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Death, death, death: W. hears them tolling in the sky, the great bells. We're at the end, the very end! There can't be much more, can there? This is it, isn't it? The credits are rolling…. The game is up….

They're calling him home, W. says. He sees them as light-filled figures in light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light? He's falling upwards, W. says. Is this the Rapture?

And meanwhile, where am I falling? Down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the great betrayer? Is that the humanzee, bred in Soviet research labs?

W.'s ill and I'm ill, and it's his fault, since I caught it from him. My thighs ache, I tell W. on the phone. I'm staggering around like Widow Twankey. So do his, W. says, but he's unable to rise at all. He's bedridden, he says, and all he can see is the rain streaming down the windows.

W.'s been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

W. has been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. You need to get it all out. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

W. hasn't had a thought while he was ill, he tells me. He always thinks he will. It worked for Kafka, didn't it? And what about Blanchot? But W.'s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

Spurious: reviews and mentions overview

Spurious, the novel, by Lars Iyer, published by Melville House, was launched on the 25 January 2011 in the USA and Canada, and will be launched on the 24th March in the UK. Spurious has its own page here.

It is available from usual online retailers.

My A-Z of Spurious is catalogued here.

 

Interviews

Ready Steady Book interview, with Mark Thwaite, March 29th.

‘The Quest for Seriousness Trammelled by Idiocy’, interview with Colin Marsall at the Marketplace of Ideas. Podcast available on the MOI site and at the Itunes shop. It will be broadcast at KCSB-FM 91.9 in Santa Barbara, California, at 1PM Pacific Time. Mid March.

Reviews & other longer pieces

Asylum, by John Self, May 26th.

Art-Review, by Laura McLean-Ferris, Issue 51, Summer 2011 

BiblioDrome, May 10th.

Being in Lieu, ‘Then a Pitiable Faculty Developed in Their Minds’, by Jen Craig, May 6th.

The Cherwell, by Tom Cutterwell, May 6th.

The Believer, ‘Lars Iyer’s Spurious’ by Casey Walker, May.

Kevin From Canada: ‘Spurious, by Lars Iyer’, April 26th.

Letters and Sodas: ‘Spurious, by Lars Iyer’, by Heather, April 16th.

Bookmuch, by Valerie O’Riordan, April 9th

Laish: ‘Spurious’, April 8th.

Full Stop, by Michael Schapira, March 30th.

The Nervous Breakdown, by Nick Antosca, March 16th.

The Guardian, ‘Sad Apes’, by Stephen Poole, March 12th.

Quarterly Conversation, ‘Pile of Shit Reviews Profound Philosophical Rhapsody’, by David Auerbach, March 5th.

I’ve Been Reading Lately: ‘Kafka Remains the Rage, Or Siding with Spurious’, March 4th.

The Brooklyn Rail, ‘The Dynamic Duo’, by Tatiaana L. Lane, March.

The Hipster Book Club, by Yennie Cheung, March.

San Francisco Chronicle, by Kevin Canfield, Feb 27th.

The Millions, by Emily S. John Mandel, Feb 22nd.

Known Unknowns, by Emmett Stinson, Feb 15th. Also broadcast on Triple R Radio, Melbourne.

Biblioklept, Feb 2nd.

KGB Bar Lit Magazine, by Linus Urgo, Feb.

Complete Review, M.A. Orthofer, 31st January.

Washington Post, Book World, by Carolyn See. ‘Foolish Posturing Atop the Ivory Tower’, 27th January.

NYLON, not online, in a co-review with Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning. Review by Erinrose Mager:

A tragic mien, too, undercuts the sheer hilarity of Lars Iyer’s Spurious (Melville House). “Start with these letters on a piece of paper: s-p-i-n-o-z-a,” quips W., our narrator’s companion and co-philosopher. “Ponder that in your stupidity.”Iyer, a British scholar of the theorist Blanchot, started a blog called Spurious in 2003, the content of which serves as the base for Iyer’s first novel. A narrative My Dinner with Andre turned on end, Spurious is peppered with moments of epistemic interrogation: “Were we the condition of thought?” “Are we capable of religious belief?” “Is he the Messiah? Am I?” W. and the narrator don’t want the reader to answer their questions, but rather for them to acknowledge the significance of their being posed in the first place. All along, they attempt to uncover a fungus that molders in the narrator’s flat, lest it consume the place entirely. The high/low binary we find in Browning’s prose appears again in Iyer’s; to read Spurious is to discuss Kafka’s The Castle and farts in one exacting sentence–all the while reeking of gin.

