W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes. – 'Your rolls of fat', says W.
It was like Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen me naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.
The signs are coming more quickly now, we agree. The current's quickening, as it does when a river approaches the waterfall. And who are we who can read such tell tale signs? To whom has the secret begun to reveal itself?
The apocalypse will reveal God's plan for us all, that's what it says in the Bible. And if there is no God? No plan, either. We're lost, quite lost, as the signs quicken. My life, for example. W.'s. Our friendship; our collaboration. Signs, all signs, which in turn enable us to read signs, as though our lives, our friendship was only a fold in the apocalypse, a way for it to sense its own magnitude.
Our friends, what has happened to our friends? W. dreamt we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all; that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamt we'd mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs. But he was wrong, terribly wrong, for news has come that they are turning on one another, our friends, just as we, one day, will turn upon one another, W. says.
To be betrayed by your friends: what worse fate is there than that?, W. says. To know your friend has betrayed you in the name of cynicism and opportunism?
It had to happen; he sees that now. It had to fall apart. Wasn't his dream, always, that we could save ourselves from the end? But we will not hold it back; the disaster will begin with what is closest to us. And what's my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand? Et tu, idiot?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs. Et tu?, as he sees my face is only that of the apocalypse …
How many times have I betrayed him?, W. wonders. I'm on every page of his Book of Betrayals. He's always taken detailed notes. And there are pictures, too. W. wants to remember everything. Everything! One day, he's going to read his notes to me and show me all his pictures, he says. One day, standing at the head of the bed like the Archangel Michael, he's going to read me the great list of my betrayals and show me the pictures.
My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.
How could I understand what I've unleashed?, W. wonders. Does the storm understand that it is a storm? Does the earthquake know that it is an earthquake? I will never understand, says W.; that's my always appealing innocence.
It's time for the reckoning, W. says. It's reached that point. But with whom might he reckon? How to tackle an enemy who has no idea he's an enemy?
Can you see me burning?, W. asks me in his dream. He's on fire! What am I to do? Put him out – but with what? But then I, in his dream, understand: I am the fire. I am what makes him burn.
Best review of Spurious so far, I think.
See also the latest part of Spurious: An A to Z.
I am less and less able to listen to the presentations of others, W. notes. He can see it on my face. I can never hide it. At one point, he says I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.
What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don't I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water?
There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the Mersey, when I full intended to catch a ferry, he says. Then there was our aborted Thames trip, the boating expedition all the way upriver … How disappointed I had been!
Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which there gusts the wind of pure idiocy.
Literature was our great curse, W. says. To be fascinated by something of which we would always be incapable. And it's not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our heads against them, over and over again, like idiots.
I close my eyes. – 'What are you contemplating?', W. asks. 'Your next magnum opus?'
'You have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can't do, in your case, everything', W. says. 'Where do you think your strengths lie?', and then, 'do you have any strengths?'
What sort of literature would W. write, if he could? – 'I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you'.
A series of jerks and tics , like those a hanged man twitching in the final death throes. A series of involuntary and grotesque spasms: that will have been your life, W. says. Have I ever exhibited a single free gesture? Have I ever shown any natural spontaneity? I'm always crabbed, always as though confined, though of course I haven't been confined.
It's not even desperation; it's more basic than that. There's a rebellion at the level of my reptile brain, that's all W. can surmise. A rebellion at the base of my spine. 'You shouldn't exist', W. says. 'You shouldn't have been born'. That's what my body knows. It's what I know at some abysmal level. And meanwhile, there's my twitching over the void, a man half-hung, neck broken …
There are some books, of course, over which W. has wept like a baby, he says. Imagine it! Him! Completely disarmed! Completely overcome! He's wept many times, W. says. There are books that have brought him to tears, he says, great floods of tears. He's always been a pathetic reader, W. says. He's always been tremendously alive to pathos.
Of course, it's different in my case, W. says. My eyes are always dry. When do I weep? Never, W. says. I am only a hooter, a pointer. I can hoot and point at a book, but that's about it, he says. Whereas W. will sometimes read in great sweeps, on a long train journey, for example, my reading is always sporadic and spasmodic; it begins, and is almost immediately interrupted.
In a sense, W. says, I cannot be said to read at all, though I claim to be a reader; I claim to have read books by this thinker and that thinker; I claim to be an admirer of literature. But what can it mean to me, all this philosophy, all this literature? What can it mean to one who has never wept like a baby over the pages of Cohen? What can it mean who has never felt so compelled, utterly compelled by The Star of Redemption, that tears ran streaming down his cheeks?
Glee: that's what W. always sees on my face. That I'm still alive, that I can still continue, from moment to moment: that's enough for me, W. says. He supposes it has to be. If I realised for one moment … If I had any real awareness … But it would be too much, W. says I couldn't know what I was and continue as I am. I couldn't come into any real self-awareness.
'That's what saves you', W. says. 'Your stupidity'. If only he knew … That's what everyone thinks when they see me, W. says. That's what he thinks.
Meanwhile, it's left to him to bear the terrible fact of my existence, W. says. It's his problem, not mine as it should be, W. says. Everyone blames him for me. What's he doing here?, they ask. Why did you bring him? But he had to, W. knows. He has all the excuses. He's sorry in my place. I'm his responsibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Before God, we are always in the wrong, so Kierkegaard's Jutland pastor. Am I in the wrong before W.? Undoubtedly. But is he in the wrong before me? W. is responsible for me in some sense, he knows that. Terribly responsible. I am in some sense his own creation; I am the result of something that went wrong with him.
Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the former – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say?
Of course I can speak, W. says, and I speak all too much; but perhaps, at another level, I cannot be said to speak, or my speech is infested with a shapelessness and formlessness that hollows out its significance. It's as though I've worn out speech in advance, W. says. As though I've said and written everything there was to say, and carry on regardless.
