Author: Lars Iyer

Pass the mead. I need more mead.

 

Only mead can save us now – is that it?

 

Let’s listen to the mead. Let’s channel the mead. What’s the mead saying?

 

Share some mead wisdom. What have you learnt in your mead researches?

 

I’m lost in a mead-hole. It’s kinda like a k-hole.

 

Peasants drank mead. Peasants and monks.

We’re philosophical peasants.

 

Mead’s the drink for the serfs of the new technofeudalism.

 

Mead is made from honey, it says here. It’s also know as honey wine.

So it’s a wine?

In its fucking dreams.

What’s the terroir – dead peasants? Turnips? Jesters’ caps? Yorick’s skull? Authentic Python and the Holy Grail mud?  

 

Mead was in the Rig Veda. They called it soma. The ancient Greeks drank it, too. Aristotle writes about it.

I thought they drank wine?

Mead was the drink of choice, in the ancient world. The same in the Dark Ages. Taliesin, the Welsh bard, wrote the Song of Mead. They drank wine in Beowulf, too. And in Germanic poetry. It’s what the heroes drank.

Must have been mead in Newcastle, too. All these monks were here. Back when we lived under Danelaw.

Of course there was mead. Monks kept bees, so they made mead. Newcastle was all about the mead, back in the day.

It’s making a comeback, apparently. The hipsters are all drinking mead.

We should forget philosophy and open a mead bar. Ride the mead revival.

There is no mead revival.

 

Shouldn’t we drink mead from a flagon? Does anyone have a flagon? On a tankard?

We should have departmental tankards. With our names on each one. And a departmental mead cellar.

 

Are you getting any mead visions, Fiver?

 

Mead is the antidote to poison. And lies. Maybe. Can you speak a lie when you’ve got some mead inside you? Just try.

 

What’s the mead terroir?

It doesn’t have a terroir. It grows from honey.

Honey’s from floral nectar, isn’t it? So it’s from flowers. Which means from the soil – the terroir.

 

Mead’s, like, nine thousand years old. It’s pre-agriculture. The oldest fermented drink.

 

We should start a meaderie.

Is that what they’re called?

A meaderie life … I can see it now. Experimenting with fermentation. Adding spices – cloves, cinnamon or nutmeg. Adding herbs – meadowsweet, hops, lavender. Adding fruit – raspberries or blackberries. Fermenting it with grape juice. Or mulling it for Christmas. Serving it warm … Meadsters, that’s what we’d be in another life.

 

See mead doesn’t have the class associations that wine does. Mead is about the common person. The common peasant.

 

Wine is Cicero’s drink. Mead is ours. The drink of the common person. Of the vassal. Of the serf. Of the peasant. And that’s what we’ll be, once they bring in digital IDs.

 

We’d go back to the soil. Back to the earth. Back to the bees.

Shame all the bees are dying. There are only about three left, apparently.

 

We should revive the ancient Northumbrian production of mead. Learn to learn to keep bees.

 

The mead life, that’s what I’m dreaming of. A Northumbrian cottage. With a garden of beehives. With a fermentation barrel …

Going round the markets, selling our homemade bottles of mead. Jesmond market, on the bridge. Hexham market, in the marketplace. Do you think we could make a living at that?

We wouldn’t have to go to meetings, anymore. No more Boards of Studies.

 

Mead’s the taste of summer.

Summer distilled into honey, and then distilled into mead.

 

Do you think Hölderlin drank mead?

Maybe he should have done.

 

Wow, it’s fizzy. Fizzy mead. Who knew?

It’s always Chinese year of the chimp, in our meetings. Is there actually a Chinese year of the chimp?

 

Take charge, Shiva! Take the reigns! We need your leadership! Results! Tell us what we should do! Channel Cicero! What would she tell us?

 

Let idiocy decide. Let idiocy speak! Clear the floor! Channel idiocy! Come on, Driss, you’re really good at that. Let’s have an idiocy séance. Let’s let ourselves be infected by some idiotic demon, by some demon of idiocy.

 

Look, it’s actually an emergency. We’re in the open maw of Organisational Management. Even if it’s just foreplay at the moment. Even if they aren’t really fucking us over yet.

 

The autumn term. The new academic year: that’s when it will have to be implemented. By summer … the plans for to be in place.

Look, if we give a little …

Then they’ll take everything. We have to resist.

 

There’s still a long time left. We’ve got a few months left. We have to give them our plan by summer.

We won’t make it to summer. World war 3 or 4 or 5 will have broken out. We’ll have been conscripted. Shot at the front.

