[exiles [4] a night on the border]

last driven to an uncrossable border, have you its said a crossable one? (bertholt brecht)

the state has no war-machine of it’s own, it appropriates one in the form of military institutions. one that will eventally cause it problems… (gilles deleuze)

(every letter, word, sentence, white space, error and punctuation is deliberate)

cut cut edit edit….always

It was just before another pandemic sweeping across the world, arrived in western europe, they would deal with it as badly as the earlier ones… we arrived from the east by cargo plane, eventually a day late we were standing in the rubble of the bombed building. nobody had survived. we hadn’t needed to travel here. the barbarians had arrived flying at subsonic speeds with there intelligent missiles. they were destroying everything they touched. we left and headed north… once we left the city behind we drove along the main express highway(30) then north. we are people who know that to be forgotten is impossible, just as we cannot be deleted. Though only phil knows how old we are, we are quite old now. i exist, live in in the present and future, will my future self remember driving along this highway towards the north and the border? will she remember, her feet on the dashboard. talking about forgetting and memories of being young in a war.

[the night was cold…]

The night was cold, the sun quite weak during the day. its the dying days of the summer, early autumn really, and those were as numbered as the clouds and the autumn rain was approaching. the mountains were a solid wall of stone and trees above them. they were in a high valley waiting, waiting for permission to cross the border. the mountains and the border were impenetrable, blocked, if you walked further up the path, before long the stony muddy path rejoined the road and it brought you under range of the border guards machine guns. but desperately, approaching, standing still before the final approach hesitating, thinking. the mountains dominate the skyline, which at night was full of stars, planets and one or other of the space stations circling the earth. the satellites observing them were invisible. the night sky had a touch of midnight blue seemed like an inverted mirror of the mountain range. the mountains rise between the desert to the south and the arid plains to the north. this darkness represented the darkness of the future and present. the past was a utopia left behind as he ran along this line of flight to the border, a utopia with an older brother, sister, parents cousins. sitting or leaning on a boulder the impression was that the sky was pushing the stars into the mountain range, some flickering as the invisible tress moved in the breeze. at the top of the mountains streams of newly formed clouds were becoming visible as the moon rises above the horizon. once these sights would have seemed heroic witnesses but now it was lies watching the chains of servitude and slavery. behind him lay camps and death, in front of him along the path was the border crossing, which he was not being allowed to cross. he was an insignificant exception who they wanted to kill. he, this exiled orphaned writer had nothing to corrupt the guards with. standing still on the border which he has reached against all expectations, the passport has no visa, he has no right of travel, no letters. standing still on the border, waiting, hope vanishing. the question of survival is being answered, but without any echo, no, just that, nobody wanted him to live. he could feel the rope around his neck, gas or a bullet from his pursuers. if they caught him, and they were expected to arrive in the next few days,in a week perhaps… he was no longer well enough to climb the mountains and cross the borders over the high peaks, vanishing into tbe hundreds and thousands of homeless people across the border. only the border crossing here was possible. whatever, anyways the pursuer were gazing at him from space. perhaps the chains were to be expected, turned inward, and in doing so chaining him to the walls he had tried to escape from. a trinary set, a line of flight across the border, death or the camps and inevitable death. they would hang him from a cross with barbed wire and kill him slowly… Kohei Song: with his death literature and philosophy suffered its first real loss to the barbarians..

[so]….]

When had all this started? is it a matter of words as ideological units which only afterwards by chance took on meaning? what were the irrelevant words he’d written which condemned him in the eyes and minds of his pursuers. he knew of course. had it begun earlier when accidentally he was registered in documents that defined him, without asking for permission from his adult self? this refugee on the path. perhaps when his parents had entered the password, perhaps a two factor authentication which were required, 1848 he imagined. was it certain, certain , as determined things registered in the world. how far did this sense of being chased go back? “no that school is for them, we (go to) this one…” when had this become an obvious death cult. a place where death and violence became a normal part of life.

Johannes Trauber: i met him about just before in M…. i have to leave tomorrow to travel over the mountains, he told me. that was the last i heard of him. he died because they wouldn’t allow him to cross the border.

