R.M. sensed it: the season changed two nights ago. We were in London; when I joined R.M. on Saturday it was hot and sultry, we took the umbrella when we went for dinner. It rained steadily, consistently, with a kind of patience. Flashes of lightning, thunder. Then the season changed; it was cooler, fresher.
Autumn, and a few weeks before I have to prepare to give papers again. I can write whatever I like. Pleasant to draw a breath here, to note the turning of seasons, the beginning of a new term, another one after so many. Am I looking forward to it?
Last night, friends return from hotter places. Tequila and enchiladas, beer and nachos in a south-facing garden. Where will I be by the end of the year? Still here in this city, or in another?
The turn of the seasons. Read Handke, whose books are always poised at the threshold. He is my companion at the threshold. Over the next few weeks, I promise myself to write on Josipovici’s short stories, on the origin of taste (inspired by Bergson), before I begin to write on music (an essay on Will Oldham) and film (Tarkovsky’s Mirror).
No more philosophy, I tell myself. Everything I write is to be completely contained in the object I write about. And the writing has to be as though dictated my that object, lending it an idiom.
No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns to me as a kind of dream, unless the whole of philosophy concentrates itself into the absolute density of a dream, meaning everything and meaning nothing, returning too full of itself, overfull with significance, but somehow without itself, stripped, vacancy in place of presence. Philosophy as it passes like the wind in the field at the beginning of Mirror. The doctor has turned, he’s walking away, he turns back, and then the wind passes through the long grass of the field. The wind passing like benediction, that great speech which speaks in the bending of long grass, in a wave that passes through grass. So it would be with philosophy: let it speak as it touches things, as it passes through them. Let it be no more than that passing.
No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as the dream in which everything is present, and nothing: whose saturation leaves as it were a gap between philosophy and itself. That gap is the thing, which speaks in the gasp philosophy must leave and depends upon. Wisdom of the thing, thing-teacher as it speaks of itself and only of itself. No more philosophy, I tell myself, unless it returns as a kind of prayer in things, that silent meditation in which they seem to think of themselves, resting in themselves.
As we walked up the path to the church, a drunk, faced flushed, squatting in the sun and watching cricket practice called out to us. A succession of jokes. He was a happy idiot. ‘That’s beatitude’ said W., who had been talking about Spinoza. Idiot, idiom: I thought: I would like to be as drunk as that, dreaming myself into things. I would like to be that drunk, where the gap between philosophy and itself, the turning of one season into another, would be the hinge, the point of articulation wherein the future could be seen. The future: what philosophy lives from and kills. The future as it is born in the epoche in which it is not the philosopher who sees the world, but the world that sees him. Epoche: season, suspension, and I imagine to myself, threshold and gap. The epoche is the future, I tell myself as we walk in the sun, the future is with us in this turning of seasons.
That was last week, still summer. Now it is autumn. The heating’s on. I listen to The End of Amnesia by M. Ward. The plants almost cover the bins in the backyard. I pile my jumpers on my chest of draws. Seven jumpers, seven colours, bought in a shop in the tropics that has since closed down (Triminghams). Seven jumpers, which I recall to teach the difference between particulars and universals, but also to speak of what is singular and different from everything else. But how can I summon them thus, as examples for a philosophy class? No more philosophy, I tell myself. Cezanne describes his working method as a reflection on things seen, and mine should be a reflection on being seen, called, by all the things in the world. Called 7 times by 7 jumpers, I tell myself. Called 7 times over by 7 different-coloured jumpers.
Lars Iyer's Blog 