Lars Iyer's Blog

The end is coming, W. says. He's sure of that. Our end, or the end of the world? Both!, W. says. The one is inextricable from the other. Do I see it as he does? Is he the only one who can read the signs?

He can see them even now, on this sunny day in Cawsands. He sees them in our honey beer, W. says. In the dog who wants me to play with him, dropping a stone at my feet. In the narrowness of the three-storeyed house opposite. In the name of the pub in whose garden we drink: The Rising Sun. And in me, too? – 'In you above all', W. says.

The Rising Sun: what sun is going to rise over us? A black sun, says W. A sun of ashes and darkness. He sees the image in his mind's eye: the man and boy of The Road, pushing a shopping cart down an empty highway. Only in our case, it'll be two men, squabbling over whose turn it is to ride in the cart. Two men with ashes in their hair, exiled from our cities and all cities.

At the bus stop, W. tells me about his current intellectual projects. Can be summed up under the following heading: Capitalism and religion. The 'and' is designed to be provocative, W. says. Of course, the project isn't original to him. He's a follower, not a leader. An imitator, an ape.

Still, he persists. He's taking notes. He's reading, thinking. Even dreaming. He's dreaming about the 'and' that links capitalism to religion. What is this link? What is the significance of the copula?Perhaps it has something to do with the word that is the most opaque of all, W. says. The everyday.

Really it's my word, W. says. It's a word to which I am close as he is not. For isn't it in my long periods of warehouse work and unemployment that I came into contact with the essence of the everyday? Wasn't it then that I knew myself brushed by what Blanchot calls its infinite wearing away and Lefebvre its eternullity?

I am an expert even in my idiocy, W. says, that's the paradox. No doubt it's my idiocy which drew it close, the everyday, and let it follow me like a stray dog. – 'You'll never leave it behind', W. says. He's impressed with my loyalty, even though it's the only example of my loyalty. – 'You'll always carry it with you', he says. Because there it is, in my eyes, carrying a kind of distance with it, a sign from faraway.

'You feel it, don't you?' Yes, I feel it. Years of warehouse work. Years of unemployment. A kind of living death. But a death you were unable to die. I am the copula, W. says. I live it; I embody it. And he, beside me at the bus stop, does he live it too?

Route 441, towards Pigeon Forge. Our hosts are driving across the state to the Smokies. We stop in Knoxville for lunch. Our waiter's very literary. Cormac McCarthy wrote a novel about Knoxville, he tells us. Suttee, it's called. That's a Hindu name, I tell him. Shiva's wife, who let herself be immolated rather than accept dishonour.

We ask him if he's read The Road. – 'It's great', W. tells him. 'Really depressing'. He wept when I lent it to him, he says. Our waiter tells us he wants to be a writer. He's studying on a writing programme. What does he want to write about? - 'Oh, you know, everything', he says.

I should show him my American notebooks, W. says. Turning to me, 'They're full of wisdom, aren't they?' – 'So you're a writer as well', says our waiter, refilling my glass with ice water. – 'He's not a writer, he's an idiot', W. says. 'But he did write a good poem about preppies … How did it go? 'Tall/ sand in the hair/ white teeth/ pullovers/ deck shoes/ white shirts and blouses/ yachts with white sails/ fuckers'.

We visit Yee Haw Industrial Press and buy posters advertising gigs by El Vez, the Atlantic City Rhythm Rascals and Shinola. 'You think he gave a lumpy shit about the so called music business …' reads my poster of Hank Williams. 'I believe Hank saw the light brother. AMEN. Visit Disgraceland', it reads.

I admire its sentiment, though W. and I found Graceland unexpectedly restrained and moving. We admired Elvis's contemplation garden, where he went to think over things. We thought of several things ourselves in the contemplation garden, looking over the grave of his twin brother who died at birth.

Graceland's surprisingly small, we agreed. The kitchen, for example – it was like any suburban kitchen. The living room, the dining room the same. Elvis was a man of modest tastes.