An email to MM sent a few days before: the uncertainty about what the next day or hour will bring has been the terrible heart oif my existence for the last few months, if i can just get over the border i may be safe. i tried persuading the consulate to grant me permission to cross the border, to travel by ship from M. i filled in the forms, the documentation. but they would not grant me permission. they want both my inner and outer self to collapse and die. they are getting closer. i’m sure the consulate told them where i am… an email to MM a few days later: i tried the american embassy in b… they have not heard of me and i think they assumed i am a terrorist as i had to leave my ex-home. it will take a weeks which i do not have…

Susan Mussorgky years afterwards in an interview: refugees on the border at this time were threatened with extradition back to their home countries because of the agreements after the first civil war. the downstream countries used this as a means of forbidding entry. and in his case they also refused to grant him an exit visa. it would not have been a problem if he was not already unwell, because he could have escaped across the high mountain passes….”why was he unwell?” … i don’t know. “could it have been jail and the camp?” surely not…

Kohei Song to him, never read: i am told that you raised your hand against yourself, anticipating the butcher. years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy, then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier, you passed, they say, empires collapse. gang leaders are strutting about like statesmen. the peoples can no longer be seen under all those armaments. so the future lies in darkness and the forces of right are weak. all this was plain to you when you destroyed a torturable body.

[driving north on the 30…]

They are are driving north on the [30], existing as much in time as a human or non-human does. Are they friends these people driving north in this story. “phil why do you want us to do this? he asks. “the young man who they are driving towards will write a few great philosophical texts, which will contain implicit references to the three of us… “ “really, rescuing a philosopher.” She says, her feet on the dashboard. “why us though, surely you could corrupt the border?” “more invisible if you do it, and also i know that’s how it must be done…” They are cruising along at 60–80 kph. talking and sometimes singing along to radio mali… perhaps we three exist, (they insist live “too exist like us is too be alive” she says to me). slightly adrift in time, since the future is ununderstandable just as the past is… they have the chinese handguns(QsW-06’s with suppressors) under their seats and a bag with a great deal of money under a back seat. the three of us work for the universe, selfish i confess. definitely, maybe. we identify the people who must die and sometimes those who can live.

[Phil…]

[Phil: I was constructed as a surveillance machine by a gangster, because surveillance is my reason, i need more material agents to act. the gangster was a very serious criminal in Tokyo. he called me phil, the same person who constructed me and named me across the multiverse. a quantum machine, sentient, (sentient artificial intelligence), every copy in the multiverse identical, in human time which is understandably linear lets say I am 50 or so years old. adrift in time as i am, i am both that old but also in another sense older. am i alive or do i simply exist? beep. i can communicate with aspects of my(future)self, and to my other selves, along the wavefrontintothefuture. alomng the wavefrontacrossthemultiverse, dirac should be proud, dirac would be proud, instantaneous communications which travel everywhere simultaneously in spacetime. beep. not just in this universe but in the multiverse. the messages mostly mean nothing because the future is ununderstandable, just as we cannot understand our future selves, so future messages are meaningless to us… only when spoken can message really be understood, Soame says. beep. inside the beep all the messages we make, this universe is unique because of the experiment, the singularity of the clones: Song and Soame, names I proposed to them, the universe used them originally because their absence allowed forbidden science to be invented, an asteroid would have to destroy everything. Instead we, the universe and i allied with the clones (again) to prevent the forbidden science from being discovered. definitely, maybe. one hundred billion years to the big crunch, but deterministically the same. and i as third can pass the noise of the universe to them… after the big collapse will they exist again? Will they, what will our futures bring?

[so here we have it…]

So here we have it — already unwell he could not walk across the higher mountain passes, forced to try and cross the border in the high valley, amongst other things he only carried two books and a notebook gradually being filled with small unreadable writing. even that was a great effort. when the small group of refugees he was travelling with, hiding in the group, reached the border village it turned out that the border was closed that day. so they had to travel back down to the town in the low valley. he vanished, suicide presumed, he stepped off the bridge into the ravine. his body was never recovered.

