Spurious

Protestant Guilt

If there's one thing he's learned from me, W. says, it's not to work in the evenings. Two hours of work - real work - is enough, W. says, and that's what I taught him. Of course, I never even manage that, W. observes. Two hours - when I have ever worked for two hours? When have I ever worked at all? But he admires my resolution never to work in the evenings and never to work at weekends.

W. would like to be a layabout, he says. He'd liked to do nothing at all, not even work. But he thinks of little else but work, he says, and when he's not working, he feels a terrible urge to work and a guilt about not working. It's Protestant guilt, W. says. We all feel it, W. thinks, even him, who is a Catholic from a Jewish background. It's everywhere, says W.

He knows my views on the topic. He knows I think it should all stop and right now, he says. But haven't I fallen into the administrative trap? Aren't I in the office dawn until dusk, administrating? W. had thought I'd be the one to break from work. He thought I'd give it all up and go somewhere else.

This country, says W., is terrible. He tells everyone he meets to leave. Leave immediately, he says. Of course, when he left, he only came back, W. says. His time in Strasbourg, that great, peaceful city, taught him only that he was British, and couldn't live anywhere else. There's something wrong with him, he says. And with me, he sees it too. We're British - and worse, he says, English, and though we despite England and everything it stands for, we're stuck here.

Despite everything, though, W. still dreams of Canada: that's his escape route, he says, his line of flight. It's Canada that would teach him to work less. Canada with its great lakes and great forests. The sheer expanse of Canada soothes him, W. says. The fact of Canada. It's not like England with everyone swarming around, W. says. The Yukon: if only he could there, W. says. He'd be a gentler person, W. says, a kinder one. His soul would expand like the open expanses of Canada,, W. says.

Runts of the Litter

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 you're always about to soil yourself, says W. It's why you have a continual nosebleed and always feel sick.

Many illnesses have passed through W.'s body. We're weak, he says, 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 to my stomach.

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. What would I be like if I didn't go to the gym?, W. wonders. It's all channelled into my enormous thighs, W. says. They're grotesque, he says. You're out of proportion. And my great fat arms.

For his part, W. takes no exercise. He hasn't felt well for many years - eleven or twelve. 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. That's what I always say, isn't it: that going out walking on my own would lead to enormous melancholy?

W. also feels it. He's essential agrophobic, W. says. He's only really happy holed up in his room, working. He'd prefer never to leave his house, says W. Or indeed his office. He'd like to hole himself up like Howard Hughes, he says, with bottles of toenails and 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 it all been for?, W. asks. Nothing, he says. We're runts of the litter, W. says.

Drinking

No one should drink as quickly as I do, says W., no one. Or as much. You drink too much, W exclaims. Of course, W. remembers when I barely drank at all. I wasn't a drinker then, W. says. I lived with monks at the time, which explains a great deal. What happened?, says W. What changed for you? I know: it was finding friends. You didn't have any friends before, did you? All you had were potatoes, your potato friends.

W. remembers coming to stay with me, and being made potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Potatoes were your mainstay, said W. I tried to convert him to my potato diet, W. remembers, and he agreed, I did have quite a way with potatoes, I cooked them in interesting ways, but in the end he thought I was insane. No one can live entirely on potatoes, W. says. Not even you.

In those days, W. remembers, the only friends I had were potato friends. Didn't I draw faces on them, and animate them like some idiot child? That's what W. imagined. You and your potatoes, W. says. Your only friends.

It all changed when you actually found some friends. You left your potatoes behind, W. said. You went out into the world. My God, the amount you used to drink! And the way you drank! So quick! So remorselessly!

For his part, W. is a steady drinker - a heavy drinker, but a steady one. He paces himself - he learnt it from Polish drinkers, who begin slowly and continue slowly, but drink through the whole night. Visiting Poland taught W. a great lesson about drinking.