We particularly admired his Bauhaus style squash court, which he designed himself. Imagine it – Elvis the architect, Elvis the modernist. But it really was his design. He drew up the blueprints, he had them approved, he insisted on building a modernist squash court in the grounds of Graceland.

'Ah, you really inspired me the other night', says W. on the phone. 'It was nothing to do with your thought'. What then? He bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. Then he sat in the dark having apocalyptic thoughts and thinking vague about messianism without knowing anything about messianism. – 'That's how you live, isn't it?'

On the Greyhound to Memphis. He can see my lips moving as I read, W. says. It's not a good sign in a scholar. Our hosts lent us a book each, one on country blues, and the other on the history of Mississippi. – 'Have you learnt something, fat boy?', says W.

He's been reading about the freed slaves who cleared the cane breaks and the forests of the Mississippi Delta, raising levees against the flooding river. W.'s been reading about the black labourers who rebuilt destroyed railroads and repaired the levees, and took new jobs in the mines and docks. He's been reading about sharecroppers who tied themselves into a system of permanent debt by renting land, mules and supplies from white owners, and the new kind of slavery which came with the Jim Crow laws that segregated and disenfranchised them.

'This country!', he says. 'This country!' It's as bad as Britain with all its colonies. Am I the colonist or the colonised?, he wonders. Of course, I haven't got a drop of British blood in my veins. That's probably what saves me.

I tell him I've been reading about the dispersal of plantation orchestras after the Emancipation; of wandering balladeers and country string bands. I've been reading about the juke joints where freed slaves could drink and dance, and of the field hollers and work songs of the black labourers who ploughed with mules, picked cotton and pulled corn. I've breen reading of makeshift instruments – of baling wire become diddley bow, of jugs and washtubs that become percussive, of a pocketknife used to play slide guitar.

I've been reading of the deep blues of the Delta, of a music of outcasts and outsiders, which came from the poorest part of the poorest state of America, from plantations, prisons and hamlets too small to appear on the map. I've been reading of its toughness and simplicity, of pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and of verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and broken relationships, of the great flood of '27 and the great drought of '29.

It's the music of life, I tell him. Of still being alive. But of being alive and torn apart. Of being the insulted and the injured. But still alive, still alive in the one chord vamp, in a rhythm that precedes melody, that breaks and fragments it, dissolving melody in the waters of its own flood.

W.'s moved, he says. He's never heard me speak so coherently, so sweepingly. What would my blues name be?, he wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.

In a bar at Five Points, Nashville, W. berates the bartender about the poor choice of gin. Bombay Gin is terrible, he tells her. Tanqueray isn't bad, especially with tonic, but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick. She says her customers like it. W. tells her to introduce them to Plymouth Gin. Why hasn't she got any Plymouth Gin? You can get it in America. Our bartender looks annoyed. She'll get what her customers want, she tells us. But how do they know what they want when they haven't tried Plymouth Gin?, W. asks. I don't think she wants to hear about Plymouth Gin, I tell W.

East Nashville is gentrifying rapidly, our hosts tell us. It's preppy hour: joggers and dog walkers fill the streets in the early evening. Fireflies hover over the grasses. It's peaceful. But at night, it's too dangerous to go out. – 'Don't go walking by there', they were told by their landlady as she drove them past a pair of red brick houses. 'Gunshots all the time!' But all they could see was a black woman taking in her laundry from a clothesline.

In the supermarket when they first got here, they saw two twelve year old boys held face down by a security guard, a gun to their heads. Can you believe that? This is a third world country, they tell us. They roll up their shirtsleeves and show us their tattoos: workers of the world unite on one arm, the swallow from Wilde's The Happy Prince on the other.

Later, they play us Barbecue Bob and Memphis Minnie (trading licks with Kansas Joe McCoy) and Big Joe Williams (with his nine string guitar). They make us listen to the funk guitar style of the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it sheeks, they tell us. They point out their sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It's their microphone technique, they tell us.

You find the ultimate blend of melody and rhythm in string bands, our hosts tell us. They've become a real enemies of melody, they say. They hate dead syncopations, they say. They hate drums.