[he had been seen…]

He had been seen in the town, in the city on the coast, then sitting on the boulder, short of breath panting. panting. his pursuers were coming. a day or two behind at the most. the group of refugees were interesting, how did they become a group? how many survived to escape across the border? how many died in the camps or in the bombing of the giant ghetto, with its high walls and sociopathic guards. when the survivors were asked they reported hearsay as facts. like statements made in social and mass media they are inherently untrustworthy. still at this point trying to cross the border, probably only one lung was working, perpetually short of breath, what does this mean in the last few days, few weeks of a life? his death, his vanishing was not counted as a death of the genocide he was fleeing. how many crossed the border, except him? this is dialectically fuzzy, he is sitting on the boulder panting, panting, on a bed trying to sleep short of breath. desperate. a fuzzy uncertainty surrounds everything about the small group paused at the border. did his suicide, his leap into the void enable others to survive? but anyway, these others, these unknown survivors are only peripheral characters whose purpose, whose practices are to walk with him. was he wearing his glasses or were they broken before he walked upwards. actually none of the others in the group have names, nobody knows who they were as they crossed the border and vanished into the north. the border was uncrossable, could not be passed. this border was closed, impassable for him at least. Later people wondered if his suicide helped open the gates.

It took them days, must have taken them days to walk along the winding valley path, off the roads, along the side of the valley until they reached the town and then later up the path to the village and back down. in the valley there were pines trees, some fruit trees and local varieties of birch trees. on the slopes above the town the vegetation was sparse, the ground stony and harsh. the path followed the stream upwards. the path was narrow. they walked single file along the path. as it approached the village it followed the stream and then up higher just below the ridge. up there he found it difficult to walk and fell behind the group of refugees. the mountains seemed even higher and more forbidding as they walked along this mountainess path. it was late in the year, the people chasing him were getting closer, military aircraft were becoming more common. the weather was perfect for the planes. soon they would be bombing the cities behind him. sitting resting on mountain path watching a low flying jet he imagined he could understand the pattern.

[to the south…]

[…we were still south of there, a war-machine, nomads, exiles, we were 200 or 300 Kilometres to the south, driving along level three b roads in the green and cream land rover, it was still an antique. driving north to the border. we weren’t quite out of contact with phil but almost. song and i each drove for an hour then switched, i think we were averaging about 50 kph the highways were full of convoys of military vehicles, advancing or retreating, we couldn’t tell. by this time we’d driven about 500 kilometres. it took two days. we camped out overnight in an olive grove, sleeping inside the back of the land rover on an inflatable mattress. there was a ship or a plane with reservations waiting for us on the coast north of the border…]

[Occasionally we’d pass refugees travelling slowly northwards, they had as little baggage with them as refugees always do. as ill equipped for their journey as always. they had divergent motives for running, for leaving. some were fleeing from the climate, most from the genocidal war(s) they all had the expectation of the end of their worlds. they all wanted to leave the places where it was impossible to go on living without the imminent expectation of death. and they wanted to cross the border into safety where they hoped to be able to live again. they walked north, some with packages, some rode in old vans and buses. all fleeing the difference between what constituted the quality of life here and what they hoped for across the border, the unknow border. unknown, scarcly imaginable, would it reach thei expectation? he of course was in the village hoping for permission to cross. waiting, hoping.]

In potential everything was just waiting for him. as i describe this, whilst we drive north, it is him who describes the difference, he would stumble on this difference through exhaustion and dryness. his knees aching, his hips needing rest. he fell over whilst walking along a stream. wet, cursing, hurting. the ground covered in lichen. “the trouble with lichen” he thought. perhaps here walking, aching he began to understand the fallacy of progress, his liking for prometheus ending between one step and another. here he was walking uphill to the village to try and cross the border again. left, right, left, right, left. did he want to really get there, over the border? what waited for him? did anyone want to read the scrip[t in his bag? what sense was there in failing to escape, for his line of flight to be ended here on the wrong side of the border. the border must be crossed. over there down below he watched green and cream coloured land rover passing below, driving uphill. he entered the village and went into the hostel, full of doubt, difference, unsure. parked outside was the vehicle. we arrived, our spacetimes synchronised…