 

Why don’t we talk about what we’re working on?

Okay, what are you working on?  

 

Why don’t we talk about the … purple?

Fuck the purple.

The purple is really getting to me.

 

We need to protest! If only we could glue ourselves to something.

 

You’re leading from below, Shiva. From under the table.

We need to slump, I say. Get horizontal. The vertical axis shouldn’t be available to us. We should be too ashamed to be vertical.

Such a head girl, Sophia. Such a good, good girl. Sophia doesn’t even like swearing, do you?

But the secret is that Sophia likes big, tough men, isn’t that right?

You’ve got that real bobbysoxxer ‘50s thing going on. That Sandy in Grease before her transformation thing. But what you’re really waiting for is for Mr Right in his leather jacket. With an Elvis quiff. In his hot rod. A real bad boy. A greaser. With a comb in his back pocket.

He’s got chills, Sophia. They’re multiplying, apparently. They’re electrifying. He’s the one that you want, ooh, ooh, ooh, honey.

Is there a reason why we’re here?

Everything happens for a reason.

What’s the reason? Explain it to us. Why are we here? Why us?

Why him? (Pointing to Driss.) There’s got to be a reason for Driss. And even for Helmut.  

 

Tell us about the Nephilim again, Io. Explain it all through the Nephilim. We love Nephilim stories. We’ll sit at your feet with crossed legs to hear your Nephilim stories.

 

Come on, Io – we need this shit. We need raw Christianity.  

 

Io, with her FUCK THE ANTICHRIST teeshirt. With her NOT MY WORLD teeshirt.

 

Io, whispering punk prayers.

 

Were there Christian punks, back in the day, Io? Were, like, the Sex Pistols Christians? Were Television? Was Patti Smith?

 

You should become a nun, Io. You’d make a good nun. Is there a punk order you can join? You should start one.

If only it would end. If only it would come, the apocalypse. The endless end: that’s what we suffer. Infinite finitude.

If only it could be brought to stop. If only it didn’t go on.

Every moment only increases our madness. We’re only going to go more mad.

 

The farce continues. Even we – even we are allowed to go on. Which goes to show just how wrong things are.

People like us were born. People like us slopped into being. People that shouldn’t be. Awaiters of the end, that’s all. Limit-desirers.

We shouldn’t be here. Our kind.

 

That we’re allowed to ply our trade. That we’re allowed to pass ourselves off as philosophers …

When we most of all want the game to be up. When we want to stop pretending. To throw in the philosophical towel.

At least take us! At least destroy us. We didn’t ask to live, did we? Strike down! Zap us!

What would be apocalypse be but a relief?

 

We want the book closed. We want a full stop. For there to be a halt. We want to see the credits roll.

Satan, at the dead centre of the universe. Satan, frozen, at the dead point of the turning world.

The weight of the whole cosmos compressing him.

 

Satan’s immobility. The opposite of the freedom of angels. Satan’s hatred. The opposite of God’s love.

Satan, encased in the frozen waters. In the opposite of the life-giving waters of baptism.

 

One tenth of the angels fell in fucking ruin.

 

Satan’s cold. Satan’s nothingness permeating all things. Seeping out.

 

Satan’s heaviness. Satan’s gravity. The opposite of the light, the spirit of God.

 

Satan’s bat-wings, beating the frozen air in vain. Stirring up cold winds.

 

Satan’s three hideous mouths. Continuously chewing on traitors.

 

Satan, continuously weeping tears of frustrated rage.

 

So did Satan fall to earth in Newcastle?

And the Organisational Management campus was built on top of the crevasse.

The depopulation phase. The thinning-out-the-herd phase. The we-are-too-many phase. The open murder phase. The doctors-are-baffled phase. The collapsing-in-the-streets phase.

Sudden death! Sudden terminal cancer! Sudden neurological disaster!

 

They’ve cast us out of History. They’ve thrown us out of Meaning. A Holocaust is happening, and no one has noticed. Mass murder everywhere. Normalised. People dropping dead. And it’s not even noticed.

 

We’ve passed through the mirror. Into some strange new realm. Is this real? Can any of this be real?

 

Stunned, every day. Battered, every day.

 

They’re screaming in our ears and we have to pretend not to hear. The stench of death everywhere, and we make that we cannot smell it.

 

Speech itself is a lie. Everything we say, even if we speak against lies. The lie is the condition of speech.

 

And poison everywhere. The very air. The rain. The water.

We inhale poison. Exhale it.

Our thoughts are poison. We lie in our thoughts. In our dreams.