They play us some early John lee Hooker. Hooker plays electric guitar rhythmically, they tell us. Rhythm is everything, they tell us. It's all about the boogie. They put on Bukka White. The guitar produces the rhythm, says our host. It doesn't follow it.

As soon as drums polluted the blues, that was it, our hosts tell us. W. thinks they've gone too far. So does Sal. Fuck melody!, our hosts say. I'm swept up by their argument. Fuck melody!, I shout. Fuck drums!

Our hosts tell us of their photographic project to rescue images from another Nashville. How else can they be saved from the monotonous uniformity of the urban sprawl – from identical malls and warehouses and the suburbs of vinyl houses?

They've photographed abandoned roller skating rinks, empty toilet roll holders in public toilets, resting freight carriages, tarpaulin covered cars and closed up loading bays; they've photographed sofas stranded on sidewalks, the signs on Mexican restaurants, and various views of the girders of the pedestrian bridge that leads downtown …

How moved they were by the faint painted-over letters they saw on a monumental mall fronts, and of the words 'closeing sale' graffitied across a shuttered shopfront! How moved by the rusting stairwells and broken glass in the derelict Yazoo Brewery!

And who wrote the following lines on a piece of paper stapled to a telegraph pole: 'Patience. Don't think of it as deferred gratification, but as immediately suffering'? It was partially covered over by a poster advertising free Ninja lessons, they said.

What are they looking for? Our hosts speak of kernels of time, of dialectical images and rescue operations. They speak of actualising an obsolete past, of reenchantment and reawakening, and of the temporal and hierarchical layering of the city.

Our hosts are people of history like us, W. says. Messianists.

We ought to be content to write ragged books, W. says. Ragged books for a ragged world. Oh, he forgot, W. says. I already do. 

W.'s learning ancient Greek for his new book, he says. It's going to be on religion. He was going to do a book on time, but he's decided against that. Religion, he says, that's his topic, and for that he needs Greek. And maths! If he's going to write about Cohen and God, as he intends to, he'll have to understand the infinitesimal calculus.

He sends me his notes.

In Leibniz what is key is the concept of the differential as the infinitely small. The ground of the finite is the infinitely small. It is the infinite that founds the finite, and not the finite the infinite – this is why the infinite is not a negative concept.

Impressive! I write back. He's reading The Logic of Pure Knowledge, he says. In German!, he says. Logik der Reinen Erkenntnis. It's taken him a year so far, and he's only on page 50.

The essential point for Leibniz is that dx is the origin of x. As with fluxion, the infinitesimal is the fundamental meaning of the judgement of origin.

What does fluxion mean?, I ask W. What does any of it mean? He's not sure, he says. He bought a book called Numbers, but only got through the first chapter, 'What is a Number?'

Anyway, here's the good stuff, he says, and sends me some more of his notes.

Third judgement: the Judgement of Contradiction. 1) The Not and the Nothing. Judgement has its origin if the judgement of origin, but this requires the mediation of the nothing. This would seem to require the judgement of negation, Vereinung. That is to say, contradiction. But the nothing is not to be confused with the 'not' of negation which is only a verbal form.

They look like notes of a real scholar, I tell W. They amaze me. He knows they amaze me, W. says. I have certain instincts. It's like a chimpanzee jumping up and down and screeching. He does an impression on the phone.

Die Identitat ist das Gut, ist der Wert, W. says. Der Widerspruch ist der Schutz, ist der Recht. Du bist ein Schiessehund. What do I think of his German accent?

Greek! Mathematics! W.'s not like me, who will just dash off a book regardless. Actually, he was genuinely moved by my new book. He almost wept when he read chapter three. Why don't I write another book, and make it a trilogy? God, that would be hilarious, W. says, a trilogy from me.

W.'s decline is getting worse. He doesn't work at night any more, but watches trash TV instead. And now, like me, he's bought Civilization 4. What appals him, he says, is that he plays Civilization 4 with more seriousness than he works.

Of course, W. knew that the last thing he should ever do is to buy Civilization 4. Which meant therefore that he went straight out and bought Civilization 4, W. says. Then he destroyed Civilization 4; he snapped the CD in two. Then the next morning, he went out and bought it again, he says, but he threw the whole package in the bin before he even got home.

