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Ozu's most endearing characteristic, for me, is what Sato calls his "pillow shots." The term comes from the "pillow words" used in Japanese poetry – words that may not advance or even refer to the subject, but are used for their own sake and beauty, as a sort of punctuation. In Ozu, a sequence will end and then, before the next begins, there will be a shot of a tree, or a cloud, or a smokestack, or a passing train, or a teapot, or a street corner. It is simply a way of looking away, and regaining composure before looking back again. (via)

Ozu's use of "pillow shots," which unobtrusively break up the action and give the viewer a moment to contemplate or rest. The "pillow shots" consist of flowers or banners or whatnot … (via)

Much has been made of Ozu's visual devices: the camera pitched to the eye level of an ideal spectator watching from the comfort of a tatami mat; the compositions that emphasize the geometric qualities of the Japanese interior, with its clean lines, right angles and frames within frames; the "pillow shots," as Ozu called them, of wind-rustled trees, passing trains, empty side streets, that provide buffers of silence and reflection between dramatic scenes. (via)

Ozu also developed a curious form of transition, which various critics have labeled "pillow shots" or "curtain shots." Between scenes, he would always place carefully framed shots of the surroundings to signal changes in setting, as well as for less obvious reasons. Basically a hybrid of the cutaway and placing shots, these transitions were considered unusual for extended length; they sometimes seem motivated more by graphic composition and pacing than by the demands of the narrative. (via)

The insufficient exposition of the beginning is what constitutes it as the place of the muses, as inspiration.

Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable: they are the moment, to be more precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained.

Giorgio Agamben

'God gives death the dimensions of His absence.

The book veils itself in the book. As God does in God.'

and

'A great love carries within it a mourning for love.'

Edmund Jabès (link)

Jean Genet, from various interviews.

I would indeed like to free myself from all conventional morals, those that have hardened and crystallised and that impede growth, that impede life. But an artist is never completely destructive. The very concern with creating a harmonious sentence supposes a morality, that is a relation between the author and a possible reader. I write in order to be read. No one writes for nothing. In every aesthetics there is a morality.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude? A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

[On The Maids] A critic said that maids 'don't speak that way'. They do speak that way, to me, when I'm alone at midnight.

I will hazard an explanation: writing is the last recourse when you have been betrayed. There's something else I'd like to say to you: I realised very quickly, as young as fourteen or fifteen, that all I could be was a vagabond and a thief, not a good thief, but a thief all the same. I think my only success in the social world was or could have been along the lines of a ticket inspector on a bus, or a butcher's assistant. And since this kind of success horrified me, I think that I trained myself at a very young age to have emotions that could only lead me in the direction of writing. If writing means experiencing such strong emotions or feelings that your entire life is marked out by them, if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation, or their analysis can really allow you to deal with them, then yes, it was at Mettray, and at fifteen years old, that I began to write.

Writing is perhaps what remains to you when you've been driven from the realm of the given world.

E.M. Cioran:

We are increasingly interested not in what an author says but in what he may have meant, not in his actions but in his projects, less in his actual work than in the work he dreamed of. If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealised in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself[….] We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements. The strange thing in this case is that the work was not even begun, for of The Book, that rival of the Universe, there remains virtually no revealing clue; it is doubtful that its structure was outlined in the notes Mallarmé destroyed, those that have survived being unworthy of our attention. Mallarmé: an impulse of thought, a thought that was never actualised, that snagged itself on the potential, on the unreal, disengaged from all actions, superior to all objects, even to all concepts – an expectation of thought.

A little later, Cioran notes that whereas Baudelaire called Poe a 'hero' of letters, Mallarmé went further and called him 'the absolute literary case', and comments,

No one today would assent to such a judgement, but that is of no consequence, for each individual (like each epoch) possesses reality only by his exaggerations, by his capacity to overestimate – by his gods.

Marguerite Duras, from Practicalities:

This book helped us pass the time. From the beginning of autumn to the end of winter[….] none of the pieces deals with a topic exhaustively. And one reflects my general views about a particular subject[….] At the most the book represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things[….] The book has no beginning or end, and it hasn't got a middle either. If it's true that every book must have a raison d'etre, this isn't a book at all. Nor is it a journal, or journalism – it doesn't concern itself with ordinary events. Let's just say it's a book intended to be read[….] I had doubts about publishing it in this form, but no previous or current genre could accommodated such a free kind of writing, these return journeys between you and me, and between myself and myself, in the time we went through together.

