Lars Iyer's Blog

There's no river here, that's the trouble. There's nothing to open up, to liberate. There are the canals, of course, but they're further out. And they're too straight, too orderly. A city needs a river!, W. says. It needs an expanse.

How many times has the centre been rebuilt? How many times have they wrecked the city centre and wrecked it again? And yet it looks exactly the same as any other English city, only worse. The same complexes for shopping and eating, clustered around the same waterfronts (in Birmingham, canal fronts). The same so-called luxury flats for aspirational buyers, the same industrial-aesthetic chic, the same bullshit public art, the same daft quarters …

Birmingham's a wound, a terrible wound. But it's his wound, W. says. He takes it personally.

Edinburgh morning: it's a song in our hearts, this city. Coming out from out hotel, we feel a great upsurge of love: opposite, spread before us, the Old Town rises up in layers. We tremble with love – don't we feel lighter here in Scotland? Isn't the air fresher, keener? And we have the whole day before us. We have time, the whole day, like an empty expanse.

The relation to a city can be sexual, of course, W. says over breakfast. We remember the graffiti from May 1968: I came in the cobblestones. And wasn't there a woman who recently married the Eiffel Tower? But the young of '68 came collectively; theirs was a collective orgasm, enveloping those who were supposed to stand against them – the men and women of established power.

All or nothing: isn't that what the Situationists demanded of the city? Human freedom, in urban form. A transformed cartography. Wasn't that what they sought in their derives, their driftings – an exodus from the capitalist urban grid to the utopia secreted in the city? Wasn't it the concidence of desire and architecture for which they looked, the free associative passage of meanings and moods, a reading of the city like a book of poetry?

Debord and the others drifted for weeks to find what we've found. They passed through half-demolished houses and dossed down at night in public hardens looking to escape alienation and reification writ in stone, the capitalist transformation of space into its own decor. They wandered in forbidden catacombs in the name of a critique of human geography. They drank – how they drank! – to break their fetters, to usher in the reign of prodigality and glory, of a true metropolitanism.

Some places drew them closer, some repelled them; they sank into some routes like fissures, following the cracks in the urban network. They drained into sinkholes and found havens in the drift, temporary stopping places: certain bars, certain quarters. But above all, they moved, they kept out of place, and for months at a time. They moved, and the will to change life as it was moved with them. Life as it was, life as it is: they blazed through Paris like a trail of fire …

London, the heart of London. Wasn't this where we refused to come to launch our books? We had to refuse!, we agree. What other choice was there? To be admired by the academy is to become corrupted by the academy, we're agreed on that. We have to remain outside the academy, indifferent to it. We have to pursue our work in obscurity and silence.

Of course, this is not a time which admires modesty, we agree. We'll have no followers; we'll found no school: W.'s reconciled to that. No one will seek us out to discuss our ideas. So be it! Ah, we have our friends, of course, W. says. W.'s friends (they're his friends really). He sought them out! He approached them!

Ah, our thinker-friends, W. weeps to think of them. Hasn't he taken them into his home, treating them as the mnost honoured of guests, for weeks at a time? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to present their ideas? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the college quadrangle bathed by sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.

Haven't these thinkers thanked him for restoring them to the world, for bringing them back among others. Haven't they told him of their terrible melancholias, of disorders of the spirit that their effort to think has only driven deeper? Haven't they told him about finding God and losing God, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments?

Ah, they've suffered like gods, his thinkers. They've been subject to impersonal agonies, to interstellar torture …

We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Reached from without. He's seen it in the eyes of his thinkers: distance, starlight. He's seen starlight flashing in the empty expanse. He's seen all the way to the heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole in the thinkers who have returned from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. He's seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Anarctic of thought.

Thoughts should shatter the frozen sea within us, Kafka said, says W. And that's what he's seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its every detail in a way only a thinker could understand.

W. is dreaming of the Canadian city, he says. He's dreaming of a different kind of urbanism.

The Canadian city is part of the wilderness, he says; it includes it. To be inside the Canadian city is also be inside the Canadian wilderness, W. says mystically. The Canadian city is only a fold of the wilderness, a way of answering it, of echoing it.

The Canadian city is full of space, W. says. Its boulevards remember the ice-plains, its skyscrapers the gleaming summits among the mountains. Its windows flash back the aurora borealis to the sky. And its night time darkness recalls the darkness of the thick pine forests that cover the land.

And it's full of time, W. says. Everyone has time. People – strangers – stop and talk to one another. The Canadians are a patient people, W. says. They're not to be rushed. That's where he learnt what patience was, W. says. That's where he learnt to take deep breaths and walk upright. – 'Even you! Even you might learn to take deep breaths and walk upright'.

And I might learn French, too, W. says. That's where he learnt his French, W. says. He grew up speaking French, Canadian French, the French of the Quebecois, he says. The French of the wilderness.

That's how you can calm a wilderness bear, W. says, by speaking to it in Quebecois French. That's how you might calm a wilderness wolf, speaking softly, calmly, in a language full of space and time …

I have a Hindu story for every occasion, he knows that, W. says. What about for a train journey? Very well, I agree. I'll tell him a story for our times. I'll tell him how even God needs to cheat in order to serve dharma … 

The battle on the plains of Kurukshetra – the great battle of the Mahabharta, that even the gods looked down from heaven to watch – has raged for several days, with neither side gaining an upper hand. On the one side, the forces of the Pandavas, led by Arjuna, who fight on the side of dharma; on the other, and though their ranks contain many virtuous men, the forces of the Kauravas, who fight against dharma.

Disaster strikes for the Pandavans on the thirteenth day of battle: Arjuna's son is killed. Jayadratha, the Asurya, is the culprit. In his grief, Arjuna cries out that he'll avenge his son's death by sunset on the next day, or throw himself into the funeral pyre. Fighting stops at sunset, in accordance with the rules of war, and that night Arjuna meditates in silence, concentrating his powers on the task ahead.

