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Our inaugural Dogma presentation was on Kafka – the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke very ineptly (W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse. – 'What were you on about?' But Dogmatists stick together; a question for one is a question for the other. You have to stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says W., but we did so gloriously.

Our second Dogma presentation concerned friendship as a condition of thought. W. stole half his argument from Paolo Virno, and the other half from Mario Tronti. Virno and Tronti write of their ideas as though they were categories in Aristotle, he says. He admires that. W. reminds me of the sixth Dogma rule: always claim the ideas of others as your own.

Forming an ultra-Dogmatist splinter group, I spoke of my friendships, of friendships in which thought was at stake.

W. is prompted to add another rule to Dogma: Dogma is personal. Always give examples from your own experience. No: the presentation in its entirety should begin and end with an account of your own experience. Of turning points! Trials! Of great struggles and humiliations! My life lends itself particularly well to such a rule, W. says. – ‘The horror of your life’.

Our third Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear open our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster – with world-historical seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without question!

W. spoke of nuns; I of monks. He spoke about dogs; I about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.

In our fourth Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. There can be no love in the modern world, W. says. There can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of agape and eros. And then W. spoke of philein: the greatest kind of love, he said.

We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greek terms that you barely understand.

(from Dogma)

Dogma cover visible here.

It's out in February, but available for pre-order now.

The war is beginning, W. says. The forces of the great battle are assembling.

He feels like Arjuna in the great battle of the Bhagavad Gita, W. says. He feels like the great warrior who had thrown aside his bow and sunk to his knees. Why should he fight?, he wailed. Why should he go on? And that’s what W. wails: why should he fight? Why should his  go on?

Krishna comforted Arjuna by granting him a divine vision. The warrior was granted a vision of Krishna’s celestial form: the entire cosmos turning in the body. He saw the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He saw a million divine forms in the fire, and the manifold forms of the universe united as one …

'What does your celestial form look like?', says W. 'Go on, show me'. Actually, he thinks he's already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. My vast, white belly. My flabby arms. The trousers that billow round my ankles …

And my dancing, my terrible dancing. It’s end of the cosmos that W. sees in my cosmic dance. It’s the destruction of the divine forms, and of the manifold forms of the universe. He sees the putting out of the stars. He sees the extinguishing of the sun, and the night swallowing the day. He sees the opposite of the act of creation, the opposite of cosmogony …

(from Dogma)

How peaceful it had been, his college, when he first arrived! Colleagues greeted each other warmly. They sat out in the quadrangle, taking tea and discussing their scholarship. No one taught more than a couple of hours a week.

Then the fall began. Contact hours went up. Colleagues became busier; there was less time to talk. Scholars worked alone, with their office doors closed. But still they waved at one another across the quadrangle. Still they visited each other’s offices for tea.

Things fell still further. Colleagues worked in solitude, only in solitude. Some stayed home to work in their studies. Some fell ill in isolation. Some prayed in solitude in the college chapel.

And then? His colleagues have begun to scowl at one another, W. says. Colleagues snarl at each other in the college corridors. Who talks of their scholarship now? Who talks of ideas? Who reads now? Who writes?

(from Dogma)

Rolling thunder. Lightning flashes in the summer sky. There’s trouble at his college, W. says.

The rumour is they’re going to close down all the humanities, every course. The college is going to specialise in sport instead. They’ve brought in a team of consultants to manage the redundancies, W. says.

Oh, some staff will be kept on, he’s been assured of that. The college needs some academic respectability. They’ll probably make him a professor of badminton ethics, W. says. He’ll be teaching shot put metaphysics …

But everyone will have to reapply for their jobs, that’s the rumour. They’re going to cut the workforce in half. It’s Hobbesian, W. says. There’s going to be a war of all against all.

(from Dogma)

Dogma: that’s what we should call our intellectual movement, we agree. Dogma should have many rules, we agree. We should never break them!

The first rule, says W.: Dogma is spartan. Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others. Really speak to them, using ordinary language.

The second rule: Dogma is full of pathos. Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep – weep without end!

