The Death Drive

Why does he listen to me?, W. says. But he knows why. There'd be sense in keeping people around to inspire him, W. says. But not to destroy him. Unless it's his death-drive, W. says. Unless I'm his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

Ostracism, that's what I've brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.'s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth, and there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want for himself? Ah, there's no way of telling. He'll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We're heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pine trees to where nothing can live.

Down – and Out

Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being lead out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of not-knowing will come to an end. For that's all he's experienced since he took up with me, W. says. The horror of not knowing where the next step will lead, for example, he says. The horror of the uncertainty of his destination.

For where's he been heading all this time? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down – and out – that, too is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

Fauns

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad – very bad – and at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Of course, my tendency is to scare them off, W. says. It's to bellow and fuss and deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. tries to keep quiet, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who can go back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe them with soft words and sympathy.

It won't be that bad, he tells them. Don't listen to him. Or: don't worry, everything's going to be fine. Ignore him, he's an idiot. – 'But in their hearts they know', W. says. 'They know what's going to happen'.

Dead Zones

No more, says W. No more. He's passing through a dead zone, he says, as you are beginning to find in the oceans: blank regions where there is no life. There's no life in him! It's all over!

W.'s despairs are like magnetic fields, he says, like great clouds in the air through which he passes. They have nothing to do with his inner states at all. It's not a matter of emotion. His despairs, W. says, are not even his.

Why does he always feel he's falling? Why does he feel that nothing is real?

The Clouds of Jupiter

Are we even alive?, says W. Is this even happening? Are we really talking – right now? Because all he can hear is a great roaring, W. says. He's falling, W. says, as through the clouds of Jupiter.

When will he ever hit anything real? When will he strike his head upon the hard shore of the real? Because that's what he wants, even if it dashes his head to pieces. That's all he wants, and especially if it dashes his head to pieces …

Only death is real, W. says, and it's time to die, it really is. But death isn't coming any closer. If anything, he's too healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, W. says. Eradicated, along with everyone who has known us. Our memory should be wiped from the earth … 

Sometimes W. finds the coming disaster a comforting thought. It will be a relief, a blessed relief, the parched earth, the boiling sky. Because won't it entail the absence of us? Won't it mean, at the very least, our complete destruction?

Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn't that a relief: that there will be no future?  And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

No!

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one tried hard enough, that's what W. discern, when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough, and what a task! How many times has he tried to explain it to me? How many emails has he sent? 

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it was like beating a big, dumb animal. It seemed pointless, and cruel. How could I understand why I was being beaten? I bellowed, that was all. It was perfectly senseless.

He drew pictures, W. says. He scrawled red lines across my work, but I never understood; I carried on regardless. I'm tenacious, he has to give me that. Or rather, something is tenacious in me. How can I continue when there's so much that is wrong? It baffles everyone, W. says. Is he still going? Is he still alive?, they ask him, who can only shrug in dismay. What can he do?, he says.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

I Don’t Understand

The 80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we are driven out from Liverpool Station. It's going to be terrible. W. lived in Liverpool in the 80s, W. says. He knows what it was like here. He shudders. We're finished. Doomed. How long do you think we have?

W. feels like the boy in Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns all the way round, 360 degrees, ending up facing in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. Why can't you follow orders?, he's asked. You told me to turn, he says. And then, I don't understand, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, a voice comes. Another cadet, off camera.

His parents are dead. He's turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That's what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox and whistling, tears running down his face … I don't understand, that's all he will say. It's all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Streets boarded up. Whole sections of the city abandoned. A world without pity. Without mercy. Great walls raised against the sea from which the migrants will come (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up, melting, from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there'll be blackness everywhere. We'll die lingering deaths. We'll die in the sludge, very slowly.

I don't understand, that's what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. I don't understand.

What is sometimes characterised as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a 'nostalgia' for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politicisation and subsequent periods of depoliticisation and withdrawal are modelled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as 'nostalgia' is about as adequate as to characterise the body's hunger, before dinner, as a 'nostalgia for food'.

Frederic Jameson, from Postmodernism

Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible.

Rosenstock-Huessy

Because he did not find his voice, but his voices, Pessoa never fell into the trap of knowing what he was doing; he didn't need to imitate himself to keep writing.

Adam Phillips

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and me?

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I became one of these people you see in movies in the background, those extras just pacing back and forth.

Al Columbia, discussing his period in mental hospital

Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.

Adam Phillips

… the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I can’t even think of them without crying. That’s what I admire most in literature, its ability to make you weep. There are two compliments I really appreciate. “It made me weep,” and “I read it in one night. I couldn’t stop.”

Q. What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality? 

A. There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things.

Houellebecq, interviewed

I got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't really believe in movies anymore, either.

