Notes on a Month of Militancy by Mark Fisher

2010

What we’ve grown accustomed to is a split between leftist political commitments and the most vibrant, experimental dance music. No doubt this is an aspect of capitalist realism, and it’s no accident that I referred to Simon’s piece on hardstep in Capitalist Realism. In fact, it might well have been the case that the central concept of the book was triggered by Simon’s commentary on ‘keeping it real’ there:

“ In hip-hop, ‘real’; has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police.’ Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call downsizing (the laying–off of the permanent workforce in order to create a floating  employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

‘Real’ is the neo-Medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, Jungle reflects a Medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, conspiracies, and covert operations. Hence the popularity as a source of samples and song titles of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honor that o predate the liberal, social democratic era. […]

The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’; form of collective activism (union, left-wing politics): it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.

In hip-hop and, increasingly, Jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially-constructed reality as natural. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you are either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in the Jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream.” [1]

At Day X1 I heard the predictable “Killing in the Name” [2] and the even more predictable “Sound of the Police”[3], alongside The Beatles, Madness, and – depressingly- The Libertines- and, most jarringly, “Another Brick Wall ( hearing “we don’t need another education” as we shuffled out of the kettle made for a suitably incongruous experience).[4]

But a video that Jeremy shot on Thursday suggests a possible convergence between post-nuum music and politics. [5] It is my belief that the UK music culture of the next decade will emerge from a  stew of sound and affect in the kettles these past few weeks. Paul Mason dismissed the idea that the demo was exclusively populated by ‘Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields}- but of course (we) Lacan-reading hipsters were also there, alongside the “bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.” In other words, this brought together working-class culture and Bohemia in something like the same way that art schools – so crucial to UK pop-art culture since the Fifties - used to. But with very good reasons from its own point of view- neoliberal policy has been hostile to this proletarian-bohemian cultural circuit. While Further Education and new universities have o precisely tried to make theory such as Lacan available to the working class culture- while also trying to engage with everything vibrant coming out of working-class culture – the policy has been to re-cement rigid class and cultural distinctions: philosophy for the bourgeoisie; “vocational’ courses for the masses.

pages 478-9








[1] Simon Reynolds, “Slipping into Darkness”, Wire, No 48, June 1996

[2] Rage Against the Machine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ

[3] KRS-One 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZrAYxWPN6c

[4] they were protesting higher school fees.

[5] ‘Nuum refers to the hardcore continuum or linear progression of hardcore (punk) music said to have imploded in 2001/2. ’continuum’ refers to evolving political/cultural contexts within which the music itself was produced

War Journals by Ernst Junger

Isaiah Berlin’s account of his conversations with Boris Pasternak provides a ‘nutshell’ summary of Ernst Junger’s view of the war in precisely the same period of time:

In 1945 he (Pasternak) still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the war had seemed to him to be – a storm as transforming, in its own terrible fashion, as the Revolution itself, a vast cataclysm beyond our puny mortal categories. Such vast mutation cannot, he held, be judged. One must think and think about them, and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one’s life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance and rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, transforming events which are beyond all ethical and historical categories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocents, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.

In several instances Junger recalls surreal dreams of utter destruction- including himself and members of his family- and notes that they have boosted his morale. What better explanation of the determination of the Germans to fight to the bitterest end, despite the folly of their belief that if only Hitler could be removed the Allies would accept a peace that would leave their nation in tact and without having to pay any steeper price than the prosecution of the Nazis themselves, all others having ‘innocently’ pursued legitimate though largely mythological nationalist ends.


Later, Pasternak came to regret such sentiments, at least to the extent that any suggestion that he had at any time colluded with the Soviet regime provoked him to expression of the most intense anger and denial and insisted in the most self-destructive manner in publishing Doctor Zhivago in the West, though others made provisions to preserve the manuscript even in the event of a nuclear war. Did Ernst Junger come to regret his sentiments, beyond what was necessary to preserve his own skin?

Junger denounced the Nazis as ‘cannibals’ and pitied the Jews- ‘one must always pity the persecuted’ he writes, but it is not clear that his  aristocratic version of the supremacy of the State would have been any more tolerant of opposition than Hitler’s; perhaps just a ‘kinder and gentler’ approach to the mass of ‘inferior souls’ that came into his view.

