Author: Lars Iyer

Words of the Earth. It speaks, but says nothing. It speaks, but speaks silence, heavy silence.


Errant words, cast out of themselves. Indistinctly murmured. Reverberating with the earth. With the darkness. With the void.


Failing to begin. Passing into another time, where there are no tasks, no projects. Where time is lost. Where time is absent.


Fascination. Solitude. Alone, not with oneself.


The limitless. The remote. A place where no one can rest.


Nocturnal space. Where nothing can abide.


Night’s deep apparitions. The dark is not dark enough. The dead not dead enough. We can’t cease to see it. The incessant, that makes itself seen.


The phantom night. The unwelcoming night. The night that wants nothing to do with us. The night that does not welcome, does not open. Baseless. Without depth.

Unattainment. We’ve always known it. Always wrestling with it. Always close to it. Even when we were writing our dissertations. When we sit in our offices in the summer, trying to work.

Inachievement. That we know only in our idiocy. That we experience only in our stupidity. By what we’ve missed. What we’ve failed to achieve. By the rejection emails we received. By the contracts that were not renewed. By our general fuckedupness. By our usual fucking up.


No one ever thought we were brilliant. No one ever took us for prodigies. Nothing very much was expected of us. We were here today gone tomorrows. Vanishers. Ephemera. Always on the brink of disappearance. Mayflies.


No one even thought we’d complete our PhDs. Would ever finish out dissertations. They thought we’d drop out. We thought we’d drop out. Or fail. Or be referred.


And did we ever expect full time academic jobs? Of course not. Did we ever expect a career? No. Did we ever think things would move forward for us? Of course not. We didn’t believe in ourselves – let alone anyone else.

Everything has disappeared. But this everything has disappeared appears. Everything disappeared, but there’s still something. Something hidden, something never taken account of, something unmeasurable, unaccountable. That appears on no one’s books.


Eternal nothingness. But eternity as eternal repetition, eternal lapping on the same shore.


The void, nothing but the void, but there’s not even a void, just as there’s not even nothingness. Nothing bothers to be. Nothing that leaves the element. Nothing that crawls up the shore. Nothing that tries to breathe the air.

Everything’s larval, submerged. It all stays under the water. It all gasps, under the water.


Not even a prayer. Not even a plea. Not even a desire. That’s too grand a word, desire.


Blind pressure. Weight of the weightless. Crushed, but without anything crushing you.


How we disappoint everyone. How we disappoint ourselves. How we fuck up.


Formless. Prolix. Spreading. In a kind of contagion. An invasion. A great slackening. An untying. A loosening. Of moment from moment. Of minute from minute. Of hour from hour. Of day from day. Of night from the other night.


Abandoned to what we are. To what we aren’t. Given to it – given over to it. But to what? To nothing.

At the mercy of what? Subject to what? Dependent on what? Inspired by what?


Foundering. Sinking into ourselves – but into what? Into ourselves become what?

Ourselves become swamp, become mire, become no man’s land. Ourselves become wasteland, become edgeland, become nowhere, become terrain vague.


And distance in our hearts. And absence in our hearts. And errancy in our hearts.

Truancy. A true truancy. A scattering. They’re scattering our ashes. Dispersal …


We’re unreal. Impossible. Each of us a kind of fog. Each of us a cloud of vagueness.


Behind the world. Is that where we are? Beneath it. In a lower dimension, where things come undone. Where what we say is slurred. A dub dimension, the usual world in dub, in vagueness, in echo.


This is truth. The truth of error. Errancy.

Wandering without respite.

Removal. Evacuation. Astray in ourselves. Our own ghosts.


Echoes. Rumours.

Life without life. Death without death. Always elsewhere, never here. Never coinciding with ourselves.

Obscure abundance. Here collapsed into nowhere, and all that. Disappearance. The end unending, never reaching the end, never finding finality.


Who are we supposed to be? Whose disguise is this? Whose alibi are our lives? Whose lie are we telling? Who are we, and who aren’t we?