The next morning, Arjuna rises more resolute than ever, and men and horses fall in their hundreds to his arrows. Chariots collapse in the dust. But the enemy, having heard Arjuna's oath, have set six of their greatest warriors the task of guarding his son's killer.

Fight as he might, loosing volleys of arrows, Arjuna can get no closer to his foe. And so, in the last moments of the afternoon, with the rules of war dictating that all fighting stop at sunset, there seems no choice but for Arjuna, leader of the Pandavan armies, to follow his son onto the funeral pyre.

Then Arjuna's charioteer, Krishna, the avatar of God, lifts his chakra over the sun like a great cloud. Krishna, who promised to have no part in the fighting having friends and allies on both sides, has made sunset seemed to fall all at once. Soldiers on both sides head back to their camp. Even the warriors who surround Jayadratha drop their guard, taking off their armour and turning for home.

'Strike now!', Krishna cries. 'He's unguarded!' Arjuna is aghast. – 'But it's sunset. I should put down my arms!' – 'It's not sunset', says Krishna, 'for the sun continues to shine above my chakra'. Arjuna shakes his head. – 'I don't understand, Lord!' And Krishna replies, 'You must win this battle. There are higher kinds of justice'. And so Arjuna does the bidding of his Lord, firing an arrow into the breast of his enemy, thus avenging the murder of his son.

'What is a chakra?', W. says. 'Do you have a chakra? Have you got one in your rucksack?' And then, 'So Krishna made it look as though it was night so Arjuna could kill his enemy? Sounds pretty dodgy to me'. Technically, it wasn't sunset, I tell W. – 'But he made it appear so'. But technically, sunset had yet to fall. This seems very unfair to W. Well, there was more unfairness to come, I tell him.

On the fourteenth day of battle, I continue, Yudhishthira, the oldest of the Pandavas, makes a terrible mistake. In the midst of battle, the dead of his own armies all around him, he wonders whether there might be another way to resolve the battle.

'Duryodhana!', he cries to the greatest of the warriors of the enemy army, 'I will make you a deal. Choose any one of my brothers and fight him instead, in one to one combat. The victor will win the battle, and we can stop the carnage'.

Duyhodhana agrees, he says, but on one condition: that he chose the weapon with which they'll do combat. Yudhishthira agrees in turn; the battle ceases, and all wait to see who Duryodhana will pick. Will it be one of the twins Nakula or Sadheva, the youngest of the Pandava brothers, valiant warriors, but probably no match for their enemy? Will it be Yudhishthira himself, the son of Dharma, famous for his virtue rather than his prowess on the battlefield? Surely it couldn't be Arjuna, the greatest of archers, who has already felled thousands of enemy soldiers! And surely not Bhishma, a man with the strength of seventy elephants?

'Bhima!' cries Duryodhana, and everyone is surprised. 'We will fight with maces'. What a strange choice! Bhima is stronger than him, and Duryodhana and he were taught mace-fighting by the same teacher. What madness is this? Combat begins. Bhima lands some mighty blows on his opponent which thunder like earthquakes, but Duryodhana shrugs them off, striking mighty blows himself. Over the hours and days that follow, Bhima visibly tires. How could it be?: it is Duryodhana who is winning.

Krishna takes Bhima aside during a break in the fighting. – 'Duryodhana was given a boon', he tells him. 'He was led to the river by his mother, and prayers uttered over him. The gods granted that every part of him touched by the river became impossible to harm. That's why your mace cannot inflict the lightest bruise'. Bhima: 'Then I can't defeat him?'

Krishna: 'Listen carefully. Duryodhana was too modest to step naked into the river in front of his mother, and the river did not touch his groin. Strike him there, and he will fall'. Bhima looks shocked, for the rules of mace combat forbid blows below the waist. How could he maintain any virtue as a warrior after such an act?

He has no choice, Krishna says. – 'You must not lose. You must break the rules of war if you are to serve the higher rule, the law of dharma'. Bhima, who had sunk to the ground in despair, looks up at him. – 'Since it is you who have asked me, Lord, I will do as you say'. And sure enough, he strikes Duryodhana a terrible blow across his thighs and kills him outright.

'And I suppose you think that's technically alright, too', W. says. 'Hindu technicalities!', W. says. He's had enough of them. 'Anything goes when you think the world is illusory'.

Why did Krishna advise the Pandavas to break the rules of war?, I continue. How can a lie be superior to the truth? Some say Krishna had his eye on a greater duty, a higher dharma, than that which ruled men on earth; others that the enemies of the Pandavas deserved nothing else: weren't they unrighteousness, adharma, incarnate, no matter which men of virtue fought amongst them?

Others still say that the battle marked the transition from to the lowest of the Four Ages. In the Age of Iron, there is nothing left but cynicism and opportunism, and even gods have to lie.

W. will have none of talk of a higher dharma, he says. Religion is about seeking justice in time, in this world, not outside of it, he says. There is no higher law in Judaism, W. says. It's far more sensible. God's law is the same everywhere, W. says. Well, that's how it works in his Judaism, he says, which is to say, the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig. It's entirely different to Hindu fatalism, he says. To Hindu cynicism. Religion should have nothing to do with technicalities, W. says.

And there's worse to come, I tell W.

The battle on the plains of Kurukshetra set family member against family member, friend against friend, pupil against teacher. I'm not sure how Drona, the teacher of the Pandavas, ended up standing against them in battle. Of warriors, he was among the most feared; not even the gods could defeat him so long as he held a weapon in his hand.