Then, in a weak moment, despairing of his many years of intellectual work and convinced he'd taken a fundamentally wrong turn, he downloaded Civilization 4 from a torrent site, W. says, and has been playing it ever since.

Having Leonard Nimoy as a narrator is an attraction, of course. Whenever you discover a new technology, it's Nimoy who says some apposite quotation. It's edifying, W. says. He hears Leonard Nimoy's voice now whenever he reads philosophy, he says. It is necessary to know whether we are being duped by morality, W. says, in Leonard Nimoy's voice. It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity, in Leonard Nimoy's voice.

The philosophers we've heard have always had unfeasibly high voices, we remember. Think of Heidegger, on that CD I bought, going on about Hoelderlin. He sounded like a castrati, W. says, and does an impression.

Then there was Levinas. Didn't W. phone him once, from a Paris phonebooth? He was going to ask about attending the Talmudic readings. But he had to put the phone down when Levinas answered, W. says. His voice was so high! The receiver fell from his hands, and Levinas was saying, 'hello? hello?' in his very high voice. W. was really nonplussed.

Canada is the only way out, W. says. Only Canada can save him. But Canada is as remote as the moon. Canada is buried, hidden in the night, and all he can see is the night.

Where is he heading? Into what darkness is his world turning? Towards me, W. thinks. He's turning towards me. How did I become his leader? By what turn did he end up before me?

He took my advice, that was his mistake. He asked for my advice, and he took it. But why? Why does he turn to me again and again? I have a sense of urgency, he'll give me that. I live in a perpetual state of emergency. I'm always panicked, paranoid. I always think it's about to end, and want to take mad leaps, want to madly escape, like a fly banging against a window.

What's my new plan, for example? To emigrate to Ireland to rear rare kinds of chicken! It's incredible, W. says. What kind of plan is that? How could anyone have such a plan: emigrating to Ireland to rear rare kinds of chicken! But that's what I'm advocating, and with great vehemence. Going artisan! Taking the artisanal turn!

What experience do I have of rearing chickens? W. knows the answer. None. None of rearing chickens, let along rare kinds of chicken, and none, indeed or farming. What experience do I have of rearing anything? Do I think I've reared myself?

He can come with me, I've told him. We can breed rare kinds of chicken together. We'll start a farm, a co-operative, I've told him. We can supply restaurants who want the old kinds of chicken, not the new kinds, which get so fat they can't walk and taste only of corn and bulking agents.

Lean chickens, that's what we should go to Ireland to raise, I've shown him my books about smallholding and self-sufficiency. I've spoken to him at length about the artisanal life. Of A life outdoors, in the fields! Even he's persuaded.

There's a market for lean chicken, I've told him, especially in Ireland. They value the artisan over there.  There are restaurants who want lean chickens, not the great, fat, tasteless ones. It's going to be the new thing after free range chicken and organic chicken, I told him.

W., inspired, says he might go to Canada to raise goats. We could go together, and breed chicken and goats together to make chicken-goats or goat-chickens.

How could it have happened to him?, W. says. He still can't believe it happened. One moment, he was on the plateau, high up, only the sky of philosophy above him and the firm ground of his scholarship below him, and then?

He blames me, W. says. Why did he listen to me? Why does he base his life decisions on my booming apocalyptic advice? Why, when he knows my utter certainty is not really based on understanding or knowledge?

He still can't believe it, he says. He was headhunted. I was there, I saw it. Him – headhunted! It seemed so fortuitous. Apply!, he was told. We want you!, he was told. Then he asked me what to do, W. says. He turned to me, that's where he went wrong.

What did I tell him? Apply!, I said. Apply at once! I even looked over his application letter! I read it, I went over it for mistakes! I gave him advice. And when he got the job? When he turned up to the campus and found there was no office for him, no computer?

I told him it would be okay! I told him everything would be fine, and it was all turning out for the good. And when he heard that redundancies were imminent? That the end was coming? I was still unbothered. I wasn't really perturbed.