I'd like to write a book the way I'm writing at this moment, the way I'm talking to you at this moment. I'm scarcely conscious of the words coming out of me. Nothing seems to being said but the almost nothing there is in all words.

When I was writing The Lover I felt I was discovering something: it was there before me, before everything, and would still be there after I'd come to think things were otherwise – that it was mine, that it was there for me. It was more or less as I've described, and the process of writing it down was so smooth it reminded you of the way you speak when you're drunk, when what you say always seems simple and clear.

Marguerite Duras, from an interview in Two By Duras:

Alcohol is irreplaceable. It's perfect. But it's death. I've almost always written on alcohol, and I've always been afraid. I've always been afraid that alcohol would prevent me from being logical, I've been afraid that it would show in my writing. Now, without alcohol, I'm  no longer afraid. But the moment I stopped drinking I was afraid I'd stop writing. The writing in books such as The Lover is, as a line of Baudelaire calls it, 'belle d'abandone', beautiful in its abandonment, in its loss. I've no idea if this abandonment has always been within me, forgotten. But it surfaced when I wrote The Lover. I wrote it without meaning to write, it happened[….] I didn't think about the style, I didn't think about how I'd write it, and when I started writing I felt that the book itself was the style. I had the impression of not writing at all, I don't remember having 'done the writer', as the Italians say.

The heart of The Lover is myself. I am the heart and all the rest of the book, because there's no literature there: only writing. These days no one writes. Or almost no one. There are books, books made out of books, and behind them there is no one.

… the clandestine nature of writing. I can only write for people if I don't know them.

I work a lot, very hard. I've always enjoyed working. Now I work without alcohol. I hope I'll be able to continue to work without alcohol. Because of my liver. I've ended up with a very small liver. That's terrible! Terrible because alcohol is so positive, so perfect, such a major occupation. There is nothing like alcohol. Just look at all the drunks in the taverns. They talk to themselves, they are perfectly happy, they are in harmony with their beings. They are like kings. They are the authentic kings of the world.

from Aharon Appelfeld's A Table For One:

Writing is a huge effort. But, unfortunately, even at my age, I cannot say that I've discovered the secret of writing. In writing, you are tested each time anew. A page where the words are set down on it right and flows – that is almost a miracle. When I finished the novella Badenheim 1939, I wept from sheer tiredness.

I never made a fuss about my writing. Everything I wrote was in cafes, mostly quiet cafes, but also in bustling, crowded cafes. It never bothers me when people talk. Many writers have tortured their families because the noise made it difficult for them to concentrate. True, literary writing isn't regular writing, but then, neither is it a disease requiring the hushed silence of those around it. I have a great deal of respect for an artist who doesn't impose his moods on those around him. Writing is a struggle, and it should be between you and yourself, without involving additional people.

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that God dwells everywhere. 'In the trees as well?' – 'In the trees too', he replied. – 'In the animals too?' – 'In animals too.' – 'In man as well?' – 'Man,' replied Grandfather, 'is the partner of God.' – 'Man is God?' I was shocked. 'No. But he has a little of God in him.' This conversation has been etched in my memory. Grandfather was a believer – he believed with his whole heart and all his soul. That belief of his was expressed in every gresture: the way he gripped any object, opened or closed a book, picked up a child and placed him on his knees. Sometimes I feel I have inherited his religious feelings from him. I never learned much from abstract ideas; the figures from my childhood and the experiences in the Holocaust are what stand before my eyes and have molded my thoughts.

[Perhaps Appelfeld is religious through the details of his books. Perhaps to record them is itself a kind of belief.]

After a few hours of writing, I would take a stroll, walking up to Agrippas Street, meandering about for an hour or two. Then I would return home. The stroll was a continuation of the writing.

There's no doubt that the Temple and prophecy are the pinnacle of faith, but only metaphysical poetry can attain such heights. Prose needs solid ground; it needs objects and a space whose dimensions you can relate to. The peaks of prophecy and revelation are just not possible in prose. Biblical prose, in contrast to prophecy, is factual; it recognises the weaknesses of man and does not demand divine attributes of flesh and blood. One can listen to the prophets, but it's impossible to draw near to them.

Cafe Peter was my first school for writing. There I learned that simple words are the precise ones, and that daily life is our most true expression.

The Fifth Rabbi

W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts at the end of his great study of Jewish Mysticism.

When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known – his name, and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery – would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

A generation later, the second Rabbi – his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life – confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and said, We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers. What he wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi – whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure – went to the woods and said, We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi – his name is well known, and he lived as we do - faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

There was a fifth rabbi – well, he wasn't really a rabbi – Scholem forgot, says W. His name is Lars and he writes everything about himself at his stupid blog. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was on Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of times.