The third rule: Dogma is sincere. Speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics that demand the greatest of seriousness. Aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity. Rending sincerity. Be prepared to set yourself on fire before the audience, like those monks in Vietnam.

And the fourth rule? Dogma is collaborative. Write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend upon what you write. It should mean nothing more!

W. reminds me of the collection, Radical Thought in Italy. Paolo Virno! Mario Tronti! They’ve always been a touchstone for him. It's pure Dogma, he says. They're all friends. Their essays have no quotations, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were world-historical. Oh yes, that's another rule: always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory: Dogma plagiarises. Always steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own.

(from Dogma)

St Hilda’s College, looking at the river. Capitalism and religion, W. muses. He hasn’t got much further with his thinking, W. says. His notebook’s nearly empty. I flick through it.

Where there is hope there is religion: Bloch, I read. Sometimes God, sometimes nothing: Kafka, I read. I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room: Celan. Beautiful! But there are few thoughts of W.’s own.  He’s going through a dry period, W. says.

Maybe he should try his hand at poetry, like me, W. says. He could write haiku: ‘Half ton friend/ in trouble again’. ‘Fuckwit in a vest/ Friend I love best’. Or he could draw some pictures.

(from Dogma)

The bus back to Nashville. Sounds of screaming. A roaring two-stroke engine. The passenger in front of us is playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his laptop.

W. yearns for his study, he says. He yearns for his bookshelves. He yearns for the tranquillity of his mornings, when he leaves a sleeping Sal in bed so he can do a few hours of work before breakfast.

There was no need to come to America, he says. He’s learned nothing here. His thought hasn’t advanced. How about my thought?: has that advanced? He thought I looked quite reflective by the Mississippi. Quite meditative. It must have been the flowing water. Rivers calm even the most frantic apes, he’s heard that, W. says.

He turns through my notebook. – ‘Ah! Drawings! Who’s that supposed to be?’ Huckleberry Finn, I tell him. There’s the raft. – ‘And what’s that?’ It’s Moby Dick, I tell him. And that’s the Pequod. W. admires my classics of American literature series.

And what is this? A poem? Preppies, it's called.

Tall/ sand in the hair/ white teeth/ pullovers/ deck shoes/ white shirts and blouses / yachts with white sails/ fuckers'

Very perceptive, says W. Here’s another. Cabin Boy, it’s called.  

Upstairs, on deck/ The preppies are dancing/ with their caps worn backwards. /I am the cabin boy/ scrubbing their things./ I am angry

He like that, W. says. It’s very terse.

And what are these? More poems?’, W. says, turning my notebook upside down and squinting. Lyrics, I tell him. They’re lyrics from Jandek.

Ah, Jandek, W. say. Wasn’t Jandek was supposed to be my great discovery, rivalling W.’s discovery of Béla Tarr? He has to admit, there is something to Jandek, W. says. It’s the quality of his despair. The wailing. Jandek understands the apocalypse, W. says. Jandek knows that the End Times are upon us.

The Humility of Pain. That’s what he calls a song title, W. says. The Blues Turned Black. And he’s been releasing records for twenty-nine years, giving no interviews, remaining wholly mysterious? It’s admirable, W. says. I should learn from it.

Hasn’t W. suggested that I write a book on Jandek, on the religious aspects of the music of Jandek? You should always write on what you love, W. says. On what you love, and don’t understand, W. says.

(from Dogma)

Spurious available as $1.99 e-book.

Not the Booker press release.

We visit the full-sized concrete replica of the Parthenon, which sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Nashville’s supposed to be the Athens of the South, our hosts tell us. The Athens of the South! I should feel at home here with my formidable knowledge of ancient languages, W. says.

W. insists on buying us souvenir togas. I take a picture of us posing on the steps. W. feels like Socrates, he says. But who am I, next to him? It’s ironic, because Socrates had a kind of idiot double, a man who looked exactly like him, but who begged for a living, and lived in a barrel in the marketplace, his shameless habits scandalising all of Athens.