Current reviews of his memoirs tout Junger as a proponent ‘the humanities’ in the midst of the greatest barbarities- ‘light shines even in the darkest abyss’- This was undoubtedly the view of the Wehrmacht’s ‘Junker’ command. They protected him from the Nazis and made sure he could not be connected to their plots to kill Hitler. Indeed,  large parts of his memoir consist of demonstrating his own sensitive and superior aesthetic: his attention to the changes of season, the beauty and profusion of flowers that come into his view, the particular, detailed attention he gives to the form and variety of beetles that he endlessly observes and collects. His openness to the many writers and graphic artists he encounters in Paris, not-withstanding that it is only very late in his memoir- long after he was convinced that Germany would lose the war- that he begins to sense that such connections could have serious consequences for them after the war.

He browses the many book markets of Paris, taking advantage of the rock bottom prices occasioned by the austerity imposed by the occupation but sometimes it is difficult to discern whether the pleasure he takes in them is more in ‘the rare edition’, the tactile feel of a luxurious cover, the quality of the paper, clarity of print than in the actual content of the works of such authors as Leon Bloy or Vasilly Rozanov. He writes that he has been reading this or that author but often, it seems, in a quite desultory fashion, a ‘good way to pass the idle  ‘off-duty hours’  of his time in Paris. Of his duties he says next nothing except that he had a meeting with one official or another. A snippet here and there discloses his general attitude and behavior but he conceals the particulars his many extramarital affairs. Apparently he made no effort after the war to correct the self-protecting lack of candor or distracting strategies of his original compositions.It is a vulgar and distressing book none-the-less.

There is much to be said for this ‘eye-witness’ account of the War and occupation in this memoir. One sees the decimation of helpless civilian populations caused by the allied bombing campaigns, the rains of shrapnel from anti-aircraft, the ruin of many ancient edifices, life on the precipice of annihilation and the indifference to humanity that engenders. I could make more of this book if I examined the life of its author before and after the war in more detail than is provided in the introduction. To what extent did the Allies themselves ‘figure’ the war in the same way Junger and Pasternak did: as a natural cataclysm preluding some inevitable, subsequently unheard-of victory of the human spirit?

What is Liberalism by Domenico Losurdo

Some Embarrassing Questions


The usual answer to this question admits no doubt: liberalism is the tradition of thought whose central concern is the liberty of the individual, which is ignored or ridden roughshod over by the organicist  philosophies of various kinds. But if that is the case, how should we situate John C. Calhoun? This eminent statesman, vice president of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, burst into an impassioned ode to individual liberty, which, appealing to Locke, he vigorously defended against any abuse of power and any unwarranted interference by the state. And that is not all. Along with ‘absolute governments’ and the ‘concentrations of power’, he unstintingly criticized and condemned fanaticism and the spirit of ‘crusade’, to which he opposed ‘compromise’ as the guiding principle of genuine ‘constitutional governments’. With equal eloquence Calhoun defended minority rights. It was not only a question of guaranteeing the alteration of various parties in government through suffrage: unduly extensive power was unacceptable in any event, even if of limited duration and tempered by the promise or prospect of a periodic reversal of the roles in the relationship between governors and the governed. Unquestionably, we seem to have all the characteristics of the most mature and attractive liberal thought. On the other hand, however, disdaining the half-measures and timidity or fear of those who restricted themselves to accepting it as a necessary ‘evil’, Calhoun declared slavery to be ‘a positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce. . . . So is Calhoun a liberal?

No doubts on this score were harbored by Lord Acton, a prominent figure in liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, an advisor and friend of William Gladstone. In Acton’s view, Calhoun was a champion of the cause of the struggle against any form of absolutism, including ‘democratic absolutism’; the arguments he employed were ‘the very perfection of political truth’. In short, we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.

