In the Meantime
We're at the sand dunes - they're supposed to be building something here, but nothing is being built. A cliff of sand, a halted mechanical digger, a wide field of long grass: this is where us children play, the ones who will be the last to know patches of wilderness such as this in the Thames Valley. We bring our bikes here in the long summer, a few of us. And what do we do? Scramble up and down the cliff; start fires in the dry grass. Above all, it is a wilderness, it is not here for any reason; they were planning to build a school here, but did not; soon, it will be transformed into a golf course. But in the meantime?
In the meantime: that is our time. Our friendship includes our relationship to this space and others, that have not been transformed into places of leisure and work. Off by bike to find other such places - patches of land forgotten by others, woods behind houses, the barrows; all gone now, all disappeared. Now are the suburbs as if they had been there forever. The takeover is complete when all signs of a struggle have vanished. For us, at that time - we were eleven or twelve -, passing through a new housing estate was enough. An estate just like ours, but unalike in one detail or another. A lake, say, or a river - that was enough to make it exotic. But best of all, open space. Best of all, open space without function, a space torn from space.
Through the long grass to the pond with tadpoles. Through the grass, with nets and jamjars. Or, travelling further, to the lake under whose rocks leeches are to be found. We press them on our arms - suck! They never suck, but drop off into the water. We put scrap wood down among the trees and turn it over weeks later in search of slow-worms and toads. And there are snails with different coloured shells which we will place on one side of the road to watch them cross, risking being crushed by cars. Then there are the ant's nest between kerbstones, and that day when they swarm, and winged ants crowded the pavement. And the drains, down which we drop stones and mud and whatever we find: drains by which we sit and make up songs. Our wilderness, the gaps in the housing estates.
How is it the labyrinth of roads becomes a prison? How is it that the estates becomes the obstacle to our lives? We buy maps and cycle out to the larger expanses, the ranges the army claims as its own. We wander into plantations and through farmer's fields. What is it we're looking for? Why do we climb the low hills and look into the distance? There is something missing from our lives - what? Something is missing from our lives, but what is it?
We are friends by way of the wilderness. Our friendship is one of movement; we cycle - we search. So do the days of summer pass. One day, another - summer is passing. What will we have done this summer? Of what was it comprised? Day lies down on day. Days accrete, until summer acquires a shape, like a coral reef. That was our summer: we turn the object over in our heads. Yes, that was it, our summer, and our friendship which passed by way of the summer.
Later, when we are older, there are parties. Our days are spent waiting for parties; we count down each day as it comes. Forty-one days ... forty. We play computer games. We cycle to a far town to buy cheap cans of drink. All time is lived in the direction of the party; the days point ahead of themselves like an arrow. We live in the not-yet; the days stand out ahead of ourselves. For what are we searching? When will it come?
But they come, the parties. And then - the post-mortem. Detailed discussion of everything that happened. Analysis. Did it happen, what we were looking for? What happened, even as it seemed to vanish in the crowded details of the event? Our lives were turning. Our schooldays were ending. Was this it - life? Was this all it was? At sixteen, seventeen, our days were full of vast holes. We had time on our hands, all of time! But now time wasn't liberation, but oppression. Time became oppressive. What were we to do? What were we doing with our lives? Was this life? Was this it - life?
Still we were friends by way of the wilderness. But now it was the wilderness of waste, the expanses of waste. The days were closing themselves down; nothing new was beginning. Gradually, it became clear - gradually, it revealed itself: the extent of the day, the day's mediocrity. The fields were lost under houses. Sometimes we would go to the construction sites and break the windows of the new houses. One night we went on a vandal's trip and the security guards shouted at us and we laughed. What could we do? The fields went; the ponds were drained. Now came the companies - Microsoft and Digital Electronics! Now they appeared, the great companies and their workforces. What of our friendship? What of the wilderness by which our friendships lived?
Already they were succumbing to drugs, our friends. Already they were making a wilderness of their evenings, tearing time apart. They were disappearing, our friends - lost in hashish, lost in the smoke-haze. No longer scavanger's trips to the backs of the shops on Sundays to see what we could find. No longer thief's trips to construction sites (rolling home a huge ball of lead). No more vandal's trips to the new houses.
Once, the wilderness was full of promise. Each gap in the world pointed beyond itself: there was the future - there it was in time subtracted from time, just as space was subtracted from space. The wood glade was an indication; the lake pointed beyond itself; the diving beetles prophesised. And now? The future had arrived; we fell out of the world.
