London Aquarium isn’t a local aquarium, I tell W. It isn’t content to display dogfish and eels. It’s a prestige aquarium, I say, which makes things entirely different. It’s a capital city aquarium …
I soothe him with my chatter, W. says. And the darkness of the aquarium makes him think he’s sinking underground. That he’s lying down and giving up, and rotting in the humus with all the dead of London.
W. has no understanding of Danish pathos, he says. He doesn’t understand the mood of Denmark.
Tungsind: that’s the one Danish word he has to understand, haven’t I told him that? Tungsind: Danish melancholy. Nineteenth century Danish melancholy. Isn’t that what Kierkegaard said he suffered from? Isn’t that what had been passed down to him from his father? And hasn’t it been passed down to all Danes, even though Denmark is supposed to be the happiest country in Europe?
It’s why the Danes are such bad drunks, W. says. Danes show themselves at their worst when they drink. Tolerance, openness and liberal-mindedness go out of the window. Danish happiness is thrown out of the window. Danes become Vikings again, when they drink, W. says. But defeated Vikings, brooding Vikings who have lost all their fire, if not all their anger. The drunk Dane is full of a weary rage, a resentful ire. He knows, W. says: he sees it in me. — ‘You can be so cruel. So vicious’.
Has my stalker followed us to London? — ‘You do still have a stalker, don’t you?’ I do. — ‘He’s still following you about?’ He is. He’s always in the shadows, I tell W. He’ll appear somewhere, when we least expect him. — ‘It’s going to end in a stabbing’, W. says. He’s sure of it. ‘Someone’s going to stab you’.
I bring them on myself, W. says, the nutters and the weirdoes. What draws them to me, my mad men and women? Why am I the one they pick out from the crowd? Because they do pick me out. They follow me, buttonhole me, write incessant emails to me; he knows that. He’s met them; they’re terrifying.
More terrifying still is his role in all this, W. says. Is he a nutter? A weirdo? The worst of nutters, the worst of weirdoes, I tell him, which terrifies him all the more.
The Isle of Dogs. This is where suicides used to wash up, W. says. And this is where they’ll wash up again, at the feet of the steel and glass buildings of Canary Wharf and its neighbours, where the financial services industry has its hub. This is it, the capital of the capital, W. says. We’ve found it: the real centre of London, with its great towers. We’ve found the centre, unashamed of its symbols of power and wealth …
There is a sublimity to Capital, a deathly beauty, we agree. It commands awe, like a starry sky. We could be in Shanghai, we agree. In Dubai …
Capitalism, unashamed of itself. Money, unashamed, coming into the open. A new day has begun. Capitalism is natural and eternal and unabashed …
We’re at the beginning of a new age, W. says. A gleaming age. A steel-and-windows age. And there will come the men and women of the new age, taller than us, with bright eyes and white teeth. Taller, sleeker, with broader skill-sets.
And what will our role be, in the new age? What will happen to us, in the new university? Will we become learning facilitators, taking our students through the Microsoft philosophy package? Will we become virtual guides in the Philosophy-World™ learning environment?
Will we become puppets of Capital, teaching that our Britain is the best possible Britain, that history could only have led to our neoliberal present? Will we teach that all philosophers — even those most opposed to capitalism — are really capitalist philosophers, and that capitalism really is the truth of all things, that it was waiting there all along for us to catch up? Will we teach that all thoughts — even anti-capitalist thoughts — are ultimately thoughts of capitalism, that every idea, in essence, is a capitalist idea?
We’ll be drinking, W. says. Drinking and weeping by the side of the Thames.
These are the people who rule the world, we muse, as we stand among the commuters on the Docklands light railway. These are the eagles with outspread wings, riding the thermals of international capitalism. These are the eagles immune from it all, from the destruction of the world, and from the suicides that wash up against the towers …
W. reads out his favourite passage from Kraznahorkai, with great vehemence:
They have ruined everything they’ve managed to get their hands on. They’ve managed to get their hands on everything, ruined everything — seized it, ruined it, and carried on in this way until they have achieved complete victory, so that it is one long triumphal march of seizing and ruining …
They have ruined everything, W. whispers, looking round at the commuters. They are destroying the world.
Double red lines along the road. Double yellow lines, those we understand, but double red ones? — ‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’, W. says. It must be because of the terrible volume of traffic, we agree. It must be because of the ceaseless procession of cars and vans.
How crowded the city is! How cramped, with its narrow pavements, and dead-eyed Londoners pushing you onto the street. There’s no space to breathe! The dust, the terrible dust! We’re choking! We’re dying here!
W. is panicking. I sing snatches of our song to soothe him: ‘Hey, little W.…’ He sings along, still distraught.
W. has London plague, he says. He needs to leave the capital! We’re men of the provinces, W. says. We’re men of the periphery. But perhaps we might escape London in London, W. says. Perhaps we might escape into London’s periphery.
That’s what the Situationists sought in Paris, W. says. Human freedom, in urban form. A ‘transformed cartography’ — that’s what they called it. Wasn’t that what they looked for in their dérives, their drifts: the utopia hidden in the city?
Debord and the others drifted for weeks around Paris, W. says. They passed through half-demolished houses and dossed down at night in public gardens, looking to escape ‘alienation and reification writ in stone’. They wandered through the caverns and tunnels of the quarries of Paris, and through the catacombs where the sign above the portal read, ‘Stop! This is the empire of death’. And they drank — how they drank! — to break their fetters, to usher in the reign of prodigality and glory: a true metropolitanism.
Some places drew them closer, some repelled them; they sank into some routes like fissures, following the cracks in the urban network. They drained into sinkholes and found havens in the drift, temporary stopping places: certain bars, certain quarters. But above all, they moved, and for months at a time. They moved, and the will to change life as it was moved with them. Life as it was, life as it is: they blazed through Paris like a trail of fire …
To move, to move. But where has our London drifting taken us? W. wonders. He reads the sign. The Trafalgar Tavern. To the pub! Where else? Ah, he shouldn’t have put me in charge of the drift, W. says.
W. is dreaming of the Canadian city, he says, over our pints. He’s dreaming of a different kind of urbanism.