Kael reviewing Slow Motion

There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly interested in the future. I don't think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

W. G. Sebald, interviewed

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

Genet, interviewed

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that God dwells everywhere. 'In the trees as well?' – 'In the trees too', he replied. – 'In the animals too?' – 'In animals too.' – 'In man as well?' – 'Man,' replied Grandfather, 'is the partner of God.' – 'Man is God?' I was shocked. 'No. But he has a little of God in him.' This conversation has been etched in my memory. Grandfather was a believer – he believed with his whole heart and all his soul. That belief of his was expressed in every gesture: the way he gripped any object, opened or closed a book, picked up a child and placed him on his knees. Sometimes I feel I have inherited his religious feelings from him. I never learned much from abstract ideas; the figures from my childhood and the experiences in the Holocaust are what stand before my eyes and have molded my thoughts.

Appelfeld, from A Table of One's Own

I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Tarkovsky

Day is falling, the fire is dying, and I'll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. With the curtains drawn aside, I can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. Under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. It lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.

Bataille, The Impossible

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.

'Optimists write badly' (Valery). But pessimists do not write.

Blanchot

Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.

I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.

Bram Van Veldt

The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn't want to lie.

Bergman, from the notebooks to Persona

Revenge on my Head

Are the trucks going to crush us?, that's what I ask myself as I'm channelled through the campus, I tell W. Are the diggers and cement mixers going to grind us into the earth?

Sometimes I want to pre-empt the destruction, I tell W. I want to lie my head beneath a caterpillar track. Want it to burst like a melon. Because my head aches, I tell W. My head throbs … And that's what the machines want, I sometimes think: revenge on my head.

I have nightmares of regeneration, I tell W. Nightmares of being called in, of my benefits being docked. But I work, I tell W., I'm not on benefits. I have nightmares of summonses being posted through my letterbox, of schemes to get the long term sick back to work. But I'm not one of the long term sick, I tell W.

I have nightmares of being made to wait in an open plan office, ticket in my hand, waiting for my appointment with a Case Worker. I have nightmares of having my needs reassessed. But I don't have any needs, I tell W. I'm fine; I don't need reassesment.

I have nightmares of signing Agreements, of presenting myself to be retrained. Reskilled! I have nightmares about flipcharts and group work. But I don't have to sign any Agreements; I have a job; I don't need to be retrained.

I have a job: but for how much longer?, I say to W. How long will be before they come to me? Because they are coming for me, I tell him, in their great trucks and machines. And so I might as well my head down them, before the trucks and machines, and let my head burst like a melon.

Channelling

I hate it, I tell W., the terrible channelling around the building works. He'd hate it, the rat-runs for pedestrians. You have to rush, head down, among the crowd. To rush and have to watch your footing, because the crowd moves quickly.

Oh sometimes some foreign students will slow it right down, they'll promenade, as they do back in Spain or Malaysia; they reclaim the path (the non-path, the channel) talking and laughing with friends, and paying no heed to the pent-up walkers behind them.

Everyone wants to be somewhere else, except the Spanish and Malaysians. Everyone's pressing on headlong into the future, which is only a future of absolute control. Headlong and with heads down, in lock-step, staring at the pavement, staring at their feet and the backs of the feet of others… 

Where are we going? They're driving us on like dogs. Like rats. This is how they'll destroy us, because they will destroy us. This is how they'll wear us out, channelling us through the campus till we drop.

Vehicles Reversing

The continual sound of drills. High pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through concrete. I daren't look out of the window. What's happening out there?

The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A chugging in the distance (the worksite stretches all around the building). The distant throbbing of engines …

It's driving me mad, I tell W. on the phone. I can't hear a thing. I can't work. I can't read (W.: 'that's a good excuse'). I can't write (W.: 'You could never write'). Wasn't I suppose to be taking my Polyani notes? Wasn't I supposed to be sending them to him?

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice. And now warnings overlapping warnings as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear… Stand well clear… Stand well clear… And now a a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. Surely a helicopter isn't landing? A helicopter couldn't be landing …

A thick smell – is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. Everything's reversing, I tell W. The whole world's reversing.

They're remaking the world behind the high glossy fences with photographs of begoggled scientists of every nationality. They're rebuilding the campus! And does it need to be rebuilt? Do they need the new office blocks for private partners of the university? Do they need to storm heaven with new glass monoliths?

My head's aching, I tell W. My head's going to burst.

BullRing

BullRing: for fuck's sake, W. says, reading a sign. What happened to the 'The'. What happened to spaces between words? It's a New Labour thing. It's a bullshit rebranding thing.

It was a name for a street once, a public space, W. says. And now it's the name of a mall, a private space of consumption, he says. It's a brand name, Bullring. It's supposed to suggest a distinct retail experience.

Well, at least they can regenerate it, W. says. They can't do anything with the Pallasades. Even the city planners knows it's unredeemable. A multi-storey carpark in the middle of the city, right at its motor-city heart …

At least they pedestrianised New Street, W. says. At least you can walk for a few hundred yards without seeing a car …