Category: W.

Don't write about them!, W. cries of Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil. Leave them alone!

He, when he writes of them leaves his thinkers intact in their greatness, their distance. They remain remote and brilliant in the sky of thought. But when I write of them? I make others doubt, W. says. I make others despair.

Are Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil really so worthwhile if he's writing on them?, they ask themselves, looking at me. Were we wrong all along if he thinks they're right?

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

My non-intelligence. My non-integrity. My non-belief. The non- in each case is not merely privative, W. says. Not merely a lack of intelligence, or a lack of integrity. My non-belief is a desecration of belief, he says, my non-integrity a desecration of integrity. My intelligence a desecration of everything intelligence means.

'How stupid you are!', W. says. 'How measurelessly, infinitely stupid. How corrupt!' W. shakes his head. My non-belief is far beyond his. It's fallen into itself, collapsed, like a black hole. And it threatens to draw everything along with it. My non-integrity threatens to draw his into its abyss; my non-intelligence is the black sun around which W.'s revolves in a decaying orbit.

And if there are those we admire for their intelligence, integrity and belief, it is with the risk that they, too, despite their same intelligence, integrity and belief, will be dragged across the event-horizon of my non-intelligence, non-integrity and non-belief. Must he really fear for the oeuvres of Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Weil? Must he really fear for their reputation as I, like an idiot, begin to write on them?

'The glamour of thinkers, of thinker's lives, that's what attracts you, isn't it?', W. says. The glamour and distance of the lives of Kierkegaard, of Weil, or Rosenzweig, of their lives as thinkers: I have a sense of that, a real sense, and it humbles me. How could it not?

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

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

Rosenzweig, Weil, Kierkegaard … what can they possibly mean to me?, W wonders. An answer comes to him as he watches me reading Hello!

'That look on your face … That raptness …': he recognises it, W. says. He's seen it before, when, in the early hours, we pore in wonder over the pages of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard. – 'How is it possible that a human being could have such thoughts?' one of us will exclaim. How is it possible …?: but that's my only response to these thinkers, just as it is to the red carpet celebrity.

In the end, it's a sense of distance I admire, in the case of intellectual brilliance and my stupidity on the one hand, and airbrushed beauty and my unairbrushed grotesquerie on the other.

I eschew OK, National Enquirer and other celebrity magazines just as I eschew lesser thinkers. But I revere Queen Rania of Jordan in her photospread in Hello! just as I do W.'s collection of German edition Hermann Cohens.

My obsession with the Queen. My admiration for her outfits, almost always exactly the same, but in different colours, as though she had been dipped in a different tub of paint each time. My stories of having met her hatmaker, and of spending an afternoon with a lady in waiting.

She's a very down to earth woman, I've told him. She eats her breakfast from tupperware boxes, her corgis round her ankles, I've told him.

But I feel some leftist unease with respect to the Queen, he knows that. I know I shouldn't approve of the monarchy, or follow its activities in Hello!

My favourite quandary, which I mull over in airport check-in queues, or on platforms waiting for delayed trains: Would I accept an invitation to a royal garden party? Would I RSVP positively to an invitation signed in the Queen's hand? Of course I would, I murmur on some occasions. Of course I wouldn't, on others.

My obsession with celebrities, with minor royalty. My obsession with Hello! Why do I always bring it with me on our train journeys? Why do I insist on leaving it in his study when I come to stay?

'Who are all these people?', he wants to ask me, when he sees me reading. 'Why do they matter to you?' Because they do matter to me, that much is clear. The way I read. The way I nod my head over its glossy pages, like a Jew over the Talmud. He sees, as never before, a look of absolute seriousness on my face. He sees it there: an intensity of focus only the Husserl archives would warrant.

What are you looking for?, W. says, as I turn the pages. What, in Oscar dresses and airbrushed actresses? What, in the photospreads of Queen Rania of Jordan?

My obsession with domestic accidents, with injuries caused in the home. That's what I search for on the internet in dead hours, isn't it? For photographs of head injuries caused by falls on linoleum. For accounts of paralyses brought about by trips and stumbles. For medical descriptions of electrocutions and hanging accidents; for pictures of burns and bruisings … For domestic accidents and, indeed, all kinds of accidents.

Is it to remind myself of my own fragility, my own clumsinesses? Is it from concern for the poor victims, the maimed, the injured? Or is it, as W. expects, some kind of grotesque schadenfreude, a kind of revelling that I continue to survive, despite everything?

Bishop Berkeley gave up philosophy to lecture on the healing properties of tar water, W. says. He gave it all up – he'd written his masterpieces by the age of 23, but he still had a long life to live, which he then spent advocating, in lectures and pamphlets, the entirely false thesis that tar water was the cure for all ills.