But Diogenes merely acted like an idiot, W. says. He lived in squalor, true enough – but that was because he despised the conventions of society. He lived in poverty – but that was because of a disdain for the stupidity of the rich. He was shameless – but that was because he thought human beings lived artificially and hypocritically.

But Diogenes had a terrible wisdom of his own, even Plato granted that, W. says. He had a terrible teaching, which he taught by living example. A Socrates gone mad, that’s what Plato called him. A Socrates, because Diogenes, too, believed in reason, exalting it above custom and tradition. But a Socrates gone mad, because he took shamelessness to a new extreme: eschewing all modesty, pissing on people who insulted him, shitting in the theatre and masturbating in the public square …

A Diogenes gone mad, W. says: that’s how he thinks of me. A man without shame not because he rejects ideas of human decency, but because he knows no better. A man outside of society, not because he would live as an ascetic, but because no one wanted him in it.

(from Dogma)

Downtown Nashville consists largely of car parks. Odd bits of metal stick out of the ground at shin height. There’s no one around except a fully outfitted cowboy walking down the street. – ‘Must be German', W. says.

Where, we wonder, are the people of Nashville? That’s one thing we like about our cities, we agree: there are always people about. They’re usually drunk, of course. Drunk and lairy. But that is a good sign.

(from Dogma, sequel to Spurious)

Are we even alive?, asks W. Is this even happening? Are we really talking – right now? Because all he can hear is a great roaring, W. says. He's falling, W. says, as through the clouds of Jupiter.

When will he ever hit anything real? When will he strike his head upon the hard shore of the real? Because that's what he wants, even if it dashes his head to pieces. That's all he wants, and especially if it dashes his head to pieces …

Only death is real, W. says, and it's time to die. But death isn't coming any closer. If anything, he's too healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, eradicated, along with everyone who has known us. Our memory should be wiped from the earth … 

Sometimes W. finds the coming disaster a comforting thought. It will be a relief, a blessed relief, the parched earth, the boiling sky. Because won't it entail our absence? Won't it mean, at the very least, our complete destruction?

Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn't that a relief: that there is no future? And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

No more, says W. No more. He's passing through a dead zone, he says, like the ones they are beginning to find in the oceans: blank regions where there is no life. There's no life in him! It's all over!

W.'s despairs are like magnetic fields, he says, like great clouds in the air through which he passes. They have nothing to do with his inner states at all. It's not a matter of emotion. His despairs, W. says, are not even his.

‘We tried to tell them, didn’t we?’, says W. Yes, we tried to tell them. – ‘We tried to warn them?’ Yes, we tried to warn them. Our lives were living warnings. We all but set ourselves on fire. We all but soiled ourselves in public. – ‘Actually, you did soil yourself in public, didn’t you?’, W. says.

30 Oct 1940. Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time – is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Cesare Pavese, from his Diary

 - The painter Philip Guston once said something very nice about this, he says. He said that when he went into his studio everybody was in there with him: his dealer, the public, all the great artists of the past. They are all looking over his shoulder and talking. One by one they leave, and then he himself leaves, and then the painting begins.

Gabriel Josipovici, After

… it has never occurred to me in this war to seek out danger and death as I had done so often in earlier years – at that time death avoided me, not I it; but that is long past! Today I would greet it very sadly and very bitterly, not out of fear or anxiety about it – nothing is more soothing than the prospect of the stillness of death – but because I have half-finished work to be done that, when completed, will convey the entirety of my feeling. The whole purpose of my life lies hidden in my unpainted pictures. Aside from that, death is not frightening …

Franz Marc, writing to his mother in 1916 from the front, two weeks before his death.

Thanks to your reviews, Spurious has been shortlisted for the Guardian Not The Booker Prize 2011 award.

Naturally, I issued the wrong instructions at the blog and elsewhere, with the result that most of the 48 reviews Spurious received did not count. However, there were still a sufficient number of votes for the novel to make it to the shortlist.

Thanks to all who voted.

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk through the gorse towards Cawsand. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He's a man of the city, W. says. And if we're out of the city today – apolis, as the Greeks would say – it is only to return to it refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsand to Plymouth.