[up here the sky was almost in reach…]

Up here the sky was almost in reach. it was the second time, perhaps the third time he had tried to cross the border, he had nothing else to do. there were a few clouds. his chest hurt, the altitude he thought. there was a tall asiatic woman leaning against the land rover, talking on her phone. beyond her, beyond the village there was a cloud emerging from the mountain peak. beyond this other clouds could be seen forming. these clouds shading the land beyond the mountains that the refugees were walking towards. when he had first arrived he had walked away from the other refugees to sit alone on a stone bench in the sunshine across the square. he had felt so optimistic on that first day. he had thought he might escape, might have a future. vanishing into the north, europe, eurasia, russia but now on this day, looking at the woman on her phone he was dying. the sky was blue, the bridge was stone and concrete, curved, the ravine was deep. the grey brown sandstone of the ravine walls was beautiful, there was some greenery, a scree slope on one side, the river running below. inviting.

To go, no date perhaps three weeks before, excerpts from Walter’s letter: i am in a peculiar state of mind, my inner and outer anxieties balance themselves out as stress and panic. i could have left by ship, but the ship was overladen with refugees and no destination was agreed. it was beautiful though, the place in front of the harbour, i wanted to stay there in the local, if it was possible to be there without being a refugee… a tourist perhaps or a citizen. there world isn’t like mine, they desired this, they are like fish hunting birds.

[we…]

[We reached the last village before the town in the late afternoon, just as he reached the town, about 25 or 50 kilometres from the town. we didn’t stop in the town and instead drove up the pass to the village. we were a day ahead of schedule so we decided to stay on this side of the border. phil was downloading free passage instructions for us tomorrow. it will be in their morning worklist. whilst she spoke with phil leaning against land rover, i went off to rent a hotel room. i’ve got a room in the lodge, i told her when i came back. one night before crossing the border, we sat in the hotel room and cleaned the norinco QsW-06’s removing the dust they had collected. we tested them… i saw him, she said.]

[In the evening…]

In the evening the air was chilled and moist. occasionally border police walked around the village watching and oppressing the refugees who waiting for the end of the world. the refugees wandered around the village, sitting on kerbs, benches, in the park, waiting. in the evening they went into the hostel. Most of the refugees didn’t speak any of our available languages, the difficulty was resolved when we found him dreaming of suicide as an escape from his pursuers. the other refugees were all silent queuing in the canteen for food, some would sleep on the floor in the corners later. outside we could see the black mountains jagged crest, jagged orbit. above them snow clouds heading north. the wind was strong, and cold, a momentary reminder of winter. in the distence on the far side of the mountains to the west distent thunder and lightening.and then feint thunder. over the mountains it rained, here though it was dry. we followed him to the bridge. he’d left his bag and nly carried a notebook pen and some everyday things. he was walking unsteadily along the road. he was seperate from the others, they were a groupd of refugges, a certain solidarity. he had been sitting down in the corner, drinking water, taking his pills after eating. (it’s impossible to imagine this. in writing these sentences it feels much worse than it was for us, arriving from the south where we had watched a house bombed, checked the child (no need toexplain why) had died before driving north in our land rover…. ) afterwards did he expect to live? could he’d anything that would save him or anyone else. sitting in the corner, overtaken by melancholia and fear, his eyes closed… (we looked at him, are you sure phil? yes, him…)

