Lars Iyer's Blog

'No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way'. W. is reading out loud from Scholem's didactic poem. – 'How do you think it applies to you?', W. says. 'Do you get in your own way?' I get in his way, that's for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in him also gets in his way. It's my fault, he's sure of that. If it wasn't for me, would he reach the star of redemption? He'll never know, W. says. He suspects not. 

Unexpectedly, we find Graceland immensely moving. It surprises us – we'd heard it was awful, terribly kitsch – but we find it restrained and moving. Elvis's contemplation garden, where he went to think over things. The grave of his twin brother, who died at birth, and of his beloved mother and father, who lived in Graceland with him. And, of course, his own grave, marked Elvis Aaron Presley, 1935-1977 - how terrible! how sad!

Graceland's surprisingly small, we agree. The kitchen, for example – it's like any suburban kitchen. The living room, the dining room. Elvis was a man of modest tastes. We admire his Bauhaus style squash court, which he designed himself. Imagine it – Elvis the architect, Elvis the modernist. But this 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.

In retrospect, we agreed, we wish we'd signed up for the V.I.P. tour. After all, you come to Graceland just once in your life. It's a one-off. We missed the Elvis By Night exhibition – Elvis, we learned, was largely nocturnal – and the tour of his planes, one of which was named after his daughter, Lisa Marie. 'Taking care of business', it read on its tailfin.

Still, we saw the jungle room, with its famous indoor waterfall – and we admired copies of the cheques Elvis had sent to local charities which covered the whole wall. We only saw one of his jumpsuits – again, the jumpsuit tour, magnificent as it sounded, was for V.I.P.s only. If only we'd paid those few extra dollars …

And we arrived out at the contemplation garden, the perfect end of the tour. What did we contemplate? The squash court – Elvis's Bauhaus squash court. His short life, which ended in the bathroom almost directly above the main entrance to Graceland, above the stone lions. And the mediocrity of our lives, with so little achieved, compared to the King.

Do they really have porches in America? They really do have porches. You can sit on the front porch – the front portion of the porch – and watch the world go by, or you can sit at the back for some privacy. Americans don't go in for gardening, we notice: the back garden – brown grass, uncut – simply runs out unfenced onto the road behind. It's exactly the same as the front garden.

But the Americans are tremendously neighbourly, we notice that. Didn't our hosts' neighbour bake a tart for us, their visitors? She brought it over, and we ate it with our Bourbon. She greeted us, and we her. What part of England are you from?, she asked, and we told her. We told her we were heading to the Smokies with our hosts – a long drive, by our standards – and she said it would be a great trip. Have a great trip, she said.

That wouldn't happen in England, we agree, that neighbourliness. The Americans, in general, are a friendly people. They're articulate: they're able to talk, and they talk at length, interestingly, being free with their opinions. There's nothing guarded about them, from our perspective. They give of themselves.

Hadn't we found, in nearly any situation in public, that we were drawn into conversation by the Americans around us, whoever they were? Perhaps it was our accents. Perhaps our bearing. More likely, it was because we had Sal with us, who inspires conversation. People talk to Sal, have you noticed that?, says W. No one would talk to us if it wasn't for Sal.

Americans have the pioneer spirit, we've noticed. They move about a great deal. We were told, on several occasions by our interlocutors, of marriages and divorces, of moving around. They move from here to there just like that. From state to state … they're used to vast distances. They're used to travel, to uprooting themselves, they're not like us. The Americans are a pioneer people, we decide.

Haven't we always liked – basically liked - Americans? Haven't we always found them tremendously fresh, unprejudiced? They make us feel old and crabbed. Old, and from Old Europe. Americans will talk about anything, anything. They don't distinguish between the private and the public, not really. They keep nothing from you. The things we've heard on our American travels! To us, from Old Europe, it is sheer generosity. To think, these people are willing to share so much with us, with strangers. But probably they talk this way all the time.

