Lars Iyer's Blog

Why bother? Why begin? Why again, and again and again? We're bored with ourselves, with our eternal slapstick.

I should shoot him, W. says, and he, me. We should aim our guns at one another and fire at the same moment. But our double suicide is part of our clown act, which reaches its pinnacle when we fire and our guns pop and we get up again, as stupid as ever, as desperate as ever.

Who are we amusing? Who laughs at our slapstick? Tragedy repeated becomes farce. And when farce is repeated – when farce wears itself thin?

Two clowns throwing custard pies at each other, long after the audience has left. Two clowns, make-up running with their tears.

In the morning, we work, W. before dawn – in the hours before dawn, when the world is quiet – and I after dawn, as the world wakes up. We work – W. reads, and sometimes he writes, and I look blankly out at the window, sometimes jotting down a few notes or so – in a kind of innocence, a forgetting.

For hadn't our work, the day before, left us as failures? Hadn't we failed our task yet again, and anew? Isn't that all the succession of days means to us: failure again and anew; fresh failure, different varieities of failure, but each time failure nonetheless?

But there is our innocence, our holy forgetting. There is the new morning, and the confidence of the new morning. So we can forget, and thereby get to work. In innocence, we begin to work – or what we call work. We work, Sisyphuses who have forgotten they are Sisyphuses, and our day is always the same day, the same mockery of the day, and the same despoiling of our innocence and forgettting.

Abandonment – is that the word? But abandoned to what? Our lives, the wretchedness of our lives. Our failure. Again and again, our failure.

Why don't we learn? Why do we never learn from our mistakes? But if we did learn? If we took, as our lesson, the failure of our efforts on a previous day and on a succession of days? If we saw our lives as what, in fact, they are: a series of grotesque mistakes, a series of impostures and usurpations? W. shudders.

Why has it been left to him, rather than me, to face our disaster? I am a little more idiotic than him, and therefore a little more forgetful. I can wake with a little more confidence in my labours; I can throw myself more obliviously into my studies (my so-called studies). And in that way, I throw myself ahead of him, too – ahead, and calling him after me by my power of forgetting, which is to say my idiocy.

Why don't I learn?, W. asks himself. But he thanks God that I do not, and that I encourage him by my example. Everyone needs an idiot friend, he says. He thanks God for his idiot friend.

Our grief … We are grieving men, we decide. Men full of grief, saturated with it, men who have had too many disappointments, too many failures. Men of grief, but men of hope, too, men who, for a time each day – just before dawn for W. when he goes into his study to work, just after dawn for me, when I gaze vacantly out at the yard – are given the gift of forgetting their grief. Who, forgetting it, are ready, without knowing it, to disappoint themselves again, to fail anew.

Our idiocy is our salvation, W. says. The way we are unable to learn from our mistakes. For our lives, in their entirety, have been a mistake! We were mistaken from the first, and all along!

Sometimes it strikes him with great force, W. says, the extent of our mistakenness. How could we have got it so wrong? How could we be so deluded? But in truth, we delude ourselves. We forget – we want to forget – the lessons of yesterday in order to begin again today – before dawn, for W., after dawn, for me.

We wish a holy idiocy upon ourselves. We want to be born again as we sit at our desk (W.), or gaze vacantly out of the window (me). Born again in idiocy and forgetting! Plunged into the Lethe freshly each morning! Ah, what would be left to us otherwise but our suicide? What, without our idiocy, except that sickness unto death incapable even of suicide?

Sometimes W. thinks his melancholy is deeper than his philosophy; that he has attempted to think, that he has been drawn to thinkers, only to escape the despair that, in the end, always lies in wait for him.

It always seeps back, he says, in the still hours of night. It's always there when he turns off his television and trudges up to bed. It's there in the blackness above him as he sleeps, in the blank slate of the sky. And it's there at the heart of his sleep, too, forming itself into nameless monsters, into stirrings that lead him to break out in night sweats.