His city, W. says, but not for much longer. By what cruel fate will he be made to leave? For what reason will he be forced out? He knows the time will come. He’s always known it, which has made his relationship to the city that much more intense. He’s always known the city would slip through his fingers.

A man without a city is a terrible thing, W. says. But that’s what he might become. Aren’t there rumours of redundancies in the corridors in W.’s college? Aren’t there murmurings in the quadrangle? It’s a bit like ancient Rome, before they stabbed Caesar to death, W. says.

Of course, he’ll have to leave, if he loses his job, W. says. He’ll have to take to the roads. Because there’s no work here, not in Plymouth, W. says. There’s nothing for the locals, those who’ve lived here all their lives, let alone W., who is only an adopted son of the city.

You can lodge yourself in an adopted city, but you’re never entirely of your city, W. says. He thinks of me in my Newcastle. – ‘Don’t think you’re safe’, W. says. ‘Don’t think you’re going to live out your life in the pubs of Newcastle’.

‘They’re coming to get us’, W. says. Who? Who’s coming?, I ask him. He’s not sure. But somewhere, far away, our fate has already been decided.

[Opening section of Dogma, second version. Also replaced.]

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk through the gorse towards Cawsands. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He's a man of the city, W. says. And if we're out of the city today – apolis, as the Greeks would say – it is only to return to it refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsands to Plymouth.

At most, he admires the sea as it borders the city, just as he admires the edge of Dartmoor, which you can see from his office. But then, of course, he likes to approach the city from the countryside – Plymouth from Cawsands, say, or Plymouth from Jennycliff: either way, there's nothing better than seeing the city – his city – sprawled across along the edge of the Sound and running up all the way back to Dartmoor.

His city, W. says, but not for much longer. By what cruel fate will he be made to leave? Why will he be forced out? Of course, he knows the time will come; he’s always known it, which has made his relationship to the city that much more intense. He’s always known it would slip through his fingers.

W. is familiar with my desperate love for my city. He shares it, after all. When was he happier than when I led him up one of the hills on the Town Moor to survey the city?

It was a bright day, W. remembers, and though we'd already spent many days drinking, I hadn't yet turned, as I am wont to do, he says. Yes, I hadn't yet come to resemble Blanche Dubois as I usually do when I spend many days drinking. I was neither maudlin nor vicious.

W. still cherishes my comprehensive account of the history of Newcastle delivered from the top of the hill on the Town Moor. My account of the history of the city and its buildings, which I pointed out to him one by one. My interest in local history surprised and delighted him, W. says. It ennobled me, he says; I stepped forward in a new way in his imagination.

But then, of course, he knew I was making it up; he knew it was all nonsense; he knew it all along. How could it be otherwise? W. has never liked facing up to the fact that I'm a faker. He always wants to imagine the best for me, and me at my best. He has the highest hopes for me, W. says. He always has.

W. had to piece together the history of Newcastle for himself, he says. He read tour guides and websites; he consulted plaques on our walks. He traced the course of the culveted rivers that run beneath the streets and speculated upon where they run out into the Tyne. He consulted Ordinance Survey maps of the riverbanks and insisted upon reconstructing the medieval city in his own mind, walking the route where he thought the city walls once ran.

You ought to know everything about your home city, W. says, if only to know what you're about to lose. It makes it more poignant, more mournful, W. says: your inevitable loss of your city. Because we will both lose our cities, W. says, it's inevitable. Just as he will be forced out of Plymouth, I will be forced out of Newcastle. Just as he will be kicked out of the city he loves, I will be expelled from the city I profess to love, despite the fact that I know nothing about it.

[Opening passages of Dogma, now replaced]

Spurious reviewed by Biblioklept.

And by Anna Aslanyan at 3:AM.

What first got you interested in writing?

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you've been driven from the realm of the given world, says Jean Genet. I don’t feel I got interested in writing so much as forced into it. 

Who or what particularly influences your work?

Who? Writers from continental Europe, from South America … from anywhere except Britain, where I'm from. Or who regard themselves as internal exiles in this country.

What? A sense that we are living in the end of times.