 Modern Painters, by Scott Indrisek (not online), February:

Two “mystics of the idiotic” argue over their own insufficiencies in this hilarious and eminently quotable debut novel. The essentially plotless tale portrays unconventional friendship and crushing self-doubt, and circles around various obsessions: Kafka, booze, the Messiah, genius, and the lack thereof. “Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that,” laments the narrator. “We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.” The pair awaits the end of the world while lamenting their own stupidity.

Book Forum, by Erik Morse, 25th Jan.

LA Times, by Susan Salter Reynolds, from her ‘Discoveries’ column, 23rd Jan.

Publishers Weekly, not online, Jan 20th.

Two friends drink, walk in the English countryside, and talk (and talk and talk) in Iyer’s playfully cerebral debut. The action–what there is of it–revolves around an unnamed Hindu narrator and his frenemy, a mopey professor known as W., who harbors a deep insecurity, is contemptuous of the narrator, and loves Kafka. The narrator, meanwhile, lives in a rotting home that’s being taken over by a creeping fungus and suffers W.’s constant tongue lashings with a resigned cheeriness as the pair muse, debate, ponder, and talk endlessly about their places in the world. Iyer finds ways to weave in contemporary cultural artifacts, from film director Bela Tarr and rock group Godspeed You Black Emperor to a range of influential European intellectuals, though it’s not clear whether the narrator and W. are more yin and yang or Abbott and Costello. It’s a love it or hate it book: repetitive, too much in its own head, and self-satisfied, yes; but also piquant, often hilarious, and gutsy.

 

Mentions  

March blog roundup: Shhh I’m Reading is currently reading Spurious. So is Akacocolopez, and, for that matter, Stuart Evers, interviewed at Shortfire Press. By My Green Candle quotes from Spurious. Conversational Reading asks whether there are flat or rounded refrerences in Spurious.

The page for Spurious at Buy.com has an interesting ‘annotation’, Feb.

Ads Without Products: I Like An Idiot, Put It All On the Internet, Feb 22nd.

Moby Lives: How Should Writers respond to Criticism, Feb 10th.

Moby Lives: On the Comedy of Cruelty. Feb 3rd.

The Dewey Divas and the Dudes, Jan 25th.

Cherwell, ‘Fantastic fiction 2011’ by Fay Lomas, Jan 20th.

New York Times, ‘Inside the List’ by Jennifer Schuessler, an article on recent bestsellers in Philosophy, Jan 14th.

Moby Lives: On Those for Whom We Write. Jan 13th. 

 

Other

A review in a Chinese language on what I think is an online book retailer.

 

Back to blog.

 

– But there are cosmic themes in your films, and you've been quoted as saying that you're "trying to look at things from a cosmic dimension."

– You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought "Okay, we have some social problems in this political system – maybe we'll just deal with the social question." And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there's the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It's very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It's just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us.

– What do you think this shit is that's coming from the cosmos?

– I just think about the quality of human life and when I say 'shit' I think I'm very close to it.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

In the centre of the tiny, cluttered studio, lit by a skylight, Diego poses, sitting immobile and resigned on a stool: he is used to it. But Alberto, in spite of having examined his brother's face for almost fifty years, is not yet used to it. He is just as astonished as he was on the very first day before this unknown, immeasurable head, which defies and refuses him, which offers only its refusal. If he approaches his brother, the latter's head grows out of all proportion, becomes gigantic and threatening, ready to topple on him like a mountain or the angry face of a god. But if he backs away a few paces Diego recedes into infinity: his tiny, dense head seems a planet suspended in the immense void of the studio. In any case, and whatever the distance, it forbids him to approach. It looms abruptly, a separate, irreducible entity.

[…] We know what a head is', exclaimed André Breton one day, disappointed and irritated that Giacometti preferred reality to the imaginary. We do indeed know what a head is. But the knowledge, precisely, is what Giacometti is struggling against.

Face to face with his sculpture, we are scarcely freer than Giacometti in front of his model. For it carries its distance within it and keeps us at a respectful distance. And our relationship recreates the strictly evaluated space so that its totality, and that alone, may appear. This figure does not allow us to rest our eyes on one or another of its parts; each detail refers us back at once to the whole. It does not develop a rhythm which would gradually conduct us owards an encounter. it does ot reveal itself as a series of plasic events leading to a harmony, a chord. It bursts forth in its immediate presence: it is an advent.