Hope returns, of course. Hope always returns before dawn, and the pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window. Hope returns as he pulls on his dressing gown and goes next door to his study to open his books and take notes. But such hope, W. sometimes suspects, is but a modality of despair, made of it.

Why is he reading Kierkegaard alongside Cohen and Rosenzweig? Why is he teaching himself the infinitesimal calculus? Why is he attempting to think messianism mathematically? Where will it lead him? To his desk in the other room. To his lonely station against the void which itself is only part of the void, just as his hope is only part of his despair.

Melancholy, melancholy. 'What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim', Pascal says, 'but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?'

True happiness: what can this possibly mean for W.? What sense of it can he have? I've been in his life too long, he says. I've been there too long, blocking the sun of what might have been his happiness with the moon of my stupidity.

Ah, the lunar eclipse of his life! Ah the obliteration of his hopes and dreams! He knows his happiness, what he might have been, only from the faint glow of its corona.

'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.

But what about me? Do I hate myself? W.'s sure I must hate myself in some way. – 'Look at you! Look at your shoes!'

W. sees no difference between Christianity and socialism, he says. No difference between Christianity and communism. Religion is only ever about this world – W.'s always been insistent on that.

The trouble lies in finding this world, because it's been hidden from us. We've lost it, and lost ourselves: isn't that what Kierkegaard teaches us? We have to understand the real object of our despair, Kierkegaard says. We have to understand what we lack. This world, W. says, this world is paradise.

We need to get out, W. says. We need to leave, just leave. Have I ever felt that?, he asks me. No, of course not. I lack the vision. I lack a sense of the horizon, and what is beyond the horizon. I lack thirst. I lack hunger – spiritual hunger.

My frustration is never expansive, as W.'s is. It never takes, as its object, the whole of my existence; never gives unto that sense of abandonment that makes of the world, and the things of the world a series of illusions. 

Oh, he knows I have a Hindu sense that time is a circle, and the world will be destroyed and remade anew, but I don't have the Christian sense of wanting to escape, of making the exodus to a promised land. Exodus … why does W. find this word so moving? Exile … Expulsion … He knows about these things. He knows what it is to be outside, to be excluded.

Didn't he lose his job last year? Wasn't he cast out, into the outer darkness? And now he has been reinstated – now his redundancy has been rescinded – hasn't he come to understand that the experience of being inside and at work does not surmount, but carries with it the whirlwind from which he has escaped? That at any moment it might happen again, his expulsion, his exile that, in each case, are only the mirror of a larger expulsion and a greater exile: of that Fall which is at the root of the Christian conception of things.

For the Christian (for Kierkegaard), we are fallen. We are sinners. But our despair must also be the ground of hope. It is a sign of what we have lost, and what we might find again. This is why exile, for him, is also an Exodus; why the promise of paradise has awoken in him.

I'm wearing Frankenstein shoes, W. says. The shoes only Frankenstein's monster would wear to hide his great, ugly feet. And my feet are great and ugly, W. says. And flat – as flat as the Fens. As flat as the salt lakes of Utah. – 'You've no arch!', says W.

His feet, by contrast, are superbly arched. He can walk quietly, disturbing no one, whereas I crash everywhere, disturbing everyone with my great, ungainly flippers.

That I don't try to hide them, my feet, by suitable shoes is a sign of my decadence, W. says. That I compound the error of my feet with the error of my crocs: my Frankenstein shoes, only shows how far I have fallen.

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.

That's Pascal, W. says. Are we nobler than our slayers? Are we more dignified than the forces arrayed against us? And there are many forces, W. says. There are many slayers. The end is coming. These are the last days, the end times. We're vulnerable, he says, desperately vulnerable. But isn't it now, at the moment of our extinction, that we might rise to our highest glory?