Outside ourselves. Expelled from ourselves. Held outside ourselves. Our own usurpers. Our own stand ins. Our own stunt doubles. Our own extras. Failing to convince. Doing bad impressions of ourselves. Pretending – but badly.

We’re pod people. We’ve been bodysnatched. Possessed. This is not us speaking. But who is that is speaking?


The persistence of what cannot finish. The anterior. The posterior.


The inordinate. The measureless.

A place that is nothing but interval. But interstice. That is nowhere yet.


A time that is interval. Where nothing has happened, where all is yet to happen.

A waiting – but for nothing other than waiting. Waiting become intransitive. Without object. The abyss.


Here collapsed into nowhere. Nowhere that is also here.


Death happening and never stopping happening. Infinite dying. The shadow of a moment.


No one yet. Not quite anyone. No one any longer. But Someone. Impersonal. Never anyone in particular. Not you and not I.


An assembling that is a dispersal. A summoning that is a letting go.


The formless presence of absence. An opaque, empty opening. No more world. No world yet. Not anything: earth. The elemental deep.

Roaming, dazed. Unable to formulate a single thought. Marajuaned. Mary-janed. Stoned, but on everything, on life. Stoned on it all. Microdosing on everything.


Lives as living ruins. Where nothing was expected of you. Where you didn’t have to amount to anything. Where you could get away with it: a life on the dole.

And there were others, like you, getting away with it. Where there was a whole subsociety of those getting away with it, doing nothing in particular. Enjoying themselves dazedly. Late-morningly.

Getting up late. Sleeping until the afternoon. Barely seeing daylight. Living for what? Living, just living, without plan, without forethought.


No, we’re not alive! That denial. We were never alive. We never opened our eyes. We never came into the world. We were never born …

Ruined, from the first. Demolished, from the get-go.


Making mixtapes. Trading tapes. And science fiction paperbacks. Reading, yes, reading, in summer parks. Wasting our youth. Knowing youth as wasting.


Ruination was the law. Destruction – but not of a grand kind. A gentle sabotage and self-sabotage. Let’s not bother to live, we said to ourselves. Let’s not bother to try. Let’s not bother to bother. Never try to try.

Let’s never get with it. Fuck the programme. Let’s deviate. Wander off.


Always off course. Off living – like off roading. Living off. Dazed. Distant in the eyes.

Stupid – but with an impersonal stupidity. An idiocy that isn’t even your own. A sweet idiocy. A mute idiocy. The idiocy of all mute things.


Insignificant: that’s what we are. We are embracing the insignificant. We are lost in the insignificant. We don’t even bother with the worthwhile. We can’t even conceive of the important. We’re doodlers in the margins. Graffiti artists without tags.

We’re like rust. Like erosion. An impersonal force. A way things happen – or fail to happen, but not the happening itself.


Always on the verge of sleep, but dreamless sleep, unpromising sleep. Going nowhere sleep.


And light everywhere. The light from which we shrink. The light we distrust. The light we feel is looking, looking for something from us. The light that searches. Searchlight beams sweeping the world. We don’t want to be seen. Surveilled.

We want to stay out of sight. Attain invisibility. Walk between raindrops. Become incredible shrinking men and women. Who disappear. Who can’t be found. Who’ve always and already left. Who were never where they said they were.

Without fixed address. Homeless. Answering to no one. Going under fake names, under alibis. Except every couple of weeks, when we go in to sign on. To claim our dole.

We don’t want living philosophy. We don’t want living thought. We want to think as dead people. We want to think in death and of death and nothing other than death, and the error of death.

A perpetuity without beginning or end. That stays stagnant. Doesn’t produce, doesn’t destroy …


We can’t be anything. Only ever returning.

Beginning again, only to fail to begin. Ending once more, only to fail to end.


Belonging to a time – a non-time – before the beginning. Belonging to a time – a non-time – that comes after.


