W.’s hair is very long now. It’s a year since he last had it cut.
Some of it falls in ringlets. It’s his Jewishness, he tells me. He
looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.
Why don’t you grow your hair long?, says W. I tell him I’ll never
grow my hair long. I like to be sleek and streamlined like a swimmer.
W.’s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says.
You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked
windows like ghosts, but now developers have moved in. Flats are still
popular in Plymouth, despite the housing slump. Once we toured the new
developments at the Royal William Victualling Yard, where they took us for affluent lovers, we remember. The wide boulevards and the military grey of
the buildings calmed us. W.’s street is all flats now, except for his
house. We stand outside and admire its storeys.
W. and I are supposed to be thinking about Messianism, but our minds are blank.
What are your thoughts on Messianism?, asks W. I don’t have any thoughts on Messianism, I tell him. What about you? W. isn’t able to think about Messianism, he says. He’s not capable of it, and neither am I.
This is how proper people think, says W., his arms held behind his back and his head raised. Do I look as though I’m having lofty thoughts?
He’s reading Cohen’s Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism at the moment, W. says, and there are whole stretches that he doesn’t understand. I don’t know what he’s on about, W. says, but it’s got something to do with maths.
W’s studying differential calculus again. He’s got a textbook and doing an online course. No matter how hard he tries, he only gets as far as the chapter, What is a Number? It’s like parallel lines running to infinity but which never meet, W. comments of his relationship to maths.
Lars Iyer's Blog 