Nowhere’s safe. Nowhere’s sheltered. There’s no sanctuary. No place that escapes the horror.

 

How is it that no one notices? Or only a few of us? What have they done to our brains?

 

How many years of continual murder?

 

We’re used to Hell. We don’t even see that it’s Hell. We live in the inferno. Because we’ve forgotten anything else.

 

Incessancy. The on and on. That’s their mode: the relentless mode.

They have no future – because they’ve captured the future. The future is their future. The world will ceaselessly be their world. We can’t imagine anything else. We can’t tell another story. We’ve no imagination. It’s been crushed, along with everything else.

And we can’t begin anything because we can’t end anything.

 

We’re tired of the ceaseless. We’re tired of permanent emergency. Of their martial law. Of their emergency powers.

 

Because we can’t bring their nightmare to an end. Its false eternity.

 

The Machine is awake and it’s watching. It’s scanning, continuously. It’s monitoring all. ‘Seeing’ all – without seeing anything.

We’re monitored – watched. The satellites circle the globe. The algorithms listen to us – without hearing us.

 

Their diabology. Their mythology.

 

Death throes. Derangement. Coils looping around us.

 

We speak with forked tongues. We’re made to. We’re made to become little Satans.

 

We’re sinking downwards. Pulled down by their gravity.

Ever more narrowly confined! Shut in! Shut off! Shrouded in darkness!

Our eyes shut. Our vision turned inward. Closed off from the world.

No one wants to kill themselves. No one wants to run amok. No one wants to tear up the world. To uproot it. To negate it all. To say the great no, and that everything starts from a no.

No Bernhardism. No Beckettism. No Artaudism. No Durassianism. No Bachmanism. Nothing volcanic. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing apocalyptic. Nothing hateful. Nothing sky-zapped. Nothing lightning-rent. Nothing torn. Nothing shattered.

 

No need for a religious tonality. For a poetic tonality. No need to invoke the greater forces. Drives. Excesses and lacks. To what over- and under-shoots. To what burns above and below. To angels and devils. To gods and goddesses of all kinds.

 

No raving. No outbursts. No crying upwards. No staggering. No stumbling. No passions of thought.

 

No one’s mad anymore. All madness medicated. Monitored. Under control. All madness managed.

 

It’s all moderation. All manners. All politenesses. All manageable, steerable. All containable. Domesticated! Cattle-like! To be steered and controlled! To be culled if we are too many. With none of us noticing!

 

Who know nothing of the saving negation of literature. Of the saying no of literature.

 

No exodus literature. No way out writing. No escape prose. No vectors of dissent. No burning it all down. No self-strangulation. No Hatred capital H.

 

No gathering storms. No electric hum in the air. No rumbling of thunder. No wild lightning. No trembling of the earth.

 

Falling pillars. The Crumbling. The Ruination. The Collapse.

We should put our literary things away. They don’t belong to us. Put our literary toys back in the box.

 

It’s played out. It’s been done. It’s over.

You can’t write after those guys. Except to say that you can’t write after those guys. Except to decry the impossibility of writing. The endless end of literature. The endless end of everything. Of everything meaningful!

 

It’s continual. It’s forever. The disastrous day that goes on forever. The apocalypse without actual apocalypse. The day of wrath that never ends.

There’s nothing else to know – to see – to think about. it’s every day there was and can be. It’s the Exhaustion. It’s the Played Out. it’s the Endless. It’s the Ceaseless. It’s the no more and the nothing else. It’s fatality. It’s farce. It’s after tragedy. Endless comedy, that amuses no one. Parody parodying what?

 

The Nothing. the great Nothing. The Everything as Nothing. Empty eyes scanning empty skies.

 

Literature’s caught. Literature’s at the end of the line. Thrashing.

 

Literature’s death twitch. It’s death shudder. And death without grandeur! With no one to see it! A whimpering, really. An unwitnessed death. A tree falling in a forest that makes no noise.

 

Literature gave up – and no one noticed.

No reason for it anymore. It lost its raison d’etre. It lost its survival instinct. It didn’t even want to live. Fuck going on, it said. I won’t go on. Fuck tomorrow. And fuck today.

 

The island of literature has sunk. Like Atlantis. Like Ys. It’s under the fucking waves. And it’s time to realise that.

 

A mouldy pile of Penguin modern classics from the 50s. Green spined. Small sized. Smelling bad. Spines cracked. Pages falling out.

Borges. Kafka. All those guys. In some bin bag at the dump. In the waste disposal. Shovelled into the maw of oblivion. With all the other abandoned crap. Used nappies.