When he saw his side was facing defeat, Drona became furious enough to use the murderous and terrifying brahmastra, the greatest weapon of the day. Now he was truly invincible, destroying whole divisions of the Pandavan armies.

What to do? Krishna tells the Pandavas that Drona can only be killed if he lays down his weapons. But how can he be made to do that? Drona's son was the very meaning of his life, the very reason he relinquished a brahminical life in order to became a warrior. He would lay down his arms only if he hears his son Ashwatthama is dead, Krishna says.

Yudhishthira is baffled. But Drona isn't dead, he says. – 'But we will have to tell Drona Ashwatthama is dead', Krishna says. Yudhishthira can't make sense of this. 'So you're telling us to lie, Lord?'

Krishna whispers in the ear of Bhima, who rises and disappears. – 'I have told him to kill one of our elephants, whose name is Ashwatthama', Krishna says. 'Now you can tell Drona that Ashwatthama is dead without lying'. The son of Dharma shakes his head. – 'Is this really what you want, Lord: to deceive a virtuous man?' And Krishna says, 'It is what I want'.

In the midst of battle, corpses of his enemies piled about him, Drona hears a great cry: 'Ashwatthama is dead!' It's Bhima's voice, he says to himself. Can it really be true: his son – dead? He shakes his head. No, he will not believe it. – 'It is not true!' he cries. 'You're deceiving me'. And then, 'Yudhishthira: is it true?' And then another voice comes, Yudhishthira's, who is incapable of lying: 'It is true: Ashwatthama is dead'.

Drona, as Krishna predicted, lays down his arms in despair. The former Brahmin, teacher of the Pandavas and their enemies alike, allowed himself to be beheaded on the fifteenth day of battle.

He's never heard anything so stupid, W. says.

'Go on, have an espresso', says W. He's having one; why not me? But he knows why not. He knows the effect coffee has on me. He knows the excitement, the fever-dream. W.'s hoping for a moment of illumination. He's hoping for the clouds – my clouds – to part and for me to say great things. He's waiting for my eyes to roll back in my head …

My prophetic days seem to have gone, W. says. Once I was worth listening to. Oh, not for what I thought I said, and nor indeed for its content. No, it was the pathos W. remembers. The mood.

Is there something like a messianic mood?, W. sometimes wonders. My voice used to tremble, W. remembers that. I sounded upset, as though about to cry. And then it began, then I began to speak – or someone spoke, at least, W. says. The espresso spoke. The caffeine. I became the sock puppet of God, W. says.

Oxford Spring. It's always Spring in our Oxford. The sky is open, expansive. We feel wistful, full of a vague sense of possibility. This year, things will be different, we tell ourselves. This year will be a new beginning.

But of course, nothing will begin. We've long since worn out any beginning. Long since mocked it, laughed at it, and finally sunk beneath it, staring mutely upwards like apes in the gutter. Life, real life is elsewhere. And who might we have been in that foreign country, that glittering elsewhere?

Until the seventh day, some theologians say, the creation was unfinished W. says. Until the Sabbath. And what is the day after the end of the world, our eternal day, our non-day except a kind of Sabbath?

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 what has unmade the Lord …

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 …

We need to escape!, W. says. We need to get out of here! Zizek's gone, and why shouldn't we? He'll follow me, W. says. I have a great instinct for escape, like a confined ape waiting for his keeper's inattention. At a moment's notice, I'll vault the walls …

W.'s ready to vault after me, he says. He's had enough! Isn't that why he keeps me with him: to be alongside another who has had enough?

But it's always too much for me, that's the thing, W. says. I seem always to be thinking of what I left behind. I am, first of all, a man of the outside, W. says. A man who knows what lies beyond all walls …

Somewhere, in my head, I'm running along screaming, W. knows that. Somewhere, head back, mouth open, I'm screaming as loud as I can. W. can hear it sometimes, he says. He can hear it even hundreds of miles away, my great scream, like a dog howling in the night. And he wants to send up his howl, too, he says. His scream. He wants to run along the streets like a madman.

Zizek called him comrade in an email, W. says. It was a fine moment. He'd been put in charge of inviting Zizek to speak. They'd corresponded: emails went to and fro. And then W. sent Zizek a piece he had written, taking up something or other Zizek had said. And Zizek's next email to him began Dear Comrade …

Dear Comrade … And for a moment, W. pictured himself alongside Zizek on some barricade or another – some philosophical barricade …

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 constantly travels from one conference to another, just as we should constantly travel from one conference to another. He's killing himself with work and stress in the name of thought, just as we should kill ourselves with work and stress in the name of thought.

He's got diabetes, no doubt from the sheer intensity of his philosophical thinking, just as we should have diabetes from the sheer intensity of our philosophical thinking. 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. And he has a sense that we really do live at the end of times, with the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding towards us, just as we should have the sense that we live at the end of times, with the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding towards us.

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?

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.

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

It's not even that we're in the End Times, I've always insisted. We're beyond them. We've gone past the End Times. Oxford after the end looks quite like Oxford before the end, we decide. 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 need a woman in your life', says W., as he always does when very bored. 'Why haven't you got a woman in your life?' Sal's more intelligent than him, W. says. More intelligent than us. – 'And better than us. More consistent. She thinks something and does it. We think things, and what do we do?' She's our Rosa Luxembourg, we agree. And who are we? 

Sometimes W. dreams of a great political act, of a great deed as pure and simple as a swordstroke. Of an act of great goodness, great justice. But all he can think of is suicide. – 'Let's jump into the river'.

The son of Man will bury man, while he himself will remain unburied: where's that from?, W. wonders, looking through my notebook. – 'Ah, who will bury us?'

