Devon in the sun, visiting W. for work. Finished Hofman on the plane and thought to myself: I should have a go at writing like him. Picking up turns of phrase, the way people become present in gesture and in speech. The other person as style, as the incarnation of a style or the unfolding of a mode equivalent to a substance – a way of being, a how-being-is rather than a thing. Nothing mysterious about the otherness of the other, I think to myself, it’s all there on the surface, but how to attend to it as magnificently as Hofmann allows his narrator to do of his dead grandfather?
I took a bottle of Tequila with me and we drank until W. told me when I drink I become lairy and apocalyptic and swear a great deal. We had some Tequila then a bottle of white wine and then an excellent bottle of red wine a student gave him. ‘We’ll never drink anything like this again’, said W. We listened to two compilations I made of the Fall in W.’s red living toom. W. when he drinks gets to a point where he says, ‘the problem with you is ….’ or ‘your problem is …’ I tell him I’m going to write on music from now on. W. finds this very funny. ‘You don’t know anything about music’.
Later that night we go up to W.’s study and spread his Rosenzweig books on the table. ‘He wrote The Star of Redemption in his early 30s’, W. says. He always gets to a point, when he drinks when he says ‘How is it possible for a human being to write like that?’ He has The Star in German – 500 stern pages – and the little book, unpublished in Rosenzweig’s lfietime which he wrote in a month as a simpler presentation of the ideas in The Star. ‘How is it possible …’ he says.
The next morning, Smog and we make up new lyrics to ‘A Hit’: ‘We’re not going to be Rosenzweig, so why even bother’. We walk along the coast speaking of our stupidity. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do. It has absolutely no consequence’. I ask W. what buoys are for. ‘To mark hazards or shipwrecks’, he said. And I said of the buoy we passed, ‘there’s the wreckage of your career’. Now we’ve walked too far; our shins ache. We catch the ferry back across the Tamar.
Cocktails in the evening. Martini, very simple and pure. W. tells me I have to behave and not talk about our thighs. All the fat from my stomach, I had told him – and he always likes to touch my stomach – has become muscle on my thighs and so I can’t fit my trousers. The next morning, hungover again, W. goes through his Sainsburys magazines deciding what to cook that evening. We go shopping and I go out and buy ‘fighting juice’ (cans of Stella) and pork scratchings for an aperitif. W. asks me lots of questions about food. ‘How come you eat so much?’ That night, we burn CDs (the new Low album, Sufijan Stevens, Danielson Famile) and watch Dodgeball.
Today, W. found a new way to torment me. He said: you’re so full of pathos, everything you write is full of pathos. But he said he quite liked my new book. ‘I almost wept’, he said of the third chapter. But he doesn’t think I really mean it. ‘You don’t really feel those things, do you?’ I reminded him of a pathetic sentence in his new book. He said, I wrote it for you. Then he says: ‘everything you write is pathetic’, and then I said: ‘you have to discover what you and only you can write’. He says, as he always says, ‘I like it when you whine’. He likes my posts about academia, he says, and I agree. ‘Everything was leading up to them’, I said, ‘it’s all downhill from here’. ‘You should always write from hatred’, said W.
W. always says I am his id. He says, ‘you can barely control yourself’ and does impressions of me writing. ‘It’s like an ape’, he says. Sometimes he tells me to behave. See those doors? he says, as we go into some posh room or another, ‘yes’, no more talking about your thighs when you get in there. Or your illnesses. And don’t touch yourself.
Every year I tell him about my latest plans to escape philosophy. ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like the rest of us’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me, and set out my Hindu stall. And what was it last year? W. is very pleased he taught himself Hebrew. This year, I tell him, it’s music. I wasn’t going to tell him, I said, but surprise him when a gleaming new book comes out all about music. ‘What are you going to write on?’ – ‘Smog’. – ‘What are you going to say?’ – ‘I don’t know’. W., who plays guitar, finds this very funny. ‘It’s music from now on’, I tell him.
I always remind W. of Deleuze’s example of the wasp and the orchid, the wasp becoming-orchid and the orchid becoming-wasp. We’re Brod and Brod, I tell him, and neither of us is Kafka. What I mean to say is that I am not his id and he is not my ego, but that’s what we become when we are together. Both of us are becoming-Brod. I remind him of the funny dance sequences of Ben Stiller’s team in Dodgeball. ‘That’s what we should do in Dogma Philosophy’. ‘We need uniforms’. S., who is with us all weekend, finds us insufferable but sometimes entertaining as you would two apes in a zoo. W. says he’ll always write out of hatred at conferences from now on. ‘No scholarship’, he says, ‘just hatred’.
W. can cook, play guitar, read several languages and converse politely. ‘You’re the complete humanities academic’, I tell him, ‘you have a broad personality’. W. finds it funny that I can’t do any of these things. ‘What do you do all day?’ he asks me. Then he tests me on Spinoza: ‘what is a substance? what is a mode?’ he asks. I tell him I gave up the Ethics. ‘It’s too hard. I only read about music now’.
We read the paper. The Observer has a long section on climate change. ‘We’re doomed’, I said, ‘we’re all going to die’. I ask W. whether it will get hotter or colder. Colder, he says, when the North Atlantic Drift switches off. There’ll be ice as far down as Nottingham, I said. We both agree: the Petrol Crisis will trigger a world wide financial collapse. ‘It doesn’t matter what we do’, he said, ‘we’re doomed’. Then, glum, I go out and get more beer.
Kafka came on holiday to Plymouth, said W., making it up. And Brod. ‘Didn’t he have a corner shop here with Brod?’ said W., still making it up. W. tells me he catches the ferry to the gardens sometimes to read. ‘What do you read?’ – ‘Kafka’. – ‘In German?’ – ‘No, it’s too hard’. We walk up the road by the Hoe where the council have stuck in little metal pillars with the names of famous residents written on them. ‘I’m going to be there one day’.
We joke how much money our books will make us. W. is very smug about the amount of times his has been proofread. ‘How many have yours sold?’ I tell him writing a paperback is a serious business and I’ll only do so when I have an idea. W. notices the Moleskine notepad I bought for myself in America. ‘It’s for ideas’, I said. ‘What ideas have you had today?’ I told him I’d written the words ‘lairy’ and ‘apocalypse’.
As we eat the chicken from Sainsburys I feel a great excitement. I speak about God and the Queen and the chicken. W. can see how excited I am. Yes, it’s the food, I said. It makes me rapturous’. I’ve never seen anyone who likes food as much as you, says W., who has only eaten a small breakfast and refused the pork scratchings I bought as an aperitif. ‘I don’t want to spoil my appetite’, he said.
‘You want to be famous’, says W. to me. We compete to see who is the least careerist. ‘Refuse promotions’, says W. He thinks I publish writing here because I want to be famous. ‘I write just as much as you’, says W. ‘but I don’t publish it’. It’s true. Sometimes he sends me his lecture notes.
Summer in Devon. We are in HMV looking for Bad Santa on DVD. I had told him how good it was. I had brought Tripping with Caveh with me, which features Will Oldham. ‘He’s so tender’, I say. ‘He’s got a lovely smile’, says W. We listen to volume 3 of the Nick Cave B sides boxset. W. rhapsodises. I am drunk, lairy and apocalyptic. W. says, ‘the problem with you is …’ and we’re off again.
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