'My God, look at you', W. says. 'Your trousers are covered with stains. Your shirt … It's unspeakable. And your shoes: do you really call them shoes?' They're crocs, I tell him. – 'Yes I know they're crocs'. They're good for the allotment, I tell him. – 'But this isn't the allotment!'

This isn't the allotment … why does W. see this, and not me? Why don't I understand my own abasement, and the forces that are arrayed against me?

'His melancholy, rather than his talent, made him exceptional', says one commentator on Kierkegaard, 'and his talent purified his melancholy'. And our melancholy?, we wonder, as we wander round the lake in Leazes park. Ah, but we're not really melancholy, W. says. Sometimes we're a little sad, W. says. A little down, but these reflect only the disappointments of mediocre men.

Sometimes, it is true, he does feel he is in the grip of something – that he has some sense of the world-sadness Kierkegaard describes. Of a sadness that belongs to existence, to human life in its fleetingness, in its ignominy. But this is only after spending a few days drinking with me – only after late nights and early mornings, after eating rubbish and spending too much - and he soon cheers up.

He is a man of hope, W. says, just as I, too, am a man of hope. It's in hope that we set forth in the morning on one of our expeditions, just as it is in hope we stay up until dawn, discussing our findings. But isn't our hope only a sign of our shallowness? That we can rise again, each morning, full of hope, despite all that happened the day before, despite ourselves, despite the mediocrity of our achievements; that we can take stock, each night, of the adventures of our day having forgotten that every one of our adventures is like any other, i.e. a failed adventure, is a sign only of our imposture, and of how far we are from Kierkegaard's melancholy.

''From a child I was under the sway of a prodigious melancholy …' Ah, what can we understand of the melancholy of Kierkegaard – of melancholy and its attendant suffering of which he says 'I was never free even for a day'? What of the 'premature aging' of the Danish philosopher that, he said, was caused by his melancholy? What of his isolation to which, he says, melancholy condemned him – 'for me there was no comfort or help to be looked for in others'?

Then, too, there was his necessary capacity to hide his melancholy; the depth of his melancholy found its correlate in what he says is the dexterity he possessed of hiding it 'under an apparent gaiety and joie de vivre'. His only joy lay in the fact that no one knew how unhappy he felt.

He would communicate nothing! He would fool them all, and not only because he wanted to spare them his wretchedness. He wanted to be 'absolutely alone with his pain', he wrote; he wanted, he said, to be 'relegated to myself and to a relationship with God'. This was why he could revel in the 'unlimited freedom of being able to deceive'.

And what about us, W. and I? Neither of us is alone with his pain, W. says. I am the cause of his pain, for one thing. And if I suffer – if I whimper, sometimes, about my manifold troubles – it only adds to his suffering, aping it, mocking it, as if W.'s Weltschmerz were on the same level as my administrative worries, which are really only the same as worries about keeping my job.

Pain, what do I know of pain? Of the pain I cause W., for example. Of the pain I cause others and for which W. has constantly to apologise. He dreams of being alone with his pain, W. says. Alone with it, relegated to himself and – perhaps – to a relationship with God. A relationship with God, and by dint of his Weltschmerz, the depth of his Weltschmertz. But then, too, he is frightened of being alone, W. says. Frightened of losing me, because he might be relegated only to his own idiocy, his Weltschmerz disappearing like morning dew.

'The self must be broken in order to become itself', says Kierkegaard. The self must be broken: what do you think that means? Have we been broken? Are we broken enough?

We need to be brought to our knees in order to understand Kierkegaard, W. says. We need to intensify our despair, to despair over it. Yes, that's what we need: to double up despair, to set despair against despair.

Ah, but this, too, is a danger. For we are liable, in such extremity, to set ourselves defiantly against the task of becoming ourselves. We tend to that defiance in which we glory in the particularity of our despair, using it as a badge of our excellence. I am my wound, we say to ourselves. I am my suffering. 