On Magdalen Bridge, a junkie in a sky-blue jumper asks for money for 'chippies'. To the left, the meadow to which we can never work out how to get. If only we could find our way to that meadow, which runs along the river! If only we could feel the grass under our shoes! What thoughts we would have! What ideas!

Sometimes W. thinks we might walk our way to ideas. That to walk – if we walk far enough, hard enough – might also be to think. Or at the very least to think about thinking. To have ideas about ideas, ideas we might one day have.

What's my significance?, W. wonders. Do I illustrate some broader trend? Am I a man of our times, or against our times? Sometimes, W. thinks I'm ahead of my times, a kind of augur. – 'Go on, predict something'. But the future is unclear.

We're in the desert, W. says, and the meadow by the river is our Canaan. In the desert, the face of the wilderness … that's where the Biblical prophets went to be alone with themselves. To be alone with God! What else did John the Baptist seek? What else Elias and Eliseus?

The fidelity of the desert, W. reads in my notebook. Cassian: prayer of fire. – 'What have you been reading?', W. asks. I will give you rest (hesychia): God to Moses. Jesus to his disciplines. I seem to be drawn to Christian pathos, W. says. He feels it himself, he says.

If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions, and give to the poor … and come, follow me. Is that what we should do?, W. wonders. Should we head further into our desert? But there's no pillar of cloud to lead us, no pillar of fire, and we have to get a bus back to town from the Oxford suburbs.

When he wants to think of my compromise, my shortcomings, when he wants to underline for himself the outrage of my existence, W. compares me in his head to Shostakovich.

To Shostakovich essentially alone, essentially defenceless before a system that was destroying him (W.: 'You essentially in company, with all the others, worse than all the others, leading them into ruin …'); Shostakovich with raw, exposed nerves, with his terror of officials (W.: 'You craven, you kneeling before the officials, asking them what they want');

Shostakovich pale, emaciated, his physique undermined by constant cold and hunger, by tuberculosis of the lymphatic system, a bandage always round his neck (W.: 'You full of rude good health, free of illness except for occasional coughs and colds');

Shostakovich whose genius will ring through the centuries (W.: 'You whose non-genius should likewise be legendary, whose stupidity should likewise be remembered'); Shostakovich who wrote his music in full score, straight away, with the greatest intensity and speed, never needing to try things out on piano (W.: 'You who write nothing, who will do anything to avoid writing');

Shostakovich pacing up and down the room, writing his music down while standing up; 'Not a day', he said 'without writing a line' (W.: 'You at your desk, playing Tetris on your mobile phone'); Shostakovich keeping back his chamber music, his string quartets (W.: 'You not keeping back anything; you lacking all sense, all discretion');

Shostakovich with his amazing and original pianism, his fast tempi, his fantastic octaves despite his small non-pianistic hands (W.: 'You who listen to Jandek plink-plonking; you whose spade-like hands are incapable of any delicacy');

Shostakovich with his self-possession, his capacity to work, to just get on with it, never succumbing to fads (W.: 'You reading the latest thinker just translated French, you reading the latest stupid secondary commentary about the latest thinker just translated from French');

Shostakovich oblivious of his surroundings and to any form of comfort, demanding only an unlimited supply of the strongest bitterest tea (W.: 'You only wanting to be well fed, drunk, and in the brown light of the pub');

Shostakovich whose work like all great Russian artists carried a moral charge (W.: 'Your work shows no moral charge, no ethics, no goodness');

Shostakovich carrying a packed suitcase with him at all times, waiting to be taken away (W.: 'You who I wish were taken away'); Shostakovich sitting out on the landing so the Secret Police wouldn't disturb his family when they came (W: 'You who would volunteer to be taken away, who would hold out his hands to be handcuffed. Arrest him!, you would say, pointing at me. Arrest of all them!, you would say, pointing to all your friends');

Shostakovich forced to join the Party against his will – 'I am a whore', he cried (W.: 'You who would have joined any Party that would have you, you who are the whore of all whores, the whore of Babylon');

Shostakovich lost in the complex labyrinth of Party bureaucracy … (W.: 'You willingly losing yourself in the labyrinth, plunging into it …'); Shostakovich playing the role of an obedient Party member (W.: 'You playing no role; you absolutely yourself');

Shostakovich weeping out loud in front of his pupils - 'They have been hounding me, they have been pursuing me' (W.: 'You who want only to be hounded, to be pursued. You who cry "chase me, chase me" to the audit team, swimming away through seas of paper'); Shostakovich hysterical, his teeth chattering (W.: 'You dry-eyed and composed amidst the catastrophe');

Shostakovich weeping uncontrollably as he composed his 8th Quartet (W.: 'You never weeping, and knowing nothing of weeping'); Shostakovich weepingly telling his friend of the sleeping pills he'd bought to kill himself (W.: 'You who above all should kill himself, not killing himself, you who drive other people to want to kill themselves, not killing himself');

Shostakovich accused by functionaries by the Ministry of Culture of sinning against 'Soviet reality' (W.: 'You who want to belong more than anyone else to what is called reality'); Shostakovich denounced by his colleagues, his fellow composers (W.: 'You who are first to attack yourself, first to attack him, to whom I should be closest. You always on the verge of betraying him, and betraying everyone. Of betraying yourself');

Shostakovich harried, hassled; subject to scrutiny by the most stupid Party officials (W: 'You harrying and harassing yourself to work and harrying and hassling yourself at work'); Shostakovich dismissed from one Conservatoire, then another (W.: 'You somehow undismissed from your job, from one job and then another');

Shostakovich due to be arrested and taken away, called in to be arrested and taken away, saved only as the person arresting him was arrested and taken away, and when he turned up, there was another official there who had no idea who he was (W.: 'You wanting to be arrested, presenting yourself to be arrested, but with no one to arrest you');

