feels as though he's suffocating, he says. As though his hands were clawing the air. Still, at least we didn't bring Sal, though she wanted to come. She'd run amok, we agree. It's like matter and anti-matter, we agree. Bringing Sal to Oxford might destroy the universe.

Still, here we are, suffocating again, buried alive again. Being buried alive is bad enough, W. says, but being buried alive with an idiot! At least I should amuse him. At least I should do something funny. But Oxford even gets to me. It's like going round with a sulky ape.

Why does Oxford always make him think of Poland?, W. wonders. Perhaps because Poland is the opposite of Oxford, W. says. Because Poland is a place of thought, where thought is valued, and Oxford is a place without thought, and where thought is despised.

Poland: ah, that's where it all began, so many years ago now, we agree. Our collaboration, our dog and pony show.

Is there such a thing as friendship at first sight, W. wonders? Well, that's what happened in Poland, in Wroclaw, W. says, when he saw my Adam Ant dancing: friendship at first sight.

Ah, he still remembers it, when, in the middle of the meal held our honour, the British delegation in Wroclaw, I pushed back my seat in order to demonstrate Adam Ant dancing. He remembers when I took to the dancefloor, recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video. And he remembers how the Polish postgraduates followed me; how they, too, pushed back to their seats and took to the dancefloor, likewise recreating Adam Ant dancing from the 'Prince Charming' video.

Lars is a man who does not know shame, W. thought to himself. And he seems to encourage others, too, to forget their shame. And soon W., too, pushed back his chair, and took to recreating Adam Ant dancing on the dancefloor.

Oxford Spring. It's always spring in our Oxford. Every year we come back. Every year, the new spring, which is to say the same spring. And the same Oxford, too. And the same gloomy thoughts about Oxford. And the same desire to get out of Oxford immediately.

'It's happening just as you predicted', W. says. 'The collapse of the universities. The collapse of civilisation'. Don't you realise how good we're having it?, I've always said to him. These are the best of times, I've said, over and again. It's going to get worse, much worse, I told him, and I was right.

Why did it take an idiot to tell him that?, W. wonders. Why, when it should be obvious to everyone? They're destroying the universities: of course they are. How could it be otherwise? They're destroying the humanities: shrugged shoulders; so what else is new? Let them destroy it all, W. says, looking around him. Let it all come down.

I read from my notebook:

There is no more university; there is a great and venerable, barely camouflaged hole, a game of ceremonies. Rectors, deans, lecturers, students, all move to cover over the void, a void that is governed over by the rules of dead time.

That was Blanchot during May 1968, I tell him. No more university … Or might we dream of another kind of university, another kind of lecturer, and another kind of student?, we wonder. Might we dream of a dispersed university, a university in motion, in exodus, without walls, without buildings? Of a university of the periphery that flashes up around certain bars, certain havens in the city – of a kind of learning that appears and then disappears, in nearly one and the same moment, leaving its students and lecturers dazed and wondering what happened.

Was I the student, and you the lecturer – or was it the other way around? Did I teach you something, or you me? Or was it something between us that spoke – was it the relation between us, the movement of conversation that took us as its terms?

Oxford after the end looks quite like Oxford from before it, we decide, walking through the city. The same colleges, the same river. And the same walk for us, through Christchurch Meadows.

After tragedy, farce, we agree, remembering Marx. And after farce? This. Us. Christchurch Meadows.

'You really are the snack king', W. says. Is there any kind of snack I haven't brought with me? He admires me for it. There's something very true about my hunger.

I lay my snacks out on the table between us. I've gone for an Indian theme for this trip, I tell W.: chevda, Maharashtra-style, I explain, with dried fruits; banana chips fried in coconut oil (upperi, it's called, I tell W.), and the snack of snacks: murukku, from Tamil Nadu, which is well nigh unobtainable in England, but was sent to me by Indian relatives. It's wrapped in Indian newspapers for an authentic touch. And the wild card – an American snack, this time - corn nuts, too – the only snack I know wholly invented by one person, I tell W.: by Albert Holloway in 1936.

W.'s brought nothing to eat in his new man bag, he tells me. It's a souvenir from his recent Columbian trip. He was flown all the way to Bogota to give a seminar. They looked after him very well over there, of course. He'd expect nothing else from South Americans. They're not like us, limited people. They're full hearted, open. And they love philosophy! The philosophy department was massive. There were dozens of philosophers, young and old, crowding his seminar.