Of course, W. has always believed that I am his wound, and that I am his suffering, but it comes to the same thing: he hasn't despaired enough. If he is to grasp the true measure of his despair, understanding it as sin, and then moving to the opposite of sin, that is, faith, then I am the idol he has to smash. He must move beyond localising all his troubles, the cause of his despair, in my presence in his life.

But how can he do that? There must be some part of him that loves his despair just as he loves me, for he does love me, W. says.

One mustn't read too soon, W. is adamant about that. One mustn't simply devour an oeuvre, tempting as it may seem, the many-coloured spines of Kierkegaard's works, in the Hong and Hong edition, lined up on my windowsill, as inviting as boiled sweets.

One cannot just begin at page one, and then read one's way to the end. There must be a kind of pause before reading, a dwelling in the clearing opened by the fact of Kierkegaard, by the fact of his writing, by the fact that he lived.

That Kierkegaard wrote: we should pause before that fact, mulling it over. That Kierkegaard was at all: we should mull that over, too. And that we exist, too: ah, that's what's unbearable, W. says. The fact that, despite our best intentions, we'll never be able to understand a word of Kierkegaard.

We're method thinkers, W. says. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!

It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in English translation, in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only the mind! To the culture of the thinker, in this case, Danish culture of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the works, their engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.

But how are we to do that?, W. wonders. How, when we could only ever be the apes of Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's monkeys?

I'm to be his guide into the mountains of Kierkegaard, W. says. His sherpa. I'm to carry his things. What should he bring? His learning. His years of study of the philosophy of religion.

He'll instruct me as we climb, he says. He'll point things out, and when he gets tired, I can give him a piggy-back. Kierkegaard: in truth, I know more about him than W. There's the Danish connection, of course. My Danishness should be a help. Kierkegaard's Danishness has always bothered W. He lacks a context for him. He can't grasp his place.

Of course, this is doubly difficult for W. as a Catholic (and as a Jew). Perhaps there is something Protestant in me (through my Danishness), as well as Hindu (through my Indianness). Perhaps I have some instinct for Kierkegaard he lacks.

But then, of course, my knowledge of Kierkegaard is confined to trivialities. Gossip about his life, for example. About his relationship to Regine, or to his father. I don't understand his place in the philosophical tradition or, for that matter, the theological tradition. I have a purely regional knowledge of Kierkegaard; I don't know his place in the great chain of thinkers.

That's what W. will bring to our collaboration: his sense of the broader landscape. His grasp of the sweep of European thought.

Kierkegaard! Kierkegaard! There are too many books! They're too long! Too involved! How is one to begin to read Kierkegaard? How does one set off? With the very first book, proceeding to the second, and so on? Or should one read the major works first, giving a sense of the real themes that occupied the thinker, so that one can glimpse them in nuce when looking, later, at his earlier writings? Will weariness exhaust the reader before he reaches the explicitly Christian writings, the ones under Kierkegaard's own name?

Perhaps we should begin with them, the Christian writings, W. says. Perhaps that is what incumbent upon the scholar in our age: to take Kierkegaard seriously as a Christian thinker. But then, too, there is the question of Kierkegaard's relation to his contemporaries, to the Danish church, to opinion in Copenhagen. Perhaps one ought to begin with a biography. Is that how we should attune ourselves to Kierkegaard?

In the end, W. can't decide. He leaves it to me, he says. I'm to be his guide. I'm to direct his reading and our reading. What do I recommend?

What's happened? I've lost my ability to walk slowly, W. says. I'm no longer an ambler, like him. – 'You're in too much of a hurry!' It's only the slow walker who notices things, W. says. Who can take things in.

He's concerned for me. I look pinched, stressed. – 'You're taking all the nonsense too seriously'. I should work harder, that's the remedy, W. says. I need to read. I always get depressed when I don't read.

W. reminds me of our collaboration: we were to read Kierkegaard together, volume by volume, over the summer, sending our findings to one another. Kierkegaard, volume by volume! Don't I have the Hong and Hong editions lined up in my office?