And then, one day, I was the last one left. The others had gone away to study, and I was left. Now it came, the apocalypse. Now came the unveiling, whereby I knew the gaps were closed and there was no future. What did I see? The completion of the suburbs, the indefinite expansion of the housing estates: it was over, the world was over. Walls on all sides. Escape - but to where? I worked; I took no holidays. I worked - the day was over; this was the apocalypse.
No need to search, it's all - here. No need to travel; the world was expanding from - here. No escape; apocalypse: everything that was to happen had happened. Time had stopped going forward. It was a circle: time and space, a circle. I lived the same day over and again. And when they returned, my friends, from their holidays, it was only a brief reprise. When they came back, it was only to seize upon those few moments from which the last drop hadn't been squeezed.
We were friends by way of the wilderness. Now, when we visit them, our friends have disappeared from themselves. Haze of smoke; a rented flat - three of friends collapsed, half-dead. Was this it? This was the apocalypse: this was all there was and would be. I worked at Digital Electronics; I worked at Hewlett Packard: there was no more time.
Two Alterities
Time is the other, says Levinas; no surprise that it is to erotic love, to romance that he will first trace the gift of time (even if such love is subordinated by him to the engendering of the son, by which the relation to the infinite is accomplished). Love: is it by that the wilderness might be found again? It is true in those days I did find such love, even as it eluded me - even as it did no more than vouchsafe itself and disappear.
Was that enough to be able to look beyond the world - or at least, receive it, the world, by way of the gaps in its extent, its unbroken horizon? It was nearly enough. Nearly - but didn't it, that love, set itself against the apocalypse of the everyday so as to throw the latter more starkly into relief? Didn't it confirm the closure of the world it opened?
And would I say the same of reading? I know this: that it was not by success that such love as I refer to could be known, but by its failure. Impossibility was its path; the wilderness was revealed to me because of what did not happen. Only by its withdrawal could love be known: this was its pain, but also its promise.
By this love had I been elected - but to what had it returned me but myself? I could say I learnt then of a wilderness inside that was the correlate of an outer wilderness: that the horizon of the world was breached even as my own horizon - the closed space of my identity - was likewise breached. What was awoken outside was awoken inside me too; henceforward I would know that inner falling away by her name, the one I loved. So it became, this name, a magic charm.
And what of reading? I consumed books; I was hungry; I read several a week. Came the day when I could not consume the book I read: Kafka's The Castle held itself from me even as I read it. What was I reading? That by which I knew the meaninglessness of the world, its very extent as promise. This was miracle: an affirmation occurred by way of reading, of the very closedness of the world - or rather, that closedness, the wall of the world, became the blank screen upon which the world was projected, just as, by night, the window reflects the lit room with darkness behind it.
What had I discovered? Something like the nothingness of the world, only I did not suffer from what the world was not. Was it Sartrean freedom I had discovered? Heideggerian authenticity? Rather, it was the fall away from the self - the giving up of those contours which had held me intact and held the world apart from me. Who was I? The 'who' resounded without answer. In those two alterities, which came almost at once, I received the world again. But how long it took to learn the lesson of what I received by love and by reading!
The Ogre's Heart
But perhaps I never learnt a thing. Is it because I'm a certain kind of person that I was attracted to the thinkers I admire? Or is that what I am was made by that encounter; that I cannot subtract myself from what I read? Perhaps this is a false alternative: isn't that I was ready for the encounter and was changed by it, such that I was not myself thereafter? But I was already changed by what I encountered by way of the two alterities. How did I know that Blanchot would become important to me, I who could barely understand a line he wrote? But I understood and that reading laid the path I am following now. That was my life: is it possible to say that? Or is it that to live was to have been dispossessed and to have known friendship by way of dispossession. Wasn't it in the wilderness I was already lost? Wasn't that what I always sought - to lose myself?
The ogre in the fairy tale buries his heart in a chest somewhere far away; the hero, to kill him, must discover its location. What of me is buried in the Thames Valley? What is buried there, such I lag behind myself, snagged so that it is necessary to pass by way of the Thames Valley in order to speak of myself? My heart? Only if the heart is the organ that turns the body inside out. Only if it is by my heart that I am claimed by the two alterities that opened for me, then.