Chouchani lived like a tramp, W. says, unkempt, wandering, staying for a while with those he took as his pupils, before moving on. And you had no choice about Chouchani taking you as his pupil, W. says. He selected you, not you him! He’d bang on your window; he’d demand to be admitted to your home. And there he would stay, night after night. There, demanding nothing but attention to the intellectual matters at hand. Nothing but study, and seriousness in study. And then, just like that — did he think you’d learnt enough? did he suppose you’d reached your limits? — he disappeared. Just like that, he was gone, his room cleared — disappeared. Chouchani was the Mary Poppins of Talmudic studies, W. says.
We can trace Chouchani’s path, W. says. New York. Strasbourg. Jerusalem. And didn’t he die in Montevideo? Isn’t it in Uruguay that his tombstone can be found, and on it, the lines, ‘His birth and his life are bound up in a secret’?
Think of Chouchani’s mastery of the Bible! W. demands. Bring to mind Chouchani’s knowledge of the two Talmuds, the Midrash, the Zohar and the work of Maimonides! W. exhorts. Contemplate his mastery of the latest theories from mathematics, and from physics, and his total knowledge of literature, ancient and contemporary, and his boundless philosophical learning!
And now, W. says, imagine an entire generation of thinkers who rose to these heights! Imagine an entire generation of Essex postgraduates in whom thought was burning as brightly as that!
How harsh he was, Chouchani! W. says. And how harsh they were with one another, the Essex postgraduates! How merciless in debate Chouchani was! W. says. But the Essex postgraduates were merciless, too; they, too, would let nothing pass! How serious the great Talmudist was! W. says. But the Essex postgraduates, too, were serious! Thought, to them, was always a matter of life and death!
Did Chouchani hold a knife to the throat of one of his pupils, who was slow to understand the repercussions of Tossafot’s commentary? W. wonders. Well, a knife was held to his throat in Essex University Student Union Bar, he says, because of some misunderstanding or another on his part, some obtuseness about the B-deduction in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or about the syntheses of time in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Rightly so! W. says. He needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to learn!
And didn’t W. in his turn, hold a knife to the throats of younger Essex postgraduates? W. should hold a knife to my throat, he says. Not because I would be capable of reaching the same intellectual heights as an Essex postgraduate, W. says. But to give me an idea of what it meant to be an Essex postgraduate.
That’s another superstition: that every former Essex postgraduate keeps a knife in the house at all times, blade sharpened. A knife that might be used against them if they become a betrayer of thought, or that they might use on one of thought’s betrayers. I’d better watch it when I visit him, W. says.
Manchester was good to us, W. says, as we wait for our train, back at Piccadilly Station. It was good. We gave our talk, fielded questions, we didn’t get lynched …
Capitalism has triumphed, W. told our audience. Capitalism has conquered the external world, and now it’s going to conquer the internal one, too. The very intimacy of our lives, that’s capitalism’s new frontier, W. said. Our private ideas, our tastes, our moods: that’s what capitalism has set out to conquer now.
In the end, our loves and friendships will become capitalist loves and capitalist friendships, W. told our audience. Our innermost hopes and dreams will become capitalist hopes and capitalist dreams. Our sighs will become capitalist sighs. Our wistfulness, capitalist wistfulness. Even our philosophy, opposed as it is to capitalism in every way, will become capitalist philosophy! W. said. Even our thoughts will become capitalist thoughts!
And our despair? W. wondered aloud. Is that what’s left to us? Is that what remains of the good and the true? Is it in truly experiencing our despair that the path to our salvation lies?
Despair! W. took our audience through the twists and turns of The Sickness Unto Death. Of The Concept of Anxiety. He took them through crucial sections of Marx’s Capital. He conjured up a bearded Kierkegaard for our audience. A melancholy Marx!
And then W. gave me the floor. The room, abuzz with excitement during W.’s half of the presentation, fell silent. And I, too, was silent. The sound of construction from outside. The beep of a reversing vehicle.
Starting slowly, quietly, I began to extemporise on what I called the time of stupor, the time of drifting. I spoke about Tarkovsky’s Stalker, about Tarr’s Damnation. I spoke about untensed time, about time out of phase, about temporal puddles and temporal ox-bow lakes …
I spoke about Manchester as rust-zone, as sleeper. I spoke about the past and the rotting of the past. I spoke of those parts of the city that were cut off from time. I spoke of the unregenerated and the unredeemed. I spoke of the Sabbath, of the interregnum, of the great holy pause …
I spoke of attenuated despair, of grief stretched thin. I spoke of diffuse melancholia, and of the disorders of the vague. I spoke of the fear of the everyday — of cop show repeats on daytime TV, of Columbo and Magnum P.I. I spoke of stale beer and gingerbread men.
I spoke of falling to the level of the everyday. Of letting yourself fall. I spoke of watching the end credits of Neighbours not once, but twice a day. I spoke of what Perec called the infra-ordinary, and Blanchot, the infinite wearing away. I spoke of peripheries without centre, and of suburbs which never reach the city.
I spoke of nightbuses and eternal rain. I spoke of five hundred different kinds of boredom. I spoke of the wisdom of the long-term sick and the unemployed. I spoke of kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.
I spoke of empty hours and empty days. I spoke of wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. I spoke of misty thoughts yet to coalesce. I spoke of hazy skies and clouds of midges.
I spoke of being lost in time, buried in time. I spoke of time piling up like a great snowdrift. I spoke of time as an ache, as a wound, as a sigh. I spoke of space as a prayer, as a plea, as a poem.
I spoke of the nihilism of Joy Division. Of music which came from the other side of death. I spoke of rigor mortis and lockjaw. I spoke of the dancing chicken of Herzog’s Stroszek.
I spoke of the anti-gravity of dub. I spoke of the Rastafarians of Old Hulme. I spoke of polytricks and the Babylon shitstem. I spoke of the exodus and of repatrination. I quoted Prince Far-I: ‘We moving outta Babylon/ One destination, ina Ithiopia … Ithiopia, the tyrants are falling/ Ithiopia, Britain the great is falling …’