W.'s always admired them – their sober spines, the varying colours against which the title appears, varying from volume to volume (Point of View in charocal, The Book on Adler, bronze, Fear and Trembling in a handsome burgundy). And then there's the sheer bulk of them, spanning my windowsill; it's quite moving.

How is it I know Kierkegaard's work better than him? What was it in him that appealed to me, the Christian to the Hindu? But then we have our Danishness in common, Kierkegaard and I. We have our Tungsind in common, I've insisted, our melancholy. My deep Hindu sadness sits side by side with my deep Danish melancholy, it's a terrible combination.

But W. has never believed in my sadness, nor my melancholy. – 'You're capable of neither'. Nor is he, for that matter. – 'We're frothy men. We're men of the surface'. But why, then, do we find the depths so fascinating? Why this row of sober books on my windowsill? Why has our collaboration led us to Kierkegaard?

Sometimes W. feels we're being tested. Sometimes he feels he's being tested, having to work with me. Like Job before the whirlwind, he wants to ask 'Why me?' Why him, indeed. Why me? Why has he been paired with me in our collaboration? Who shacked his leg to mine? Who tied us together like Siamese twins?

We're being tested, and Kierkegaard's our test, W. feels sure of it. Kierkegaard's the name of the mountain range before us. Oh God, the lofty, terrifying peaks of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript! Oh God, the fearsome ravines of The Concept of Anxiety! And what about the treacherous lowlands of the Edifying Discourses?

And what of the other mountain chains to which Kierkegaard's is joined? What of range of Hegel, of Kant, of Aristotle, looming in the mist? What, for that matter, of Luther and the Schoolmen? And what of those contemporaries of Kierkegaard, his interlocutors, the targets of his invective, who you would have to speak Danish to read? He thought he could count on me to read Danish, but I'm no good for that. What kind of Dane can't read Danish?, he sighs.

Messianic: Judee Sill (madly Christian, always a good sign), Jacques Ellul (madly Christian), David Shrigley (he has our sense of humour), Kafka (of course), Rosenzweig (who else?), Jandek, Karl Polyani, Jeff Magnum, Josh T. Pearson, Charles Crumb, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky (the Russian films), Harvey Pekar, Robert Bresson, Rickie Lee Jones' Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, Jean Luc Godard, Bill Callahan, Cat Power (early Cat Power), and Will Oldham (early Will Oldham).

Not Messianic: 'You', says W. 'Your cock'.  

The Elephant 6: it's a legend to W. The Elephant 6 Recording Co.: wasn't that what Jeff Magnum used to write on the DIY albums he gave to his friends? Ruston, Louisiana, that's where it began. Ruston, full of jocks, full of enemies meant they had to become friends, had to band together. Music was their shelter. Music the forest in which they would wander together.

What were their bands called? There were so many of them. Everyone was in at least three. What mattered was their collective: the Elephant 6. What matters is that they recorded songs for one another and performed for one another. What matters is the cassettes they exchanged, and their home-run record labels on which they put out each other's music in tiny editions.

Ruston, in the middle of nowhere. Ruston, nowhere in particular. The Jocks were too much. The isolation was too much. Who among them had the idea that they should all move together to Athens, Georgia, and start a new life there? The Athens, Georgia of R.E.M. and the B-52s. The Athens, Georgia, where rent was cheaper and people were more laid back and there was a music scene to be part of, which they'd never visited, but to which they decided to relocate en masse.

So they left their crash pads in Ruston. They left their shitty jobs. They drove across America. And they found new crash pads in Athens, and new shitty jobs. And they continued to make cassettes and give them to one another. Continued to write songs only for one another, living in each other's imaginations.

Then they scattered again, a blown dandelion clock. Then they came together again, this time in New York. They dug through thrift stores for records. They lived on coffee and cigarettes. They wrote songs through the night and into the dawn.