Describe your writing process.

‘Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go’, says Clarice Lispector.

For my part, I always had vocation. I think what I learnt, through the million or so words I wrote at the blog on which Spurious is based, was that my talent lay in decrying my 'talent'.

The writing process? A lengthy self-assassination. The systematic expunging of literary gestures. Humiliation in public.

What is the most surprising thing you have learned as a writer?

That novels sell very, very few copies. But perhaps that’s only the case with my novel …

 Which of your books is your favorite and why?

No contest. The Blanchot books are academic things, Spurious a living thing, because it knows its own anachronism, and laughs at it.

 What kind of effect do you hope your books will have?

I like nothing better than hearing a reader laugh out loud. But I want to make the reader sob, too.

Interview with Contemporary Authors (offline publication)

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, and to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. Curled up woodlice in room corners. ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature’, W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling.  And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, that’s what W. thinks.

They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try and communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it saying it now, for those who have ears to hear it? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it. – ‘You understand the damp’, W. says. Or rather, it understands itself in me.

And there are the rats, too, he shouldn’t forget them. My rats, that’s how he thinks of them. My rats, my familiars, living under my floorboards. He’d hear them chattering if he pressed his ear to the floor, W. knows that. He’d hear them speaking their obscene language, for all that I tell him that the rats are all dead.

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants – and the mushrooms. But W. believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat to begin, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic …

'The messianic era is about to begin', W. says quietly, almost to himself. Then he shouts it out, for all to hear: 'The messianic era is coming!' And then, 'Let's drink to it!', he cries, but we've run out of alcohol.

1.06 AM. W. catches a taxi back to his house on the other side of the city, to fetch back the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. It might be his finest hour, he says.

1.51 AM. Sitting out in the quad, we drink W.’s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We even drink his rare bottle of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, because they can’t find good quality damsons. And we drink one of his treasures: Plymouth Navy Strength Gin in the old bottle, before the redesign: gin at 90 proof, made that strong so as not to be inadvertently ignited by cannon gunpowder. That was the one time he was refused a drink at the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, W. says, when, already drunk, he asked for a Martini made from Navy Strength Gin.

Then, we drink a bottle of Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Béla Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink a round of Slivovitz, the famous plum brandy from Eastern Europe — drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says — and then Becherovka, a kind of nutmeg liquor from the Czech Republic. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, since it should be served ice-cold with turbot, but how else is W. going to keep us all drunk?

2.41 AM. Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them the impossibility of the spiritual and the impossibility of the political. Drinking always carries you through despair, W. says. Carries you through it, but bears you beyond it, if you are prepared to drink right through the night.

3.22 AM. We have to libate the palm trees!, W. tells us. I didn't know there were palm trees on campus, but W. assures me they exist. And there they are — palm trees in a grove, over which we pour a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.

3.31 AM. The hour of the wolf. We look for the Plymouth Pear in the campus woods. We talk of Beckett and Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentina, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers?, W. wonders. They were exiles, of course, but drinkers?

The exile is a man of a coming future world …: Flusser wrote that.

Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the huge role alcohol played in these people's lives: so Arhika's wife in her memoir. And Gombrowicz, what did Gombrowicz write? We have nothing of relevance in our notebooks.

We tell the postgraduates of an anecdote from the life of Debord: Alcohol kills slowly, read the government information poster near Chez Moineau. We don't give a fuck. We've got the time, Debord scrawled over it …

We've got the time. Life is long, not short, W. and I agree. Life is terribly long … It's too long! … To live without a lifetime, I read from my notebook. To die forsaken by death …

4.30 AM. We need to discover a new discipline of drinking, to drink until our teeth are stained red from wine, W. says. In Vino Veritas, W. says. In Vino, all we’ll ever know of Veritas, he says.

I read from my notebook. A man who drinks is interplanetary, Duras said. He moves through interstellar space. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God, she said. The lack of God! We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God, what in fact we are!