The question we have poised does not only emerge from reconstructing the history of the United States. Prestigious scholars of the French Revolution, of firm liberal persuasion, have no hesitation in defining as ‘liberal’ those figures and circles that had the merit of opposing the Jacobin diversion, but who were firmly committed to the defense of colonial slavery. The reference is to Pierre-Victor Malouet and members of the Massiac Club, who were all plantation owners and slaveholders. Is it possible to be a liberal and a slaveholder at the same time? Such was not the opinion of John Stuart Mill, judging at least from his polemic against the ‘soi-disant’, British liberals (among them, perhaps, Acton and Gladstone), who, during the American Civil War, rallied en masse to a ‘furious pro-Southern partisanship’, or at any rate viewed the Union and Lincoln coolly and malevolently.[1.]

We face a dilemma. If we answer the question formulated above in the affirmative, we can no longer maintain the traditional (and edifying) image of liberalism as the thought and volition of liberty. If, on the other hand, we answer in the negative, we find ourselves confronting a new problem: why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of liberalism? Locke regarded slavery in the colonies as self-evident and indisputable and personally contributed to the legal formalization of the institution in Carolinas, however vigorous his  denunciations of the political ‘slavery’ that absolute monarchy sought to impose were. . . .

Now let us take a contemporary of Locke’s. Andrew Fletcher was a ‘champion of liberty’; and, at the same time, ‘a champion of slavery. Politically he professed to be a republican on principle and culturally was ‘a Scottish prophet of the Enlightenment’. Jefferson defined him as a ‘patriot’, whose merit was to have expressed the ‘political principles’ characteristic of ‘the purest periods of the British Constitution’- and those that subsequently caught on a prospered in America. Expressing positions rather similar to Fletcher’s was his contemporary James Burgh, who also enjoyed the respect of republican circles a la Jefferson, and was mentioned favorably by Thomas Paine in the most celebrated opuscule of the American Revolution (Common Sense).

Fletcher and Burgh are virtually forgotten today, and no one seems to want to include them among the exponents of the liberal tradition. The fact is that, in underlining the necessity of slavery, they were thinking primarily not of blacks in the colonies, but of the ‘vagrants’, the beggars, the odious ,incorrigible rabble of the metropolis. Liberal England presents us with another case. Francis Hutchinson, a moral philosopher of some significance (he was the ‘never to be forgotten’ master of Adam Smith), who, on the one hand expressed criticisms and reservations about slavery to which blacks were indiscriminately subjected. On the other hand, he stressed that, especially dealing with the ‘lower conditions’ of society, slavery could be a ‘useful punishment’: it should be the ‘ordinary punishment of idle vagrants as, after proper admonitions and trials of temporary servitude, cannot be engaged to support themselves and families by any useful labor.’ Were Fletcher, Burgh and Hutchinson liberals?

In analyzing the relationship that the three liberal revolutions (Dutch, British and American) developed on the one hand with blacks, and on the other with the Irish, Indians and natives, it is misleading to start out from the presupposition of an homogeneous historical time unmarked by fractures and flowing in unilinear fashion. Clearly predating Locke and Washington, and a contemporary of Grotius, was Montaigne in whom we find a memorable self-critical reflection on the West’s colonial expansion that we would seek in vain in them. ‘Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to.’ People took their own country as a model ‘There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!’ Going back further, we encounter Las Casa and his critique of the arguments employed to de-humanize the Indian ‘barbarians’. . .

Recourse to vulgar historicism to ‘explain’ or to repress the surprising tangle of freedom and oppression that characterizes the three liberal revolutions we have referred to is fruitless. The paradox persists and awaits a genuine, less comforting explanation.


To render it explicable, the paradox must first be expounded in all its radicalism. Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success. The total slave population in the Americas reached about 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, an finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s. Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. In the mid-eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (878,000). Although its empire was far more extensive, Spain came well behind. Second position was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi-colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London. Hence there is no doubt that absolutely pre-eminent in this field was the country at the head of the liberal movement, which had wrested primacy from the Glorious Revolution onward. ‘No nation in Europe has plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain.’ ( Pitt the Younger, House of Commons, April, 1792). In John Wesley’s view, ‘American slavery was ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun. ’James Madison, slave-owner and liberal, observed that ‘the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man- power based on mere distinction of color- was imposed  in the most enlightened period of time’ .  .  .