The Tohu Vavohu

Death is close, says W. Death has set out to find us, all of us. And this will be a death of a kind we cannot anticipate. A meteor-strike, the flaming sky, the stars falling from the heavens … We have no idea of what is to come, he says.

What idea could we have? How could we anticipate our annihilation? Death will be everywhere, W. says. The earth a flaming ball. Why does no one understand? He understands, though, insofar as he can understand. He gets it, and that makes him feel very alone.

It's the opposite of cosmogony, W. says. It's the return of the pell-mell, of chaos, of the tohu vavohu, he says, quoting Genesis. Of course, I should know a great deal about that, with my flat, W. says. I should know everything about it, with the damp spreading across my wall.

It's like fate, I've told him, the damp. The water streams down the wall. It weeps. And then my flat's tilting sideways. It's pitching into the earth. If you look at the skirting, I've told him, you'll see how far they are above the floorboards, which are sinking, along with the joists beneath them. Sinking and leaving a great gap between themselves and the skirting, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

I think it's smiling at me, the flat, I tell W. I think it's beginning to laugh at me.

A Double Suicide

A double suicide – is that the answer? But who would stab whom first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?

Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn't the end already overdue? Shouldn't it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We'll close our eyes at last. There'll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

Genet, interviewed

I've never felt Sam to be a pessimistic playwright. A pessimist does not try to write. The true pessimist wouldn't take the trouble of writing. Writing is an attempt to communicate, and if you're a pessimist you say communication is impossible: you wouldn't do it.

Edward Albee, interviewed

Stupidity's never blind or mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to expresss themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

Deleuze

‘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, cited here.

In each life, particularly at its dawn, there exists an instant which determines everything[….] This instant is not always a mere flash[….]

How old was I? Six or seven years I believe. Stretched out beneath the shade of a linden tree, gazing up at an almost cloudless sky, I saw the sky topple and sink into the void: it was my first impression of nothingness, all the more vivid in that it followed a rich and full existence[….] Commencing on this day I began to ruminate on the lack of reality in things[….] I was one of those men predestined to wonder why they live instead of actually living, or at most living only on the margins.

The illusory character of things was once again confirmed for me by the proximity, by my ceaseless frequenting of the sea; a sea whose ebb and flow, always mobile as it is in Brittany, disclosed in certain bays an expanse which the eye could only embrace with difficulty. What void! Rocks, mud, water… Since each day everything was put back into question, noting existed. I imagined a night aboard ship. No reference points. Lost, irremediably lost – and starless.

Seen in its vastness, existence is tragic; up close it is absurdly petty.

from Jean Grenier, Islands

Robert Walser wrote his books just like a farmer who sowed and reaped, grafted, fed his animals and mucked out after them. From a sense of duty, and to have something to eat. "It was a job like any other."

"My most productive work times were morning and night: the hours between noon and night found me stupid."

"I could not tie myself to a paper or a publisher. I wouldn't want to make any promises that I couldn't keep. Things can only grow from me unforced."

[Jakob von Gunten]'s my favorite, among all my books." After a pause: "The less the action and the smaller the geographical region a writer uses, the more important is his talent. I am immediately suspicious of novelists who excel in plot and use the whole world as their character. Everyday events are beautiful and rich enough that a writer can strike sparks from them."

"Artists must fit in with the ordinary. They must not become clowns."

"In 1913 when I, with a hundred francs, returned to Biel, I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible. No [gloating.] I went walking by myself, day and night. In between I conducted my business as a writer. Finally, when I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture, I went back to Bern. At first things went well there for me. But imagine my fright when I got a letter from the feuilleton editor of the Berliner Tageblatt in which they said that I hadn't produced anything for half a year! I was confused. Yes, it's true, I was totally written out. Burned out like an oven. I made a genuine effort [despite the letter] to continue writing. But they were silly things, and that worried me. What works for me is what can grow quietly within me and what I've somehow experienced. Then I made a couple of amateurish attempts to take my life, but I couldn't make a proper noose. Finally it reached the point where my sister Lisa took me to the Waldau Institute. I asked her just outside the gate "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do, but enter?"

"It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium. The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again. [In that regard] no one has given me a room, paper or pen."