For us – for me especially, says W. – talking is a great effort. I'm stuck mostly in mute indifference, W. says. It's only when I'm drunk that I speak, says W., and then almost entirely nonsensically. We're a reserved people, we English. We need to be drunk to talk, except for W., who has real manners, but then he's part Canadian. Especially me. I speak in great incoherent gales when I'm drunk. I talk rubbish, sheer rubbish. I bluster. I talk smut. And then I turn, W. says, I always turn. I become maudlin, and then vicious. I'm like Blanche Dubois, W. says.

Of course, I'm English through and through, W. says. I have all the sins of the English, which is odd, because my parents were emigrants. He'd expect more from me, W. says, given that my parents were emigrants. He, of course, has his relationship to Canada, that's what saved him. His part-Canadian soul. His Canadian citizenship. He nearly had a Canadian adolescence. Imagine! Imagine what would have become of him! As it is, he had a part Canadian boyhood. He knows something of the Yukon. He carries something of the Yukon in his soul.

And here we are in America. Here we are, ambassadors for our home country. The English abroad! What a thought!, W. says. To be English, and abroad! We call the Americans 'sir' and 'madam'. We heard it was very important to be polite over here. The Americans, despite their apparent informality, are keen on formality, on formal relations. They're not like Australians. That's why I have to be especially careful, W. says. Let Sal do the talking, W. says. She calls everyone 'sir' and 'madam'. She has charm, W. says. Wit. We lack charm – well, W. has some charm, he says, and we lack wit, although W. has more than me.

Luckily, we have Sal on our side. What would we do if it wasn't for her? Who would look after our tickets? Who would see us safely on the Greyhound? She's our eyes, says W. And our ears. And our sense. We're idiots in America, W. says, and we think back to Herzog's film. He's the elderly neighbour, whatever his name was – Scheitzer, I remind him, oh yes, Schiezer, W. says – and I'm Stroszek himself, I'm Bruno S. Without Sal, he'd be arrested and I'd shoot myself on a chairlift. Without Sal, says W., the chicken wouldn't stop.

We're lost in America! Here we are, in the deep south, pretty much, and thoroughly lost! What are we doing here? What led us here? Some terrible mistake, we agree. Some lapse in the logic of the universe. Is that really the Mississippi? It really is the Mississippi, wide and brown. Why is it so brown?, I ask W. It's full of mud, W. says. Water and mud.

On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.'s facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses. Stop arsing about you two, she says, though she finds it all very funny. And behind us, the great brown Mississippi, rolling improbably along.

America's so big!, we agree. It's overwhelming, really, when you think about. How far is it to the coast? A thousand miles? Two thousand miles? Some great, improbable distance, we're agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive. There's so much space here. America's so exposed. We think of the terrible signs we saw on the Greyhound bus of a passing hurricane. Houses torn up, trees destroyed and flung about. I took pictures. I'd never seen anything like it. America's in danger, we're agreed. It's too big! It's too vast!

We never like to be too far from the sea, W. especially. Doesn't he always demand, when he visits me, to be taken to the sea? Doesn't he always take me directly to the sea, whenever I visit him? I'll meet you at the sea, he tells me, when I text him from the airport. And I have to go straight there, straight to the sea to meet him. And in the middle of America, when the sea's so far away? What then? What to do?

Our hosts drive us around Nashville. They show us the sights. But we know, like us, it doesn't satisfy them. We know they're waiting for us to break, for us to say: but this terrible, so they can say, yes, it is terrible; yes, it's a living death. Because that's what it is: pure terror; and that's what it is, a living death. How will they survive here? How will we, for that matter, survive here?

The zoning of the city. Here, hospitals, dozens of them, one block after another. There, car dealerships, dozens of them. It's zoned, it's all zoned. You have to take your car to get from one zone to another. You have to take your car to get anywhere, or do anything. And we can't even drive, W. and I! We can't drive, and Sal can't drive, though she's said she's going to learn to drive, when we go back to England. She can't drive, we can't drive, which means we're utterly dependent on our hosts, our poor hosts, who detest driving. They've been forced into driving, they tell us, which is terrible.