There comes a stage in your life when you have to drink, W. says. There's nothing for it. The world is shit, life's shit, and if you thought for a moment, really thought, you'd kill yourself. W. went through a period of drinking everyday, he says, just as I went through one. He had to, he says, it had all become too much for him. He learned it from me, he says, drinking through your despair.

He was a melancholy drunk, W. says, lying in front of the TV with a bottle of wine. I, on the other hand, was an exhilarated drunk, writing rubbish on the internet all night, when I wasn't out in the pubs. Of course, W. never knows when to stop drinking. He never stops until he passes out, he says. Imagine it: passed out, in front of the TV. That's why he cut down his drinking, W. says.

I ruined my digestive system, W. remembers, that's why I stopped drinking so much. I was continually on the verge of soiling myself, it was disgusting, says W. When he came to stay and followed my drinking regime, it was exactly the same: he was on the verge of soiling himself. He had a glimpse of the horror of my life, which was completely different to the horror of his life. Your digestion!, he remembers. What did you do to yourself? No one should have lived as I did, says W. He's amazed I survived.

(Patrick Keiller, director of the great London and Robinson in Space suggests that the mysterious Robinson - named after a character in Kafka's Amerika, finds his utopia in my city. This doesn't surprise me. But then again, as he also says, Robinson is currently in prison, 'having been picked up in late 1996 by MoD police wandering lost on moorland near the former Spadeadam rocket base, suffering from apparent memory loss'.

Keiller says he is planning a third Robinson film. And note (for a future post): 'The Situationists saw their explorations at least partly as preliminary to the production of some kind of new space, but in 1990s London, they seemed to have become an end in themselves, so that 'psychogeography' led, not to avant-garde architecture, such as Constant's 'New Babylon', but to, say, the 'Time Out Book of London Walks' (via).)

The youth who attacked the orphanage at Auteuil as a symbolic force of control were rioting out of boredom rather than material privation, asserting their refusal to be assimilated into a pre-ordinained economic order. By throwing a brick, spitting in the face of authority, committing a crime, getting hopelessly drunk, drifting pointlessly between bars, they were able to short-circuit the 'circuit of exchange' which controlled their lives. 'Let youth cease to serve as a commodity', preached Isou. The new proletariat, above all, Isou said, must be able to accept nothing as given and deny all social forms of order. They were outsiders who were determined to stay on the outside.

Hussey on Debord

Sobbing in the Ruins

Whatever happened to W.'s publisher? Once the most generous and gregarious of men, he insisted upon travelling hundreds of miles to visit W. and take him out to dinner. They spent days going over the proofs, which were properly proofread (not like yours, W. says, which was farmed out to Malaysia). And he'd decided on a full colour cover to the paperback - an expensive undertaking, W. notes. Granted, the final version still had typos on the first page (to my amusement) and even in the blurbs on the back (which I found even funnier), but it was a handsome volume, and one of a series of handsome volumes.

But what's happened to the publisher? He's gone out of business, that much is clear. You can't get the books anywhere, which always amused W. As soon as it was in print, it was out of print, he said. It was always and already out of print, he said, which was fitting, he said. Luckily, he got a box of free copies, says W., which he sent to his friends. Were it not for that, no one would believe it had existed, W. says.

To W., it's completely inconsequential whether the book is in print or not. You should always publish with friends, he says, and the publisher was a friend. But where is he? He doesn't reply to emails or telephone calls, W. says. Doubtless there's no longer a computer in his office, nor a telephone, he says. Doubtless the office has long been stripped and demolished, he says, and he's sitting sobbing in the ruins, W. says.

You should always publish with friends, W. notes, and that's all he wants from his vanished publisher: a sign of friendship, of their shared failure. That's all he would want from any of his friends, who are all failures, whether they know it or not.

The Bath Test

If it can't be explained to Sal in the bath, then it's not a genuine thought, says W. That's his test: the bath, Sunday night, he tries to explain his thoughts to Sal. She's merciless, says W. She demands that everything be absolutely clear, he says. She doesn't tolerate vagueness or prevarication. She wants to understand, and if she doesn't, it's invariably my fault, W. says. 

