And I walk so quickly! W. says. What am I trying to escape? — ‘Yourself? Well, in that case, you’re doomed’. Once, he and Sal saw me from afar, a pedestrian among pedestrians. They saw me just as a stranger might see me: as a derelict, walking at a furious rate, head down, glowering. What’s wrong with that man? they wondered to each other. What’s his problem? And then they saw it was me, and they know all about my problems.
There’s a fundamental difference in our philosophy of walking, W. says. He is a Jewish walker, for whom every walk is an exodus, a leaving behind of the house of bondage. For the Jew, every walk is a political act, a determined effort to found a new community, to journey together away from the captivity of Egypt.
But I am a Hindu walker, W. says, for whom walking is not political, but only ever cosmological — ‘You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!’
The Hindu walks in circles, W. says, as in the cycle of rebirth, or the turning of the Four Ages. But the Jew has only one direction. The Jewish walker is always walking towards Canaan.
Eid in Rusholme, on the curry mile. Barriers free the street from cars. Families walk out to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Women with hennaed hands. Men in white prayer robes. Children shouting and running. Is this what it will be like after the revolution?
He feels attuned to Indian pathos, W. says. To Indian joy! The chaos! The colours! The smells! And everyone out, walking together. The people joyfully wandering in the streets. He thinks of what he’s read about Ghandi’s Indian revolution. About the Quit India movement. About Non-Cooperation. Didn’t Ghandi bind the Indians into a single, interwoven community? Didn’t he mobilise Hindus and Muslims alike — and the Sikhs, the Jains, taking no heed of old enmities …?
He’s always understood me to be a kind of Bartleby of politics, W. says. I would prefer not to: that’s what my indifference to social questions amounts to. Or, better: Fuck off, I’m eating.
I’m antisocial: that much is clear, W. says. Reclusive. He’s seen the expression on my face during long conference presentations. He’s seen the wild desire for freedom that burns in my eyes. I want to leap over the walls! To bellow! To scream! And doesn’t he want to escape with me, a whelk on the side of a whale? He remembers our great conference break-outs, W. says. To Titisee, from Freiburg University, paddling out onto the lake. To the bar at Five Points, in Nashville, from Vanderbilt University, demanding Plymouth Gin. To the Rendezvous Barbecue, from the University of Memphis, wanting only the finest ribs … Outside! I cried, W. recalls. I want to breathe!, I cried. Air! I bellowed. He loved me in those moments, W. says. Everything that was good and noble in me shined forth.
I find the company of academics intolerable, W. says. Unbearable! And isn’t he the same? Doesn’t he share something of my dread, and my urge to flee? Isn’t he also becoming something of an academic savage?
But there are other kinds of people, W. says, that’s what I have to understand. Other ways of being together. Political friendship: do I have any sense of that? Of what it means to band together against a common enemy? Of what it means to share a commitment, to be part of collective work, free from all personal ambition?
W. reminds me of what Tronti wrote of the early days of operaismo:
We brought together a fine old madhouse. During our meetings, we would spend half our time talking, the rest laughing. For us, the classic political friend/enemy distinction was not just a concept of the enemy, but a theory and practice of the friend as well. At that moment, another world was possible. I’ve never yet met people of higher human worth.
Political joy; political laughter, W. says: can I imagine that?
We stop for Indian snacks. Chevda. Murukku: I know all the names, W. says.
Kierkegaard was a man of the street, W. says. At home, Kierkegaard rarely opened his door to anyone. But on the streets, where he walked every day, his high-shouldered, crablike gait familiar to everyone …
Contemporary accounts have him walking arm in arm will all kinds of people: politicians and actors, poets and philosophers, bakers and fruit-sellers, market porters and bar-women. And didn’t Kierkegaard like to go out on the stagecoach to the country, to feel the sun on his face and speak to the farmers in their fields? Didn’t he stand out in the barns and chat with the herdsmen, and sit out by the road with the stone breakers?
But when a satirical review published caricatures of him, Kierkegaard became a laughing stock to his fellow Copenhageners. Children followed him, shouting out the title of his first book: ‘Either/Or, Either/Or!’ His former walking companions sniggered …
And so Kierkegaard went inside, closing his doors against the world. His inwardness went unchecked. He became paranoid, raving … faith festered inside him. His belief went sour! He was dying of ridicule! Dying of loneliness! Poor Kierkegaard! Poor Seren!, as they called after him in the street. Poor Søren!
And what did they call after me in the street, when I lived in Rusholme? W. asks. What did the children shout after me, as I passed? Ah, but he knows I hid myself from everyone, then as now. I barely left my bedsit, except to go for my evening kebab. To be is to be perceived, Berkeley said. But who perceived me? W. wonders. Only a god or a beast can be alone, according to Aristotle, W. says. Was I god or beast? W. wonders.
Manchester, stranded on a rush-hour bus. We rank our friends in order of their intelligence. Then we rank them in order of their melancholia, and wonder if there’s a correlation. Then we rank them according to their punctuality, cross-referencing our results with our previous findings.
Our brighter friends are always late, we decide, always disorganised. Our brighter friends are also melancholy, which is probably why they can never keep their appointments. How many times have they left us standing, looking at our watches? W. always smiles on such occasions. — ‘There are more important things than meeting us’, he says. ‘Much more important things!’
If anything, I am too punctual, W. says. I’m always there before everyone, anxiously pacing about. What do I think I’m going to miss?
I have a dim sense that something is going to happen — but what? What can I possibly understand of what is going to happen? You can’t replace intelligence with punctuality, W. says.
Our Manchester friends are late, very late. We should pay it no heed, W. says, over our pints in the bar. We should cultivate the art of waiting.
But it’s no good. By the time our friends arrive, fresh from the gym and in their cycling lycra, we are already drunk, and speaking in great apocalyptic gusts. Before long, we’re alone again, having driven our friends away into the night.
‘No one wants to talk to us, have you noticed that?’, W. says. ‘We’re like lepers in the middle ages. Someone might as well be walking in front of us, ringing a bell’.
‘You shouldn’t have told them about the spider people’, W. says. ‘That’s what did it’. The spider people. Our phenotypes are being disrupted, I’d told our Manchester friends. It’s the increase in carcinogens and tertogens, I’d said. The rise in allergens and hormone disrupters.