Lars Iyer's Blog

'Do your chicken dance', says W. 'Do the funky chicken'. W. likes to watch me dance. It's so improbable, he says. So graceless.

I'm a frenetic dancer, W. says. I've got ants in my pants. Isn't that what I told him: I've got ants in my pants? I tell him I never said such a thing. It's a fantasy. Never mind, W. says. – 'Do your chicken dance. Go on, cheer me up'.

He does an impression. – 'This is how you dance', W. says. 'Do you see?' He flaps his arms. He turns his knees inwards. He hops about on his feet. I can't help it, he says. He knows I can't help it …

He had ideas, the dying Bataille said, but they didn't dance for him any more. W. has no ideas, but I'm going to dance for him, aren't I? Dance, fat boy, dance!

The chicken stops here. That on the run off groove of the fourth side of Still, Joy Division's posthumous album. On the second and third sides, the imprints of chicken feet. On the first side: the chicken won't stop. But the chicken did stop … How was the chicken, Stroszek's dancing chicken brought to an end?

The end, the end. It won't occur as quickly as that. It won't be punctual. It'll be late for itself. It'll be late arriving. And in the meantime … That meantime may be the span of our lives. But it may be but a single day, a single honour, a moment …

The conditions are here. The conditions for the end are here. The chicken won't stop, not now. It's dancing. It's dancing on the hot plate beneath its feet. That's what happens when you put a coin in the slot, as Bruno did (Bruno S. playing Bruno Stroszek).

The plate heats up, the chicken dances. Over it all, Sonny Terry's harmonica. An uptempo blues. A quick blues, bubbling along, and the chicken dancing.

W. likes to see me dance, he says. – 'Go on, dance, fat boy!' We're non-dancers, he always says, and that's our strength. We dance, but we don't care about dancing. Real dancers envy us. Our freedom, which is really our stupidity. They've told us so.

But the secret is we dance like that chicken. Because we have to. Because the floor is hot. Because someone put a coin in the slot. And that's so of our lives, too, isn't it? Who put the coin in the slot? Who are we amusing? Ourselves? Hardly ourselves. The joke's worn out.

We're a sideshow. The catastrophe's happening elsewhere, offscreen. Bruno Stroszek shoots himself off camera. We infer he shot himself because his empty ski lift chair comes rolling into view. There it is: empty. Where's Bruno?

We heard the gunshot. He had a rifle with him, and a frozen turkey. He lay the frozen turkey beside him, and – one presumes – put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth, and that was it …

Why did he have a frozen turkey with him?, W. wonders. We've forgotten. He had a frozen turkey and a rifle, and put some coins in the slots of various machines to watch the duck play a drum, the rabbit ride a fire truck and the chicken dance. The chicken won't stop. And we won't stop, will we, fat boy?, W. says.

Nothing has happened to us, W. says, not really. We've led ordinary lives; we're just like anyone else. But we've a sense, don't we, that things might be different?

Leave this place!, we tell the young people we run into. Get out of this country! And for those of us left here? Drink! Drink your way through the day. 

Haven't I spent years doing just that?, W. says. I'm like an advance guard, a scout, out ahead of everyone. Yes, sometimes he has the sense of that: I'm ahead of him, ahead of everyone, drinking on my own in the squalor of my flat.

I'm preparing myself, W. says. I know what's to come, and I've prioritised rightly. Live each day as though it were the last, the very last. Drink your way through it. Numb yourself.

If only death would come cleanly! If only it would fall like a great axe from the sky! But that's not how it will come, and that's the horror. You won't be able to die: isn't that it? The power to die will be taken from you.

That's why you have to drink yourself into a stupor. It's practice, practice for the coming end. That's how to meet death: dead drunk, and without a care. That's how to meet the death that will not come.

Drink! says W. Drink! Really, there's nothing else for it. There's nothing better to do. The days are too long. This day, for example – what time is it? just after lunch. Just after lunch – it's unbearable! Only drinking can save us. We'll float drunkenly through the afternoon. We'll lie back and float, like idiots in a lido …

Administration is our good fortune, W. says. Our endless bureaucracy. Because we can still believe that if we had time, we could produce a masterwork.

Imagine it! Time, just time – and silence. And a room – a bed, a desk, a window. The world reduced to a room. You'd rise from your bed and go straight to your desk. Straight there – it's no distance.

Straight to work! Reading with care and patience. Beginning to write – a few notes. Exercises at the barre. And then it would begin, the real work. Then it would begin again, taking off from yesterday – one page, another – who's counting?

How the day would be crossed! A great bridge, spanning from morning and evening! And you'd arrive on the otherwise tired but content: a day had passed. Another day of work.