4.50 AM. We need to wait, W. tells the postgraduates, as we watch the first plane land at Plymouth Airport. We need to be watchful, and as watchmen, drunk. Above all, we need to drink, W. tells the postgraduates, filling their cups. We need to perfect a continual drunkenness, we tell them. A vigilant drunkenness. A sober one.

There's no point going to sleep, W. tells the Plymouth postgraduates. What use is sleep to us? We must stay awake, ever-watchful. We must stand watch for the signs of revolution. We must be like the pillar saints, waiting for God. We must be like Saint Anthony in the desert, wrestling with his demons. And above all we must wait, and wait together. Above all!

God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I quote from Jabès. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W.

7.00 AM. All around us, on the grass, the Plymouth postgraduates are sleeping. All of God’s children are asleep.

What are they dreaming of?, we wonder of the postgraduates asleep in the long grass. What are they dreaming of, the other postgraduates we’ve met on our travels?

We see them in our minds’ eyes: across the whole country — our damned, benighted country — postgraduates are turning in their sleep. Middlesex postgraduates, with their filed-down teeth, are dreaming of Armageddon. Staffordshire postgraduates are dreaming of the British Events, of British Autonomia. Manchester Metropolitan postgraduates are dreaming of dérives, of stupor, and the forgotten kingdom of Old Hulme. Greenwich postgraduates are dreaming of new kinds of friendship, the seed of the coming revolution, and of new kinds of political faith. And Dundee postgraduates are dreaming of that point at which despair becomes hope, and becomes despair once more.

What do Newcastle postgraduates dream of?, W. wonders. Of being left alone by me, for one thing. Of being untampered with, ungroomed. One day, they’ll put me on trial for the abuse of postgraduates, W. says. One day, he’ll see me on TV, being walked into court with a coat over my head.

And of what are W.’s postgraduates, the Plymouth postgraduates, the children of God, dreaming? Of the wide, high moor, W. hopes. Of cider made from the apples of the moor. Of songs of peace and gentleness sung on the moor. And of Plymouth Sound, which they will see glinting all the way from the moor, like utopia.

Jason Gross recommends Spurious at Flavorwire as one of the Contemporary Short Novels for Your Summer Reading Pleasure …

Ben Loory reviews Spurious at Good Reads. So do Andrea and Heather.

Midnight. Now's the time for our last speech. Our last words, before the police come tomorrow to break up the occupation. They'll lead W. away in handcuffs. This time, he really will be sacked. This time, it really will be the end.

We must take no heed for the morrow, W. says. He feels the presence of God, very strongly, W. says. Don't I? He wants to weep, W. says. He wants us all to weep, all the occupiers. He wants to make a pact of tears.

But the postgraduates won’t weep with him, W. says. Not yet. Only when every postgraduate in the land weeps will the last thinker come, W. thinks sometimes. Only when every postgraduate is overcome by weeping …

'Since the destruction of the Temple, the divine inspiration has been withdrawn from the Prophets, and given to madmen and children', W. says to our audience, quoting from the Talmud. ‘And it's been given to idiots, too’, he tells our audience. And then, under his breath: 'Go, fat boy!'

It will be like Chernobyl, our future, I tell the audience. And they will be like Chernobyl children, our descendants, each with his own deformity, her own cancer.

That's how they'll know one another in future, I tell them: by their cancers. Everyone will have a different kind of cancer. One will have cancer of the spleen, the other cancer of the heart, a third cancer of the ears, and so on. And they'll die before they're teenagers, like Chernobyl children. They'll die with no one to care for them, gasping in the air. They'll die alone and screaming, thousands of them, millions of them, as the atmosphere boils away.

‘Go on’, W. says, sotto voce. ‘Tell them about your vision’.

I see them building great cities at the Poles, I tell our audience. The last cities, after the destruction of the other ones, where no one is allowed but the rich. They’ll build New Mumbai in northern Siberia, when the old one drowns, I tell them. They’ll build New London in northern Scandinavia, when the old one burns, I tell them. They’ll build New Mexico City in the Western Antarctic, when the old one is destroyed in the coming wars, I tell them.

