Inanity

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. I think they find us, who are usually the people to whom no one wants to speak – there’s no advantage in doing so – and we are always ready. We are friendly, if nothing else, and there’s only a few people we’ll do anything to avoid. And besides, it amuses us when people throw themselves on our mercy. ‘You must be really desperate. We’re the last people you should talk to. It’ll get you nowhere.’

We tend to speak in chorus. What does it matter which one of us said the following, to the young postdoc at a prestigious university. ‘You must leave at once. It’s terrible. You shouldn’t spend another day there. You’ll go mad. You see people like you don’t belong there. They’ll hate you. They probably already do. They’ll sniff you out straightaway. There’s no point. You have to fail. You have to know you’re a failure. That’s absolutely essential. If you don’t know you’re a failure, then nothing.’

W. looks at me. ‘You know you’re a failure, don’t you?’ I agree: ‘oh, very much so.’ – ‘And I’m a failure, aren’t I?’ – ‘Definitely.’ And then to the postdoc: ‘You’re the wrong class, you see. It really matters. We’re the wrong class too, aren’t we?’ – ‘Very much so.’ – ‘The difference is that I can pretend to me middle class, and he can’t’, says W. I agree. ‘He gets all surly’, says W., ‘like an ape.’ – ‘I can’t help it,’ I tell the postdoc.

On the other hand, I saved W. from the high table. – ‘I’m your id.’ W agrees. – ‘Everyone says the same thing: since I’ve been hanging out with that L.—, my work’s really gone downhill.’ We laugh. -‘He’s destroying my career’, says W., ‘really. He’ll destroy yours, too.’ And then we start again: ‘You have to leave straightaway. Get a job somewhere else. Go to the periphery’; and in chorus: ‘always stay at the periphery.’

More recently, another stray joined her destiny to ours. ‘Do you like to network at conferences?’, W. asks her. She looks at us both. We laugh. – ‘Of course you don’t!’ Why else would she be hanging out with us? We decide she must be undergoing a crisis; they often are, those who join our table. Still, we are on hand to give out advice. ‘Never listen to us. We give bad advice, don’t we?’ – ‘Very bad.’ But still, she listens, as the postdoc did a few years previously. ‘We must have the air of those in the know’, I say. – ‘We have the air of idiots’, says W.

We hold court in the bar. ‘We’ll be in the bar!’, we tell everyone. – ‘Constancy is always admired,’ I tell W. He agrees. – ‘People need to know where they can find you.’ Days pass in the bar. It requires stamina and pacing. We are calm drinkers, and full of amiability. There are only a few people we absolutely want to avoid.

W. likes to ask questions when people join us. ‘What you’re favourite colour?’ The postdoc’s not sure. – ‘Puce’, I say. – ‘What colour’s that then? Get me another beer.’ Sometimes, at my encouragement, W. tells us about his recurring dream. ‘I’m in a car, driving along, which is funny because I can’t drive. I’m on a big motorway.’ – ‘That’s it?’ – ‘Yes. Whenever the dream begins, I always think, here I go again.’ He turns to me. – ‘Do you have any recurring dreams?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Oh.’

In some company we’re a bit desperate, and flail about for conversation.  ‘What’s your favourite drink?’, W. asks. And then we speak of ours. – ‘Plymouth Gin. But get the old bottle. It’s changed now.’ – ‘They’re going for the American market. There are adverts on the underground.’ And then we speak of Martinis. ‘At the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, they import three different kinds of Vermouth.’

W’, I can see, is getting desperate, and needs calming down. ‘I’m becoming hysterical’, he says. We should go out and find good cocktails, I decide. It will restore our sense of purpose. As we walk, I remind him of the qualities of our friends and allies. W. is cheered. I sing him a snatch of a favourite song, and he joins in, happy again.

We wander through shady streets, looking for caiprenias. ‘I think we should find someone else to discourage,’ I tell W., when we are refreshed. But W. is suddenly in a pensive mood, and wants to wander town very slowly, with his hands behind his back.

‘This is a terrible town’, I say. He agrees. ‘But what is it that makes it so terrible?’ We muse on this for a time. ‘It was rebuilt to look exactly like it was, that’s the problem’, W. decides, and compares it unfavourably to Plymouth, which made no attempt to do so. ‘Everything here’s so fake.’ But then I remind of Warsaw, and how we liked it there. ‘That’s because it was obviously fake.’

The wines here are particularly bad. The previous night, a friend of ours worked his way through all of them, ordering a glass of each from the menu. In the end the waiter sat down with us and told us the bar was terrible. He was Polish, and keen to try his English: ‘my heart, how do you say it?’ (he makes the gesture, and we say ‘aches’) ‘aches for you. Go somewhere else.’ I ask W. to tell me about his recurring dream as we walk. He does, and it makes me laugh.

