The Destroyed Thinker

Manchester lacks a river, W. says. It lacks an expanse. That’s why Mancunion thoughts are always claustrophobic thoughts, he says. It’s why Mancunion thinkers are constrained, trying to fight their way free.

And there’s the rain, the terrible Westerlies, W. says. Manchester is particularly prone to Westerlies, which roll across its plain. The weather is so heavy here, W. says. So crushing.

The Mancunion thinker has constantly to struggle against melancholia, and thoughts of suicide. He thinks of Alan Turing, eating an apple he’d coated in cyanide. He thinks of Ian Curtis, hanging himself from a clothes-airer.

Sometimes W. thinks that it is only the destroyed thinker who understands what matters most. That it is only destroyed thoughts that can think the whole. Is that why, despite everything, he reads my work so carefully? Is that why he still believes that I might have something to say? I am a destroyed man - that is clear enough. But a profound one? If I have depths, it is despite myself, W. says. If I have a significance, it's one that I myself do not grasp. But my life, in its own way, is a kind of witness to the end. My writing is what philosophy becomes before the last judgement.

But there can be no thought from a regenerated city, W. says, as we look up at the warehouses converted into luxury flats. There can be thought without dilapidation! No thought without urban blight!