Across from the casino at Jakobsbad there's a baroque building that resembles a monastery, probably an old folks' home. "Should we go inside?" Robert: "It looks much nicer on the outside. One should not try to reveal all secrets; I've believed that my whole life. Isn't it good, that in our life so much remains foreign and strange, as though behind ivy-covered walls? That gives it an inexpressible appeal, which more and more goes lost. Today it's brutal, how everything is desired and taken."

On the matter of productivity: "It's not good for an artist to wear himself out in his youth. Then his heart is prematurely fallow. Gottfried Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Theodore Fontane saved up their creativity for old age, certainly not to their disadvantage."

"During my last months in Bern I had nothing to say. Gottfried Keller might have experienced something of the sort when he accepted the post of [Staatsschreiber]. Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence."

"Writing in particular needs a man's full strength–it just sucks him dry."

"At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible."

"I was so happy this morning," said the enthusiastic Robert "when I saw clouds instead of blue sky. I don't care for beautiful views and backdrops. When the distant disappears, the close grows more intimate. Why shouldn't we be satisfied with one meadow, one forest, and a couple of peaceful houses."

"I liked my hospital room quite a bit. One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, [like children exhausted from their play]. It feels like a monastery, or the waiting room of death. Why have an operation? I was happy as things stood. It's true I got nasty if the other patients got something to eat and I didn't. But even this didn't last long. I'm sure that Hölderlin's last 30 years were not as unhappy as portrayed by the literature professors. To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to constantly satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be!"

"Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible."

"You see, every time I moved into a new city I tried to forgot the past and immerse myself completely in my new milieu."

I asked Robert if it was true that he had burned three unpublished novels in Berlin. "That could well be true. At the time I was mad for novel-writing. But I realized that I had seized on a form that was to too long-winded for my talent. So I moved back into the little shell of short stories and feuilletons …"

"In Herisau" he continues "I haven't written anything. What for? My world was smashed by the Nazis. The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed. I've almost become a [Petrefakt]."

After a few steps, Robert: "Let's slow down; we don't want to chase after the beautiful, but have it with us, like a mother her child."

"In your youth you're eager for the unusual, and you're almost hostile to the everyday. As you age you come to trust the everyday more than the unusual, which arouses suspicion. That's how people change, and it's good that they do."

"How often such quiet, inconspicuous folk are underestimated when they're young, and yet they are that which holds the world together; from them comes the strength that helps a nation survive."

Robert never acquired his own library, at most a pile of little Reclam editions. "What else do you need?"

In the sun, Robert’s head reddens like a tomato. He smiles at me with enthusiasm: "It would be nice to keep going like this into the night."

"Back in Zschokke's day, they still understood how to write gracious novels. Today novelists terrorize readers with their dense tediousness. It's not a good sign for these times that literature acts in such an imperialistic way. It used to be modest and good-natured. Today it possesses [Herscherallueren]. Das Volk are said to be its subject. That is not a healthy development."

Robert: "It's good to be thrown back on simple things. Think of how many people shed their ballast in the war, and how beauty then had room to grow."

from Carl Seelig's Wandering With Robert Walser, in English for the first time, in a draft translation by Bob Skinner.

The Sacrifice

At the beginning of things, I tell W. - a beginning which, in Hindu cosmology, will return after the end – Vishnu, appears in the cosmic void before his servant, Brahma, who has been charged with the task of creation. How shall I begin, Lord?, asks Brahma. Begin with a sacrifice, says his master.

But what shall I sacrifice?, says Brahma. Sacrifice me, says Vishnu. What shall I use, as the means of sacrifice – what as the knife, as the altar, the post and the fire?, says Brahman. Use me, says Vishnu. I am the offering and the reward.

What is sacrificed, then? If it is Vishnu to whom the sacrificial act is dedicated, then God has been sacrificed to God. The object and subject of sacrifice are the same. But Vishnu is also the means of the sacrifice – its knife, its altar, the ceremony itself. He is the chant and the fire, just as he is what is sacrificed and is also the presiding deity of the sacrifice. He is all those things.

But why, then, is the sacrifice necessary at all? Perhaps it is because the world, the whole world we see before us, is what is not yet sacrificed. Perhaps the world itself – all of us, all our lives – is the offering to be burned on the fire.

But even that is wrong, I tell W. For the sages tell us that the world, seen in the right way, is, in its entirety, already a sacrifice. Seen thus, all things – everything that is part of the world, and even the world itself – are already aflame. The world burns upwards to God just as God is in all things as the burning itself and the power to leap upwards.

