We’ll die in our millions, I tell them. In our billions! Africa will have to be abandoned. India. China will become a dustbowl; America, a salt plain. We’ll die slowly, in great agony, as the skies burn red. We’ll sink down by the walls built to exclude us. We’ll die by the laser swords of robot soldiers. We’ll die of starvation and we’ll die of exhaustion. We’ll die of thirst, terrible thirst. We’ll die of new diseases for which there are no names …
And New Shanghai will tower into Arctic skies, I tell our audience. New Washington will gleam like Canary Wharf in northern Alaska …
And our bodies will swell and rot in the blazing heat. Do you know what corpses smell like? I ask our audience. They smell sweet, I tell them. There’s a smell of rotting, yes, but there’s a smell of sweetness, too.
‘Pathos, more pathos!’, W. whispers.
I see the money-makers still profiteering on the cindered husk of the earth, I tell our audience. I see New Beetham Tower in the New Manchester of the Arctic. I see New Old Hulme floating on the ice-free ocean …
I see celebrities on red carpets under hot, black skies, I tell our audience. I see helicopters circling in the burning sky. I see military putsches and crazed dictators. I see Fascism 2.0. I see Fundamentalism Reloaded. I see wars without end.
I see investors leaving earth in a swarm of rockets, I tell our audience. I see the mega-rich in orbit around a burning earth. I see them looking outward, out towards the stars, for new investment opportunities …
‘Are they weeping yet?’, W. asks. They’re not weeping, I tell him. Okay, it’s his turn, W. says.
‘In the dark times, will there still be singing?’, W. asks our audience, quoting Brecht. ‘In the dark times, there will be singing about the dark times’. As with song, so with speech, W. says. ‘The last covenant will be the covenant of speech’, W. tells our audience, obscurely. ‘Speech is our promise’, he says, but no one really understands.
W. repeats to the audience something I’ve told him about my monk years. Every night, before dinner, the monks would bless the garden with incense. Incense would waft through the leaves. It would waft into the night and towards the animals of the night. Towards the city foxes and the barn owls. Towards the slugs and the snails and the rats. Incense would waft to the people of the night: to the prostitutes on the corner, and to the burglars who used the gardens as a run-through. To the junkies looking for their fix, and to the muggers waiting in their alleys.
This is what happens with speech, W. says. Whenever we speak, we speak to others. To the junkies and burglars. To the prostitutes on the corner. We speak to the outcasts, to the widows and the orphans. We speak to the city foxes! To the barn owls! We speak to the slugs and the snails and the rats! We address them, W. says. Our speech redeems them.
Here I am, that’s what Moses said when God called his name, W. tells our audience. Here I am, that’s what each of us says when we speak. Here I am, ready in response to the other, to all the others. Ready in response to God, to what remains of God.
God’s people are prophets: Moses said that, W. tells our audience. Every person is a prophet: Amos said that. We are prophets in speech, W. says. We prophesise by speech. We save the world through our speech. We are messiahs, each of us, because of our capacity to speak.
And what does the messianic epoch mean but speech? W. says. What does it mean but the day of judgement that is announced in speech? Speech belongs to the Moment, W. says. Speech is touched with eternity …
W. reads out a quotation from his notebook:
I don’t believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here … I really do believe in something, and I call it ‘a day will come’. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won’t come, because they’ve already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they’ve always destroyed it. It won’t come and yet I believe in it. For if I can’t believe in it, then I can’t go on writing either.
That’s Ingeborg Bachmann, W. tells our audience. A day will come — the day is coming, every time we speak. Tomorrow, W. says, the police will come and break up our occupation. But there is another tomorrow; another kind of tomorrow. Tomorrow it was May, W. says. And tomorrow it will be May again …
Midnight. — ‘The messianic era is about to begin’, W. says quietly, almost to himself. Then he shouts it out, for all the occupation to hear: ‘The apocalypse is upon us!’ And then, ‘Let’s drink to it!’, he cries, but the college bar’s stopped serving.
12.06 AM. W. catches a taxi back to his house on the other side of the city, to fetch the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. — ‘Drink for his friends!’, he says, unloading a boot full of booze. ‘Drink for everyone!’ It might be his finest hour, W. says.
1.51 AM. Sitting out in the quad, we drink W.’s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We even drink his rare bottle of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven’t made for a number of years, because they can’t find good quality fruit. And we drink one of his treasures: Plymouth Navy Strength Gin in the old bottle, before the redesign: gin at 90 proof, made that strong so as not to be inadvertently ignited by cannon gunpowder. That was the one time he was refused a drink at the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, W. says: when, already drunk, he asked for a Martini made from Navy Strength Gin.
Then, we drink a bottle of Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste, from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It’s really the property of the Plymouth Béla Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink a round of Slivovitz, the famous plum brandy from Eastern Europe — drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says — and then a round of Becherovka, a kind of nutmeg liquor from the Czech Republic. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis — a terrible waste, W. says, since it should be served ice-cold with turbot. But how else is he going to keep us all drunk?
2.13 AM. Alcohol makes people speak, that’s its greatness, W. says. It makes them religious, political, even as it shows them the impossibility of religion and the impossibility of politics. Drinking carries you through despair, W. says. Through it, and out beyond it, if you are prepared to keep drinking right all through the night.
2.52 AM. We have to libate the palm trees! W. tells us. I didn’t know there were palm trees on campus, but W. assures me they exist. And there they are — palm trees in a grove, over which we pour a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.
3.01 AM. The hour of the wolf. We hunt for the legendary Plymouth Pear in the campus woods. We talk of Beckett and Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentina, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers? W. wonders. They were exiles, of course, but drinkers?
W. opens his notebook. ‘The exile is a man of a coming future world …’: that’s Flusser, he says.
‘Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the huge role alcohol played in these people’s lives’: that’s Arhika’s wife in her memoir, W. says. And Gombrowicz, what did Gombrowicz write? W. has nothing of relevance in his notebook.