They lay on the grass in Central Park and dreamed of the future, of the new day into which they'd step together. Of a door that would open in the sky. Of living in the woods in a communist utopia, where they would make music with their friends and have no contact with the outside world. Of building geodesic domes and giant waterwheels for electricity and setting up speakers, blasting out sounds randomly. They didn't need anyone! Only each other!

They played gigs, mad gigs, like evangelists. They played to hear themselves through the ears of an audience. They played to hear each other play, their songs becoming new, becoming light, and floating up through the darkness.

And Jeff Magnum sang like a magic realist. His voice swooped and dropped and roared in a fever dream. He sang and he strummed and the band played their accordions and singing saws behind him. They played uillean pipes and the zanzithophone. They played fuzzed bass and flugelhorn. They played trombones and bells. They swapped instruments onstage to play like amateurs, like people who'd never played before.

Then back to Athens again, back to their crash pad with its tin foil walls and brightly coloured canvasses, with old keyboards and reel-to-reel machines, and a twelve foot Chinese dragon and a theremin. Back to the house where twenty people wrote and recorded and slept, where kids and dogs wandered in and out.

Was it there Jeff Magnum first read Anne Frank's diary? Was it there that he sobbed for two days and two nights, and rose on the third and composed songs aloud in the bathroom?

They heard him there, his friends of the Elephant 6, and knew something was happening. They heard him singing songs over and over, working them out without writing anything down. They heard him recast songs he had written over the years, breaking them up and mixing them with new bits and pieces of songs.

They heard his voice crack and strain as he sang about loving Jesus. They heard it wandering passionately off key as he sang about loving Anne Frank, and about Anne Frank's ghost. 

They heard his songs as a single, everlasting piece, images and motifs repeating themselves endlessly. They heard the song cycle of In An Aeroplane Over the Sea as it came together in the bathroom, and were ready with their many instruments to learn the songs and make them new.

Then they toured again. They were friends on the move again. They practised their songs on the road. They were a mad marching band, part marachi and part salvation army. They played carnival music and Bulgarian folk music. They played musique concrete and acid folk.

Who had ever heard anything like it? Who had ever heard songs sung with such urgency and desperation and compassion and tenderness? He sang to make people feel, Jeff Magnum said.

He sang about going back in a time machine and saving Anne Frank. He sang about Anne Frank being reincarnated in a Spanish boy. He sang about a two-headed boy in a jar and about siamese twins freezing to death in the forest. 

People felt, but what did they feel? He sang of the interconnection of all things. He sang of joy and death, or murder and birth. He sang of the past and the future. He sang of grief and being united in grief. He sang of the world's sadness, and of the joy of those who, together, saw that sadness and knew their friendship must include that sadness.

And he sang of friendship, too – and love. Sang of counting everything beautiful we can see, of a shower of stars against the blackness of night; of death, of the end of things and the end of love.

He's seen it before, W. says, in some of his more desperate students. In the half-wild ones, who've come off the streets after years on the streets. In the half-mad ones, who want only to lose themselves in some great task of scholarship, but who are made for everything but a great task of scholarship. 

In our time – and this is an indictment of our time - a figure like Kierkegaard becomes a magnet for all kinds of lunatics, W. says. It's desperate, he says, but also moving in its way: the way the work of Kierkegaard draws the lunatics towards the light. It led me in the right direction, W. says. It saved me; he has no doubt of that.

'First, for you, there was Kafka, W. says, and then there was Kierkegaard. First my obsession with Kafka – which launched you towards your undergraduate studies, and then my obsession with Kierkegaard – which launched you, threw you, towards your postgraduate studies. Because that's what you sensed, didn't you, even in the midst of Hulme? That's what was drawing you through Kierkegaard's books, one after another?'

It was a kind of path, up which I was running red-eyed and dry-skinned. A path, up which I went breathlessly, with my heart fluttering and my blood seeming to roar in my ears. – 'And you're still running, aren't you?'

