‘Compare our friendship,’ says W. in my imagination, ‘to that of Bataille and Blanchot. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which takes place in the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, nothing survives, but nor should it. Of their near daily exchanges in the Paris of the early 1940s, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since you, like an idiot, put it all on your stupid blog.
‘Blanchot was above all discreet, but you are indiscretion itself; Bataille did not speak of his friend, but you are gossip and idle talk itself. Whereas both men were immensely modest, and weighed everything they said with great care, you are immensely immodest, and weigh nothing you say or write with any care at all. Whereas both wrote with great care and forethought, you write with neither care nor forethought, being seemingly proud of your immense idiocy.
‘How is it that we, who admire both the friendship between Blanchot and Bataille and that between Blanchot and Levinas have failed so signally in making anything of our friendship? I know: it’s entirely your fault. You’re an idiot.’
For my part, in my imagination, I tell W. that my absence occupies, for him, the same role as Palestine and manual labour did for Kafka: I am the correlate of his own inability, his own apishness. In truth, I tell him, we are both Brod, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, an apostle will not look out; when Brod looks into Kafka, only Brod looks back. You are my Brod, I tell W.; but I am your Brod, too. I am your idiot, but you are mine, and it is this that we share, in our joy and laugher, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.
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