Start over – but don’t bother starting over. Give up – but don’t bother giving up. You can’t begin and you can’t finish.


A prolixity, an endlessness. Everything is futile, everything is sterile. Nothing advances. Nothing blossoms into a beginning. Nothing can lay down its head at the end.


No place to arrive, to rest. No home. No dwelling.

Only disturbance. Impersonal agitation. A trembling, a rumbling, a shaking of the earth that is the earth. The earth as earthquake.


The earth that will swallow everything – but indifferently. The earth doesn’t care what we’ve achieved or not achieved.


No work that is not unworked, no doing that simultaneously an undoing. No action that isn’t also inaction.

The stupidity of the earth. The stupidity of us who belong to the earth – who belong to it by belonging to nothing, to nowhere because that’s what the earth is: nothing and nowhere.


We’re stranded. Beached. Becalmed. We make no progress. We only revert – devolve. We don’t move forward. We don’t move at all.

Every gesture is sterile. Every beginning is fake. Every beginning collapses. Gives way. Falls into itself.

We will not succeed – we won’t even fail. A pathetic … falling short: is that it? Not failure, never quite failure, because the idea of failure still depends on success.


The ruin of all things. And there were only ever ruins. There was only ever unaccomplishment.

All our works were fruitless. Pathetic. Fruitless.


Unnoticed in their inachievement. Never magnificent in their failure. Never like the heroes of tragedy. Never beating their breasts in frustration.

What was European philosophy for us but a way of seeking to be crushed? What was it but the dark planet toward which we wanted to be drawn. To be crushed by its gravity! To be pulverised against it!

To be drawn into the dark orbit of Phenomenology of Spirit. Of the Science of Logic. Of the complete works of Edmund Husserl. Sublimely great. Inescapably great. Vast – unimaginably so. And who were we, by comparison?

The chance of our destruction: that’s what we sensed in philosophy? Lured by it, like those weird creatures of the sea-depths, with their dangling lights. We were drawn to Kant-fish and Feuerbach-fish and Husserl-fish. To be swallowed by them!

And didn’t we love the strangest fish? Weren’t we drawn to the deepest, darkest fish of all?

The dream of being swallowed by some creature of the deeps. As they’d swallow up krill. Plankton. Totally unnoticed. Totally unimportant.

Dying as irrelevancies. As incidentals. As no ones and nothings. As flies or fleas. As infusoria in the water. We’d bother no one in our dying. We wouldn’t cry out. Wouldn’t raise our voices. Because we weren’t worthy of their attention, the great books to which we were drawn. Because they shouldn’t be disturbed, the great tomes that lay like wrecks on the seafloor …

It tastes old, this wine. It tastes senescent. Like it’s the oldest wine that ever was. Like ashes. Like something burnt out, long ago.

It’s posthumous wine, for posthumous drinkers.


Last wine, from the last harvest. From the last vines. From the last vineyard.
Ingest the poison. Drink it more deeply than anyone. Drink it into your depths.

And then what?


I can taste ashes. I taste earth. Thick, heavy earth. With a side order of ashes.

There are only degrees of poison. And degrees of being poisoned. There are only varieties of lie. The lies we tell ourselves … The lies others tell us …

We wouldn’t know the truth. We wouldn’t be able to tell truth from lies. The truth would be entirely wasted on us, we who live by lies. Who have been fed nothing but lies.

We know the truth. We have an instinct. That’s what Livia always said.

Livia wanted to invert things. She wanted to exacerbate the tensions. To deepen them.

Strife – that’s what she wanted. A rift. An eruption. A violence. That would reveal everything anew …

Livia’s lightning. What so great about revealing things? What about changing them?

Communion’s  about sharing a cup, sharing fate. Between equals. Between those brought together at the heart of empire. Around a table. And at that table, salvation is eaten and drunk, not just believed.

It sounds very cool.

Eaten and drunk. Did anyone bring any snacks?