'And what were you doing in Hulme Free State?', W. says. 'What was the failed Bohemian up to?' Half-sleeping in his room, shivering with cold, he says. Half-sleeping on his mattress, pigeons cooing outside the boarded-up window. Half-sleeping and wishing they'd keep it quiet out there.

In the mornings, going down the piss-smelling stairwell to buy milk, I'd be planning my day's reading and my day's note-taking, that's what I told him. As the speed began to hit, as my skin dried and my eyes dried, I'd be ready in my room with my books. As I began to sweat, I'd open my library copies of Kierkegaard, of the collected works of Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, and I'd be poised with my pencil over the page.

I read Philosophical Fragments as gangs of Hell's Angels fought outside over drug deals, and the Concluding Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments as I heard gunshots in Woodcock Square. I read Repetition in the laundrette, and Fear and Trembling as I queued for patties in SamSam's.

I lay out on the greens in the summer with the two volumes of Either/Or, and cracked open the spine of Stages on Life's Way listening to the pirate radio station broadcasting from Charles Barry. Didn't I spill warm beer from my can of Red Stripe on the pages of The Concept of Irony?

I opened the first of many volumes of the Journals as autumn turned to winter, and my breath froze in the air. I began The Concept of Anxiety as I stamped my feet for warmth by a fire of old plywood on an upper deck. And I filled my notebooks with my thoughts on The Writing Prefaces and The Book on Adler while the muggers waited in the dark corners of the decks with their stanley knives and screwdrivers.

Did I bother the Rastas about Kierkegaard? W. wants to know. He can imagine it, he says. He sees it in his mind's eye: a drug addled idiot talking Kierkegaard to the Rastas. Did I bother the hippies about Kierkegaard? W. can see that, too. A speeding idiot blathering about Kierkegaard to the hippies. And what about the ravers – did I bother them? He can see that, too: bug eyed ravers looking blankly at an idiot chattering about Kierkegaard …

Sometimes, W. thinks my idiocy draws me closer to God than he is, and all the more in that I profess no belief in God whatsoever. What does God mean to me? Nothing, says W., but on the other hand – everything, because it means nothing.

God means too much to him, that's his trouble, W. says. The idea of God. But I have no idea of God. I have no ideas, and this is what saves me.

What drove me to it? Why did I decide on speed?, W. wonders, but he knows the answer. I can't bear empty time, he says, he knows that. And there I was, after my studies, unemployed once again, and with no prospects for employment. I thought: life is too wide, too large. I want to constrict my attention. Want to focus on one thing at a time. 

Hulme Free State: that's where I went to score, wasn't it? It's where I went to live. Hulme, old Hulme, before it was regenerated. Old Hulme, with its Crescents of maisonette flats linked by old walkways – 'decks'.  Old Hulme, put up very quickly in the 60s, concrete panels locked together like a house of cards, but from which its council tenants quickly fled.

The concrete, once white – a futural white – turned chewing gum grey under grey Northern skies. And the empty decks and walkways, the greens between the Crescents, called out to every freak in the north. They came from every direction: hippies and ravers and bikers, travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours. And now the bunker-like pubs were full again, and the bunker-like clubs played hard techno and lover's rock.

'And you came, too, didn't you?', W. says. I wondered into Hulme Free State, that's what the graffiti called it. I wandered among the condemned buildings, past the shattered TV someone had thrown from the top deck of Charles Barry (each Crescent was named after a famous architect: William Kent, John Nash, Robert Adam, Nicholas Hawksmoor …), past the piles of rusting white goods and mouldering furniture.

There were fires burning on the walkways, I noticed that, didn't I? Luckily, concrete doesn't burn. Especially wet concrete. Especially damp concrete. And the Crescents were always damp, I told W. that. Dark grey on grey – that was the damp, soaking through the concrete.