‘Inanity saves us,’ says W. I agree. It’s like a spiritual strength we draw from within. ‘Empty chatter’, says W., ‘that’s the key.’ We are masters of chatter and fill our days and nights with it. There are several conversational defaults. ‘Tell me about your stomach,’ W. says. I tell him of its current condition and W. muses on its causes. We engage in speculations about digestion, lifestyle and diet. ‘You go out too much’, says W. ‘if I had your lifestyle, I wouldn’t last a day.’ I ask him if he thinks he’s made of sterner stuff. ‘We’re weak. We’re the runts of the litter.’

Sometimes we meditate on our weaknesses. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ muses W. We both know the answer: literature. If only we knew mathematics. If only we were that way inclined. W. has books about maths, and every year he tries to read them. ‘I can never do differential equations,’ he says. It’s like Greek: every year he tries to learn, but falls at the aorist. ‘The aorist breaks me every time’, says W., dramatically. We list the names of our friends who are good at maths and sigh. ‘They’ll amount to something’, says W., ‘we won’t.’

‘But what we do have’, says W., ‘is joy. We are essentially joyful.’ I agree. ‘We are content with very little’, W. says, ‘it doesn’t take much to keep us happy.’ – ‘Pork scratchings and a fourpack’, I say. ‘Or chicken. Remember when I made you chicken?’ I do remember. W. was amazed. ‘You were ecstatic,’ he says, ‘I’ve never seen you so happy.’ – ‘Chicken does that to me,’ I tell him, ‘and that was particularly good chicken’. W. had spent the whole day preparing it, first cutting out a recipe from a magazine, and then going with me to the supermarket to get the ingredients, and finally letting it cook all afternoon. He remembers my excitement lovingly. He likes to see me eat. ‘You’re so greedy’, says W.

The inane are happy, we agree. Not for us all the talk of desiring desire; we are quite content, as idiots are. ‘I think that’s what you’ve given me,’ says W., ‘idiocy.’ I agree it’s my great gift to the world. ‘It’s very pure, your idiocy’, says W. I agree, and explained how it was honed for years in the cellar of the house I shared with monks. ‘Your monk years,’ says W., who also had his monk years. We tell our monk stories to others, never to each other; we are already agreed on monks, on the subject of monasteries and so on.

I ask W. how his religious turn is progressing. ‘It’s abating a bit’, he tells me. Last year, he felt drawn back to the church. W. wasn’t brought up religiously, he explained, but when he was thirteen he suddenly demanded to be taken to church and became very devout. ‘You were never religious were you?’ -Never for a moment.’ – ‘It’s the purity of your idiocy. It saved you.’

The other day, on the phone, I told W. there had been much speculation about us on the internet. ‘You and your stupid blog,’ said W., ‘but I always said your talent was comic.’ He doesn’t read the blog, W. says, except when he’s really, really bored. ‘It’s so pretentious!’ W. thinks my weakness is wanting to be loved. ‘That’s why you do it, keep a blog.’ He admits to be amused by the line, ‘Idiots always come in pairs‘, and by the speculations about the relationship between us on the net. ‘Haven’t they got anything better to do?’, says W.

For his part, he has been lost in bureaucracy. He speaks again about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been. ‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When he was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, W. says. He’d been delirious. I was ill, too. ‘You’re never really ill’, says W., ‘you just whine. You’re a whiner.’ He’s the same, he admits. ‘Men are all whiners.’

Sometimes, there come to our table those who hate everything about them. ‘You’re in the right company’, we tell them, and buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. ‘The point is not even to try to engage.’ – ‘Give up now’: that’s our advice, jointly delivered. ‘There’s no hope for you, you have to know that.’ – ‘We do, and look at us.’ – ‘We’re essentially joyful’,  says W. – ‘It’s because of our inanity. It protects us’, I say. Soon, our table guests are cheered. – ‘See, it doesn’t have to be so bad!’ Hours pass in the bar. – ‘The key is pacing’, we advise.

Once we kidnapped a plenary speaker and brought him to the pub. We drank and I ordered plate after plate of cumberland sausage just for the amusement of it. Our table, and the one we pull over to ours, is covered in plates of Cumberland sausage. ‘Look at all those sausages!’ says W. to the speaker, ‘I hope you’re hungry.’

Later, wandering back to the campus, we get lost in the fog, the speaker and us. Where are we going? ‘We’ll never get out of here’, we tell the speaker. ‘You’ll be trapped forever with us, going round and round.’ I ask W. to tell us about his recurring dream to pass the time. And W. asks the speaker, ‘Do you have any recurring dreams?’, and a little later, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’