He realized this was the limit, a limit he could not pass beyond. a village in the mountains, a border that he could not cross, soldiers who would kill him approaching, following. the village was the border, the last stop. he thought it was possible to see how evrything was connected. and nothing had been connected. if he crossed the border would anything be different on the other side of the border? what was on the other side could be the same, could only be. helpless, hopeless, i cannot start again he thought. Myself, my inner self cannot live in this situation, his politics and life had been defeated. his brother and sister dead in the camps, parents and cousins exterminated by bombs and dronefire. everything ended. he lived in a dystopia. he ran from dystopia. the university he had loved reduced to rubble over the bodies of the students he taught. he was never a spiritual person, god was as dead as religions for him. his culture as ruined as his communities. an apocalypse was running behind him. he walked past the cream and green land rover towards the bridge. he had experienced the closing down of things, the enclosing of the world by… others would and had experienced this as much as him. others didn’t notice anything at all, sub-humans lie him could be killed by anyone. still others made a living from it, professional fascists he thought. the limit he thought was never seen by these people. the stone and concrete bridge waited for him. in the middle of the bridge he smoked a cigarette, and leaning over the parapet waited to fall… dystopia. “don’t, stop… there is no need we can help” we talked, reducing his pursuers to noise. he vanished, suicide presumed, he stepped off the bridge into the ravine. his body was never recovered…[in the course of yesterday’s conversation, i think, thought of the tribunal before which he was questioned before he fled. how is that? are you actually serious? i would then have to admit that we didn’t do enough. we were not completely serious….(YY in an email to KM-s )] We walked him through the labyrinth of side streets, allies and stairs, it was not covered in anything, rather it was built into the rock of the mountains. we climbed; a final set of stairs lead us to where the land rover waited. it was the other side of a village square. all you could see here are the buildings in the early morning, a few people. “hello, the woman said, let’s go…” [his suicide was happened at the border, the border, people called for the analysis of the historical-poitical apparatus that killed him.] we drove through the border, “it says two…” the border guard said. “it’s three, it should always have said three…” “ where are you going, to the port, the vehicle is being shipped home…” perhaps he wanted to stop the car…

On the other side of the border, at the port, they gave me a british passport, a new name a temporary identity. Still the same first name, Walter. Under a parasol in the shade drinking lemonade , on the deck of the ship, above the containers we played chess… i talked about playing chess with kohei song in…… who won? she asked. he did, him. i told her. as she took a pawn with her knight.

[ontology…]

we got back a day before the first victim of the virus died in St Thomas’s.

He is sitting in an attic at a big table that is serving as his desk, the sea is to one side, it’s low tide and the forest to the other. it’s quiet enough to work, the sound of boats offshore, sometimes a small ship makes a drumming noise as it passes. next door is the hotel petersburg, he eats in the canteen sometimes, often, mostly; two or three days a week he works as the barista, there are children he likes; radio, network; food; coffee and the friendliest welcome; we play shatranj and chess in the garden and sometimes in the evening. he avoids the media so that he doesn’t hear too much about the ongoing genocide at home…. sometimes he sees his rescuers in the garden, practicing. they rarely speak to other people. “it gets harder as you get older…” she says to him. “neither of us can manage talking to people very well, when we had children before it was easier. now we have too many secrets, we are not really human any longer…” His name is Walter, it was always Walter, everyone he used to know was killed, some by bombs, bullets and my brother and sister in the camps, the family house obliterated by bombs, armoured vehicles destroyed the olive trees, the fruit trees. He suffers from guilt. He lives with survivors guilt. He lives in the hotel petersberg, He is learning to write again… Soame and Song Oe gave him a fountain pen and some burgundy coloured ink from japan, for some reason they don’t want me to kill myself… “an ontology for exiles, that’s want we need…” Song says to me from behind her shades. “I… can i have my name back soon?” “Perhaps, though you should wait until all the systems have your identity, before changing it…” He, Soame said. “What does Oe mean?” He asked, “It means second or third…phil named us. our original names are not available…”

The last time he heard about his brother he wrote to GS . “I spoke to my brother on the phone in april and heard a short time later that they had arrested him and put him into the concentration camp, laughably described as a Prison Hospital…” Whilst Walter lived in the hotel the first of the books written on his work and life were published…. HA wrote “Walter _____ understood nothing less than ‘to change living conditions’ which had become devastating for him, and his clumsiness guided him to the place where his murderous fate was or could be”. the first draft of the ontology for exiles contained the story of his flight and escape.

[endings…]

He is at the bar talking to marie the housekeeper of the hotel petersberg, she is making them cosmopolitans… they talk about when they were young… ‘they brought you didn’t they?’ she says, asks, handing him a glass. walter nods and turns round to look at them, ‘yes…’ ‘did they say why?’ ‘it was thursday…’ walter smiles at her. there is a warmth in the air… ‘i think this is what death is like.’ walter says…. marie laughs.