by Lars Iyer
It’s our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel an enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There’s nothing better than visiting a city at the periphery, W. says, just as there’s nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).
And there is our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essentially peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have been completely left alone. No one watches out for us, but on the other hand, no one has really noticed us, so we can get up to whatever we like. We are blips on no one’s radar. Our fates matter to no one, and perhaps not even to ourselves. That’s one thing that marks us very strongly, we agree: indifference to our own fates.
For haven’t we noticed that the world is shit? Isn’t it the most obvious thing that it’s all going to shit? You can’t struggle against it. You can’t do anything at all. Those at the centre don’t realise it. They haven’t grasped their essential powerlessness. Only we have grasped it, we who live at the periphery of our own interests, no longer advancing our own cause.
For what would that be: our own cause? What could we want in a world of shit? First of all, distrust yourself, burrow down. Destroy all vestiges of hope, of the desire for salvation. Because it will not come good. It’s leading nowhere. Nothing means anything. The centre does not matter. There’s suffering everywhere—agreed. There’s suffering and horror everywhere—on that we’re agreed. But the first step must be to peripherise ourselves, and to peripherise ourselves with respect to ourselves.
W.’s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows, like ghosts, but now developers have moved in.
This part of the city was once very wealthy, he says. His house was once owned by a ship’s captain, he says—imagine it! We stand back and admire its storeys.
The railway to London used to run through here, he tells me a little later. Passengers would disembark from their cruise liners onto the train, and go straight up to London. The houses are still grand, W. says, although most of them have been turned into flats now. They’re full of alcoholics and drug addicts, he says. No one wants to live round here.
Children bang on the window as we sit inside and drink.—‘Ignore them’, says W., ‘don’t pay them any attention’. He’s not frightened of them, he says later as he closes the shutters.—‘They’re lost’, he says, ‘you can see it in their eyes’.
Their grandparents would have moved down from Scotland, like everyone around here, W. explains. Thousands of them came down to the dockyards a couple of generations ago, but there’s no work for them now, nothing. So what do they do but drink all day?
He’d drink all day, says W., if he had nothing to do. Sometimes they punch him or throw ashtrays at Sal, but that’s alright. He’d be exactly the same, says W.
Sand beneath an exposed cobblestone. Under the paving stones, the beach, I say to W., who’s showing me old Plymouth. Not much of the old city survives, W. comments. We pass through a walled medieval garden, with a low maze and a fountain. Alcoholics drink beneath a portico, listening to a radio. There’s no one to move them on, W. says. He approves of that.
These are the end times, we both agree. It’s enough to be left alone like the alcoholics, but our time will come just as their time will come. We’ll be rounded up and shot, W. says. It’s only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out. They haven’t really noticed us yet, that’s what saves us. But when they do …!
The clock is ticking, we agree.—‘This is not our time’, W. says as we walk through the newly converted Victualling Yard. Who lives in these flats?, we wonder as we pass through the wide boulevards. Who can afford them?
What are the signs of the End?, I ask W.—‘You. You are a sign of the End’, says W. ‘Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won’t have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer’.
There’s something sick about us, W. says, something depraved. Only it’s not just about us, says W., but about the whole world. We’re seismographic, W. says. We register the great horrors of the world in our guts. That’s why I’m always about to soil myself, W. says. It’s why I have a continual nosebleed and always feel ill.
Many illnesses have coursed through W.’s body. Colds, of course. Myriad flus. Pneumonia, once. Gastroenteritis, twice. We’re weak, he says, we’re the runts of the litter. Something has come to an end with us. We’re the end of the line in some important way.
It all finishes here, W. says, pointing at his body and then pointing at mine. Especially here, says W., pointing his finger at my belly.
My obesity always impresses him, W. says. My greed. The way I eat, the amount I eat. He’d call me a carnal man, W. says, but that sounds too grand.—‘You’re just full of greed’. He wonders what would I be like if I didn’t go to the gym?, It’s all channelled into my enormous thighs, W. says. They’re grotesque.—‘You’re out of proportion!’ And my great fat arms, W. says.
For his part, W. takes no exercise. He hasn’t felt well for many years—eleven or twelve, he’s not sure how many. There was a time when he’d go for great walks on the moor, he remembers. He had a walking friend, of course. You can’t go walking on your own, that would just lead to enormous melancholy, he says. In fact, that’s what I always say, isn’t it: that going out walking on my own would lead to enormous melancholy?