And in the evening, after dinner? You might read a novel. You might look out of the window, muse, as you would be entitled to muse. And the next day, rising, it would all begin again, workday melting into workday, the great project arching through the months and the seasons and the years …

But luckily we have our administration. Luckily we have our alibis. Imagine it, if we were to be given time. Imagine it – a room, the world reduced to a room: a bed, a desk, a window. And some books, I add. And some books, says W.

We'd deface the books and set fire to the desk. We'd jump on the bed like idiot children and smash our fists through the window. Then we'd hang ourselves, or masturbate, one of the two …

Oh, how has it come to this? How has it come to so little?

The chicken won't stop. The chicken stops here. There's a great deal to meditate upon in these phrases, W. says. They're like mantras to him. Weren't they etched into the first and last side of Joy Division's Still?

They're from Herzog's film Stroszek. Ian Curtis watched it just before he killed himself. Stroszek, which ends with the coin operated attractions in which a duck plays a drum, a rabbit rides a fire truck and a chicken dances. The chicken won't stop.

How much that film means to him!, W. says. To us! Which one am I?, he wonders, Bruno Stroszek or his elderly neighbour, Scheitz, so obsessed with animal magnetism? Scheitz is arrested, of course – he and Bruno hold up a barber shop. The police take him away, and Bruno? He rides off on a ski-lift and shoots himself.

'That's what'll happen to us when we go to America', W. says. 'You'll shoot yourself, and I'll be arrested'. All that will be left is the animals the duck, the rabbit and the chicken, and some blues harmonica music. The chicken won't stop. The chicken stops here.

The apocalypse: our alibi, our excuse. The greatest of sick notes. What could we achieve? What could have we have done?

We knew it was coming; we set down our pens. We knew a new dawn – the opposite of dawn – was spreading dark rays behind the horizon; we closed our books. So it was coming; it really was time.

But it was only its conditions that had come. Only the chance of its coming, likely as it was. We've entered a new phase. We're expectant; the sky has darkened as before the thunderstorm, and the storm will come, but when?

We're watching out for lightning. Listening out to hear the rumble. Show us a sign! But our lives are full of signs. Too full; overfull. Life is burgeoning with death. The night – the bright stars – with the disaster to come.

Will the sun plunge into the sea? It will be as if the sun has fallen into the sea. Will the stars fall from the sky? It will be as if those stars have fallen. W. and I fall asleep with dreams of the apocalypse wrapped around us like blankets.

The apocalypse is coming – yes, that's certain and, because of that certainty, reassuring. Because if it were not? If it were not to come? Upon what could we blame our vague sense of dread? Upon what our sense of purposelessness? Upon what this frittering away of our lives? Upon what our endless chatter? 

We need an excuse; we have one. We need a correlate; we have that too, and it's coming closer by the day. 

Relief. Relief mixed in with disgust, with horror. Relief that that disgust, that horror has a reason to exist. And our impotence in the face of the disaster? The fact that we can do nothing? Relief that our idiocy too has a reason to exist.

Where's it all going? Where's it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.'s in the dark, and it's not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. And as it awakens, something in us awakens. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun?

He knows what I'll be doing when the apocalypse comes. The same as ever, W. says. The usual thing. I'll be in my tub, furiously masturbating. Furiously masturbating!

Just like Diogenes, W. says. Only not like him, for with me there is no point – it's not about mocking the pretensions of others; it's not a call for natural virtue over against the false word of society. It's like a chimp in the zoo, W. says. A chimp with foam on his lips and nothing better to do.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes he thinks a great blow will strike down from the sky. It's preparing itself there, he thinks: some blot of lightning, some storm after which it will all have become clear. He watches from the train window when he commutes to work. It is there, he knows, behind the windowless wall of his office.

The judgement: when will it strike down?, W. wonders. When will it come?

Am I an idiot dreaming he's a genius, W. wonders, or – this is unlikely – a genius dreaming he's an idiot? Because there is something genius-like about my idiocy. It's extent. It's splendour.

I've kept him entertained – I've kept everyone entertained, like some idiot conjurer. How do I keep pulling the scarves of my idiocy out of my hat? How have I managed to humiliate myself over and over again?

It must take some kind of genius, W. has often supposed that. It must be the result of some entirely unforeseen order of ability. But then, too, perhaps it is my idiocy to mistake myself for a genius; perhaps that's it.

My incessant activity. My remorselessness: it's as if I thought there were a great task allotted to me. As if I thought it was duty to humanity to press on. Don't I know that everyone's laughing? Don't I know their eyes are streaming with tears of laughter?

W. knows I think I got one over on the world, that I fleeced everyone. He knows behind my gratitude lies resentment, that my smile is the smile of a con-man, a robber. – 'You think you've got away with something, don't you?', W. says. 'You think they don't know'.