Do you remember what she called us when she heard us speak? Vague and boring, says W. You were vague, and I was boring. Or was it te other way round? Either way, She's more intelligent than us, W. says. And she can actually do things, make things, he says. She's more to give to the world than we do.

In fact, all of his friends prefer Sal to him, W. says. Whenever they visit, their first question is always, Where's Sal? They're always disappointed when it's just him, W. says. In fact, even he's disappointed, says W. What is he without Sal? How would he think or write anything if it were not for their weekly bath?

I've spent whole summers at Neauphle alone except for drink. People used to come at weekends. But during the week I was alone in that huge house, and that was how alcohol took on its full significance. It lends resonance to loneliness, and ends up making you prefer it to everything else.

[...] Alcohol, even those in the gutter, tend to be intellectuals. The proletariat, a class far more intellectual now than the bourgeoisie, has a propensity for for alcohol, as can be seen all over the world. [...] Just look at the history of ideas. Alcohol makes people talk. It's spirituality carried to the point where logic becomes lunacy; it's reason going mad trying to understand why this kind of society, this Reign of Injustice, exists. And it always ends in despair.

[...] What they lack is a god. The void you discover one day in your teens - nothing can ever undo that discovery. But alcohol was invented to help us bear the void in the universe - the motion of planets, their imperturbable wheeling through space, their silent indifference to the place of our pain.

A man who drinks is interplanetary. He moves through interstellar space. It's from there he looks down. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn't comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting, can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. Alcohol's job is to replace creation.

Duras, Practicalities

... I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new.

[...] This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a void. [...] they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most ... They create a void, and all this ... this recourse to drugs, I think is a ... it's not an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them - it's much too early for that.

[...] even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force. [...] they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now? [...] by definition they are outside of the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. [...] it's not a rejection; it's a waiting period. Like someone taking his time. Before committing himself to act.

[...] There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word 'void' is going too far ... the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself ...

[she goes on to give the example of the Cultural Revolution ('a great mystico-communist experiment') as striving for exactly this 'zero point'.]

Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence ... Do you see?

[...] I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution.

Duras, interviewed in 1969 in Cahiers du cinema

Hope

Our friend has died, the friend who was better than us in every respect. A better, kinder person, a better thinker. He liked to have us around so he could hear our laughter, he told us. You're always laughing, he said. He laughed, too. He was unlike every other academic: he was a human being, fully rounded, he'd lived in the world; he'd seen a great deal.

Hadn't a friend died in his arms? That was in the middle of a war, in Africa. He was a monk at that time, and his friend a brother-monk. Why did he join the Christian Brothers? Why did he leave them? We were never sure, but he fell into our orbit at one time or another and it was as if he was always there. Didn't he fit right into our world? Or was it that his world, full of laughter, full of a serious awareness of the pain and misery in the world, was encompassing enough to include ours?

He was a better person than us, that much was plain. From him, W. learned how to take notes at presentations: in black ink from the front for undeveloped thoughts, and in red ink from the back for developed ones. W. proudly shows me his notebook, saying that he'd done exactly what our friend said.

He died too young, much too young. He left a wife, a baby. A baby! Only a few months before he'd emailed us to tell us of the birth. He was overjoyed. A few months before that, we were sat in his kitchen, his friends - colleagues, colleague-friends - all around him. We ate Indian food - remember that? We talked about ... what was it we talked about?

He was better than us, he worked hard, he was about to publish what would have undoubtedly been a very fine book. He was taking great strides in the world; he wasn't like us, withered and depressed, for all our laughter. He despaired, but his was an exhilarated despair; he lifted all of us like a wave. Didn't he have a capacity for hope that we signally lacked? And did we ever thank him for it, the capacity for hope in these dark times?