W. is no stranger to melancholy, he says. He’s essentially agoraphobic. He’s only really happy holed up in his room, working. He’d prefer never to leave his house, says W. Or indeed his study. He’d like to become a recluse like Howard Hughes, he says, with jars of toenails and bottles of urine. It’s only the love of a good woman which saves him from that.
Now and again, he thinks he should walk to work, or cycle. But it’s too far, and all uphill. It would only depress him, W. says. In the end, he’s not cut out for exercise. He’ll lead a short life, says W., as will I. A short, unfulfilled life, which will come to nothing.—‘What’s it all been for?’, W. asks. ‘Nothing!’, he says. ‘Not a thing!’
How much time do we have left?—‘Not long’, W. says. ‘We’re not the sort who live long lives. Look at us!’ He hasn’t felt himself for twenty years, says W., and I’ve long since run to a fat and bleary-eyed alcoholism. But I am more of a whiner than he is, W. says. There’s always something wrong with me, isn’t there? One day it’s a nosebleed, the next nausea, the next some indeterminate fever … And my stomach, whatever is wrong with my stomach?
W. never used to believe me about my stomach. He thought I was a hypochondriac. But once he saw my face turn green—green!—he understood. You looked appalling, he said. Everyone was horrified, everyone at the table. And then, for a terrible morning when he was visiting me, W. himself was taken ill.—‘It’s my stomach! My God!’, he cried. He decided it was my lifestyle. All that drinking! All that eating! One night, he saw me pass out from gluttony. I ate like a maniac, he said, plate after plate. And then my head fell back … he was worried, but then he heard me snoring.
‘How can you live like this?’, said W. exasperated beyond belief. ‘How?’ I’ve always maintained that this is my five year hole. Everyone should be allowed one of those. Deleuze had one, didn’t he? A five year hole, that’s what he called it, in which he wrote nothing?—‘But Deleuze was working’, says W., ‘and you don’t do any work, do you? What happened to you? How did you get like this? Why don’t you read anymore? Why don’t you write?’
W. finds the collapse of his protégé quite fascinating.—‘When did it all start going wrong? When did you first become aware of it?’ There’s something spectacular about my decline, W. decides. Something Faustia
n.—‘What kind of bargain did you make with the devil back then? How did you appear so intelligent?’ And then: ‘Well, he’s carried your soul off now, hasn’t he?’
Then, in a spirit of diagnosis: ‘Describe your work day to me. What do you do?’ I tell him I get up very early.—‘How early?’ Never later than six thirty, I tell him.—‘I get up at five!’, W. says, ‘Earlier sometimes!’—Then I do two hours of work, I tell him.—‘What kind of work? What does it involve?’ I read …—‘What kind of reading? In the original language? Primary, rather than secondary?’ I write …—‘Ah, that’s your problem. You try to write too soon. You have to slow down. Read more slowly. That’s why I read things in the original’. Then I go to the office to do my administering, I tell W.—‘Ah, your administration’, says W., ‘that’s what stops you from writing your magnum opus, isn’t it?’
A little later, in the taxi home: ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ Nothing, I tell him. I have no plans.—‘You should do a book’, says W., ‘if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces’.
‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk.—‘All set?’ We’re all set. Despite his general inactivity, W. is a great advocate of walking: it’s what we’re made for, he says, and speaks of the long walks he used to take on the weekend.
We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle. But why is that?, we muse. Why are we content?’—‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ No, I tell him.—‘Well neither am I’.
We head up into the grounds, the great sweep of lawn running up to the mansion on our right, opening up a great landscape, planned and planted two hundred years ago.—‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, says W. Then, on our left, a beach of pebbles, the sea, and, across the Sound, the distant city, with blue-grey naval ships going to and fro.
‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out over the water. There’s a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: ‘We should go on a trip, one day. We should go to Spain’. And then: ‘We’re not going to go anywhere, are we? We’re men of habit. Simple beings’. And then, ‘Everything’s got to be the same. That’s our strength’.
The last Duke of Edgcumbe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and put the whole estate up for sale. The city bought it. It’s a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up through the woods.
