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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?

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.

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad – very bad – and at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Of course, my tendency is to scare them off, W. says. It's to bellow and fuss and deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. tries to keep quiet, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who can go back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe them with soft words and sympathy.

It won't be that bad, he tells them. Don't listen to him. Or: don't worry, everything's going to be fine. Ignore him, he's an idiot. – 'But in their hearts they know', W. says. 'They know what's going to happen'.

No more, says W. No more. He's passing through a dead zone, he says, as you 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.

Why does he always feel he's falling? Why does he feel that nothing is real?

Are we even alive?, says 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, it really is. But death isn't coming any closer. If anything, he's too healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, W. says. 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 the absence of us? 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 will be no future?  And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one tried hard enough, that's what W. discern, when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough, and what a task! How many times has he tried to explain it to me? How many emails has he sent? 

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it was like beating a big, dumb animal. It seemed pointless, and cruel. How could I understand why I was being beaten? I bellowed, that was all. It was perfectly senseless.

He drew pictures, W. says. He scrawled red lines across my work, but I never understood; I carried on regardless. I'm tenacious, he has to give me that. Or rather, something is tenacious in me. How can I continue when there's so much that is wrong? It baffles everyone, W. says. Is he still going? Is he still alive?, they ask him, who can only shrug in dismay. What can he do?, he says.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

The 80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we are driven out from Liverpool Station. It's going to be terrible. W. lived in Liverpool in the 80s, W. says. He knows what it was like here. He shudders. We're finished. Doomed. How long do you think we have?

W. feels like the boy in Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns all the way round, 360 degrees, ending up facing in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. Why can't you follow orders?, he's asked. You told me to turn, he says. And then, I don't understand, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, a voice comes. Another cadet, off camera.

His parents are dead. He's turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That's what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox and whistling, tears running down his face … I don't understand, that's all he will say. It's all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Streets boarded up. Whole sections of the city abandoned. A world without pity. Without mercy. Great walls raised against the sea from which the migrants will come (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up, melting, from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there'll be blackness everywhere. We'll die lingering deaths. We'll die in the sludge, very slowly.

I don't understand, that's what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. I don't understand.

Because he did not find his voice, but his voices, Pessoa never fell into the trap of knowing what he was doing; he didn't need to imitate himself to keep writing.

Adam Phillips

My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and me?

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

Houellebecq, Whatever

It's not that I feel tremendously low; it's rather that the world around me appears high.

Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

I became one of these people you see in movies in the background, those extras just pacing back and forth.

Al Columbia, discussing his period in mental hospital

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

Bela Tarr

There is something terribly alluring to me about the past. I'm hardly interested in the future. I don't think it will hold many good things. But at least about the past you can have certain illusions.

W. G. Sebald, interviewed

'And then you fell in with the monks …', W. says. It's the most mysterious of episodes to him, W. He's never had it satisfactorily explained to him how I ended up living with the monks. What drove me to them, or them to me?

How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among the monks as their guestmaster? Why, out of all the other candidates – and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my job – did I become Guestmaster to the community?

He sees in his imagination, W. says. He sees ape-boy standing between the monks and the world, letting in their guests, preparing them lunch or dinner, and showing them up to their rooms, which he had carefully prepared. He sees it, although he doesn't understand what he sees: ape-boy making beds and running his cloth along the dado, ape-boy in the supermarket fetching food for dinner, ape-boy taking coats and hats and making pleasantries in the oak-parqued reception room, ape-boy arm in arm with a monk he's escorting across the icy pavement. He sees ape-boy sitting in attendance on nut-brown Copts with twinkling eyes at ecumenical dinners and calling taxis for white-robed Dominicans heading to the station.

How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? What recommended me to them? What, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean? W., by contrast, has every idea of what living a life of genuine spirituality might mean. He, too, lived among monks, and for a time -over a long summer on the Isle of Man - even thought of becoming one.

Ah, but he can say little of it, not to me, who puts everything up about him, W., at his blog. A veil has to be drawn over some things. A kind of silence has to observed. But he came to know what it meant, a spiritual life. He met a holy man. They walked along the seashore, talking about the essence of religion.

And isn't that where it began, W.'s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this world? Isn't that where he understood that the question of religion wasn't to be left to philosophers and metaphysicians, and with the philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?

W. took a vow of silence, he says. He spent days in solitary prayer. Hadn't he begun to understand that it was the world here and now to which religion attended. To world as it currently is! As it is, and insofar as it harbours its redemption. Only insofar as it is close to eternity. It was his time in silent meditation that set him on the road to grasping what is so clear to him now: that religion is not a metaphysical affair. It's about ethics!, W. says. Politics!

What did I understand, when I fell in with the monks? What did I grasp of the vision of the world vouchsafed to me? That, too, is a mystery to W., for whom it has always seemed clear that I know nothing whatsoever of religion. There I was, nonetheless, a Guestmaster, and for several years. There I was, masturbating in my attic room as the monks around me prayed unceasingly for the world.

Away until late Sep.

The cover and other details of Spurious, the novel of this blog, are part of Melville House's catalogue here. Spurious is available for pre-order from Amazon UK and USA. It will be released in January 2011.

The cover and other details of Spurious, the novel of this blog, are part of the catalogue here. Neither the blurb nor the bio are my work (I certainly didn't call myself a philosopher …)

I'm away until mid-August.

A novel, Spurious, based on material here at the blog, will be published by Melville House in January 2011. A second novel will follow later.

Spurious is available for pre-order at Amazon (UK – £9.00, USA – $10.00).

