When did it begin, W.'s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother's caravan park, he says, as a child. He made friends there. – 'Working class friends, like you', he says. 'Except unlike you they had a sense of loyalty'. They wouldn't betray him!
That was the fundamental rule: there was no betrayal. If one fell, when chased by the police, they would stop and carry him. If one was accused, the others would take the blame, each of them, in his place. It was like Spartacus, W. says. The cadre was what was important. The team. And hasn't that been what's he's sought ever since?
If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of four hundred miles away, that would be something. We're islands, he says. We're stranded at the opposite ends of the country.
He dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-swarm, who would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!
Lars Iyer's Blog 