We’ll die in our millions, I tell them. In our billions! Africa will have to be abandoned. India. China will become a dustbowl, America, a salt plain. We’ll die slowly, in great agony, as the skies burn red. We’ll sink down by the walls built to exclude us. We’ll die by the laser swords of robot soldiers. We’ll die of starvation and we’ll die of exhaustion. We’ll die of thirst, terrible thirst. We’ll die of new diseases for which there are no names …

And New Shanghai will tower into Arctic skies, I tell them. New Washington will gleam like Canary Wharf in northern Alaska …

And our bodies will swell and rot in the blazing heat. Do you know what corpses smell like?, I ask our audience. They smell sweet, I tell them. There’s a smell of rotting, yes, but there’s a smell of sweetness, too.

‘Pathos, more pathos!’, W. whispers.

I see the money-makers still profiteering on the cindered husk of the earth, I tell our audience. I see New Beetham Tower in the new Arctic Manchester. I see New New Hulme floating on the ice-free ocean …

I see celebrities on red carpets under hot, black skies. I see helicopters circling in the burning sky. I see military putsches and crazed dictators. I see Fascism 2.0. I see Fundamentalism Reloaded. I see wars without end.

I see investors leaving earth in a swarm of rockets. I see the mega-rich in orbit around a burning earth. I see them looking outward, out towards the stars, for new investment opportunities …

 ‘Are they weeping yet?’, W. says. They’re not weeping, I tell him. Okay, it’s his turn, W. says. He’ll make them weep!

‘In the dark times, will there still be singing?’, he says, quoting Brecht. ‘In the dark times, there will be singing about the dark times’, he says. It’s the same with speech, W. says. To speak of the end delays the end, pushing it away, W. says. Because to speak, and to heed speech, is to belong to another order of time.

‘The last covenant will be the covenant of speech’, W. tells our audience, obscurely. ‘Speech is our promise’, he says, but no one really understands. ‘Freedom of speech is the last freedom’, W. says, but it’s clear that our audience doesn’t understand what he means by that, either.

W. rallies. He speaks of small kindnesses and the goodness of everyday life. He speaks of the failure of goodness as a regime, as an organised system, a social institution. He quotes from his notebook:

Of what does the good consist? The good is not in nature, neither it is in the sermonising of prophets, the great social doctrines or the ethics of philosophers. Yet simply people carry in their hearts the love for all that is alive; they naturally love life, they protect life.

Then he tells the audience a story I once told him about my monk years. Every night, before dinner, we would bless the garden with incense, I’d said. Incense, wafting through the leaves. Incense wafting into the night, and towards the animals of the night, I’d said. Towards city foxes and barn owls. Towards the slugs and the snails and the rats, I’d said. Incense to the people of the night, the prostitutes on the corner, and to the burglars who used our garden as a run-through. To the junkies looking for their fix, I’d said.

To speak is to bless the world, W. says. To offer salvation to all things. It is goodness without forethought. A fragile goodness, that is spoken in spite of us. That is spoken by the stupid and the weak.

Speech: it gives us all we know of God, W. says, which is to say, nothing. It gives us all we know of the Kingdom, which is to say, nothing. It gives us all we know of salvation, which is to say, nothing.

God’s people are prophets, doesn’t Moses say that?, W. says. Amos went further: every person is a prophet, according to him. We are prophets in speech, W. says. We prophesy by speech.

And just as we do not pray for ourselves – just as prayer is wholly offering, wholly about the other, so we do not speak for ourselves, either, W. says. We speak for the others. For the junkies and the burglars. For the prostitutes on the corner. We speak for the outcast, for the widow and the orphan. We speak for them by speaking to them, by addressing them, and by addressing anyone. By addressing the other person as the unknown, W. says.

W. reads out a quotation from his notebook:

I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.

That’s Ingeborg Bachmann, he tells our audience. A day will come – the day is coming. Tomorrow, the police will come and break up the occupation. But there is another tomorrow; another kind of tomorrow. Tomorrow it was May, W. says. And tomorrow it will be May again …

Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with a myriad of others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.

My life in Manchester, in old Manchester, before the regeneration. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to pour from the crack in the wall? Kafka, in my own way, which is to say, spuriously.