But in fact, I've got away with nothing. The fact that I have a career, that I've been able to publish this and then that, has fooled no one. All I've done is humiliate myself. All I've done is to bring myself down. I thought I could raise myself a little higher – thought that I could lift myself a little above the rest, but what have I done?

Reached a height only to cast myself down a little further. Climbed only in order to fall, and I'm taking him with me. How was W. caught up in this adventure?, he often wonders. How was he implicated in it all? But still there he is, with me, crawling along the parapet, on his hands and knees, thinking he got away with it all …

Absurdly grateful – that's the phrase that sums it up, W. says. Take at my life, the misery of my life – take what little I've achieved, what little chance I had, and what little I've accomplished even despite that lack of opportunity – and still, I'm absurdly grateful.

I'm grateful for my flat, for the squalor in which I live. I'm grateful for the damp that streams down the walls and the rats that crawl over one another in my back yard. And with my solitude, my misery, the fact I speak to no one, the fact that no one speaks to me - it's exactly the same: I'm absurdly grateful.

'You're surprised even to have got this far', W. says, that's what horrifies him. This far – but how far have I got? If anything, I've gone backwards; I've ended up with less than I had before. I've subtracted something from the world. Haven't I taken from W.? Haven't I deprived him of some important part of his capability?

I'll thank them as they kick me in the teeth, W. says. But I'll thank them, too, when they kick W. in the teeth. A friend of mine deserves nothing else, that's how I think of it, isn't it? Down we fall, further and yet further. Down - another step, and down again – W. didn't know there were any more steps – and thanking them all the way …

Of course, you could never write anything down our humour. You could never give an examples. A single example could be fatal! You should portray it abstractly. As a kind of dance – a game. A beachball punted through the air. Punt and counterpunt. No witticisms, no bon mots, but rather a kind of lightening, a way in which the heaviest thoughts can be released into the air.

Nothing is safe – no idea. Or rather, nothing is dangerous, not really, in the eternity of our humour. Eternity – what a word! To think we have something to do with eternity! Our eternal chatter … our eternal puerility … Yes, it sounds good, it sounds grand, but the reality …! We should be ashamed. We should be downcast. Have we really got no further? Every day it's the same. Every day – the same! Laughter over beer. Joy in some beer garden, in some forgotten corner …

That's what I always forget when I write about him, W. says. It's what's always left out: our joy. Were ever two people so joyous? Did laughter come so readily from any other pair of friends?

Laugh – that's what we do. We shake the air. We laugh until we cry, laugh until beer runs from our nostrils. We become giddy and light with laughter; we stagger like drunkards, and it's worse when we're drunk. Worse we attain that mystical plane of drunkenness, when Sal tells us she's sick of us and goes to bed.

Of course I couldn't write down what we say, says W. I shouldn't! Our obscenities. Our smut. How simple our sense of humour is! How base! And yet innocent, too – light. Wordplay, says W., it's all about that. Not wit – anything but that, although W. can be witty – but wordplay, innuendo.

It's a very British form of humour. It's where our Britishness redeems us, W. says. Didn't W. return from his year in France because he missed the humour? Hasn't it dragged him back from every adventure? He could have stayed abroad; could have wandered the great learning places of Europe, but did he? No. He came back. For a long time he kicked himself – why did he come back? Why did he return? But now he's embraced it; he understands what he is and of what he is a part.

Walser understands everything, W.'s often said. He's far out ahead of us – far ahead, like a scout. He's been to the end and come back, W. says. He knows what's out there, as we do not. We could learn everything we need to know from Walser's books, W. says, from a close study of Walser.

Lately, W.'s been returning to Walser, he says. He needed the kind of nourishment only Walser could give him. That's how he thinks of it – as nutritional. As the bite of an apple. As the first taste of Plymouth Gin, served over ice …

Walser! He always keeps a Walser in his man bag. That's what he says: a Walser, as if all his books were equivalent. As if it didn't matter so much what book of his one had, so long it was a Walser. A page of Walser can be enough, W. says. A paragraph – a line. He's inimitable.

It's time, W. says. No: it's after time. It's late. We're living on its lateness. We live a posthumous life.

Perhaps this is already hell, W. muses. Perhaps we already live in hell – is that it? They – the ones we once were – lived out their whole lives somewhere else, on earth – on the real earth. No doubt they committed terrible crimes. No doubt they were guilty of the worst, and we're what's left, serving out their sentence having forgotten everything … Hell, but perhaps it's heaven, for is life really so bad? Not now, not today, on this pleasant afternoon …

But perhaps, W. muses on another occasion, we're souls waiting to be reborn. Perhaps this is a great waiting room, this the time before a dentist's appointment, where nothing very important happens; you leaf through a magazine, you gaze out of the window …

But they've forgotten to call our names, haven't they? They've forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room. We've been left to ourselves, like abandoned children. And our seriousness is only a sham seriousness; our apocalypticism is only a kind of dressing up – and all our reading – the books of our philosophers – is only of the articles in some gossip magazine …

Death is striding towards us. Death is laughing in the morning air. It's so obvious, so clear. Why can't everyone see it: death, laughing, striding towards us?