W. tells me about the snacks he met on his trip to Columbia. Puntillitas, he thinks they were called: battered squid, delicious. And guindillas – picked chillies. And there were various kinds of chorizo sausage – various cold meats, the Columbians are into those. And they each pork scratchings, which is very reassuring. When you're a long way from home, pork scratchings are just the thing. They're called chicharron, with a crisp later of fat under the skin, as in its British version.

I tell W. about flaeskesvaer, Danish pork scratchings, served in great packets, and W. tells me of the Hungarian pork rind one of the fellow members of the Plymouth Bela Tarr society bought from Budapest to share. Apparently, they fry the pork rinds in lard, he tells me, and eat them with bread and spring onions. In fact, that's what Bela Tarr's probably doing right now, W. says, eating pork rings with bread and spring onions.

'Jesus, what is that noise?', W. says on the phone. 'Are they still building up there?' They're still building.

They've been driving pylons into the earth, I tell W. And great cranes have gone up, the drivers in their cabs on eye level with me, on the twelfth floor.

Great drill shafts 100 foot high, boring slowly through the layers of soil and rock. The new buildings will be bolted to the earth by the pylons, that's clear. The new buildings will be driven into the earth, and will drive upwards from the earth, silver-windowed, steel framed, ready for the future …

They're keeping the facades of some of the old buildings, I tell W. The elaborate entryways, some doorframes and ornamentation: the Victorian shell around the new obscenity.

Because they've hollowed it out, the university, I tell W. They've drilled out its core. They're cored it out just as they will core us out. Because they're going to scoop out our insides, that much is clear. They're going to unscrew our skulls and dig out our brains. They'll chip out our teeth – our yellow teeth – and replace them with veneers.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. – 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. - 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

I point out my old school from train window, in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything. We didn't know anything. Our teachers didn't know anything, I tell them. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell him.

I point out the warehouse where I went as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs. We stood about doing nothing. Sometimes management would come downstairs and tell us to get on with our jobs. From time to time, there'd be a cull; they'd sack a few of us. But we'd reappear in the warehouse sooner or later, employed by another agency, and go back to standing about and doing nothing, bored out of our minds.

And I point out the twin buildings of Hewlett Packard's UK headquarters, by the dry ski slope in Bracknell, where I worked as an office contractor. It was the worst of offices. I tell him of days and weeks of data entry. I tell him of wandering from coffee machine to coffee machine, of reading trade magazines in the company foyer, and of visiting the koi carp in their pond by the carpark.

And I tell him about my escape to university, my escape to Manchester, although I knew nothing about Manchester. – 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

The suburbs, the suburbs … He pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you are? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I used to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. – 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised for diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

Once it snowed in April, and the last remaining lot, the biggest, the wildest, was one pristine snow bank, full of space, I thought. Full of time … And I saw my future there in some sense, that's what I told him, W. says. I saw a future.

'You should go to college while it's still free', said a fellow worker, who read Kafka on his lunch break. He lent me his book, I told W., and I underlined a passage. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness …

'So you went north'. I went north. – 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a northerner, or a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (he could only read Kafka in translation, back then). But they'd lied, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things – great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great train routes of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like Mir space station.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. – 'Never mind the high table!', W. says. Of course, the speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else. – 'You had a real appetite!', W. said to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. And lice, says W. 

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Gor blimey, guv'nor.

We ask our kidnapped plenary speaker about his ideas. Where are they taking him? What's to be his next project? But he seems distracted. He's very full up, he says, and now he's got to and have another dinner.

It's our duty to talk, we know that. We need to settle his nerves, our kidnapped plenary speaker. We need to settle his stomach! So we tell him of our Kierkegaard project, of our collaborative paper, for which we are constructing an elaborate dossier. We tell him about the intimate link we expect to discover between Kierkegaard and contemporary capitalism, about the Danish philosopher's despair and our despair.

Our speaker's feeling really ill now, he says. What will we do? The fog's thickening. We need to stay close! To keep a head count! And it's darkening, too. Are we really going to meet God? Do you think we'll receive the Tablets of Law? - 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.