And the seventh seal? When the seventh seal of thought is opened? No one knows what will happen then, W. says. No one can imagine it. Every enemy of thought shall seek death: that’s what has been prophesised. And they shall not find it. Every enemy of thought shall desire to die, and have death flee from them …
There will be disasters, W. says. Great mountains burning with fire will be cast into the sea, and the sea will become as churning blood.
The Leviathan will awaken, W. says. The Behemoth. And the Beast will reign in Babylon, the regenerated city. And the remnant who will survive, the 144,000 who will have the name of the last thinker written on their foreheads, will ready themselves for the last battle, for the war of Armageddon when Babylon is smashed and the Beast is vanquished.
And then a new city will appear in heaven, W. says. A new dispensation. The University of New Jerusalem: that’s what they’ll call it. The university where all are students, and all teachers. The university without courses or curricula, where each learns from the lips of the other. The University of Speech, where one heeds the other and is thereby awoken. The University in Flight, where what matters is to move with thought, to dance and sing with it, and not to remain still. The University of the Periphery, which will be at the edges of everywhere, and wherever you turn.
‘Meet me at the sea!’, W.’s text message reads, when I arrive at Plymouth airport. Over lunch at Platters, W. tells me the joyful news: his postgraduates are planning an occupation! They’re going to take back the college campus!
There are only a few Plymouth postgraduates, W. says. Only a handful. But there were only a handful of Situationists! ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’, W. says, quoting Archimedes. Well, the Plymouth postgraduates are the lever, he says. And his college is the fulcrum. And the world really might be moved …
It’s happening! It’s really happening! W. can’t contain his joy. Of course, we mustn’t interfere, he says. It’s their revolution, not ours. But they’ve asked us to speak, W. says. Well, they’ve asked him to speak. He’s invited me along for some pathos, he says. Revolutions thrive on pathos, he says.
W. quotes Lenin: ‘Revolution is a tough business. You can’t make it wearing white gloves and with clean hands’. — ‘You can’t make revolution in a blousy shirt, either’, W. says. The linen look: is that what I’m going for? Of course, he’s just as bad, W. says. He should have asked Sal to advise him on revolutionary chic.
Ice-creams, by the cannon pointing out at the Hoe. The Citadel, grey and looming at our backs. Light on the waves. Nice weather for a revolution! Did the Communards on the barricades get a good tan? Were there blue skies above the revolutionaries when they stormed the Bastille?
You’re supposed to carry an onion, to stop your eyes smarting from tear gas, W. says. And you’re supposed to wear an extra vest, to stop plastic bullets. And you’re supposed to wear wrist bands and knee protectors like skateboarders, to keep the police dogs off …
But we’re going to turn up just as we are, W. decides. In our finitude. Our vulnerability. They’ll see our blousy shirts, as they’re raising their batons to strike us. They’ll see our podgy bodies and our spectacles. They’ll see the truth!, W. says. And then they’ll swap sides, and join us on the barricades …
A taxi to the campus. The skeleton of the cathedral, hollowed out by Luftwaffe bombs in World War II … The broad boulevards of Abercrombie’s city centre … The parkland surrounding the Plymouth Argyle football grounds … This is the last time we’ll see Plymouth with our old eyes, W. says.
This time tomorrow, we’ll probably be roaring through the city in the back of a police van, W. says. They’ll show us on BBC Southwest, being bundled into cells.
And this time next week? W. wonders. They’ll have locked us up. We’ll be prisoners of conscience. Political prisoners! Bono will dedicate a song to us. Our picture, like Ché’s, will stare out from a thousand posters …
W’s college, at the edge of Dartmoor.
Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Spread blankets, and a portable MP3 player pounding out Jandek’s Modern Dances. This is his kind of political protest, W. says.
W.’s disappointed that none of his sport science students have joined the occupation. He thought he might have been able to turn them. He thought they might have ended up on his side, armed with cricket bats and hockey sticks.
But his philosophy postgraduates are out in force, W. says. The last humanities students of the college! The brave remnant, the sign of righteousness on their foreheads, ready to confront the army of the Antichrist.
But there is no army. Only a lone security guard, sitting on a plastic chair.
Rain. We take refuge in the smokers’ shelter. Where are the police? W. wonders. Where are the university authorities? Even the security guard is putting his thermos flask away, and preparing to leave. W. waves at him, and he waves back. — ‘Come and join the revolution!’, W. shouts. But the security guard is too far away to hear.
Night. A fire in the empty carpark. Empty playing fields. The campus woods. Postgraduates, sitting on the kerb.
‘Since the destruction of the Temple, the divine inspiration has been withdrawn from the Prophets, and given to madmen and children’, W. says to our audience, quoting from the Talmud. ‘And it’s been given to idiots, too’, he says. And then, under his breath: ‘Go, fat boy!’
It will be like Chernobyl, our future, I tell the audience. And they will be like Chernobyl children, our descendants, each with his own deformity, each her own cancer.
That’s how they’ll know one another in future, I tell them: by their cancers. Everyone will have a different kind of cancer. One will have cancer of the spleen, the other cancer of the heart, a third cancer of the ears, and so on. And they’ll die before they’re teenagers, like Chernobyl children. They’ll die with no one to care for them, gasping for air. They’ll die alone and screaming, millions of them, billions of them, as the atmosphere boils away.
‘Go on’, W. says, sotto voce. ‘Tell them about your vision’.
I see them building great cities at the Poles, I tell our audience. The last cities, after the destruction of the other ones, into which no one is allowed but the rich. They’ll build New Mumbai in northern Siberia, when the old one drowns, I tell them. They’ll build New London in northern Scandinavia, when the old one burns, I tell them. They’ll build New Mexico City in the Western Antarctic, when the old one is razed in the coming wars, I tell them.