The fear: nothing is going to happen. Recall Philip K. Dick’s last trilogy and his idea that this is the still the age of the Roman Empire. It is still AD 51. Still the age in which Christians are persecuted. Everything that has happened since is illusion. My fear: there has only ever been the time of Bracknell, that ghastly new town close to where I grew up (Note: a new town is one of the purpose built concrete monstrosities from the 1960s).
There will only ever be the time of Bracknell, spreading to every corner of the world. And everyone will live everyone else’s life, and nothing will have happened. Bracknell: perpetually still eye of the hurricane which is spread across the globe: still centre of that great movement of suburbanisation, the takeover of countryside and village, of city and public space, the spread of the out-of-town retail park and the global firm, for they are all there: Microsoft, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, great frightening names like those of Roman Emperors whom Philip K. Dick says will rule us from now until the end of time.
Recall Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man where your surname is given to you by the corporation for which you work. But even the time of the great corporation is ending, for they are broken up into spin-off companies and subcontractors. Even these companies will be destroyed by the corrosive force of the everyday, the great call to dispersal. Who do you work for? A subsiduary of X, a subcontractor of Y. Who do you work for? I don't know. Who are you? I don't know.
It is not the time of The Roman Empire, but a kind of Dark Ages – a time of the breakup, the dispersal. Only this is the age of Light – a half-bright, evenly dispersed light, which shines upon the workers driving to work and the trains carrying children to school. An invisible light, a light which dissimulates itself so that everything else can appear.
Who is aware of it, this light? Only the part-time worker, the contractor who goes home early at three o’clock or, who, because she has no friends among her colleagues, looks out of the vast windows across to the field out of which a new retail village has begun to appear. Or to the unemployed, only a few of them now, catching the infrequent buses to town. Or to that great army of 50- and 60 year olds laid off too young. But I dream, too, of the crises of company men and women, of those nervous breakdowns and depressions which snatch from the working world. Now they are exposed to the same even light, to the menace of an everyday anonymity which reduces everything to itself. What will they do all day? They take their medication and then ... a vast expanse of hours. It comforts me, the idea that the everyday, like fate, awaits us all. That we will all be reduced to uniformity below the bland white sky.
Picture me at 19, denizen of Bracknell, still hopeful, still capable of hope. Bracknell was spreading. I bought a map of the town and its surroundings, and cycled to every green patch I could find on the map. I passed through golf-courses and school playfields, through obscure parks and plantations of pine trees. I came to the edge of a firing range. What did I discover? There was only Bracknell, and Bracknell was everywhere.
But I was still capable of meeting the indeterminateness of the day with the indeterminateness of my future. I had the bravery of youth, I cycled through the open fields, empty spaces held no fear for me because I did not know yet what I was. The everyday said: you are as strong as I am. And then it said: but I am waiting for you.
More than ten years later, at the end of my contract at one university or another, I found myself in the same spaces, on the same bicycle. I fought the everyday as it rained great blows upon me. I gave myself a task: write the book, and a habit: follow a strict working day. But the everyday was waiting for me when I dropped below the level of my work. When tired, bored or melancholy I felt its laughter inside me. Until its laughter was the form of my pain.
It was then I knew for certain that there is only Bracknell, and Bracknell is the whole world. In the end, Bracknell is everywhere, it makes everywhere nowhere. Utopia: place without place; not this or that place but everyplace. And Bracknell, too, is everywhen. Who now can have a sense of what it was like to live in another age? Think of Guy Debord’s Baroque, which he invokes here and there in his most famous books. By what strength was he capable of punching a hole through our consensus reality? How did he leap out of our time? Futile effort. Besides, what can it mean to us who read him? The Baroque? It is as far away as the moon. Only the moon will become another suburb and so too will the Baroque. Everyplace and everytime: Bracknell is all there is and first of all there was Bracknell.