W. read Kafka as he travelled through Europe, as he surveyed the European scene from his train window. He read about the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse, as the train passed through Freiburg, and about the generation of German Jews in its final hour as he arrived in Strasbourg.

As his train crossed the Alps, W. read about Benjamin and Scholem who, making constant reference to Kafka, discussed the fine line between religion and nihilism in their letters in a cafe in Berne, and about their attempt to develop, each in their own way, a kind of anarcho-messianism, an apocalyptic antipolitics, even as they argued about whether the coming of the Messiah meant the dissolution of the law or its fulfilment.

And me — what was I reading to contextualise my Kafka studies? What, as I wandered through the university library? But I had no idea of Kafka's milieu. To me, he was only a meteor who had arrived from nowhere. I read The Castle in the same astonishment with which I'd greeted it first, back in the warehouse, as I stood on the bridge of my life, with only the swirling emptiness of my future before me. Kafka was a meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity. A meteor flashing through the squalor of my mind.

Sometimes W. wonders whether for that reason my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; whether the star of Kafka burns brighter in my sky. — 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a whole cosmos, a milky way. Steer I tried to, paddling my coracle into the unknown. But where was I paddling but in circles? Where but in the spotlight of my single star?

And meanwhile, all around me, the city was regenerating. Meanwhile, they were promising to rebuild Manchester … The suburbs were coming: isn’t that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even there? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I’d have to find a crack in the city and disappear.

Spurious reviewed at Of Books and Bicycles and, briefly, at Times Flow Stemmed.

Various reviews of Spurious at Goodreads.

A nice review at Amazon (USA), and at Amazon (UK).

Various things at Tumblr.

He needs a tranquiliser gun, W. says, with a dart strong enough to bring down an elephant. How else is he going to stop me rampaging through philosophy, tearing up everything with my tusks?

That I write on Western philosophy is really the destruction of Western philosophy, W. says. That I write on religious ideas is really the destruction of all religious ideas. And that I pretend to think is really the destruction of thought, affecting all thinkers, everywhere.

Schelling, Feuerbach … no one's safe when I begin to think. Maimon, Nicholas of Cusa … Is there anyone who might be saved?

A rumbling through the heaven: Lars is writing one of his commentaries! Angels' cries: he's defiling Rosenzweig! And Weil! And Kierkegaard – what’s he going to do with him?

W. shudders. No one reads a line he writes, he says. It's of no significance at all. But when I write — when I publish my reflections, if he can call it publishing, if he can call them reflections — he wants to clasp the entire oeuvres of Bataille, Weil and Kierkegaard to his breast. Wants to build a big wall around the library and all libraries, posting sentries to shoot me on sight.

Don't let him get near!, he's told them. But he knows, like the Red Death of Poe's story, that I'm in there already, that my reading is eating away at those oeuvres like cancer.

Why do I always bring Hello! with me on our train journeys?, W. wonders. 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, W. says. 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 that 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?

'That look on your face … That raptness …', W. says. He's seen it before, when, in the early hours, we pore in wonder over the pages of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard. — 'How is it possible that a human being could have such thoughts?', one of us will exclaim. ‘How is it possible …?’

In the end, I admire Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard only as I admire the celebrities in the gossip magazines I buy. Their brilliance is only the equivalent of a celebrity's beauty; their integrity the fervour of that of an ingénue’s rise to fame. But this means I admire them only because of what I lack. My stupidity places them at an infinite and glamorous remove.

It's different with W., he says. He's that little bit cleverer than me, that little bit farther ahead, and it's enough that his non-intelligence, unlike mine, is commensurable with real intelligence, his non-integrity with real integrity. At least he has the glimmerings of the faith of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard, W. says. At least he has an idea of belief.

He, when he writes of them, leaves his thinkers intact in their greatness, their distance. They remain remote and brilliant in the sky of thought. But when I write of them? I make others doubt, W. says. I make others despair. Are Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard really so worthwhile if Lars is writing on them?, they ask themselves, looking at me. Were we wrong all along if Lars thinks they're right?