They're Canadians, they say. They don't drive. They walk, they tell us. They cycle through the wilderness, they say. They paddle canoes. They're not made for this driving existence. For a few months, they tried to manage without a car in Nashville. They cycled everywhere, for miles and miles. They cycled right out of the city. They cycled from far flung government building to government building, while they were becoming American citizens. They cycled out to their favourite Mexican restaurant and their favourite Vietnamese restaurant, but in the end, it was too much. They have a car now, something they never thought they would own – something they thought they would never have to own. They own a car – it's too much for them, as Canadians.

Canadians, if they really have to drive, car pool. They drive in groups. They hire cars together. No doubt they sing as they drive. No doubt their voices ring out on the Canadian highways, the great, wide, continent-spanning Canadian highways, in harmony, in sweet unison. But they are fundamentally non-drivers, say our Canadian hosts. As are we, W. and I, Sal as well – we're fundamentally non-drivers, we have that in common.

The sad thing is, Nashville used to have a train station, our hosts tell us. They even drive us past it, the station, which has been converted into some kind of retail space. Imagine it, W. says, a city without a railway station. He's appalled. He's horrified. His voice trembles and shakes. A city without a railway station! It's enough to send you insane.

W. had great visions of travelling by train in America. Of travelling through the great expanse of America, dreaming of the coast – the east coast, the west coast, it didn't matter – dreaming of the coast, the American coast, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific, which one didn't concern him. The bus is a poor substitute, we agree.

I, in my turn, had visions of a fifties style Greyhound bus, a silver beast, a great gleaming insect, very sleek and streamlined. A fifties style bus, slicing through the air … The reality is disappointing. The reality destroys us. The most mediocre of buses, on the most erratic of schedules …

There's not much open to the non-driver in America, we agree. It's not a country for the non-driver, who is not so much as yet unskilled in driving, which is to say, unable to drive, as unable to think of driving and unable to conceive of driving. Unable to think or conceive of driving, and of the whole world of driving. What can driving possibly mean to us? How can we understand the mind of a driver? But our hosts, nevertheless, are driving. Our hosts – our friends – have been forced into driving, and all across the state, to the Smokies. It's madness!

We're not made for this life, none of us. We confirm it for our hosts: America's not for them. Granted, we are not Canadians as they are – though W. is part Canadian, and has Canadian citizenship – but we understand their plight. We're in favour of Americans – we like Americans – but their country baffles us, and more than that, destroys us. Little by little, we're being destroyed. We need to get back! We need to go home!

Sal and I love to bicker. It's how they show affection, W. explains to our hosts. Canadians don't need to bicker, W. explains to Sal and I. They're open-hearted, open-souled. It's the expansiveness of their country. It's the Yukon, which is really the heart of Canada.

We come from a tiny island, he tells our hosts. We're like rats crawling over rats. We have crabbed souls, W. says. Of course, W.'s soul, because of his childhood in Canada, is a little less crabbed than that of Sal and I. He's not a bickerer. These two are bickerers, he says to our hosts of Sal and I, but he's not a bickerer. He can behave in company.

Our hosts are lost in America, in the heart of America. How can they survive there, two Canadians, two innocent and open-souled Canadians, in the middle of Nashville? Wasn't one of them mugged almost as soon as he arrived? Wasn't he bounced violently against a chainlink fence by the punches?

Lying on the ground, he vowed never to go out again. Better to stay inside, with your Bourbon. Better to venture only out to your porch, with your Bourbon. And that's where he sits in the evening, watching the joggers in what he calls 'yuppie hour'.

Bourbon makes a great deal of sense in America. W. calls it 'sipping Bourbon'. Let's go and get some sipping Bourbon, he says. We bring home a bottle of Knob Creek or Woodford Reserve and drink it over ice on the porch.

Our hosts play us old blues songs, and sing for us. All Canadians can sing, in our imagination. They have compulsory singing lessons just as they have compulsory swimming lessons. We tell them they should never venture further than their porch. They should sit there on the porch, and that's as far as they should go, sipping Bourbon and singing duets in the American night.

