When Derrida visited Nice to lecture at the university, he would drive up to Eze-la-village where Blanchot once lived, looking for postcards to send to the old writer.
Of course, that cunt Bono's bought half of Eze-la-village now, I tell W. He owns the old cottages, no doubt including the one in which Blanchot lived, its tiny top room, as the writer remembered, made bigger by two views, one opening onto Corsica, the other out past Cap Ferrat. Bono's probably peeking out that window now, the cunt.
W.'s always been amused by my hatred of Bono. By my hatred of Bono and my hatred of Sting. I should be immune to such things. They shouldn't concern me. The true thinker looks away from his time, W. says. Into the past, perhaps. Into the future. Looking into the past, reading books of the past as he does, W., in order to recover a sense of the future, to prophesise. What does the present matter to him, and the consensual reality that defines the present?
Derrida looked for old postcards, and sent them to his friend. Once or twice a year, he would ring him, too - would hear Blanchot's reassurances when his younger friend asked him about his health. 'I will continue to write to him or to call him, in my heart or in my soul, as they say, as long as I live', Derrida wrote when Blanchot died. Would pick out old postcards from the collector's stall in one of the winding streets of Eze ... The winding streets Bono now owns, I cry out. The collector's stall Bono's bought out!
Of course, Sting used the street on which I live in a film he directed, W. remembers. I hated that. I felt soiled, invaded. Sting - on my street. Sting, who, admittedly, is a Geordie, but had long since moved away from Newcastle, filming on my street ...
What can I see from the room in which I write?, W. says. The expanse of the ocean? The great breadth of the sky? But my tiny room only gives onto my yard, and the horror of my yard. It gives only onto the rats which scuttle across my yard, and the back wall that puts an implacable limit on its view, saying: look no further. Look no further, no, do not look. Concrete, that's all you'll see. The shore of grey, with Sting, that cunt, making a film on the other side of the wall ...