Shostakovich always on the verge of becoming an enemy of the people – always in danger of being taken away for re-education (W.: 'You volunteering for re-education, wanting to be acquainted with the latest change in regulations');

Shostakovich criticised for formalism, for pessimism – 'What we want is an optimistic Shostakovich' – for musical degeneracy (W.: 'You uncriticised and unadmonished, you still surprised he can get away with anything, all the time wanting to be disciplined and told off; you who want to get away with nothing'); Shostakovich obediently writing patriotic cantatas and programmatic symphonic works (W: 'You wanting only to write what you're told, but lacking anyone to tell him');

Shostakovich sent as part of the delegation to the Cultural and Scientific Congress of World Peace in New York, hands twisting the tips off his cigarettes, his face twitching, his face disturbed; Shostakovich wanting only to be left alone, joining other speakers to read, in a nervous, shaky voice, standard Agitprop speeches (W.: 'You sitting like an ape in the midst of committees, keenly taking notes, nodding your head, wanting only to be with others and speaking officialese like the others');

Shostakovich having to admit that the Party was right to find flaws in his art, that he was even grateful for the party for helping him to recognise his flaws and mistakes – Yes, yes, yes, I've been wrong. Of course I'll write an operetta which the People will easily understand' (W.: 'You only looking for someone to tell you about the flaws in your work, you who want only to set you right');

Shostakovich constantly having to submit written justifications for his every creative work (W.: 'You who should have to submit such justifications, who should be made to apologise to the world, to stand trial, to be shot against a wall');

Shostakovich whose Fifth Symphony was tagged 'A Soviet's artist's reply to just criticism' … (W: 'You whose every work deserves criticism'); Shostakovich who had to write an apology for his tenth symphony – explaining it had been written in too much of a hurry, that the first movement was too long, the second movement was too short, etc., (W: 'You who have never apologised for your work, never taken it back');

Shostakovich having to make a speech of self-criticism at the Union of Composer's Congress – 'Music Against the People' (W.: 'You who should only make speeches of self-criticism, should only write auto-critique');

Shostakovich having to set words by officially approved poets – (W.: 'You who want only official approval'); Shostakovich writing socialist-realist works of all kinds, patriotic works, songs of the people, programmatic cantatas and symphonic works, but also works for the bottom drawer, having no hope for their performance (W: 'but for you there is no bottom drawer, you have no need for a bottom drawer, no conception of a bottom drawer');

Shostakovich sobbing in his hotel room after the premier of his Song of the Forests, hiding his face in the pillow (W: 'You never sobbing after giving one of your presentations, never hiding your face'); Shostakovich head bent in despair (W: 'You who do not know the meaning of despair; you who he has being trying to teach despair, to teach integrity');

Shostakovich accused of 'anti-people sentiments'; Shostakovich whose music was no longer performed or printed (W.: 'You whose work shouldn't be presented or printed'); Shostakovich in ill health, visibly lame (W.: 'You in rude health, visibly robust');

Shostakovich calculatingly giving the Party what they wanted (Glory to the Wise Stalin, The Sun Shines on Our Motherland); (W.: 'You who uncalculatingly give the managers more than they want, more than anyone could want'); Shostakovich rendering to Caesar things unto Caesar (W: 'You who only believe in Caesar and doing things on your knees for Caesar');

Shostakovich full of fear, desperate, and not just for himself, for his family, his friends and colleagues. Fear for his country. Fear for the persecuted in his country, for the Jews of his country. (W.: 'You fear for yourself, and only for yourself …'); Shostakovich who said, 'When I think about my life I realise I have been a coward', he said. 'Unfortunately I have been a coward' (W: 'What do you feel when you think about your life?');

Shostakovich in public: mouth drooping, lips trembling, stuttering, knees knocking, hands fidgeting, eyes frightened, chain-smoking, chewing his nails and fingers versus Shostakovich in private: calm and concentrated, sardonic, satirical, hypersensitive to cruelty of all kinds, desperately compassionate (W.: 'You in public: an idiot; you in private, an idiot. You in public: stuttering; you in private: stuttering. You in public: twitching; you in private: twitching. You both public and private: indifferent to cruelty (your cruelty), entirely without compassion');

Shostakovich lamenting the murder of Jews; Shostakovich the victims of the Terror; Shostakovich suspicious of the medals pinned on his chest after his rehabilitation; of being declared the supreme Soviet artist (W.: 'You rejoicing at all attention, at any attention; You winning Bad Writing awards and Idiot awards' (W.'s own Idiot awards));

Shostakovich, master of satire, writing satirically, composing satirically (W.: 'You unwittingly satirising himself'); Shostakovich, master of irony, of saying one thing and meaning another (W.: 'You who say one thing and have no idea what you mean; you who, by what you say, declare nothing to have meaning, that meaning is nothing, and we're all staring into the same abyss').

W. can't work anymore, so he's reading some crap on Wikipedia about the nine kinds of intelligence, he says on the phone. That must mean they're nine kinds of stupidity, too. He works through the list.

One, he says, spatial stupidity. – 'You can't find your way about, can you? You've no sense of direction'. I've led him down the garden path, for one thing.

Two. Linguistic stupidity. – 'You can barely talk! You stutter. You stammer'. And then, 'And you can't read! You haven't got the attention span! The diligence! You're not humble before the text'. And then, 'And, above all, you can't write. My God, your writing. The typos! The grammatical mistakes! What you've done to the English language …!'