Then perhaps we sacrifice to remind ourselves that all things are already sacrifice, and that our souls themselves are afire, licking up into heaven like flames. Perhaps it is for our sake that we sacrifice, not God's: to remind ourselves of our burning souls and of the flaming that is our world. For our sake: then God would ask us to sacrifice because we ourselves are sacrifice, and we are part of that great sacrifice that God also is.

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

from Herzog on Herzog

The Humiliation Artist

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You – wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics …

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition – that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon – further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write … And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night … Then, just after you turned off the light … A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner … 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea – the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique …

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life – the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter …

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist – you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

In the Way

'No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way'. W. is reading out loud from Scholem's didactic poem. – 'How do you think it applies to you?', W. says. 'Do you get in your own way?' I get in his way, that's for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in him also gets in his way. It's my fault, he's sure of that. If it wasn't for me, would he reach the star of redemption? He'll never know, W. says. He suspects not.

Dark Age Monasteries

How has it become coupled in us, the fear and loathing of the present world and the messianic sense of what it might have been? How, in us, the sense that our careers – our lives as so-called thinkers – could only have been part of the collapse of the world, combines with our delusion that we are the preservers of a glorious European past, and that we even have a share in that past?

How, in us, is the sense that our learning – which is really only an enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophies, all our literature - is of complete irrelevance and indifference, joined with our mad belief that it bears upon what is most important and riskiest of all, upon the great questions of the age?

In our imagination, W. says, our offices in our cities at the edges of this country are like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, keeping the old knowledge alive, and our teaching samizdat, outlawed because it is dangerous, the secret police infiltrating our lectures and preparing to take us away.

Of course, when he says us here, he really means him, W. says. And when he says we know nothing, he really means I know nothing, because he at least knows something, W. says.

Seppuku

Only my viscera are honest, W. decides. Only there, deep inside my body, buried under layers of fat, is there anything like honesty. In a way, it's comforting, W. says, although it doesn't make me any easier to be around. That there's a kind of internal limit to my pretension.

You're not going to get away with it, that's what my stomach says. I'm not going to let you get away with it. That's my curse, W. says, and my judgement. It's what the samurai realised when they committed ritual suicide, their entrails glistening in the sun.

Sincerity belongs to the guts, W. says. And what of my terrible purgations – what of that terrible voiding that is like a parody of seppuku? It'll never come to an end, will it?, W. says. It's the double of my endless logorrhea, a trail of shit that runs along every line I write.

No!

'Your stomach never lies', W. says. 'It's got more integrity than you have'. That's why I'm always in such an appalling state. Something in me must know, W. says. Something must know my lies and pretension, and that, in fact, my life is only a lie and a pretension.

'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!

The Wrong Island

A Book of Revelations: was that what I was going to write? A new Book of Revelations, a new Apocalypse: is that why I journeyed out to that Greek island? It's the funniest thing of all, W. says, the thought of me heading out on the ferry from Piraeus with my divine mission in mind. How hilarious! What did I intend to do? What did I think would happen?

Of course Piraeus is disgusting now, everyone knows that. Was it really where I was going to begin my mystical journey? I must have been disappointed, W. says. I was, wasn't I? Athens was bad enough, that's what I told him, but Piraeus! Piraeus was an abomination. But I was borne along in a dream. I had my dream. I drifted along, a young idiot.

'And what did you have in your rucksack?', W. asks. 'What was in there?' He knows, he says. He knows full well. It's a detail I shouldn't omit. Your typewriter!, exclaims W. Your typewriter … It was some time ago, W. says. Before laptops, at any rate. Well, before they became cheap. And a pen and paper wouldn't do, would it? Not for taking dictation with regard to the apocalypse. A typewriter! A typewriter was essential!

'There you were', says W., 'on the ferry with your rucksack and your typewriter. What books did you bring? Did you take anything to read? Oh I forgot, didn't I?', W. says. 'You were going to give up reading. You were going to let it go. Books were going to drop out of your hand. What were you going to do instead? Act? Step into the world? Hilarious', W. says. 'The temerity!', he says. 'Write? Yes, that was it, wasn't it?', he says. 'You were going to write. To write as a man acts. And write a new Book of Revelations.

'Of course, you never got to your island, did you?' It'd gone wrong at Piraeus. I'd asked for the wrong island, or they misheard me, or they wanted to misdirect me. But I was heading for Paros, not Patmos. Paros, and by mistake – the party island, what an idiot! That was my mystical journey, W. says, to a party island.

'What did you think as the ferry docked? Patmos has become very commercial – is that what you thought? It's very noisy here – is that what you thought? People don't wear much on Patmos – was that it?