As we drive across Tennessee towards the Smokies, our hosts tell us about the Yukon. The open spaces. The lakes, beside which you can pitch your teepee. Hadn't they spent whole summers by the lakes, in the Yukon, in their teepees?

We have trouble, W. and I, imagining ourselves in teepees. Our Canadian hosts – latterly stranded in Nashville – are people of the expanses. They have expansive souls. We, however, have crabbed souls. We're men of the city, W. tells them. We'd be lost in the Yukon.

What would we do there? Looking out over the lakes, we would have to search our souls – a melancholy act. We'd have to contemplate our failure yet again, and from a new perspective. How could it end but in a drowning, two blue corpses face down in the water?

We sang about cocks, didn't we?, W. asks me the next day. He's full of remorse. Once again, we went too far, he says. Our host had a guitar; we were to sing together, to share the songs of our countries, our childhoods. We were to sing, as Canadians like to do after dinner. For a Canadian, W. explained to me, it's only natural to sing after dinner. To sing, and to listen to others sing, and perhaps to learn new songs, and perhaps to teach songs to others.

But what did we sing? What songs did we send floating up into the night? Songs about cocks, W. says. Songs in which we replaced one key word with the word, cock. We drowned them out in our excitement, the Canadians. We drowned them out in our hilarity. We've let ourselves down again, W. says. He's let himself down. Wasn't he supposed to be the sensible one in our party? Didn't he feel himself personally responsible for our behaviour?

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?

Hadn't I told him about the last patches of wilderness – the sand dunes, the long grass where we'd play as children? We'd bring our bikes along there and scramble up and down the cliffs. We'd start fires in the dry grass …

But the dunes were transformed into a golf course. The wilderness closed up. We were stuck in the suburbs, which were growing around us. Vandals' trips to the new houses. Thieves' trips to the construction sites. We'd cycle out to the army range. We'd climb the low hills and look out into the distance. Something was missing from our lives – what was it?

Was that when it happened?, W. asks with great avidity. Was that when it all went wrong? 

The suburbs were completing themselves, I told him. No wilderness left. Time had stopped going forward. We lived the same day again and again … When did my friends disappear into drugs? When did they disappear into drinking?

Had it happened yet?, W. says. It was happening, I tell him. When did it happen – at what point? I tell him I'm not sure. 

Like many others, I went to work for the new companies. There were an infinite number of them. All interchangable, more or less. Vast grey boxes set in vast car parks. Sometimes a pond of koi fish. Sometimes a view of the Swiss chalet style hotel and the dry ski slope. An infinite number of them, and an infinite number of us, too, contract workers, temps …

Which company was it that had a suite of meeting rooms named after philosophers? We'll have a meeting in Berkeley. Let's book Locke. Is Hume free? … -'Did you try and persuade them to call a room Rosenzweig? Did you get them to call one Rosenstock-Huessy?'

A new kind of wilderness: I wandered all day through the corridors in the great grey boxes, from coffee machine to coffee machine. I'd stare off out of windows. I'd admire koi ponds or the Swiss chalet style hotel. I'd plant myself in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime.

It had already happened, hadn't it?, W. says. Oh yes, long ago, I tell him. I'd taken a wrong turn, he says. But there were only wrong turns. My life, in its entirety, was a wrong turn.

'Your years of unemployment', says W. I don't speak much of them, either. Years unemployed! I was young then, W. remembers my telling him. Very young. I used to cycle. I would ride about my bike, I told him. I'd have my little pantheistic ecstasies, I told him.

I'd get out old maps and cycle to barrows, or what I took to be barrows, W. says. Doubtless they were only refuse heaps. Doubtless they were only great piles of rubbish abandoned in the woods. And then I'd cycle out all day, mapless, with no particular aim.

Through the new estates, through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, overgrown bridleways and footpaths. The quarried river with its fenced off nature reserves. And above it all, W. remembers my telling him, the blank, indifferent sky. The vast anti-cathedral of the sky.