The figures keep us at a distance; they carry their remoteness inside them and reveal their profound being. Naked, unmasked, it is now their unknown doubles who come to light.  Their hieratic attitude reveals an imperious insensitivity. They elude our understanding, reject our impulsive gestures. They do not disain us; they ignore us and dominate us. One would think them fastened on their pedestals for eternity, rooted to their rock. The gravity of their bearing, the asceticism of their demeanor and their gaze which traverses time and traverses us too withou flinching, without suspecting our opacity and our stupefaction, gives them the appearance of divinities. They seem to await a primitive cult.

Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays

Writing delights me. That's nothing new. That's the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That's how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That's how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don't experience.

Thomas Bernhard

When I write about this kind of thing, about this kind of centrifugal situation that leads to suicide, I am certainly describing a state of mind that I identify with, which I probably experienced while I was writing, precisely because I did not commit suicide, because I escaped from that.

Bernhard, interviewed, cited.

A partial transcription of the Bela Tarr interview included as an extra on the DVD of Werckmeister Harmonies.

[Tarr is asked about Damnation]

There is a difficulty about what we really think to be a film. The question really is what is film for? It's been some time since we came to the conclusion that the film is not about telling or it's function is something very different, something else. So that we can get closer to people somehow; we can understand everyday life and that somehow we can understand human nature: why we are like who we are, how we commit our sins, how we betray one another and what interests lead us.

And that's how we found this rather simple, even primitive crime story which is really a banal story because this is the thing we can get furthest away from[….] It was [a matter of] getting away, of distancing ourselves from the story because we thought that the wall, the rain, the dogs have their own stories, and that these stories are more important than these so called human stories that we write.

We believe that apart from the main protagonists of the film there are other protagonists: scenery, the weather, time and locations have their own faces and play an important role in the story […]

[Asked how he discovered this use of time]

From the very beginning the way we handled time was different to other films first of all because we cut and edited the film differently most films are piece of 'information - edit', 'information – edit' – we didn't edit that way. We are paying no concern to internal, psychological processes and we concentrate on the physical being present of the actors that is why metacommunication is more important - in fact its more important than verbal communication – and from here it is only a short step from putting it in time and space.

[Asked whether he is making a special demand on the viewer]

No, I don't have special demands from the audience I believe that I regard the audience as partners perhaps a bit more grown up than I am myself. I believe that if we make films with more openness, fairness and honesty people watch films with their hearts and minds and they only believe their eyes and then they can understand what we do and it's quite a simple thing.

And it will be special and part of their lives, and after all that's all we want and perhaps that people that come into the movies they leave a bit different, a different person than when they come in, if not as a different person, with something more in their hearts. And if we get that result we are happy and satisfied; if you get closer to the people you see on the film if you get touched by the beauty of the destitute then we've reached something, we've achieved something.

[The interviewer says that Tarr's films aren't always about beauty, but portray ugly landscapes and ugly people. Tarr responds in English, with magnificent simplicity, refusing to extrapolate.]

This is my nation.

[How do you chose the people you work with?]

We always make sure that those people we invite to work with us they are actually our friends. We always try to make sure that they are not actors but personalities and they give their entire personality to the film and that they should be present. And this is a matter of confidence: that they give us something, that they trust us that we won't betray them; that in the end we won't break our promises[….] All the people who work with us are present as personalities, be it as professional actors, workers in a factory or independent actors.

[When you say this is my nation: is it the real Hungary to which he is referring, or the imaginary world he has made in his films? Does it relate to everyday reality?]

I believe that one is making the same film all through one's life. These are the various forms, the various stages of the very same film. It's not that we don't think or look further because all these films are after all different. Every time we try to get closer to a somewhat clearer style, to create something simpler, even more simple, and to try to give an even clearer picture of what is there in Hungary today because after all we are Hungarians and we very much hope that this can be deciphered and understood in every part of the world as well.

[Can his films be taken as a political allegories?]

I would like to make it clear: there are no allegories in any of my films. And there are no symbols, such metaphysical things are far from [the genre of film]. A film as a genre in itself is always something definite. Because that piece of instrument we call the lens can only record real things, there are no allegories. There are very simple and definite scenes in the film.

And we try to think about the quality of life, because everybody has just one single life. It does matter how they live that single life; it is important what the quality of their lives is. I don't regard anything with sancity apart from life itself. And that's why it does matter what we talk about in a film.