They won't sack you, I said. They've just appointed you. But of course they were going to sack him, W. says. Who else were they going to sack? He was on probation, that was the thing. On probation, and hence sackable, hence they could get rid of him.

Of course they had no grounds to get rid of him, none at all. But they could get rid of him, that was the thing. And that's what they did! They got rid of him!

Whose fault is all of this?, W. says. His, for listening to me. Mine, for giving him advice in the first place. But he can't really blame me, W. says. He knows what's wrong with me, and with my booming apocalyptic advice. He was warned. He knew by my very tone of certainty! What leads him to me, what death-drive? Why is he following me into the darkness?

The suburbs. I tell W., about the companies where I used to work. One had meeting rooms named after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I've told him that. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I told him. It was like a fairytale giant burying his heart in a chest in the middle of a lake. In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, that's what I said.

Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me?

I talked about this in my first ever Dogma presentation, W. remembers. I spoke about reading Kafka in my warehouse in snatched time, stolen time. I said The Castle gave me hope, which was strange, because it seemed to be a book about the absence of hope, of hope's falsehood.

K. wanted to know who he was, and what he was to do, but there was no one to tell him. He was looking for orders, but he could make no sense of what he found. He was looking for the castle, but the castle was only the town in which he was living, at one with it. Hope, still. K.'s hope was undefeated.

But wasn't that it: to see the world without hope for what it was; for nothing other than what it was? I saw it in its totality for what it was. I saw it in its completeness, which was also its nothingness, I said, and W. was moved by this formulation. The Castle gave me a kind of freedom, I said. And wasn't it then that my warehouse years began to end, and my university years to begin?

Now he knows why I fear unemployment so much, W. says as we walk through the suburbs. – 'This is what you fear, this place'. I'm afraid of falling back here. Of falling to the bottom of the world, which is undoubtedly here.

We turn back through the golf course. We wait on the path as a golfer hits his ball into the distance. Then he starts to yell. – 'Oy, leave it alone', he cries. One of four lads, sauntering on the fairway in the distance, has reached down to pocket the hit gold ball. The golfer shouts again. - 'That's my ball!' – 'That's my ball', says W., remembering Pascal. 'That's how the usurpation of the world began'. And then, 'Why don't those lads come back and kick the shit out of him?'

Laughter in the summer air. My God, this world is mad, mad! Oh God, couldn't we laugh ourselves to death? If we started to laugh, really started, we wouldn't be able to stop, how could we? If we really laughed, really laughed, we could laugh forever, laughing at laughter, laughing at the whole dreadful imposture, at our dreadful imposture. They could cut off our heads, tear us apart, and we'd still be laughing, and laughing at ourselves laughing, as we were strewn along the river ….

A visit to my hometown. – 'Show me the suburbs', W. says. 'Give me a guided tour'. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life?' Where did it go wrong, W. asks. When did it go wrong?

We head out through the housing estate to the golf course. – 'Is this what you call the countryside?', W. asks. He can talk, I point out. He grew up in Walsall! Ah, but I'm forgetting about his years in Canada, W. says. He knew what a tree was. He's knew the lakes and the wilderness, as I do not. How could I? Look at this place!

There's no empty space around here, W. says. No wilderness, no scrubland or scrap of tatty wood. My God, there are not even any alcoholics! Every town needs its alcoholics!

He remembers what I told him about the light, the same indifferent light that falls on everyone in the suburbs. He remembers I said I feared it, that light, that I wanted to hide, but that there was nowhere to hide, that I wasn't like Adam, who could flee from God into the undergrowth.

There I was, exposed. There I was, in the pitiless day, the pitiless light the falls everywhere in the suburbs. There I was, accused, but by whom? By no God. By God's absence. By a night without stars that was at one with the day.

I used to go cycling, I've told W. that. I used to cycle out to the last scraps of unused land, to the sand dunes, to the shooting range. But they disappeared, didn't they? They vanished. And I couldn't hide, could I, not anymore? The day could see right through me. Light, in its indifference, passed right through me, like the particles of dark matter that pass through the earth.