And then, 'And you have no ability to learn foreign languages. How many languages have you learned and forgotten? What trace in you is left in you of French and German, Latin and Greek? And didn't you once try to learn Sanskrit? God, the hubris …'

Three. Logical-mathematical stupidity. I'm extremely poor with logic, abstractions, reasoning and numbers, W. says. This has always been clear. He's the last person to whom he would turn for assistance in his mathematical studies, for instance, W. says. In his philosophical studies, although turn to me he does, W. says. Perhaps that's his stupidity: self-sabotage. Self-ruination …

Four. Bodily-kinesthetic stupidity. I've poor control of one's bodily motions at the best of times, W. says. Grotesquely poor. How many pints have I spilled? How many beer-trays dropped? My abysmally poor sense of timing, of rhythm. My dancing, for example. W. shakes his head. 'You can tell a great deal about people from the way they dance', W. says. Oh, what has he learnt about me? – 'That you're a fucking idiot'.

And I know nothing of sport. I've no feeling for sport. When he took me to a Plymouth Argylle match, I cheered for the wrong side. – 'You were nearly lynched!' And then I made myself sick eating hotdogs. God, how many did I have?

Five. Musical stupidity. Ah, this is very clear, W. says. I've no sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, tones, or pitch, meter, tone, melody, timbre … – 'You listen to Jandek, for fuck's sake!' And then, 'You only listen to Jandek'. W. finds my dedication impressive. I'm at least consistently stupid.

Six. Interpersonal stupidity. Where should he start?, W. wonders. Where to begin? I try to avoid everyone, for one thing. I'm always looking for escape routes, for excuses to leave. I want to avoid everyone! Well, everyone except him, W. says, who would most want to avoid me.

And I've no sensitivity to other's moods – to his moods, for one thing, W. says. To his despairs, which are largely despairs concerning my presence in his life. To his melancholy, which is probably also entirely due to me. Nor to others feelings – how many times have I hurt his feelings?, W. says. How many times have I turned on him? It's always the way, after the first two days of drinking: I turn. I become nasty. It's very upsetting, W. says.

Seven. Intrapersonal stupidity. – 'What does this mean?' This has to do with introspective and self-reflective capacities, he reads. Well, I don't reflect on myself, my conduct, that's very clear, W. says. He's always wondered whether intelligence might be a moral category, W. says, and nothing to do with IQ. It's about feeling shame, remorse. It's about developing introversion. Do I ever, like him, curse myself for my failings? Do I ever ask myself how I might become a better person?

Eight. Naturalistic stupidity. I've no feeling for nature, W. says, but nor has he. Or rather, he has a Jewish distrust of the nature (- 'It's unredeemed!'), and of the cult of the natural. In truth, animals trust him. Robins would alight on the handle of his spade as he dug in his garden, if he had a spade or a garden. Squirrels would pick nuts from his palm with their tiny paws …

Children like him, of course, W. says. It's his calmness, he says. You can tell a lot by what children think of you. I just confuse them, of course. Animals watch me warily. - 'What's the ape man going to do?' Even plants seem worried, twisting towards W. for help.

Nine. Existential stupidity. – 'This is a good one', W. says. The ability to contemplate phenomena or questions beyond sensory data, such as the infinite and infinitesimal, he reads. – 'Who dreamt up this shit?'

You'd have thought I'd have some feel for the infinite, W. says. For the infinitude of my stupidity. Of my sin! And, for that matter, he'd have thought I'd have a feel for the infinitesimal, too. For the quantum. – 'For your micro-penis', W. says. 'For your nano-penis!'

Manchester's completely changed, I tell W. as we wander through Piccadilly. I hardly recognise the place. When did it happen? How did it happen?

A new world appeared while we were napping. A new world … And what was the old world like?, W. says. I'm to tell him about old Manchester …

I tell W. of watching a flock of birds wheel above Piccadilly Gardens and then vanishing into a tree and making it sing. Of Sunday walks among the warehouses near the station, half of them derelict, bushes growing from their roofs, the other half low-rent clothes wholesalers for the Asian market, and of wandering under the viaducts and along the old canal arms of unregenerated Castlefield.

I tell him of the accidental entrepreneurs of the city – of fanzine writers and t-shirt makers, of band managers and party promoters. I tell him of leftfield record shops and rehersal studios with leaky roofs, of anarchist co-ops and worker's drop-in centres, and of Frontline books where you could read about the Rosa Luxembourg and the Angry Brigade …

I tell him of a city with a council full of militants, of the toleration of structural unemployment and of high tax for the rich and none at all for the poor. I tell him of the tacit acceptance that parts of the city were marooned, left behind, and that there was no longer any point in charging anyone to live there. Manchester was being left to fall apart like Mir space station in the sky.

I tell him of the dub music that would boom out from the Crescents of Hulme Free State, of old unregenerated Hulme, system built in the 60s, and now half-deserted and condemned, with piles of rusting white goods and shattered TVs thrown off the walkways by squatting crusties. Old Hulme, the concrete of which was once white, a futural white, but had long since faded to a stained grey under grey northern skies – Old Hulme, occupied once by council tenants in large maisonette flats, but deserted when the heating became too costly and damp crept everywhere; Old Hulme that was the crack in the city to which hippies and ravers and bikers came, and travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours.

I tell W. about the music of Manchester, about the sound systems, about shebeens and drinking clubs, about the nightclub they made by drilling through the wall that divided two council flats. I tell him about dub, and the weightlessness of dub. I tell him about dub's anti-gravity, about liquified beats and aquatic rhythms.