As far as politics is concerned, I think it's a dirty business and it's not the object of any normal piece of art. We would never make political films. We would like to do more than that.

[The interviewer says Tarr's films are full of mud and dirt, with people getting drunk and falling over. They're very much about the ugly real world.]

Yes, yes.

[The interviewer presses Tarr on this: Why people falling over drunk? Why the mud and dirt? Tarr responds in English, quickly and directly.]

This is the same question why we make a film about ugly people because this is our nation this is our people that's what I see.

[Tarr's now asked to explore the relationship between literature and film.]

Film by itself is quite a primitive language. It's made simpler by its definiteness by its being so concrete and that's why it's so exciting. It's always a challenge to do something with this kind of limited language. The writer Krasznahorkai always says how can you do anything with such limited options, with such limited tools? He's frustrated that we deal with cheap things. Film is a cheap show in the town market and it's a great thing we can develop that into something valuable something that will withstand time and can be watched in 10 or 20 years or more.

[Tarr explains how he works with Krasznahorkai – how his novels inspire Tarr and his friends to find (or build) suitable a locations (a 'reality'). Film and literature are different languages, Tarr insists again.]

… that reality [i.e., the reality of a location] must be ours and we make a film about our reality with his help and from here on we talk a different language.

[On his wife and editor, Agnes Hranitzky] She's present all through the making of the film. And she is coauthor and no decisions are made without her, partly because she really knows and understands things. We do work together we make the films together. And there is an everyday process of making these film with the preparations the shooting and the editing.

And there is another important member of the family and that's the composer [Mihaly Vig] with whom we've worked together for the past 15 years and without the composer the films wouldn't be what they are. About our relationship: he would go into the studio a month before the shooting takes place, would compose the music, give it to us and then we already use the music at the stage of shooting. So the music plays an equal role to the actors or the scenes or the story. And we trust him so much that we don't go there into the studio he composes the music and brings it to us.

It's very close and very profound; a very friendly relationship that has been shaped over the past 15 years. We don't have to talk about anything serious; we never talk about art, we never talk about philosophy, we don't discuss aesthetics, we always talk about very concrete practical issues.

[Asked about cinematographers]

It's always difficult thing because one is always in the hands of a cinematographer, and what we ask is a very difficult task, both in physical and professional terms. And it's always very difficult to find the right person; some don't live up to it; some don't have the time; some are talented but make mistakes elsewhere so it's very difficult to find the right person. And we are quite autocratic and we tell the cinematographer what to do […]

[Asked about his relationship to the film industry in Hungary]

We won't knock at the door of the film industry and ask permission to be let in. Because we felt that everything that was happening in the film industry was a lie and it was a very bad and cheap thing. We thought there's no point talking to and negotiating with these people; we thought we had to kick the door in and show them what life really is and we have to show people what real life is like because they hardly see it on the film.

And from then on it was quite simple. We thought that making films should be cheap; we should be able to create films with low budgets and they have to be be 16mm with handheld cameras with nonprofessional actors and with a lot of closeups so going straight into their faces show the faces and to tell what social problems we are facing. 

And as time went by that problems there are are not only social but ontological, and there are cosmic problems as well and then we found out that everything even the weather was bad and from then on there's nothing else to do but make it total [Tarr is laughing] and create a complete desperation and the more desperate we are the more hope there is. It's quite simple.

[Asked whether his films appeal to the young in Hungary]

We were always famous for showing people on the screen who weren't seen elsewhere or before. I think at those times it was important to find a different kind of narrative.We were quite intrigued as to how we could make an epic film. Of course as we know that is quite the contrary of the film genre in general. So it looked like an exciting challenge. And we loved these young people very much because we thought that we had to talk about people who became marginal who lived on the margins because we ourselves are exactly as marginal as they are. So therefore it was nothing special to make a film about them.

The end of W.'s conference. We've run out of drink, and the bar is closed. W. goes back by taxi to his house on the other side of the city, and fetches back, after half an hour, the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. Nothing is too good for his guests!

Sitting in the quad, we finish W.'s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We drink a couple of rare bottles of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, since they couldn't find good quality damsons. And we drink his treasure of 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 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.

We drink W.'s Polish bison grass vodka with apple juice, and Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Bela Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink Slivovitz, plum brandy from Eastern Europe – drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says – and Becherovka from the Czech Republic, some kind of nutmeg liqueur.