And so the fires made by squatters wanting to escape their drenched-through flats. Fires on the decks burning up old furniture and plywood from boarded-up windows. They didn't touch solid ground for weeks, some of those squatters. They sent others down for beer, chips and tabs, and kept to their eeries.

How did I come to squat in a boxroom next to the back balcony of one of the maisonettes? How did it end up with me scraping away the pigeon shit and boarding up the broken window? How with my dragging up a mattress and spray painting no drugs sold here on the security door to keep the smackheads away. – 'Someone must have liked you. Someone must have taken your side'.

In the end, I wasn't a very good Bohemian, W. says. I coughed too much to pull on the spliff when it was passed along clockwise. I got bored sitting with the others watching traffic on the benches outside the cafe. I wasn't ready to dream my life away. – 'You wanted to do something, W. says. To read, for one thing. To write, for another.

But at night, after the pubs closed, I used to sit with the other squatters on the greens, looking up at the police helicopter. I sat and listened, as they sat around me smoking and waiting for the Kitchen to open – the nightclub they made by drilling through from one flat to another.

I listened to the reasoning of the Rastas. Listened to talk of Babylon and the Babylon system – the city around us and all cities, all civilisation. Listened to them speak about the Almighty, and about the god-King Messiah, about Exodus, about the return to Ethiopia. 

I listened to a DJ rhapsodise about the religious significance of dub, about what happens when he slid down the faders and lets vocals and melodies drop out, leaving only the interlocking rhythms of drum and bass, and when he punched in the horns at full volume and punched them out again, and when he amplified snare rolls like detonations, and let the hi hat echo and explode and fizz out into white noise. He spoke of breaking up the lyrics, abandoning verses for fragments, replacing choruses with snatches of words, and of building up the electronic ambience in the dub, letting it gather humid and dark like a humming, squalling storm above the music.

I heard a ruined beauty, eyes shrunk to tiny dots, teeth missing, talk about God. Peace: that's what smack gave her, she said. Peace, spreading warmly out from her stomach – she knew it straightaway, with her first hit. She felt lifted, lightened. Her blood felt warm. She looked upwards, she said, sighed with bliss. What was lifting her up? She felt as light as air. Look in the mirror, someone told her. Why? She hated looking. But this time, she obeyed and saw an angel, a beautiful angel. And now, though her teeth were rattling themselves loose in her mouth, now her cheeks were sunken, her skin grey, she felt the same thing. The high's like nothing else, she said. It's religious. She understood what the word God meant, she said. Complete. You feel complete, she said, stubbing out her cigarette. You feel God when you arms and legs get heavy, when there's a tingling on the surface of your skin, as though it was being brushed by a shoal of fish.

The Most High, that's what they call God, isn't it?, the girl said. The Most High: higher than all highs, but those highs pointing up to him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light back along their keen edges and converging on a single point: God, God.

I listened to an anarchist speak of the political significance of Hulme Free State, of the new world that was being prepared there outside the constituted forms of political power. He spoke of the direct democracy of the Paris Commune of 1871, of the Soviets, of Lenin's worker's councils. He spoke of the Action Committees of May 1968, of the nights of the barricades, of the general strike and the writings on the walls: Never Work! Speak to Your Neighbours. Alone, We Can Do Nothing. Alone, we can do nothing, the anarchist said. But here, we're not alone.

We looked around. Ravers, bug eyed, danced in tiny circles. French skinheads, newly arrived from Marseilles – they were said to be murderers on the run - went about menacingly, screwdivers hidden in their bomber jackets. Packs of ownerless dogs, tongues lolling from their mouths, loped through the night. We're not alone, the anarchist said.

They're shutting down the departments one by one. When will it be our turn? Soon, soon! It's a wonder they haven't closed us yet. But they're coming, the axe men. And they're raising their axes higher, ever higher.  

There's nothing left for us. Nothing left to do except drink and dance. He'll drink, W. says, and I'll dance. – 'Go on, fat boy, dance'.