Author: Lars Iyer

My obsession with the Queen. My admiration for her outfits, almost always exactly the same, but in different colours, as though she had been dipped in a different tub of paint each time. My stories of having met her hatmaker, and of spending an afternoon with a lady in waiting.

She's a very down to earth woman, I've told him. She eats her breakfast from tupperware boxes, her corgis round her ankles, I've told him.

But I feel some leftist unease with respect to the Queen, he knows that. I know I shouldn't approve of the monarchy, or follow its activities in Hello!

My favourite quandary, which I mull over in airport check-in queues, or on platforms waiting for delayed trains: Would I accept an invitation to a royal garden party? Would I RSVP positively to an invitation signed in the Queen's hand? Of course I would, I murmur on some occasions. Of course I wouldn't, on others.

My obsession with celebrities, with minor royalty. My obsession with Hello! Why do I always bring it with me on our train journeys? Why do I insist on leaving it in his study when I come to stay?

'Who are all these people?', he wants to ask me, when he sees me reading. 'Why do they matter to you?' Because they do matter to me, that much is clear. The way I read. The way I nod my head over its glossy pages, like a Jew over the Talmud. He sees, as never before, a look of absolute seriousness on my face. He sees it there: an intensity of focus only the Husserl archives would warrant.

What are you looking for?, W. says, as I turn the pages. What, in Oscar dresses and airbrushed actresses? What, in the photospreads of Queen Rania of Jordan?

My obsession with domestic accidents, with injuries caused in the home. That's what I search for on the internet in dead hours, isn't it? For photographs of head injuries caused by falls on linoleum. For accounts of paralyses brought about by trips and stumbles. For medical descriptions of electrocutions and hanging accidents; for pictures of burns and bruisings … For domestic accidents and, indeed, all kinds of accidents.

Is it to remind myself of my own fragility, my own clumsinesses? Is it from concern for the poor victims, the maimed, the injured? Or is it, as W. expects, some kind of grotesque schadenfreude, a kind of revelling that I continue to survive, despite everything?

Bishop Berkeley gave up philosophy to lecture on the healing properties of tar water, W. says. He gave it all up – he'd written his masterpieces by the age of 23, but he still had a long life to live, which he then spent advocating, in lectures and pamphlets, the entirely false thesis that tar water was the cure for all ills.

For a time, he listened to my caffeine theories, W. says. He took them seriously. Caffeine is the drug of capitalism, I'd said, and he avoided espressos. Caffeine is an iron collar, I'd said, and he gave up tea. But he likes coffee!, W. says. And he likes tea! And they have no adverse effect upon him whatsoever!

What I refuse to understand are the ceremonies of tea making and coffee making, W. says. Of the ritual of the cup of tea in the morning that follows his hours of solitary study. Doesn't he bring a cup of tea to my room every time I stay? Doesn't he bring it up both flights of stairs, knocking on the door of his study which I defile by sleeping there? And doesn't he make us both an espresso to have with the breakfast he so carefully prepares for me?

Of course, all that caffeine only makes me talk more excitedly of our need to give up caffeine, of caffeine as the drug and iron collar of capitalism. How many times has he heard me, over coffee, arguing that coffee must be banned immediately?

W. would be impressed by my studies in the Bible – you say studies in the Bible, not of the Bible, W. says – if I wasn't so drawn to the apocrypha. And not just the official apocrypha, but the apocryphal apocrypha.

I have a taste for the spurious, W. says, for dubious angelology and extravagant miracles. I like the Gnostic gospels where Jesus kills dragons with death-rays from his eyes. I like the vignettes of the beasts of the desert kneeling to the divine child, and of the palm-trees bowing down so the holy family can pick their fruit.

And haven't I spoken to him of hoping to find a caped Jesus, a flying Jesus, a kind of gospel of the superman? I must take my Biblical studies more seriously, W. says.

I understand nothing of the rhythms of scholarship, W. says. I know nothing of its seasons: of the time of sowing, of tending and caring, and of the harvest, the gathering in of the crops of thought.

Isn't that of which what he dreams, at the beginning of the summer: of the coming autumn, which will see the great gathering in of his thought-crops? Isn't it of carrying back the harvest of his ideas, so carefully tended, in his sun-browned arms?

There must be a process of thought-threshing, too, W. says. Of thought-winnowing! The wheat must be separated from the chaff. And there will be chaff, he said. Even the greatest of thinkers cannot avoid chaff. But there is still wheat. Still the evidence of a year's long labour …

But he would know of this? His crops have failed, W. says, as they have always failed, and he stands in the empty field, weeping.

Open the window!, says W. He's going to jump out. But we're only one flight up.

What is it that keeps me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. What is it that keeps him from doing the same?

We want to see how it all ends, W. says. We want to see how it will all turn out. But this is how it ends. This is how it will all turn out.

