Spurious - Lars Iyer [9]
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