I'd become a glassfish…. I was transparent…. I saw I was made of congealed light. Saw I was only a thickening of light, its doubling up. And saw that I would be undone one day, that I would disperse into the day like the the hero of The Passion of Anna.

No secrets, says W. Nothing hidden. That's what I feared above all, I told him. And I fear it still.

It'll be my turn next, W. says. They're already coming to get me. The cursor, on someone's monitor, is already hovering over my name. I've already appeared on somebody's list. Jobs at risk. Jobs to be placed at risk.

Yes, they're coming to get me. They've already set out, from the other side of the universe. The appointment has been made. Two bumbling agents will take me to a gravel pit and shoot me. Two incompetents, unsure of their orders, unsure of what I've done will be sent to shoot a bullet into the back of my head.

He knows I'll be glad of it, W. says. He knows me too well. The Romans didn't open their own veins when they wanted to die, but asked someone else to do it. And isn't that what I've been asking, and for many years: someone else to do it? It's what I want. It's what I crave … a firing squad. A night arrest. To be led to a gravel pit and be popped in the head …

'You want them to come', W. says. 'You want to feel important'. Important enough to appear on someone's list. Important enough to arrest, to take to a gravel pit and shoot. – 'This mad world was made for you', W. says.

They've concocted charges against him, W. says. They made them up! They plucked them out of thin air! Even after he hugged her, even after he saw her crying and embraced her in the snow, and told her everything would be alright, she made up charges against him, she tried to get him frogmarched from the campus; she called human resources. She called the campus police. But they wouldn't act. Even they knew it was wrong. Even they knew the charges were made up.

And he'd hugged her. He embraced her in the snow, as though she were the wounded party. As though her life had been ruined by him.

But that's why she brought charges against him, W. says. It was because he was brought up to be compassionate. Because he told her it would all be alright, there in the snow. What did she see? His weakness (which was really compassion)? Her shame (her wickedness)?

She knew she'd been judged. She'd seen an angel and spat in his face. This is how the world will end, W. says. We'll spit in the face of angels, of the poor and the wretched. We'll spit in the face of those who demand justice.

Why did W. embrace the woman who put him forward to be sacked? He was brought up to be compassionate, he says. And she was crying. She was crying as she told him it was nothing personal.

It was nothing personal … he was moved, W. says. Too moved. There, in the snow, he embraced her and told her everything was going to be okay, if not for him, then for her.

Why did he do it? It was nothing personal. But it was personal. She put his name forward. She nominated him to be sacked. And then she hid. She hid in her office. She hid at home. She didn't want to face him. And when she did, there in the snow, when she couldn't escape, she wept. There, in the snow, early one morning, unable to avoid him, she cried like a child. And W., who was brought up to be compassionate, hugged her and said it would all be okay.

But it's not going to be okay. His life has been ruined. She's ruined his life. 

The kingdom of unemployment is rising like Hades to enclose him. Soon he'll be lost among the shades and spectres. Will I visit him in his new life? Gradually, he'll be forgotten.

Gradually, his presence will fade from everyone's life. – 'Where's W.?', they'll ask at first. But later, they will only have a sense of absence, having no knowledge of its cause. And later still, there will no absence either. Life will be complete again, without tear. – 'Even you. Even you will forget me'. And then, 'especially you'.

Sometimes W. wants to send up a great cry of dereliction. Not his dereliction, he says, but dereliction in general. Abandonment.

Who has abandoned us? Who left us behind? In truth, we left oursevles behind. We deserted our duties, for what sense could we make of them? We deserted our responsibilities, which were too great for us.

We left it all behind, all the better to understand dereliction. That's what we wanted: to meet dereliction on its own terms, having thrown away our lives. That was what we sought: to give ourselves over to dereliction so thoroughly that dereliction, true dereliction, might find us.

When will it come? We're waiting. We're at the crossroads. We've come this far (we've sunk this low). Tommy Johnson was said to have sold his soul at the crossroads to become a great guitar player. We could sell ours, but who would want to buy them. Dereliction has deserted us – is that it? Even abandoment has abandoned us – is that what happened?