My Danishness, says W. as we sit on the grass for our picnic. The mystery of my Danishness. We need to become Danish in some way to be able to read Kierkegaard, he says. We need to approach his work from the inside, like a Dane. I'll need to show him how to think!

Of course, I'm only half Danish. Half Danish and half Indian, a peculiar combination, W. says. He, of course, is Irish on one side of his family and Polish – probably Polish – on the other. He's a mixture, too. He'll be able to bring his Jewish-Catholic approach to bear on our reading of Kierkegaard, he says, and I my Hindu-Protestant approach.

Where should we start? – 'Did you bring some Schnapps?' I brought some Schnapps, I tell him. – 'Is it chilled?' It's straight from the freezer, I tell W., as Danes serve it.

Aalborg akavit. Did Kierkegaard drink Aalborg akavit?, W. wonders. Undoubtedly! Kierkegaard would certainly have drunk it in his early years, his pagan years, W. says. He probably drank himself blind on Aalborg akavit before his return to his faith, just as we must drink ourselves blind on Aalborg akavit, we who are lacking in faith, in Kierkegaard's faith.

And did I bring the herrings? Yes, I brought the herrings. I took a special trip, out to Ikea, to get the herrings. We have herrings and cod roe sandwich paste from the grocery in Ikea. And we have some ryebread, too. Good, W. says, we're well prepared. To think like a Dane, you need to eat like a Dane and drink like a Dane. And here we are in the north of England, pretty much at the same line of latitude as Copenhagen, ready to eat and drink like a Dane. We're well prepared.

Now tell me, tell me about Denmark!, W. says.

Spurious on preorder at Amazon (UK - under a tenner), Amazon (USA) and the Book Depository (slightly more expensive). Publication date: 25th Jan 2011.

Drink! says W. Drink! Really, there's nothing else for it. There's nothing better to do. The days are too long. This day, for example – what time is it? just after lunch. Just after lunch – it's unbearable! Only drinking can save us. We'll float drunkenly through the afternoon. We'll lie back and float, like idiots in a lido …

You can't feign friendliness, W. says. You can't feign interest. In the end, the art of conversation is entirely alien to me, W. says. The art of greeting people.When he did try and teach me, it led to disaster. I bellow. Hello!, I cry in my loudest voice. – 'You scare people'.

In the end, no one wants to talk to me because I don't want to talk to them. They want to escape because I want to escape. I make them edgy because I'm edgy. – 'You want to escape! You want to be out of there!' Can I blame them that they want the same?

W. is always amused in those moments when the power to speak deserts me, and the other person has to guess what I want. It invariably happens when it's most urgent, and I have to be most succinct: a great stuttering and stammering. A great foaming at the mouth. – 'You can't get a word out, can you?', W. invariably says, laughing. 'My God! Gesture! Mime! What is it? More food? Something else to drink?'

W.'s reading a book of Latin philosophical phrases. – 'Ah, here's something that applies to you: Barba non facit philosophum. A beard does not make a philosopher'. What does eo ipso mean? What's the difference between modus tollens and modus ponens? – 'Tabula rasa: I know you know that. And conatus – even you must know that'.

'You drink too much', W. says. 'Mind you, I'd drink if I had your life'. Why doesn't someone put me out of my misery? Why don't I book myself into a suicide clinic? Do I have any sense of the disgust my very existence of earth should engender? But then, how could I? It would be like a pig that developed a disgust at its own excrement. I'd live in contradiction. I'd breach the law of the excluded middle. I would exist knowing only that I should cease to exist, and how could that be endured?

I came from outside, and I brought the outside with me, W. says. I came from the everyday and had to stamp the everyday from my boots. – 'How long had you been unemployed?' Years, I tell him. Years! W. can't imagine it. – 'And for how long before that did you work in your warehouse?' Years again. – 'Years!', W. exclaims, impressed. Of course, there was also my time with the monks. That's my wild card, W. says, my monk years. Who would have known from looking at me?

But there you were, and who had seen anything like it? – 'You were like a one man horde, a Tartar'. There was spittle on my lips and drool in my beard. Had I ever heard of a footnote? Did I know what an appendix was, or what op. cit. might mean? Scholarly standards were an irrelevance to me; scholarly apparatus an imposition I could completely ignore, it was quite impressive.

'Your book!' W.'s still amazed. A book without scholarship, without ideas. Without the usual concern to explain or to clarify. A book almost entirely lacking in merit. And yet! He saw something there, although no one else did. He saw it, and not in spite of its many typos and printing errors … It was there because of them. It was inextricable from them. A kind of massive, looming incompetence. A cloud of stupidity that covered the sun. But more than that: didn't it belong like a shadow of the sun, and of its burning? Didn't it belong to the clarity of the day as its cloud and blind opacity?

It was demonic, W. says. It was as forceful as a demi-urge. That's when he became aware of it as a vast Gnosticism, as a division of light within light, of life within life. Who could have written anything so bad? Who, who ruined the temple of scholarship and revealed it to have been always ruined? He saw it, W. says, even if no one else did. And it was his role to look after me.

'Have we been good?, W. asks me. 'Have we led good lives?' Ah, but it's too late now. We've been struck, left for dead. Struck, knocked over, and our assailant zoomed away. We wander in the wake, dazed, white-faced. What happened? Who did this to us? But we have no idea. We're out of ideas, and dying of internal injuries, our insides pooling with blood …

Our last words: is it time for them? Last words, but it's only bubbles of blood that speak; only blood tricking from the corners of our mouths.