But why is it his fault?, W. wonders. What have I got to do with him? But perhaps, like the Rabbi who raised a golem from the mud, he conjured me up from his own sense of failure. Perhaps I am only the way W. is in the wrong, its incessant, unliving embodiment.
There is, of course, something quite disgusting in my endless desire to parade my buffoonery before the world, W. says. It's born not from humility – an entirely warranted sense that I will achieve nothing with my life, improve nothing, in fact the very opposite – but from a dreadful exhibitionism that is part of my buffoonery, indeed is inseparable from it. For what else is buffoonery but the desire to endlessly parade one's shortcomings? To perform them, insist upon them, to thrust them into the face of everyone?
I would have been happiest in the period of show trials and autoconfessions, W. says. I would have liked nothing better than to have confessed for imaginary crimes, the greater, the better, signing every confession the police brought to me and admitting my role in the greatest of conspiracies. And I would have liked my entire oeuvre to be swallowed up by the great confessional autocritique that would sprawl from volume to volume.
I did it, I would say. I was the worst of all. It was me, it was all my fault: what have I ever wanted to say but that? W., by contrast, dreams of a mystical kind of buffoonery that is no longer dependent on masochism and exhibitionism. Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard, in the guise of a Jutland Pastor wrote an edifying sermon on that theme. But before what is W. always in the wrong? Before what internal tribunal?
'You're never happier than when you make plans', says W. 'Why is that?' I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of fort-da like that of Freud's grandchild. But then, too, there's something wild about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which entail the very opposite of control.
There are never well thought-out tactics, never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who's been locked up for 20 years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won't the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?
But there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There's a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan is a kind of kite, that's how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky.
My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books and series of books written together! For flurries of articles!
What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it's all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I do know it. Only something in me knows otherwise. Something that remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.
Each of us, in his own way, is approaching the end.
In W.'s new office, his desk is pushed up against the wall. There are no windows, though he knows it's raining outside. It must be. In my office, the windows are so filthy I can't see whether it's raining or not. W. hears the distant sound of sobbing and wonders if it's him. I hear a distant mewling, and wonder if it's me.
Why can't we give up? Why press ourselves on? Why, despite everything, do we cling to life? It must be some instinct, W. says. Some residue of natural life. But then, too, our instincts have always been wrong. They've always led in the wrong direction. We're not just careless of our lives, we've wrecked them.
It's all our fault, W. always insists. Somehow, it's all due to us, and especially me. I should bear the brunt, W. says. I should be a human shield.
My stomach betrays me, that's how I put it, W. says, when in fact, my stomach, with its endless problems, its growling and grumbling, acts only in my interests. – 'It's trying to save you', W. says, 'Don't you understand?'
That's why I look so bilious and green. It's why we had to seek out an emergency scheisse bar in Freiburg, W. says. The emergency scheisse bar: isn't that what I have to search out in every city, almost as soon as I arrive?
'Have you ever had an honest thought? Have you ever been true to anything?' The answer is no, W. says. It's always been no. A great no should be roaring in the sky. The no should deafen me, W. says, and deafen everyone who speaks to me. No!, he cries. No!
Zeno of Citium strangled himself, W. says. Imagine it! Of course, he was already an old man. He felt he'd missed his appointment with death. It had come, but he hadn't had been ready. So he brought death to him.
And what about us? Should we strangle ourselves? Should I strangle W., and W. me? But that's just it: death doesn't want us. It isn't our time, and it'll never be our time. If we die, it will be from some stupid accident, the most absurd of illnesses, an ingrowing toenail, for example. It will never be a matter of our integrity, of some act of martyrdom. We'll die for nothing, for no purpose. How could we presume to take our own lives?
You've heard of suicide by cop, of course, W. says, but what of suicide by philosophy? What of an infinitely protracted attempt to die by provoking the wrath of others through the attempt to think? What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of your stupidity?
'You know you talk rubbish, don't you? You know you write rubbish, night and day?' W.'s never seen it so pure and keen: the desire to die. The desire to be shot in the head. 'Make it stop!': that's my secret cry, isn't it?, W. says. Someone make me stop! Of course, he'd commit the act, W. says, if he didn't find it so funny.
That's my trouble – I aspire to tragedy and to tragic grandeur, but all I do is make everyone laugh. It's like a chimp shitting himself. A chimp sitting in its own shit, with a bemused expression on his face.
We should shoot ourselves, W. says. Someone ought to. He'll shoot me, and I'll shoot him, in some kind of Mexican standoff. We would lie there in the sun, bullets in our heads, the flies buzzing around us, and there would be a great rejoicing. But that's just it, isn't it: there would be no such rejoicing. No one would see, no one would know what had been delivered from the world.
How is it that we've escaped detection?, W. wonders. How is it we've got away with what we have? It would restore faith in the world if we'd be hunted down and shot. At last moment, the gun held to our temples we would laugh in joy because we knew justice had been done. It would all make sense! The world would be restored!
That we're still alive, W. says, is a sign of the closeness of the end.
The bars of your cage are caked in shit, W. says. The walls of your cell are caked in shit, in your own shit, and there you'll sit in your blanket, shivering. And everything you'll have done will have been your dirty protest. Everything you've said, everything you've written, every deed you've performed: a dirty protest.
I lapse into stammering, and can't get a word out for several minutes. W. is convinced I've had a series of minor strokes, and that one day I'll lose the ability to speak altogether. He'll be my amanuensis, W. says, like Rosenzweig's wife, who, in the period of her husband's total paralysis, used to spell the alphabet out loud until he was able by a signal – an inarticulate sound, a facial contortion – to indicate the correct letter. I am a cock, that's what W. will make me spell every time. I – am – a – cock.
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