Life!

A weekend with W., and we do our best to fill our days with inane chatter. Increasingly absurd questions probing every aspect of life: ‘Do you think you’re a nurturer?’; ‘Have you got leadership potential?’; ‘What, do you think, was your biggest mistake?’; ‘At what point did you know you were a failure?’, and even better, we had someone before whom we could parade our ridiculous, half-formed ideas on every topic.

Whole days pass in chatter, even when I catch W.’s flu and have to lie in his sofa in the upstairs lounge. W. comes and sits at the sofa’s end and we watch TV and comment on that. He had been as ill as he had ever been, said W., like Kafka or Blanchot, but he hadn’t thought of anything, he was just ill, and looked after by Sal, who, fortuitously was down for the week. And now he has to look after me.

Does he have paracetamol? Yes he does, he says, but of course he has everything but. I make him make me Lemsip to make up. He brings it up to me in a mug. You’re not ill, says W., you’re just tired. The first night, we’d been out to dinner and then to a nightclub and danced, and after that back to the house to dance some more. We worked out some formation moves.

The next day, Sunday, the traditional walk to Cawsands through Mount Edgcombe, in order, as is also tradition, to forget that the pubs stop serving food at 2.00, which is always about the time we arrive. We have foregone our honey beers in order to eat, but why deny ourselves those earned pints, especially since – another tradition – we had crossed the ravine in W.’s adventure route along to where the cliff had collapsed?

Yes, the usual fiasco, but no one lost or nearly lost as happened last time, with poor R. almost slipping all the way into the sea. In Cawsands we ate pasties instead, and ice cream for afters – and I bought fudge for after that. Then back on the busride that takes you past Whitsands where the holiday chalets cling to the cliff, with the sea on the left side of us and the city opening out on the right.

The next day, Monday, while I was ill, we had a moment of inspiration, and drafted a collaborative project on the back on a newspaper. We knew we had to be quick: soon the tide of inanity would rush forward and claim everything, but for a time, and impressively seriously, we wrote down our ideas and the other thoughts they made us have and then sat back happily. That night, we were made frikadellar and a substitute for rotkohl, and peeled boiled potatoes, Danish style.

What is to become of us? W. always trusts my predictions. I lay down the law. ‘It will happen this way …’ Meanwhile, W. is thinking about chapter two of his new book. He was ill – iller than he’d ever been before, and unable to begin. I tell him I’m reading Lacan and Zizek and all that and he sighs: he’d read all of Lacan, everything he could get hold of, in that period around his peak, more than ten years ago, but he hadn’t understood what he read.

It’s all gone now, he says, as though I’d never read it. W. is amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading, writing, before going to work. I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked very hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. But then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. He started smoking and drinking heavily to pass the hours. There was little tuition.

True, things picked up again later, when he got his first proper job. For five years, in a room, working. What zeal! He didn’t have a TV; and since he was on a 0.5, barely an hour a week teaching. He learnt Hebrew. He took lengthy notes on everything he read. He had no desire to publish, and if he did, would work for as much as 7 years on a paper. That was before I met you, he said.

7 years! But he likes what he wrote, back then. It seems okay to him. A lot of what he did then he’s forgotten, but he has the notes. His earlier notes, from the time when he wanted to be a writer, he gave away or destroyed. He kept diaries too, like Kafka, but those, too, have disappeared.

At what point did he want to become a philosopher, rather than a writer? He doesn’t know. But isn’t it true you can always hold out, in philosophy, for a late blooming – a Kant-like coming into your powers, years after you would have been put out to retirement in other fields? But he also says it was Kafka who made him both stop writing: how could his own work compare?

For all his work – and he worked very hard – he could not; so he stopped, and gave everything away, or made sure it was destroyed. Still, he muses unhappily, neither of us will get very far as philosophers. You have to know maths to be good at it. He’s stalled at differential calculus, W. says. In fact, he’s stalled at Euclid. He only really feels happy with Pythagoras, and he’s not even sure about that.

He doesn’t know much about surds. Parmenides, says W., he discovered those. No maths, says W., means no philosophy. We talk of our friends who have a background in maths. They might achieve something, says W., but not us.

We repeat the old formula: we’re intelligent enough to know what genius is, but we’re not geniuses! That’s our tragedy: to know we’ll never amount to anything. Still, we did come up with some ideas at the weekend, and we’re pleased with that. In some peculiar way, we’re advancing. By picking ideas from here and adding a few of our own, we getting somewhere. Perhaps.

I’m to transform our notes into an abstract, W. directs. Very well then. Now W. presses me about my own decline. But you never really had a peak, he says. And you don’t really do anything, do you? I’m in my office much more than he is in his, I point out. Yes, that’s true, says W. And besides, I’m reading Lacan and Zizek, and writing reviews. Yes, yes, says W., but what about work – real work!

On Tuesday, I see my second book has arrived by post from the publishers to be reviewed. W. will have to send it out. He sits down and opens it, reading the first lines. Yes – he’s found it – a mistake in the first paragraph. A really dumb mistake: I’d changed ‘ego’ to ‘the "I"’ but still gave the translation, le moi. What idiocy.

You’re depressed now, aren’t you?, says W. Of course W.’s book has mistakes not only in the first paragraph, but in the blurb. We both find this very funny. In the blurb! And after all that proofreading! After reading it again and again and again! I think you should do a third book, says W., that would be funny. Meanwhile, W. is busy writing his introduction. I’m destroying Heidegger, he says.

W.’s decline is getting worse. He doesn’t work at night any more, but watches trash TV. And now, like me, he’s bought Civilisation 3. What appalls me, he says, is I play Civilisation 3 with more seriousness than I work. I tell him I’ve given up. The computer cheats at higher levels. There’s no point playing. So what do you do instead?, says W., oh yes, Lacan and Zizek, I forgot.

For his part, W. is teaching Leibniz next year. He only has so long to understand the maths. He taught Spinoza last year, and this year Leibniz. Meanwhile, he’s going to read Hermann Cohen. What am I going to read? I tell him I’m rereading Henry Green at the moment. Caught. It’s so lovely. And then – Party Going. And then Back, which I’ve never read. What do you like about it?, says W. – It’s so pretty. That’s one of his failings, he explains to our friend who cooked for us, he likes pretty things.

He, meanwhile, is still reading Kraznohorkai. Bela Tarr’s new film has run into problems, W. tells me. His producer’s left. We should send him some money, we decide. Ah, Bela Tarr!  In the cocktail bar, we drink Martinis and then – something new – so called English caiperenas, with Plymouth Gin instead of cachasa.

More gin! We’d had a few glasses that afternoon (Saturday), in the red front room with the shutters, sitting as usual around the table, with pork scratchings from the corner shop. But we’re seasoned drinkers. Then to the restaurant, then the nightclub, and then home for more dancing. ‘Toxic’, that daft instrumental off Yoshimi, something by Kenicke (W.’s choices), and I choose Prince – ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.

Musical movement’s very important, I tell W. The next day, I instruct him about the limbic system. In mammals, unlike reptiles, physical contact is important. W. defers to me in several areas: on health and nutrition in general, and on the decline of academia. On the latter, I’m particularly good, he says, I’m always right.

‘Life!’, I exclaim, as I often do. – ‘What’s wrong with you?’, says W. – ‘Nothing’s wrong, quite the contrary.’ Life: how did we end up here, and living these kinds of lives, and doing these kinds of things? And whatever’s going to become of us?