All those Penguin Modern European Poetry books. In the tip! Not even worth taking to Oxfam. Even Oxfam wouldn’t take them. Even Pets in Distress. Even MIND didn’t want them. They were rejected from the Samaritans.

Too old! Too battered! Too smelly! Too rotten! Not even worth burning. Turned into pulp. Threatening no one. Scuffed. Trodden on. Boot marks on Kafka. Books opened. Pages open. With boot-marks. With rotting vegetables. With potato peelings.

No one’s talks about literature in the suburbs. Oh, maybe they keep a few Penguin Classics from when they studied literature as a student. With those black spines, all lined up. Some Thomas Hardy with rural scenes on the covers. Some Jane Austen – sure. But when you’ve seen the TV adaptations, why do you need to read?

 

Who reads anymore? Not very companionable, reading. Not something you can do as a couple. Compared to binge-watching some boxset together. And who wants to read when they’re worn out? When they’re flopped out on the sofa?

 

And reading’s not stimulating enough for when you’re on your own. It doesn’t give you adrenaline hits, not really. It’s not like some console game.

 

A good read. Something to read when tucked up in bed. Or curled up on the sofa. Something that will let you find out what all the fuss was about.

 

Something for the book club. That won’t scare the book club horses. A good thriller. A good crime drama. Something generic. That might as well be AI-written.

 

No one has writers as culture heroes, right? No one’s looking to authors for anything.

And authors have come right down to earth. They’re just like everyone. There’s no glamour to authors. They’re not apart from us. There’s no halo of genius around them. They’re all approachable. Accessible. Personable. There are no art monsters anymore.

And there’s the whole biography industry to show us authors of the past were really just like us. With lives, just like ours. Loves. Frustrations. And traumas, that account for their creativity.

 

This is no time for loftiness. For remoteness. For charisma. The author doesn’t descend from the gods. Authors are just like us – that simple.

 

Interviews with authors for the Sunday supplements. Showing their pleasantness. Their ability to talk like us.

 

Reassurance. They’re just like us. The same as we are. Nothing mantic. Hermetic. They channel nothing from on high. Or from below.

 

An author, pictured in their conservatory. An author, on a garden chair. An author, in a living room. On a sofa. Sitting there  Ready to tell you about their lives. Ready to summarise their biographical highlights. Ready to be just like you.

 

They live on the plane of the world, just like us. In the ordinary world. Doing ordinary things. Among the ordinary furniture of the world. Houses and roads and cars and shops. Alongside people doing ordinary things. Hanging out the washing. Watering the plants. Imposing the daily order.

 

No otherness. They’ve been brought down to our level. The average level. To the mundane.

And not the mysterious mundane. Not the enigmatic everyday. Not the thickness of the everyday. Its slowness.

Not the afternoon’s depths. Not the day’s corridors. Its labyrinth. Not the day’s dementia, when you lose your memory, your identity. When you wander, totally porous. Exchanging particles with the air.

The afternoon of a writer. The everyday of a writer. Dissolved into its chatter, the everyday. Nameless, on the street. And half dissolved by the anonymity of light. By the nothing-light, falling on everyone. On everything. Evenly. Calmly. This unintense light. This benign light, that falls everywhere.

An author’s afternoon, turned over to the suburbs. To the pensioners’ kingdom. To the early retired. To mothers with buggies. To nursery school children. To the cries of playground children.

 

Everything reduced to a psychology. To a trauma story. To a victimhood story. To an identity story.  

 

God is dead fiction. The world is what it is fiction. Things are as they are and unchangeable fiction. Human stories, about human beings like you and I fiction. Having affairs. Coming of age. Courting. All that stuff fiction.

 

Cicero liked that we’d emerged from the God-is-dead world. From ordinary banality. From the we-know-what’s-there world. From this-is-the-way-things-are world. From the we-have-it-all-worked-out world. From the we-understand-all-things world. From the medium-sized-dried-goods world. From the common-sense world.

Cicero was amused that we’d come from the all-lessons-learnt world. The wiser-than-anyone-else world. The this-is-how it-must-be world. The it-all-comes-back-to-this world. The nothing’s-going-to-change world. The end-of-history world. That literary fiction confirms. Buttresses. Props up.

 

Pop music’s the thing the British are really good at. Much better than the French. Than the Germans. Than all the continental Europeans.

Pop music: that’s where all culture goes. All ardency! All joy! All intensity! That’s where it went once it drained out of literature. All the desire for Life capital L.