MEMORY-ESSAY #1

This ESSAY has FIVE parts. Click here for the FIRST part, “CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND PART, “THEN AND NOW”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIFTH PART, “ETHOPOEIA”.

11. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, p. 180.

12. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Ropley, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2009), p. 16.

III
SILENCED

Mark Fisher and I were both involved with a magazine for several years. As time went on, we became friends. I stayed with him and his family at their home in Suffolk in the summer of 2012, but not long after this trip to the coast I left the magazine. Even though I knew that friendships made through work don’t usually last after the work has ended, I tried to stay in contact with Mark.

My first job after university was working as a publisher in a large organisation. During this employment I continued to do some academic research and wrote occasional journalism. This sideline was on rather a small scale; it wasn’t anything like Francis Fukuyama at the State Department producing “The End of History?” Still, I think I know a little about how an institution impacts a young worker’s identity. Corporate rules, often unwritten, make a powerful impression. I always had my own daydreams of escape but when I left the job after an entire decade, it came as a surprise how hard the separation was, how different the reality of exiting was compared with escape in theory.

This reminds me that when I met Mark—it would have been around the time he turned forty—he was in a precarious position. It was only later that he secured half-time lecturer posts at two different London universities. His newfound security was established just when I was myself going in the opposite direction, tearing myself away from the professional world again, though more irreversibly this time, which for better or worse I was able to do if only because, unlike Mark, I had no family obligations, and also because it wasn’t my first escape. I am not saying it was much easier the second time around.

A few months after leaving the first workplace, I met a former colleague on a bus, someone I had always got on well with. When I said hello, he responded with unmistakable coldness. He didn’t exactly blank me but he put up a barrier. Suddenly I saw another side of the institutional rules, and later I thought about the creepy, powerful pressure of certain kinds of silence and conversational clampdown. There can be so much coercion and rejection involved in politely dismissive dialogue, such quiet violence, and all because of the demands of some group loyalty.

I have searched my inbox and found the last two emails Mark and I exchanged, both from September 2015. The background was that I had proposed a joint writing project. Mark replied with interest, warned that he was busy, but suggested meeting at the end of the month; I wrote back with possible dates. That was the last I heard from him, and less than two years later he died. I remember that when it seemed likely after a few weeks that what turned out to be my final email to Mark wasn’t going to be answered, it didn’t occur to me to worry about him exactly. Instead I assumed that this was the last stage in the unavoidable fading away of a work friendship. But because I couldn’t be sure this was the explanation, I left a voicemail. Still no answer came.

During my visit to Suffolk, Mark and I walked by the sea. I remember I felt there was a barrier between us, though not like the one that was put up on the bus. I had the sensation again a couple of years later, while I was with someone else who would shortly afterwards take his own life. It was only after the second man’s death that I realised this was how I used to feel often when I was with my father, who didn’t commit suicide, not directly anyway, and now I would say it is the feeling someone can get in the presence of a sadness which has managed to become a horrible surrounding, a force field—“it is as if the sorrow comes from the outside”,¹¹ Mark Fisher wrote, “a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action”¹²—until, in the saddest cases of all, the person left or lost on the other side of it can no longer be reached.
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