The Elusive Liberalism of de Tocqueville’s America

But now let us pass over both populations of colonial origin and the poorest strata of the white population, who were denied not only political rights, but also ‘modern liberty’. Let us focus exclusively on the dominant class – i.e. white, male property owners. Did full civil and political equality obtain in this milieu? There are reasons to doubt it. One thinks of the ‘three-fifths’ constitutional provision on the basis of which, in calculating the number of seats due the southern states, partial account was also taken of the number of slaves. Far from being a negligible detail, this clause played a significant role in the history of the United States: ‘four southern voters ended up exercising more power than ten northern voters. Thus is explained the “Virginia dynasty' that long succeeded in holding the country’s presidency. This is why Jefferson was branded the ‘black president’ by his opponents: he arrived in power thanks to the inclusion in the electoral result of blacks who remained his slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed polemically: “It is a truth that cannot be denied, that in all the free  States no white man is the equal of the white man of the slave States". This thesis was repeated in 1864 by a French liberal (Edouard Laboulaye):

Because you have slaves, you will be allowed to elect a representative with ten thousand votes, while the Yankees of the North, who live off their own labor, will require thirty thousand votes. The conclusion for the folks of the South is that they constitute a particular, superior race, that they are great lords. The aristocratic spirit has been developed and strengthened by the Constitution. .  . .

From Constant onward, modern or liberal liberty has been described and celebrated as the undisturbed enjoyment of private property. But slave-owners were in fact subject to a whole series of public obligations. There can be no doubt that the Glorious Revolution and then the American Revolution consecrated the self-government of a civil society composed of, and hegemonized by, slave-owners, who were more determined than ever not to tolerate interference by central political power and the Church. But it would be mistaken to equate the self-government of civil society, now freed from those fetters, with the free movement of the individuals composing it.

“While the colonial slave codes see at first sight to have been to discipline Negros, to deny them freedoms available to other Americans, a very slight shift  in perspective shows the codes in a different light. Principally, the law told the white man, not the Negro; the codes were for the eyes and ears of the slave-owners (sometimes the laws required the publication of the code in the newspaper and that clergymen read it to their congregations). It was the white man who was required to punish his runaways, prevent assemblages of slaves, enforce the curfews, sit on special courts, and ride the patrols.” [2.]

In crisis situations the duty of vigilance made itself ever more strongly felt. We have seen a ‘military service’ of whites patrolling day and night in Richmond in 1831. In such cases, observed Gustave de Beaumont during his journey in de Tocqueville’s company, ‘society arms itself with all its rigors and mobilizes all social forces, seeking in every possible way to encourage informing and control; in South Carolina, along with the fugitive slave the death penalty awaited any person who has helped him escape.’ Significant too were the the results of the passage of laws on fugitive slaves in 1850. Subject to punishment was not only the citizen who sought to hide or help the black pursued or sought by his legitimate owners, but also those who did not collaborate in his capture. This was a legal provision which (as its critics put it) sought to ‘compel every freeborn American to become a man-hunter.’

As well as slave-owners, slave society ended up affecting the white community as a whole. Precisely because, in addition to being chattels, black slaves were also the enemy within, abolitionists were immediately suspected of treason, thus become the target of a series of more or less harsh repressive measures. Severe restrictions were placed on the press: in 1800 the slave revolt in Virginia was often ignored by southern newspapers; there was the danger of spreading the contagion further. In 1863 the president of the United States permitted the postmaster general to block the circulation of all publications critical of the institution of slavery. Rounding off the gag placed on abolitionists, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution banning the examination of anti-slavery petitions.

In the South violence against abolitionists took the form of a pogrom that did not hesitate to torture and physically eliminate traitors and their supporters, with complete impunity. The situation in the South in the years preceding the Civil War was described as follows, in a letter written by Joel R.Poinsett at the end of 1850:

 We are both heartily sick of this atmosphere redolent of insane violence .  .  . there is a strong party averse to violent men and violent measures, but they are frightened into submission – afraid even to exchange opinions with others who think like them, lest they should be betrayed.