It was here the Dukes and their guests would drive about in their carriages in the twilight, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There’s even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, looking very unconvincing in the autumn sun.
A landslide has taken the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing aslant, though most have fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It’s slow going—very overgrown—and where the cliff has completely collapsed, we have to scramble across scree.
What would happen if we fell? It’s a long way down. But W. and I never think about our deaths or anything like that. That would be pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that. We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.
As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W.—‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy’. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.
W. is growing his hair, he says.—‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. It’s the age of Aquarius.—‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side.
‘The sea makes me happy’, W. says, ‘does it make you happy?’ It does. We stand before the whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcumbe, the far off seabreak with the lighthouse at one end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the farther lighthouse that can be seen standing blue ten miles out against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, shimmeringly blue under the very blue sky: here we are again!
To think it will all end so soon! To think we’re on the edge of the greatest catastrophe! The oceans will boil, the sky will burn away into space. And won’t we be the first to be swept away? Won’t we be the first to go under?
The apocalypse is close, we know that. The apocalypse is coming, of that we are certain …
As we walk towards the lido, W. tells me about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says, to form a great defensive wall. Their bronze-tipped spears would poke out of the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W.—‘Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this’, he says. ‘You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx’, says W. ‘You’d be the first to break it’.
W.’s great fantasy, and he must admit, he says, that it is a fantasy, is of forming a community of writers and thinkers, linked by mutual friendship. Together we’ll be capable of more than we might do on our own. That’s what he’s always hoped, says W. It’s what he’s always dreamt of.
Above all, we have to avoid the traps of careerism, says W. Loyalty and trust, that’s what matters: we have to be prepared to die for one another.—‘Literally that: to die for one another’, W. says. ‘It’s all about the phalanx’, W. says. ‘The phalanx you would immediately betray’.
That’s the ultimate paradox, W. observes: that one with such faith in friendship should end up with such a friend. Would I die for him? No. Would I immediately betray him, given any opportunity? Yes. In fact, I’ve already done so several times.
Where did it all go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same answer: me. It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.
‘When did you know you were a failure?’, W. repeatedly asks me. ‘When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one’?
He asks me these questions, W. says, because he’s constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He’s not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.
What amazes him still further, says W., is that I am almost entirely lacking in the same amazement. I’m like the idiot double of an idiot, W. says, being of the same intelligence (or nearly the same intelligence; I am a few IQ points behind him), of the same degree of laziness (or nearly the same laziness; I am more indolent than he is), but entirely lacking an awareness of what I so signally lack.
Every year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. It amuses W., who knows I will never escape and nor will he. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like everybody else’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism. And what was it last year? It was music, wasn’t it? I was going to become a great scholar of music.
But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music?—‘Nothing at all’, says W., ‘about either subject’. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music?—‘None at all!’, says W. ‘Not one bit!’
There’s no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I’m stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?
W. has been lost in bureaucracy, he says on
the phone. He tells me about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been.—‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When W. was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, he says.
In W.’s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it’s the key to great thoughts, he says, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that.
Still, he’s disappointed that not one thought has come to him, not one, especially as it would pertain to the great crises that have gripped the world. He always thinks one might. It worked for Kafka, didn’t it? And what about Blanchot? But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.
We’re off on another trip.—‘How many shirts are you taking?’, asks W. on the phone. Four, I tell him. Four! He says he’ll only take two. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says.—‘You sweat a lot, don’t you, fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking?’ Four, I tell him.—‘Four pairs of pants’, W. muses. He’ll take four as well, he decides, and four pairs of socks.—‘How many pairs of trousers will you take?’, asks W. One, I tell him.—‘One!’, W. says, ‘after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing?’ W.’s going to take two pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.
On the train to Dundee. ‘What are you doing?’, says W. I’m playing Doom on my mobile phone.—‘I haven’t seen you open a book for days’, W. says. Later, I take some gossip magazines out of my bag.—‘Why do you read them?’, says W. ‘Didn’t you bring a book?’ W.’s reading The Star of Redemption again.—‘A proper book!’, he says. ‘I don’t understand it, though’. He shows me unmarked pages. Pages without any annotations, he says, except for question marks, meaning he doesn’t understand, and exclamation marks, meaning he’s totally lost.