Dub opened up the sky, I tell him. Dub opened up space. But at the same time, dub belongs to the earth. It lets the earth reverberate through our bodies. We are not made of nothing, that's what the low end said. We are made of the earth, that's what you heard when the sound system DJ slid the faders and let the vocals and melodies drop out. It's the rhythm you returned to, when he amplifed snare rolls like detonations, or let the hi-hat echo and fizz out into white noise, or when he slowed down the beat, making it thicker, stickier, liquifying it like molasses. And behind the rhythm, with it, above it, the ambience of dub, its space, its reverberations, a kind of humming squall above the music, as humid and dark as Jamaica stormtime …

I tell him about the demise of Old Hulme (of Old Manchester), its last days, as battles fought between gangs of Hell's Angels over drug deals, and of gunshots resounding in Woodcock Square. I tell him of stabbings in the queue for patties at Sam Sams, and of blood in splotches all along the floor of the laundrette. I tell him of the muggers who waited in the dark corners of the walkways with their stanley knives and screwdrivers, and of packs of dogs running wild, tongues lolling …

I tell him of hardhatted officers from the new council looking up at the low-rises, and then of the chainlinked fences they put around the Crescents, which were slated for demolition. And I tell him of breaking into Old Hulme the last night before the regenerators came, of lying out on the greens smoking dope watching the bellies of the police helicopters with their searchlights and talking about the Paris Communes and the Soviets and '68 all over again, passing round the dope clockwise because it was a time of war …

And I tell him how we they were hunting us down, the long term unemployed, the long term sick, how one by one we were caught and brought in … I tell him how we were told we had to be straightened out and reksilled; how each of us was given an advistor, a Case Worker, and made to sign an Agreement. And I tell him how we were each to present ourselves at the office to be retrained, about flipcharts and groupwork …

And I tell him that as I cracked open the spine of Either/Or in my rented room by the curry house extractor fans, I thought returning to full-time study wasn't a bad idea after all.

Manchester is a city of warehouses, we read in our guidebook on the train north. And what warehouses! The ones closest to the centre were built in the style of palazzi of Renaissance Italy, the new merchant princes of Manchester seeing themselves as descendants of the Italian princes of the city-states.

The Florence of the nineteenth century: that's what they called Manchester back then, W. reads in our history of the city. The money that was once here! The confidence! Cottonpolis: that's what they called Victorian Manchester. The city of cotton, the city of banking, the city of the vast Royal Exchange, in which 10,000 traders could buy and sell stocks and shares on the foreign market. The city of the department stores, of the new retail chains …

'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows' (de Tocqueville). And it was filthy. It was squalid, along the old Medlock where the casual workers lived: the car men and porters, the builders and decorators, the messengers and warehousemen. The old Medlock, Little Ireland: that's where Engels saw 'a horde of ragged women and children swarm about as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles', W. reads in our history book. He saw the cellars in which the Irish immigrants slept ten to a dark, damp room on beds of straw, scarcely above the level of the water flowing in the river …

And Engels brought Marx north to show him for himself, the city where the revolution might begin. For wasn't it the reality of capitalism that revealed itself in the grime and squalor of Little Ireland, even as it was concealed itself as ideology in the men of Manchester, the self-made merchant princes with their faith the free exchange of goods and labour?

For a time, Manchester was a Chartist town, a town of mass protests, W. reads. The people demanded universal suffrage, annual elections … All Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed: it was in the name of that Declaration, sent to the Prince Regent, that 100,000 reformers gathered at St Peter's Field. And it was there so many were injured and killed by the military forces arraigned to prevent another French Revolution … 

Ye are many – they are few (Shelley). But soon, they were many, too. The army was brought in to put down the revolt. And so in Manchester, garrison city, they broke the first sustained working-class movement in the Europe of the industrial era …

Ah, what do we know of political movements?, W. says. What of the politics of mass protest? As soon as the worker's movement comes to an end, we have the end of politics: that's Tronti. And he thought it ended just after '68, after the revolt of '68.

W. goes back to his reading. In the end, they didn't need the garrison, W. says. The Manchester men, the merchant-entrepreneurs, borrowed new models of internal organisation from the military. They brought in bureaucracy, and the chain of command. Each worker was assigned a place, and hence a function in the institutional whole.

In the end, it was all about time, W. says, summarising. The worker was encouraged to take the long term view – to understand his life in terms of his service to a firm. Time was predictable, certain. The worker learned to defer gratification, to develop long-term goals and self-discipline, in view of future rewards … And in return, they were granted a free weekend from midday Saturday. They were given time to shop in the new department stores, and to take to the streets, making a night of it …

And so when mass unemployment came, after the mid-century boom, there was no disorder. When famine came, no mass protest. The working classes joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Tory party, and railed against the 'Yids' and the 'sheeneymen' driven from Eastern Europe by the pogroms …

Divide and conquer, W. says. They set one faction of the working class to fight against the other like rats. And above them all, Manchester man, buying and selling shares in Cottonpolis …

When did the labour movement come to an end? When did the new order begin? Das Manchestertum: that was the word the Germans coined for this new kind of economic individualism, which saw off the rebellion of the workers. But it depended nonetheless on the predictability of time. It belonged to those firms whose names you can still read on the side of the warehouses. They thought they'd be here forever …

Once it was a city of material labour, of the import and working of cotton, of the oil trade, of engineering … It was the home of old Labour, the home of municipal socialism, with workers with their eye on their betterment. And then what happened? Deindustrialisation, of course. Which meant deunionisation. Which meant the destruction of the labour movement. Which meant the demolition of every leftist hope and dream …

They sold off the housing stock quickly, to make sure it was irreversible. They broke the miners, the steel workers, the shipbuilders. They destroyed the car industry. They opened the markets to foreign competition and foreign investment. And production was allowed to became transnational, spreading across the world, plugging into and plugging out of this or that territory, even as the financial sector was almost completely deregulated …

'Economics are the method', said Thatcher, 'but the object is to change the soul'. They changed the soul in the '80s, W. says. They changed our souls, and what did the worker become? Flexible workers, one man or woman entrepreneurs selling their labour to Capital, which now encompasses the whole of their lives. And consumer-entrepreneurs, for whom commodities have been diversified and differentiated. Entrepreneur-consumers looking to sell their soul to Capital and then to buy it right back …

Ah, there's no long-term, for the worker, not now. 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 them, the non-elite, around whom their firms are constantly changing? 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.