In fact, the contemporary historian who cites this testimony concludes that with recourse to lynching, violence and threats of every kind, the South succeeded in silencing not only the opposition, but also any mild dissent. In addition to abolitionists, those who wanted to distance themselves from the pitiless witch-hunt felt threatened, and were threatened. They were impelled by terror into ‘holding one’s tongue, killing one’s doubts, burying one’s reservations.’ There is no doubt about it, the terroristic power wielded by slave-owners over their blacks also ended up affecting, on a lasting basis, members and fractions of the dominant race and class . . .[ And lasted more than a century after the abolition of slavery itself] . . .

Has liberalism definitively left behind the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of thought?

However difficult such an operation might be be for those committed to overcoming liberalism’s exclusion causes, to take up the legacy of this intellectual tradition is an absolutely unavoidable task. On the other hand, liberalism’s merits are too significant and too necessary to credit it with other, completely imaginary ones. Among the latter is the alleged spontaneous capacity for self-correction often attributed to it. If one starts from such a proposition, the tragedy of peoples subjected to slavery or semi-slavery, or deported, decimated and destroyed, becomes utterly inexplicable. This was a tragedy which, far from being impeded or prevented by the liberal world, developed in close connection to it. Unfounded on a historiographical level, the habitual hagiography is also an insult to the memory of the victims. Only in opposition to the pervasive repressions and transfigurations is the book now ended presented as a ‘counter-history’: bidding farewell to hagiography is the precondition for landing on the firm ground of history.

[1]When he turned his attention to the colonies, however, Mill justified the West’s ‘despotism’ over ‘races’ that were still ‘under age’, and who were obliged to observe an ‘absolute obedience’ in order to be set on the path of progress. This formulation would not have displeased Calhoun, who likewise legitimized slavery by reference to the backwardness and nonage of populations of African origin.. In Mill’s view, ‘any means’ were licit for those who took on the task of educating ‘savage tribes’; ‘slavery’ was sometimes a mandatory stage for inducing them to work and making them useful to civilization and progress.

[2] Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black, N.Y., Norton, 1977, p. 108.

A Fading Shadow by Antonio Munoz Molina

[ The presentations in this Blog try to avoid the handiworks of the reviewers’ arts, the cliché’s of praise or blame, aesthetic theory, political dogma; the inevitable comparisons to  another or the author’s previous works; attempts to establish the work in a hierarchy of interest and achievement. I just want to let the author’s words speak for themselves, however useless one or two brief passages may be to any effort to convey the full scope of the work from which it has been taken. Sufficient and necessary to say in this case, however, I have read few books where the notion ‘the humanities’ was ever represented better.

 This book is about James Earl Ray- the man who murdered Martin Luther King Jr.- and, for a large part of the novel- about the nine days the man spent in Lisbon, on the run from the law, his money and options inexorably dissipating- an imagining of Ray’s confrontation with the seals of his fate. It is also about the author’s own struggles as an aspiring author, the blockages incurred by his day job and the burdens of a young wife and growing family when he too had once tried to escape to Lisbon.  But it is  about much more than that.]


Gradually, in another future life, I began to realize that beauty, harmony, symmetry, are properties or spontaneous consequences of natural processes that exist without the need for an organizing intelligence, just as natural selection operates without an ultimate purpose, and certainly without a Supreme Being determining its laws in advance. The symmetry of a leaf or a tree or a body is self-organizing, a virtue of the instructions encoded in its DNA. The sinuous curves of a river or the ramifications of a delta draw themselves on a plane like the veins of a hand or a wave retreating from the sand. The highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremeditated, yet vigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Nature is a haunted house – but Art – a house that tries to be haunted.”

                               .   .    .    .    .    .    .    .

The novel simplifies life. It simplifies it and it tames it. It begets its own fever, especially when you intuit its end. I don’t want to watch films, or listen to music that isn’t spirituals, songs from the civil rights movement, and jazz from the time. I don’t ant to write articles, or give lectures, or plan trips, or see exhibits. All I need is a wooden desk and a laptop. If the laptop crashes or its battery dies, I would continue in a notebook. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have to do with my writing.