Later it would make me shiver. Later, feeling exposed, terribly exposed, I'd stay indoors. Didn't I come to fear the day? Ah, but I was young then. Very young. I still had a kind of optimism, which is to say, a blindness in relation to the future. I still had faith in my barrows and my Roman roads.

I could carry my bike over railway bridges. I cycled through glades of tree stumps left by foresters. I cycled through golf courses, banks of green grass beneath sprinklers. I followed the private road through the plantation, and the course of the stream as it temporarily emerged from its culvert.

I was a king of the scrappy woodland along the railway, king of the new estates. The white light hadn't eaten into my soul yet, had it? The white light hadn't eaten me away.

'Your illness. You don't like to talk about that, do you? What was wrong with you exactly?' No one knows, I tell him. I couldn't get a diagnosis. Or not a reliable one, anyway.

W. believes I was ill, he says. It's not just my usual kind of fantasy. He can tell by my reserve on the topic. Usually I'll talk about anything – anything. Usually, I'll share the most intimate details of my life. But this time …

My life was bleak, wasn't it? I must have thought I was at the end. W. is someone who might say he thinks he's at the end, but he has no idea what it might mean, he says, to be at the end. – 'At the end of your wits. At the end of your tether: that was your life, wasn't it?'

He knows it involved a lot of drinking, my illness, W. says. Hadn't I said as much? Fourpacks of lager from Kwik Save. Stale gingerbread men from a discount Greggs. Stale eclairs with yellow cream. And days and days on the sofa, cake crumbs all around me. Days on the sofa, with the smell of sweet, stale beer, the curtains drawn against the day.

What did I do? Watch TV, W. remembers my telling him that. He's had to piece together the story of my illness, he says. But he sees it all now. A fat man, growing fatter, slouched with the TV in front of him. A fat man in tracksuit bottoms and a teeshirt, daytime TV, spilled beer, drawn curtains …

What was it that kept me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. Why didn't I book myself in to one of those Swiss suicide clinics? He'd've done if he'd have had my life.

What was wrong with me?, W. asks. Tiredness, that was it, wasn't it? I'd been a hamster on the wheel, hadn't I? I'd run too much, too far. I'd outrun myself. Time to catch up. Time to do myself in.

In the end, I could barely lift my arms, W. remembers my telling him. My hands were not mine. I thought I'd have to get sheltered accommodation. That really would have been the end, wouldn't it?, W. says. Sheltered accommodation. Sheltered from what? And who would bring me gingerbread men? Who stale eclairs with yellow cream?

Sometimes W. thinks he should make a study of my life. He wants to take notes, to sketch a kind of physiognomy of thought. He would reduce my life, the profusion of my life, to a few simple principles and thereby show what I am to the world.

But why bother? It should be clear to anyone with any sense. Nothing is hidden, in my case, and perhaps it's not even that noteworthy.

But then, too, W. says, a context is needed – a critical introduction, as you get in the new edition of a classic work of literature. My idiocy needs to be explained, W. says. It needs to be set back into its time, its social and political history if its true extent is to be gauged. It needs a border drawn around it, a frame and an explanatory plaque.

'Your intellectual career', W. says, laughing. 'Your career … how will you account for that? What will you tell them?' My God, how lucky I was to be lost among the mediocrities! How lucky to be born in a mediocre age! – 'No one watches out for you; no one notices. Do you think anyone is following what you do? Of course not! And you're lucky, because if they were …'

I pass for a non-entity, W. says, though I'm no non-entity. I pass for an ordinary mediocrity, though I am not that, either. – 'Something is dying in you. Something is coming to an end'. I'm a sign, a symptom, W. says. What matters is to read me correctly. And is that his task? Is that what he was put on earth to do?

Benjamin thought he could detect the signs of a turning of the age in the Paris Arcades. He took notes; he transcribed and assembled – he thought it was sufficient to show, rather than comment. Would it be sufficient to show, rather than tell in my case?, W. wonders. No: I need a commentary, W. says. I need an interpreter. Below everything I say, as in the subtitles on a foreign film, the words bullshit, bullshit, bullshit should succeed one another in inexhaustible profusion.