Death is a strong-armed man. Death is a lumberjack, carrying a great axe. How healthy death is! How robust! But we are weaklings, saplings, too small for the axe. Our necks are too narrow.

No, we'll not feel it, the axe on our neck. Death will be busy with everyone but us.

Are we in love with the disaster? In some sense, we must be. It will give meaning to our lives, to the panic-flight of our lives. It will give meaning to our wailing, our dark prophecies and our dreadful underachievement. We want the disaster, we want nothing more …

The axe is falling. The axe is falling glittering from heaven. It's beautiful; it mesmerises, but still it is an axe; still it is fatal and its blow will destroy us all.

Let it fall on us first, we want to pray. Let us be first in line. But we, no doubt, will be among the last, and the last of the last. What would death want with us? Why would death want to sully its axe?

W. is tortured by the cries of the dead, of our ancestors, he says. We've betrayed them, he says. We've destroyed their memory. After the trust they placed in us – after the faith that generation, succeeding generation, would make good on the great task of human flourishing …

Every setback of the past – every cataclysm – should make us only more dutiful, more heedful of our task. Every horror – the whole slaughterbench of history – should only make us redouble our efforts. And the coming cataclysm? The cataclysm of cataclysms?

We've failed the dead, W. says. We've failed even the ones who failed. Even they're furious. Even they're crying out in the night, the ones who themselves could accomplish nothing.

How they're going to hate us, all of us, the future generations! W. can feel their hatred even now. They're not yet born, they've yet appeared on their scorched and burning earth, but they already hate us …

Some of them, of course, will never appear. It's the conditions of their birth that will have vanished. They're bodiless, soul-less, and above all, existence-less, since they'll never be born on earth.

And that's why their hatred is even greater than that of the ones who will be born. It's why they cry day and night from the heart of their non-existence: W. can hear them. It's his greatest torment.

Ignorance falling into ignorance. Ignorance redoubled, and lost in ignorance: that's what happens when we converse. Oh, how different it should have been!

W. has always been ready to imbibe wisdom – he's listened out; he's gone from thinker to thinker; he's read, of course – he's read whole libraries. And he's even ready to impart it – doesn't he associate more than usually with the young? – isn't he ready with explanation and encouragement?

Above all, however, he's dreamt of a conversation of peers, of a redoubled movement of imbibing and imparting. Hasn't he dreamt of a conversation which, passing from one to the other, would move thought forward?

We're hinderers of thought, W. says. We trip it up, humiliate it. There's thought, flat on the floor. There it is, drunk as we are drunk and throwing up over the side of the bridge …

It's not going well, is it?, says W. It's going badly, I agree. The stars are going out, or they should be … The disaster cannot come quickly for us. We're dependent upon it; we need it to come as a correlate of our sense of the disaster, which is overwhelming.

When we're brought to our knees by the real disaster, it will account for our being brought to our knees by our sense of the disaster. It will legitimate us; at last everyone will understand, although they'll be too busy with their own troubles to think to understand.

But we'll be content, won't we? At last our lives - the whole fiasco of our lives – will have made sense.

We are dead men, the walking dead. Oh God, the burden of disgust, of absolute disgust! We're disgusted with ourselves, we'll tell anyone who asks us. We've become terrible bores, speaking only of our disgust, and our self-disgust.

Exiled and wretched, Solomon Maimon – the ever-neglected Maimon – was said to give accounts of his disgrace for the price of a drink. And ours? Who will listen to the story of our disgrace? We have to buy them drinks, that's the terrible thing, W. says. We have to pay them to listen to us. Even our disgrace is uninteresting.

Is there any sight finer than this?, I say of the Tyne Bridge as it skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roofgardens. The streetlamps, painted the same green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher … 

'You need a project', says W. 'You need something with which you can be occupied'. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He's even deigned to collaborate with me. But I've never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I've never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.

Hadn't W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn't he pictured it in his minds as two larks looping and darting in flight – two larks, wings outstretched, whose flight was interlaced, interwoven, separate and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air … We were never to rest. We'd live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the darkness …

To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall – as two bodies fall, tumbling through space. Thinking be inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we'd fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …

And instead? There is no flight; not mine, not W.'s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion; that my significance for him is as an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It's his fault, he can say, even as he knows nothing would have happened if he were free of me.