The novel subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover. You are writing even when you don’t write. Narrative imagination does not feed on what it has invented; it feeds ion the past. Every minor or trivial event that one experiences or discovers in the course of an investigation can be valuable or even decisive for a novel, occupying a minimal but precise place within it, like an uneven cobblestone in a sidewalk in Lisbon.

I barely read the newspaper. I don’t bother to open magazines or packages with books. I have deleted myself without difficulty, and to great relief, from social networks. I’m exercising my right to an ancient form of solitude, disconnected from everything; dedicating my time to one thing, and doing so because that’s what I desire, for pleasure, the satisfaction of the process in and of itself; free, for now, from all the anxiety that is sure to come, the uncertainty of the result, the fear of hostile review, the emptiness or silence that will overcome me when the book is published and I wait to hear from the first unknown readers.

The Internet is the gateway to a vast archive where every day I discover new information that feeds my writing. Admirers from all over the world write to Ray asking for his autograph. A firefighter said he could not remember the shot but he did remember the rattling of the windows. Ray wrote over four hundred letters during his time in prison and they are preserved in the archives of Boston University. The store clerk who sold him binoculars around 4:15 on April 4 was surprised to see him in a suit and with a loose tie. At the Canadian embassy in London, the person who helped him fill out the passport application [there was a typo-error on the one he got in Toronto] said he held the pen and the forms as if he could not read or write.

When he was about to pay for something, he took money directly out of his pockets, instead of wallet. Several female witnesses not with displeasure the excessive amounts of hair pomade he wore. After the shot, King’s face looked as if it had been torn from front to back. At the jail in Memphis, he sang in the shower when he was in a good mood. The gush of blood from the wound reached the door of the room. Among other things that Ray left in the boardinghouse in Atlanta were maps of the southeastern United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Louisiana, Los Angeles, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Birmingham.

Some people said he looked like an insurance agent, a door-to-door salesman, a preacher. In King’s pockets, at the time of his death, there were two ten dollar bills, a five, three ones, forty-five cents in change, a silver pen, various business cards and an appointment book for the year 1968 with black covers.

The novel has developed on its own with the unlimited richness of reality and the blank spaces I haven’t been tempted to fill, spaces in the shadows that cannot be illuminated, mostly because it has been too long, most of the witnesses have died, and the memory is quite fragile.

The novel is what I write and also the room where I work. The novel is the fine-point that ran out of ink one day when I wrote for five or six hours without stopping and filled an entire notebook. The novel is made of everything I know and everything I don’t know, and with the sensation of groping my way through this story but never finding a precise narrative outline. In 1977 James Earl Ray escaped from prison and remained on the run for fifty hours, chased by hundreds of armed officers, dogs, helicopters with searchlights, through a forest in the mountains of Tennessee. They found him hiding in a ditch, cold and starved, crouching under a layer of branches in an area infested with snakes.

The novel writes itself while I type away at the computer and also while I sit quietly and pensively with both hands on the edge of the table. It writes itself now as I travel on Tram 28 to meet with you at a pub you found on the corner of a sloping street, near the Bicas Elevator and the viewpoint of Santa Catarina. After dinner, we’re going to Caios de Sodre to see the lights of the bars and peek inside those doorways and stairways where he would have disappeared with women in tight skirts and high heels echoing on the stone steps.

Where does a story begin, where does it end? Don Quixote learns that Gines de Pasamonte, one of the criminals he released with great folly, is writing his autobiography. Don Quixote asked him if he has finished it, and Gines responds  "How can it be finished, when my life is not yet finished?” We have been apart all afternoon and I’m dying to see you. Perhaps from the sidewalk, I will catch a glimpse of your face before you notice. To love the face is to love the soul.

Tram 28 rises and falls like a sailboat on the rolling waves of Lisbon’s hills. Alone in her room at the Lorraine Motel, her eyes wide open in the dark, stunned by the unreality of pain, hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire trucks in the distance, Memphis in flames, Georgia Davis notices a sound above her ceiling, a rubbing, a scraping. She comes out of her room and stands in the empty parking lot under the red, blue and yellow of the motel sign. On the second floor, in front of room 306, custodians work quietly, scrubbing with sponges and rags the wall, the door, the floor to erase traces of blood.