And '68 is nothing in the midst of all this, we conclude. '68 is finished just as politics is finished. Because there's no more time. Because 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 conference dinner. There's Alain Badiou, sitting all alone. We should go and talk to him, says W. You talk to him and I'll listen, I tell W. I want to hear W.'s French again, he knows that. He knows I think he becomes a better person when he reads French – kinder, gentler.

But why should Alain Badiou want to speak to us? He's a man of rigour and mathematical precision, of course. He's a man of politics, of real political commitment! And what are we?

Badiou has lived through things, experienced things, but we've experienced nothing. He is a man of exceptional rigour, of dispassionate mathematical thought, whereas we are men of exceptional vagueness, of pathos-filled would-be religious thought, which, in fact has nothing to do with religion, which has its own rigour, its own precision.

What would Alain Badiou make of us? What would he conclude? Enemies, he would think. No, not even enemies, he would think. Pas enemies. Les tosseurs. But perhaps he wouldn't think anything at all. He'd just look through us, he couldn't help but look through us, a man of mathematical rigour wouldn't find anything in us with which to engage. It would be as if, like evil for Plato, we didn't really exist.

For the mathematical philosopher, vagueness doesn't exist, not really; it's only a deficiency of precision. And pathos doesn't exist either, unless it is the glint of starlight, impersonal and remote, on the eyeglasses of the militant, brick in hand, charging the police.

God, what a terrible campus! The towers are like the towers of Mordor, W. says. Like the crags of doom. In the tiny bathroom on our floor, the light flashes on and off. A fluorescent tube, humming and flashing on and off. I bring W. to show him. It's like something from David Lynch, we agree. It feels like a symbol, but of what? There'll be a murder here, later, we agree. Or a suicide. One or other of us will throw ourselves from the tower, from one of the crags of doom. Or perhaps we'll both hurl ourselves down to the concrete …

We need to get out of here! We need to get away! W. suggests we head to Wivenhoe, the fishing village where he used to live as a student. We could find a pub, settle down for evening, and then walk out along the sea, taking in the ozone. But I insist we board the conference bus, and head out for the dinner. We've paid for it, after all.

Why does he listen to me?, W. wails. The bus hurtles through the counryside, branches crashing against the windows. Oh God, oh God, he wails. I show him my cock to distract him. It's a bit like slapping an hysteric around the face. W.'s suddenly sober. He feels very, very sorry for me, he says.

'The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves'. Pascal wrote that, W. says. To hate ourselves: what a task! He'll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he'll move on to hating what I've made him become. What I've been responsible for. Then – the last step – he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.

This stage, for him, is the most difficult. He can hardly remember what he was like without me. He has no idea what he might have been, what he might have achieved? I arrived too early in his life. The blow was fatal.

It's a relief, of course, W. says. He can blame me for everything. It's all my fault, his failure, his inability to think! In fact, that's probably why he hangs out with me, W. says: to have a living excuse for his failure.

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. They must find us, deliberately seeking us out, since we who are the last people to whom anyone would want to speak. But we're friendly, if nothing else, and it amuses us when people throw themselves upon our mercy. – 'You must be really desperate. We're the last people you should talk to. It'll get you nowhere'.

What advice do we give? What do we tell them? You have to know you're a failure, we tell them. That's absolutely essential. Give up now! There's no hope for you, you have to know that. Then we buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. We must have the air of people in the know, I say to W. – 'We have the air of idiots', says W.

It's the same with our doleful companion at the table in the bar. We gave him our usual advice. We warned him! But he seemed to sink further into melancholy. We should think about cheerful things, W. says. But we can't think of any. – 'It could be worse', W. says. 'You could have Lars's life'.

Our guest staggers off into the night. – 'See what we do to people?', W. says.

Interrogative nine year old school girls on a Colchester bus. – 'Where are you going?'; 'Why do you dress like that?' Yes, where are we going? Why do we dress like this? – 'Didn't anyone tell you not to talk to strangers?'

Straight to the Student Union. We'll be in the bar, we've told everyone we know. – 'That's where you can find us'. Constancy is always admired, we agree. People need to know where to find you.

We order beers, then whiskey, then beers, then whiskey, then chips, then beer, then whiskey, then another beer and another whiskey, then chips. A balanced diet, W. says. All the major food groups.

'Godard made a film on this campus, did you know that?', W. says. British Sounds, from '68. It's really boring. W. describes the last scene, with a bloodied hand rising from the mud. – 'Godard cut his own hand for that. He wouldn't use fake blood'. 

We should cut our own hands, W. says. Our own throats … Then people might believe us. Then they might believe we have something to say.

I don't feel I belong at Somerset House, W. says. He can see that. It's a class thing. He's working class too, W. says. But I'm more working class than him, there's truth in that. In these times, we should be cultivating an aristocratic detachment, he says. We should retire from the fray like Roman Stoics, holing up on their country estates while the empire crumbled …

Should we order another bottle?, I wonder. – 'Of course!' W. learnt it from Debord, from Bacon: the art of luxurious dining at the end of times. He's read of Debord towards the end of his life, in his luxurious apartment on the rue du Bac, spending whole days planning elaborate meals and choosing fine wines. He was a warrior at rest, he said of himself. He'd lain down his arms, he'd had enough.

This century does not like truth, generosity, grandeur, Debord wrote. And Bacon, who, giving up painting in 1935, gave himself over to champagne, promiscuity and gambling, to a furious frivolity, to the grand style of existence …

Ah, but what have we given up? What arms have we lain down? Let's order some sandwiches, too, I suggest, and W. agrees.