Conversation with W. He’s reading Radical Thought in Italy. ‘It’s pure DOGMA’, he says. ‘They’re all mates. No quotes, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as if they were world-historical’ – ‘That should be a DOGMA rule’. – ‘Exactly. Write about your ideas as if they were categories in Aristotle’. W. sends me a quote:
Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence.
‘You can mull it over in your stupidity’, he says. We have a new rule, now that we’ve become co-writers: we have to give each other a list of books to read. The first one is Radical Thought in Italy. ‘That’s how we should write’, says W. Co-writers: he’s coming to visit me here, and I’ll go and visit him there.
‘I keep getting up early’, I tell him. So is he. 5.00, the pair of us. ‘What do you do when you get up?’, he says. – ‘I’m writing an essay’. ‘Why don’t you try reading? Why don’t you read something?’ – I tell him I’m going downhill. I’ve reached that age in which I can’t do anything: ‘It’s like all these artists who begin well and end up ropey. I could never imagine it, and now it’s happening to me’. – ‘But they produced something before they went downhill. What have you produced? What hill have you climbed? How do you go downhill from downhill?’
I tell him I’ve been reading X. – ‘what did you think?’ – ‘He mesmerises me. He’s everything I’m not; I feel guilty when I read him’. W.: ‘He’s a swan and you’re a bear’.
I tell W. I’ve been feeling ill. it’s my stomach. Perhaps I’m going to die. ‘You’re not going to die. You’re just fat and greedy’. W. says I should read more. ‘I can’t be bothered. I’m getting old’. – ‘You’re not old. 35 – that’s when philosophy begins. When you’re 60 you might have something to say:’ I tell him it’s too late for me. ‘I’m done with it. I’m not writing anymore’. A year ago, W. had said I was nearly running on empty. Now he says it: ‘your tank’s dry. You’re empty’.
He doesn’t like the recent posts. ‘Go back to doing what you do best. Whining. Go back to whining, like an ape crying in his Bovril’. He’s not persuaded. ‘Stop trying to be profound. You’re not profound, you’re an ape’.
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