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Oblivion

He knows what will happen, W. says. Gradually, he'll be forgotten. Gradually, his presence will fade from everyone's life. – 'Where's W.?', they'll ask at first. But later, they will only have a sense of absence, with no knowledge of its cause. And later still, there will be no absence either. Life will be complete again, without tear. – ‘Even you’, W. says. ‘Even you will forget me'. And then, 'especially you'. 

Making A Run For It

He had been waiting for the end, W. says, and still the end surprised him. That’s the lesson, he says: the end will always come too soon. The end will be there, tapping on the window …

They'll put a sack on your head. They'll lead you through the forest. They'll make you kneel … Will you cry out for mercy? Will you accept your fate solemnly, with dignity? Or will you piss and shit yourself in fear? Will you make a run for it before braining yourself on a tree?

For what cause are you dying? You don't know. You'll never understand. It's beyond you, your role in all this. What is certain is that you must die. Your time has come. You thought you had years – decades – but your time has passed, you've outlived your time, this is it …

W. is making a run for it, he says, sack on head. Any moment now, he’ll brain himself on a tree …

Murmurs

Where's it all going? Where's it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.'s in the dark, and it's not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun? 

I will be speaking in London on the 10th November alongside Michael Stewart, Julian Gough, Mark Thwaite and Sam Jordison at a Not the Booker celebration and online criticism event on 10th November.

It will run from 7.00-8.30 PM at the Book Club at 100 Leonard Street, Shoreditch, EC2A 4RH, and is hosted by Melville House publishing house. For more details, see here.

(Apologies to the person with whom I was corresponding about David Markson – I accidentially deleted your email and contact details. Please do get back in contact.)

I'm discussed alongside Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy in Daniel Davis Wood's academic essay, 'Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman: 9/11 as a Crisis of Confidence in American Literary Aesthetics'.

Not Thinking

When did you know?, W. says with great insistence. When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything? Did I know?, he asks, because sometimes he suspects I never did. Well he knows at any rate for both of us. Neither of us are going to amount to anything!, he says with finality. Neither of us! Anything!, he says imperiously.

We might carry on as if we're going to amount to anything, W. says, but that does not alter the fact that we're not going to amount to anything. We haven't had a single thought of our own, for one thing, W. says. Not one!

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I say to W., remembering Heidegger. Most thought provoking is that you think you are thinking, says W. Because you do, don't you?

A Lower Branch

The kernel is in Poland, W. often says. The secret is in Poland. But what does he mean? we run through our memories. Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? It all came together there. In a real sense, it all began.

There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, who had a civic reception. Wasn't it the mayor of Wroclaw who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wroclaw looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer? – 'And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes over dinner', W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted the primal scene for them on the dancefloor. It's a British dance move, we told them. It's what we do on British dancefloors, but they looked away from us appalled.

But they treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun – that's what they called it, a grill party. There were sausages and beer. We're a loutish people, we told them. Don't expect anything from us. We told them we'd disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but after a while, they seemed to find us charming.

I think we won them over, in some sense, W. says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were like a race apart, like elves or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could expect very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.

Yes, that's where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts' expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.

Down – and Out

Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being lead out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of not-knowing will come to an end. For that's all he's experienced since he took up with me, W. says. The horror of not knowing where the next step will lead, for example, he says. The horror of the uncertainty of his destination.

For where's he been heading all this time? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down – and out - that, too is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

For some reason everyone regards me as an idiot … and it is quite true that I was so ill at one time that I really was almost an idiot. But what sort of idiot am I now when I know myself that people take me for an idiot?

Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Westerlies

W. has always been immensely susceptible to changes in weather, he says. He can feel them coming days in advance, for example, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there's another low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of England with rain and grey clouds and humidity, and another low front behind that. How's he going to get any work done – any serious work?

It's alright for me, he says, staring out of my window at the incoming banks of clouds. I'm on the East of the country, for a start, which means the weather doesn't linger in the same way. Oh it's much colder, he knows that – he always brings a warm jacket when he stays – but it's fresher, too; it's good for the mind, good for thought.

But W. can't think, he says. He knows the Westerlies are coming. He knows low pressure's going to dominate the weather for weeks, if not months. Sometimes whole seasons are dominated by Westerlies, which costs him an immense amount in terms of lost time and missed work.

He's still up early every morning, of course. He's still at his desk at dawn. Four A.M. Five A.M. – he's ready for work; he opens his books; he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He's there at the inception, at the beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs along his window ledge.

He's up before anyone else, he knows that, but there's still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months. Not one. He's stalled, W. says. There's been an interregnum. But when wasn't he stalled? When wasn't it impossible for him to think? No matter how early he gets up, he misses it, his appointment with thought. No matter how he tries to surprise it, thought, by being there before everyone.

Wittgenstein said to me on more than one occasion: 'The trouble with you and me, old man, is that we have no religion!'

Suddenly, during one of our conversations early in 1938, Wittgenstein asked me whether I had ever had any tragedies in my life. Again, true to form, I asked him what he meant by 'tragedy'. 'Well', he replied, 'I don't mean the death of your old grandmother at the age of 85. I mean suicides, madness or quarrels'. I said that I had been fortunate not to have experienced of any of those terrible things.

from Theodore Redpath's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Student's Memoir

Death Drive

Why does he listen to me?, W. says. But he knows why. There'd be sense in keeping people around to inspire him, W. says. But not to destroy him. Unless it's his death-drive, W. says. Unless I'm his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

Ostracism, that's what I've brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.'s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth, and there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want for himself? Ah, there's no way of telling. He'll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We're heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pine trees to where nothing can live.