‘Tell me, tell me where we’re going!’, W. cried. But I would tell him nothing. On the hill summit, late evening, W. found himself prone, and I had a knife to his throat. I was silent. I was about to cut … W. waited for a voice telling me to stop. He waited for God to intervene, telling me to sacrifice something else in W.’s place. But no voice came.
W.’s dream. It must have been because I was talking about Hindu sacrifice the other night, W. says. About the four hundred kinds of sacrifice detailed in the Vedas. About the macrocosm, about cosmogony and anthropogony.
When the priest pours the offering into the fire — milk or ghee, vegetable cakes or the stalks of the soma plant — he is communicating with the divine realm, I told him. The fire itself is divine, I told him. Destruction itself is godly.
W. shudders. That’s why I’m destroying myself, isn’t it? That’s why I’m setting myself on fire. It’s part of some mad Hindu scheme. My life, the disaster of my career, is only a spoonful of ghee for the fire.
But there’s worse, W. says. He’s going to be sacrificed, too. His life, his thought, the disaster of his career will be just another offering for the flames.
Our hosts don’t understand our bickering, W. says. It upsets them. Don’t they see that it’s the only way we can express affection? It’s a British working class thing, W. told them, but they only looked at us blankly.
We’ve become strange, W. says. We’ve spent too much time in each other’s company. Even Sal can’t save us from that. We’re no longer fit for human society, W. says. For Canadian society.
How long will it be before our hosts turn us out onto the streets? W. wonders. We’ve sinned against their hospitality. We’ve desecrated their home. Our bickering (my bickering) … Our hysteria (my hysteria) … Our sense of living in a perpetual emergency (my sense of living in a perpetual emergency).
I’m a disgrace, W. says. My table manners! My habit of continually scratching myself. — ‘And why are you always touching your chest through your shirt?’, he says.
Isn’t it bad enough that our hosts are imprisoned in Nashville? W. says. Haven’t they got enough to deal with? The British working class guest is an unruly guest, W. says. It’s been up to him, W., to maintain a certain standard of behaviour. But I always let him down, don’t I? I always drag him into the mire.
Capitalism is the evil twin of true religion, said W. in our Nashville presentation. Capitalism is a kind of cult, he said. It’s the mysterious force that sustains our lives. And money is the false God we worship.
Schuld: the German word for guilt also means debt, W. explained. Capitalism functions on credit, so we are all guilty.
Consume!, that’s the commandment of capitalism, W. told our audience. It sustains the fantasy that the repayment of debt can be endlessly postponed, he said. Hidden by this fantasy is real material destruction, he said, which makes limitless debt possible in the short term and impossible over the longer term.
When we were asked what we meant by real material destruction, W. pointed to me. — ‘Look at him!’ The audience laughed. ‘No, really, look at him!’, W. said.
W. was going to tell them about the end of the world, he says. He was going to tell them about the real apocalypse. And he was going to tell them about messianism, too — about true religion, which neither the capitalist nor the new atheist will ever understand.
But our audience looked bored, yawning and fidgetting. — ‘Six people’, W. says. ‘Six bored people, looking at their watches. Did we come all this way for that?’
Jake’s Bar, Five Points. W. berates the bartender for the poor range of gin. — ‘Bombay Gin is terrible’, he tells her. ‘Tanqueray isn’t bad, especially with tonic, but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick’.
Her customers like it, she says. W. tells her to introduce them to Plymouth Gin. — ‘Why haven’t you got any Plymouth Gin? You can get it in America’. Our bartender looks annoyed. She’ll get what her customers want, she says. — ‘But how do they know what they want when they haven’t tried Plymouth Gin?’, W. says.
W.’s flying blind in America, he says to me. He is not understood over here. W.’s used to explaining me to people, but not having to explain himself. He’s a force for good—can’t people see that?
Anyway, it’s another sign of the step change in capitalism, when Plymouth Gin is taken to be a gin like any other, W. says. It’s a sign of the end, he says, when you can no longer make real distinctions.
At night, our open-hearted hosts dream of the Yukon, W.’s sure of that. The mountains, the open spaces … the fawnlike gentleness of the Yukonites … the lakes, beside which you can pitch your tepee: I can’t imagine it, W. says. Back home, our hosts probably spent whole summers by the Yukon lakes in their teepees.
Canadians are people of the expanses, W. says. They have expansive souls. They come into their own out of doors, taking great strides in the wilderness. They’re only really themselves when they go horse riding or kayaking, W. says, and when singing close harmonies around the fire at night.
W. speaks of the Canadian summer, of days that go on forever, and of the Canadian autumn, when the aurora borealis flashes out above the frosts. And he speaks of the Canadian winter, when your breath freezes in the air and the absolute clarity of the Milky Way crowns you with stars, pinprick sharp in the frozen sky.
The Canadian is a friend of the bear, and of the wolf, W. explains. The Canadian is a friend of his fellow Canadian by way of his friendship with the bear and the wolf. The wilderness opens between them, Canadians. They safeguard it; they inhale it and they exhale it; it’s the element of their lives, W. says.
It was the element of his life, too, he says, before his family returned from Canada. Ah, his Canadian years! He knows something of teepee life. He knows something of close harmonies sung in the Canadian night. But now, like me, he has trouble imagining himself in a teepee.
W.’s tried to explain England to our hosts. — ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like’, he’s said. He’s spoken of tight corners and narrow corridors, of rats crawling over rats. He’s spoken of class war, and of the triumph of opportunism and cynicism. — ‘Look at us!’, he has cried. ‘Look at him!’, he has said, pointing to me. ‘Can’t you see?’
The circle of my obsessions has become narrower, W. says. That’s the essential change he’s seen over the years.
Once, they encompassed the whole world, my obsessions. I took them for ambition, genuine ambition. I wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, I even took myself for a philosopher.
‘You studied, didn’t you? You read. You even wrote. You — wrote! It’s amazing’, W. says. ‘You wrote and published’.
What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, I’d deluded myself completely, it was quite magnificent. I’d taken myself for a scholar, a man of letters. I wrote learned articles. I spoke with learned people on learned topics …
I thought I was part of something, didn’t I? — I walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges, with my hands behind my back and my chin tilted upwards. My voice resounded beneath the vaulted ceilings. Ambition — that’s what I thought I had, isn’t it?