Our excuse: the thought that we were amusing each other, if no one else, W. says. But now that we no longer do that?

Something in us doesn't know we've died, W. says. Something in us hasn't finished dying.

Who's going to finish us off? Who, for whom we are but insects racing around when a rock is lifted? Someone needs amusing, so they're letting us survive, W. says. The gods are as masochistic as we are, and want us endlessly to enact their self-destruction.

The end has already come, we know that. The end has come and gone, the credits have rolled and GAME OVER is written in the sky.

We're dead, we're all dead, but this is no afterlife. Life – what did we know of that? Living – we never lived.

And now, wandering along the street, with me whistling beside him?

To work, really work, we must drink, W. says. We need to discover a new discipline of drinking, to drink until our teeth are stained red from wine.

That's how he sees our task this summer, W. says. We need to think, which means we need to drink our way to dereliction.

Kierkegaard knew us too well, we agree, reading his passages on religious enthusiasm, on drunken religiosity and religious phantasmagoria. How could the Dane have foreseen the apes poring over his collected works? But foresee us he did, dream of us he did, and try to warn others about us - that, too, he did.

A terrible dream: I'm leading W. up one of the hills on the Town Moor, grim faced and silent. I'm much larger than usual, a giant toad, a giant flea with great thick thighs. And W. is much smaller, a wren, a midge. And I'm silent: I'm not saying a word. I'm dragging him up the hill without offering a word of expectation.

Tell me, tell me where we're going!, W. cries. But I tell him nothing. On the hill summit, late evening, W. is prone, and I have a knife to his throat. I'm silent. I'm about to cut … Does a voice from the sky cry out, telling me to stop? Does God intervene, tell me to sacrifice something else in W.'s place? No.

Night finds W.'s body on the hill, speaking his last words in bubbles of blood.

The nosebleed: that's what sums me up, W. says. It's the truest image of me: a man with a nosebleed, and the blood dribbling onto his chest.

W. sends me a quotation: 'I've got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't believe in movies anymore'. That was from Pauline Kael's review of Godard's Sauve qui peut, he says.

Does W. believe in philosophy, he wonders? Does he believe in God? He wants to write on God regardless. He wants to write a philosophy of God because he believes in neither God nor philosophy.

W.'s dream for his conference is to gather our friends around us. To gather our friends and the friends of our friends. And to speak. To listen to one another, and to speak.

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.

That's Debord, W. says. Everything we would ever love was there: what could be more moving than that?

We must work until we bleed, W. says. Write until our eyes turn red, and blood runs from our nostrils. Because that's what's going to happen to us when we reach our idea: blood will flow from our noses. Drops of blood, splashing onto the pages on which we are writing … 

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Nietzsche wrote that. With blood, but not our blood. We'll write with God's blood, says W., mystically. It will be the blood of God that falls from our nostrils.

Perhaps it is really a kind of Sabbath for which we are looking. A time to close our eyes, but not only to rest, to recuperate. We need to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within. And we need to let ourselves be touched by a greater work, by a divine labour. Isn't it only then that we'll truly begin to work, as though drawn by a current into the centre of the channel?  

Momentum: to be thrown by thought, loosed, like a stone from thought's sling … And work, now, will not be mundane, but celestial. We will work as the stars work, as the planets turn in their orbits. Our work will as be one with the slow turning of galaxies, and the steady expansion of the universe out into the infinite … A work indistinguishable from inactivity, from the resting of a God.

W.'s been reading a life of Simone Weil with great envy, he says, sending me this passage:

… Weil's handwriting flowed with an almost supernatural steadiness, rapidity, and assurance in this period: page after page streaming out virtually without hesitations or corrections. She often worked around the clock, staying through the night in the office on Hill Street or walking home after the last underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently[….] The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprisingly only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

When will we discover the rhythm that will let us, too, work like maniacs? When that steady pressure that will make every day a work day, every day launched with a forward push from the day before …

It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.

We should insert this passage from Debord's Critique of Separation into every one of our presentations, W. says.

'Irony has two stages', says Pessoa's heteronym, Bernardo Soares, 'the one exemplified by Socrates when he says, "I only know that I know nothing", and the other exemplified by Sanchez when he says, "I do not even know that I know nothing"'.

That's our condition, W. says. We have no idea what we know or do not know. Or even that we do know or do not know: we have no idea of that, either. Do we know anything at all? Have we any idea of anything?

Dawn, the plateau of the morning. We're high up, for the campus is built on the edge of the moor which looms behind the city, and we can see out to the city and to the shining sea. Dawn, and the sky seems to open itself above us … Is it time to speak? Time, finally, to say something? But we're silent, quite silent, as we swill the last of the whiskey round our glasses.

Dereliction, says W., finally. Dereliction, I agree.