We drink some weird version of Baileys from Malta, sweet cream with the addition of cumin or cinnamon, or something. W.'s not sure where he got that. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, but how else is W. going to keep his guests drunk?

Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them spiritual impossibility and political impossibility of the political. It always passes through despair, drinking. Passes through it, but bears us beyond it, if we are prepared to drink right through the night.

We think of Krasznhorkai telling Mihaly Vig about the unbearableness of the world in the streets of Pecs. I was born into a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive.

We think of a hungover Bohumil Hrabal, feeding pigeons in his fifth floor apartment. I love ruination, I love hangovers …

We think of Marguerite Duras alone at Neauphle, except for drink. A man who drinks is interplanetary, she 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! The void you discover in your teens, she said. We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God what in fact we are!

Guests sitting in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbecues. Bags of kettle crisps. Empty bottles. Spread blankets, and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop. Everyone begins to leave, taxis drawing up in the night, until W. and I are the only ones left, the last drinkers, the most drunk.

We have to libate the palm trees!, W. says. 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, which we libate with a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.

Dawn. The air is moist. We talk of Beckett and Avigdor Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentia, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers? 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.

I tell W. 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, the comrades sent out by 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. To die forsaken by death … What should we do? What's left to us?

God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I say, paraphrasing Jabes. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W. But God has something to do with the distance between us. With our nearness, with our distance. Speech. That's what brings that distance to life. Speech between friends.

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.

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

Spurious is available for pre-order on Amazon in the USA (release date, 25th Jan 2011; price $10) and on UK Amazon (release date 24th March; price £9). Cover and blurb now featured (I didn't write the blurb). It's available on Book Depository, too (24th March; £7.50). It is also featured in the Melville House Spring 2011 catalogue.

It is rarely assumed that not wanting to live might be part of wanting to live; or that finding one's life – or as it is usually generalised in such states of mind, finding life itself – unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.

[…] [A] capacity to be depressed means being able to recognise something that is true – that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need – and have been prepared to bear the grief and guilt. In this sense depression makes us real. It deepens us.

[…] Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.

Adam Phillips

Recollection: Paul [Celan] coming back from London. – 'I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room'. And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, 'Sometimes God, sometimes nothing'.

Cosmic dust covers us. The wind lifts the air. – 'I'm writing like never before', he says.

The poem he writes in the street and then telephones to her from a public phonebooth.

Why? I don't want to look anymore. I don't get the tone. The word no longer has tone. How would you say? How would you understand? – 'The secret is in these leaves. The secret is perhaps within us', he says to me. 'But we cannot understand at all. The world is empty. The sky is empty'.

'I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid … I have paid', he says.

stray paragraphs from Jean Daive's Under the Dome

'These are truly the last days …' W. is making me listen to Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues again. 'Shut up and listen'. He plays this to the students, he says. And he makes them watch Bela Tarr. That's what he calls teaching, he says.

We should hang ourselves immediately, I tell W., it's the only honorable course of action. We are compromised, utterly compromised. W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. We should stab ourselves in the throat, I tell him. I over-react to everything, says W., it's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric. He, by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse, says W. I do have my great apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and longness of view required by apocalypticism.

How are you? Depressed as usual? Of course we're never really depressed, W. says. We know nothing about real depression. We're men of the surface, not of the depths. What do we know of those blocks and breaks in the lives of real thinkers? What can we, who are incapable of thought, understand of what the inability to think means for a thinker? And what of real writer's block – what understanding can we have of that terrible incapacity to write a line for those who have thoughts to set down?

We're melancholic, that W. grants. Who wouldn't be? Melancholic, vaguely rueful, knowing we should not be where we are, that we've been allowed to much, overindulged … And for what? With what result? We're completely irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. We can make no contribution to the issues of the day. Where are we heading but down?

All we have is our pathos, our melancholia and a sense that things are not right. But we are not right either. We're part of the problem; our own obstacle. But if you yourself are the obstacle, then what? What is to be done? Lie down and let it all pass over you. But we won't allow ourselves that. We want to do something, think something, and that's our trouble.

True thoughts pass infinitely far above us, as in the sky. They're too far to reach, but they're out there somewhere. Some place where we are not. Some great, wide place where thoughts are born like clouds over mountains.

To be able to think! To write in good conscience! But what idea could we have of that? We're men of the valleys, not men of the peaks. We know nothing of real highs and real lows, of mountain peaks or abysses.