'Still, you made good. You slept on a rock and woke in the sun. It was Sunday. Old ladies gave you collaver. And then, rucksack on your back, up you went to the monastery, the deserted monastery. You had one of your pantheistic little ecstasies, didn't you?

'Imagine it: a Hindu in a Greek Orthodox monastery, completely deserted. A Hindu ready to write a new Book of Revelations. Paros, not Patmos'. W. still finds it funny. 'An idiot with a typewriter, on the wrong island. An idiot on his mystical journey, and no books to read, on the wrong island …'

The Book of Revelations

Your trip overseas. Your period as a world traveller. It's W.'s favourite story. You'd flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn't you?, W. says. You'd flown there as a world traveller, never to return! Did you speak the language? Had you made preparations for your visit? Did you know anything about the culture and mores of the country you were going to? The answer is no in each case, says W. You just went, didn't you? Off you went as a world traveller.

What did you expect? What did you think awaited your there? No sooner than your plane had touched down, no sooner than you were through the airport, but someone would recognise you for the wit and bon vivant you were, someone would invite you for lunch, someone for cocktails – you would be already on your way to becoming a local sensation, a favoured visitor from overseas, a man to be welcomed and passed around, introduced here, introduced there.

Soon, you'd be the centre of a whole circle. Soon, right at the heart of things, the social world orbiting around you, you'd caused a kind of frisson, women were throwing themselves at you, men were vying for your company. Your conversation was legendary, your learning magnificent, you could talk on every topic, from the petty to the world-historical.

Yes, you'd be recognised for what you were, at last. The world knew you, lauded you, carried you on its shoulders. All it took was a trip to another country. All it took was some resolve, a plane ticket, and there you would be, in a country that would celebrate your talents.

Was that what you dreamed of, W. asks, with your plans for world travel? Is that what you thought awaited you on the other side? And instead, what happened? You lurched from disaster to disaster, didn't you? No sooner were you off the plane than you were beaten down by the sun – beaten by it. You'd never experienced Mediterranean heat before, had you? You'd never seen a cloudless sky. And that blue – the fierce blue of a sky without clouds. It was too much for you, wasn't it?  

You became curiously mute. You'd been stunned into silence. You didn't say a thing. What could you say? What could you have said? Nothing was going to happen to you. You'd be picked up and carried along by no crowd. There was no one to whom you could prove yourself.

Who was interested in you? Who knew your name? If you were a little younger, a paedophile might have followed you around. A little younger, a little cuter, and some pervert with a camera might have taken pictures. But then, there, in the Mediterranean heat, no one wanted to know you. No one spoke to you, even out of pity.

Because you had the wrong personality, didn't you? The entirely wrong personality. You were not a world traveller. You were not a go-getter. You weren't a hail-fellow-well-met kind of person. You were surly, as you are now. You were churlish. You kept to yourself – who else would have you? You spoke to no one – who would want to listen?

What had the Mediterranean have to do with you? – that was your thought, wasn't it? What had it to do with you, the remorseless sky, the heat, the beaches, the sunbathers? And what were you to it in turn - the towns of white houses, the cafe bars, the tavernas? Where did the Venn diagrams intersect: the Venn diagram of the Mediterranean and the Venn diagram of Lars?

You slept rough, didn't you? You slept in a building site and then out in the open, on the rocks, the loop of your rucksack strap around your arm, for security. You slept on a beach, didn't you, and the sea came up? You thought: I'll sleep on this beach, how romantic, and then the sea came up and soaked your rucksack. The waves came in and you had to flee, didn't you, world traveller? Up they came, the waves, and off you went into town, towards God-knows-where in the darkness, because there you were lost, hopelessly lost on a Mediterranean island.

Why had you travelled to that island to the first place, anyway? Why did you book a ticket there, to island, among all the others? It was something about the Book of Revelations, wasn't it? It had been written there, hadn't it? Did you think some great vision was going to befall you? Did you think you'd see the end of the world? What did you see on the beach, as the waves came up? What, as you were driven into town, looking for somewhere sensible to stay?

How long did you last out there in the Mediterranean? How long, in your new life as a world traveller? A few days, that was it, wasn't it? A few days – a handful – instead of a lifetime. And there it was, green England, that you could see from your plane window. Green England – lush, verdant – and not the rocky Mediterranean. Had you had any visions?, W. says, rocking back and forth in laughter. Had you finished a new Book of Revelations? Had something of the apocalypse been revealed to you? Ah … it's his favourite story, W. says.