What's it all for?: that's our vague question. Why have we been fitted with the desire to think but not the means to do so?: that's our vague resentment. We'll accomplish nothing: it was obvious, and from the first. We read and write in vain. And all the while, a vague melancholy and a vague sense that things should be otherwise.

Isn't it all our fault, all of it? Isn't the whole thing our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything? Yes, we're responsible. We're resigned to it; we're not just part of the problem, we are the problem.

The road is blocked – our road, everyone's road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the cliffs, we agree. We should get the water taxi out to Mount Batten, and then head up to the cliffs, and …

But what good would it do, our bodies prone and bloody on the rocks, seagulls pecking out our eyes? How could we apologise then? Because that's what we ought to do – we should spend our whole lives saying nothing but sorry: sorry, sorry, sorry, and to everyone we meet. Sorry for what we're doing, and what we're about to do, sorry for what we've done: who would be there to say that for us if we jumped from the cliffs?

‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’

‘Reification,’ he answered.

‘It’s an important job,’ I added.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’

‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’

Michelle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses,

You should never hang onto a conversation, says W. Once it's finished, pfft, it's finished. He snaps his fingers in the air. – 'I forget everything you say as quickly as that', W. says. 'You, on the contrary, remember everything, and not only that'. I make things up, W. says. I wholly invent conversations we are supposed to have had, but in fact we never did have. I'm a fantastist, W. says, a dreamer, but for all that, I'm not without guilt. I'm no holy fool, W. says, no innocent. A fool, yes, but holy – not a bit of it.

I am neither an Eckermann or a Boswell, W. says. I'm his ape, says W. and, remembering Benjamin's comment on Max Brod, a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.

Of course, W. never mistakes himself for Kafka, as I do. He's never thought himself anything other than a Max Brod. But the point is – this is W.'s first principle – the other person is always Kafka, which is why you should never write about them or hold on to their conversations, let alone make them up. The other person is always Kafka, W. says, even me. He knows that, says W., why don't I?

W. sends me a quote to mull over in my stupidity, he says.

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence. 

W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.

I want to escape, that's my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something's wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he's not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. I'm not escaping, says W. I'm going to drown with everyone else, he'll make sure of it. I'm going down, says W.

'Why don't you get rid of that jacket?', says W. 'You've been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. It's completely shapeless'.

W. and I are wearing our flowery shirts. 'Look at us', W. sighs, 'fat and blousy, and in flowery shirts, and everyone else slim and wearing black'.

What's wrong with us? Why are we never dressed for thought? Take my trousers, for example. They should be pulled up round my waist like those of Benjamin in the famous photograph. But they sag. They droop disappointingly. – You're a man without hips!', says W. 'A man without ideas!'

W. remembers the pictures of Deleuze from the 70s, with his flares and long hair. Then there were the trousers of Levinas, generous, expansive …

I'm getting fat, of course. Eventually, I'll have to wear elasticated trousers like the American professors, W. says. Perhaps it will suit me, that obesity. Perhaps it give me gravitas.

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck. – 'Poseidon must be angry', says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time.

It's choppy! – 'We should libate the sea', says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It's because the mountains are salty and the sea is full of broken up mountains, he says.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful when we were here last year, reading the plaque then as he does this time. Why was he so unhappy? He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache, then a great wave of depression breaks …

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I could have lived here, imagine … We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. – 'A better person', W. thinks, 'taller, with some nobility of character'.

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we're not geniuses. It's a gift, he says, but it's also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don't have it ourselves. 

Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka?

But then again, didn't Kafka depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka, lean on his friend in times of despair and solitude?

We too, W. and decided long ago, must give our lives in the service of others. We too must write interpretative essays on the work of others more intelligent and gifted than we will ever be. We too must do our best to offer support and solace to others despite the fact that we will always misunderstand their genius, and only bother them with our enthusiasm.

Death, death, death: W. hears them tolling in the sky, the great bells. We're at the end, the very end! There can't be much more, can there? This is it, isn't it? The credits are rolling…. The game is up….

They're calling him home, W. says. He sees them as light-filled figures in light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light? He's falling upwards, W. says. Is this the Rapture?

And meanwhile, where am I falling? Down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the great betrayer? Is that the humanzee, bred in Soviet research labs?

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.

One day, I'll surprise you all. One day, I'll really surprise you … That's what you say to yourself in brown pub interiors, isn't it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They're full of a sense of great earthly mission. Just listen for a moment, that's what the drunk says. Listen – just listen!

And when he does? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.

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. 

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.

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.