For a time, he listened to my caffeine theories, W. says. He took them seriously. Caffeine is the drug of capitalism, I'd said, and he avoided espressos. Caffeine is an iron collar, I'd said, and he gave up tea. But he likes coffee!, W. says. And he likes tea! And they have no adverse effect upon him whatsoever!

What I refuse to understand are the ceremonies of tea making and coffee making, W. says. Of the ritual of the cup of tea in the morning that follows his hours of solitary study. Doesn't he bring a cup of tea to my room every time I stay? Doesn't he bring it up both flights of stairs, knocking on the door of his study which I defile by sleeping there? And doesn't he make us both an espresso to have with the breakfast he so carefully prepares for me?

Of course, all that caffeine only makes me talk more excitedly of our need to give up caffeine, of caffeine as the drug and iron collar of capitalism. How many times has he heard me, over coffee, arguing that coffee must be banned immediately?

W. would be impressed by my studies in the Bible – you say studies in the Bible, not of the Bible, W. says – if I wasn't so drawn to the apocrypha. And not just the official apocrypha, but the apocryphal apocrypha.

I have a taste for the spurious, W. says, for dubious angelology and extravagant miracles. I like the Gnostic gospels where Jesus kills dragons with death-rays from his eyes. I like the vignettes of the beasts of the desert kneeling to the divine child, and of the palm-trees bowing down so the holy family can pick their fruit.

And haven't I spoken to him of hoping to find a caped Jesus, a flying Jesus, a kind of gospel of the superman? I must take my Biblical studies more seriously, W. says.

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

Open the window!, says W. He's going to jump out. But we're only one flight up.

What is it that keeps me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. What is it that keeps him from doing the same?

We want to see how it all ends, W. says. We want to see how it will all turn out. But this is how it ends. This is how it will all turn out.

Our excuse: the thought that we were amusing each other, if no one else, W. says. But now that we no longer do that?

Something in us doesn't know we've died, W. says. Something in us hasn't finished dying.

Who's going to finish us off? Who, for whom we are but insects racing around when a rock is lifted? Someone needs amusing, so they're letting us survive, W. says. The gods are as masochistic as we are, and want us endlessly to enact their self-destruction.

The end has already come, we know that. The end has come and gone, the credits have rolled and GAME OVER is written in the sky.

We're dead, we're all dead, but this is no afterlife. Life – what did we know of that? Living – we never lived.

And now, wandering along the street, with me whistling beside him?

To work, really work, we must drink, W. says. We need to discover a new discipline of drinking, to drink until our teeth are stained red from wine.

That's how he sees our task this summer, W. says. We need to think, which means we need to drink our way to dereliction.

Kierkegaard knew us too well, we agree, reading his passages on religious enthusiasm, on drunken religiosity and religious phantasmagoria. How could the Dane have foreseen the apes poring over his collected works? But foresee us he did, dream of us he did, and try to warn others about us - that, too, he did.

A terrible dream: I'm leading W. up one of the hills on the Town Moor, grim faced and silent. I'm much larger than usual, a giant toad, a giant flea with great thick thighs. And W. is much smaller, a wren, a midge. And I'm silent: I'm not saying a word. I'm dragging him up the hill without offering a word of expectation.

Tell me, tell me where we're going!, W. cries. But I tell him nothing. On the hill summit, late evening, W. is prone, and I have a knife to his throat. I'm silent. I'm about to cut … Does a voice from the sky cry out, telling me to stop? Does God intervene, tell me to sacrifice something else in W.'s place? No.

Night finds W.'s body on the hill, speaking his last words in bubbles of blood.

The nosebleed: that's what sums me up, W. says. It's the truest image of me: a man with a nosebleed, and the blood dribbling onto his chest.

W. sends me a quotation: 'I've got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't believe in movies anymore'. That was from Pauline Kael's review of Godard's Sauve qui peut, he says.

Does W. believe in philosophy, he wonders? Does he believe in God? He wants to write on God regardless. He wants to write a philosophy of God because he believes in neither God nor philosophy.

W.'s dream for his conference is to gather our friends around us. To gather our friends and the friends of our friends. And to speak. To listen to one another, and to speak.

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out.

That's Debord, W. says. Everything we would ever love was there: what could be more moving than that?

We must work until we bleed, W. says. Write until our eyes turn red, and blood runs from our nostrils. Because that's what's going to happen to us when we reach our idea: blood will flow from our noses. Drops of blood, splashing onto the pages on which we are writing … 

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Nietzsche wrote that. With blood, but not our blood. We'll write with God's blood, says W., mystically. It will be the blood of God that falls from our nostrils.

Perhaps it is really a kind of Sabbath for which we are looking. A time to close our eyes, but not only to rest, to recuperate. We need to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within. And we need to let ourselves be touched by a greater work, by a divine labour. Isn't it only then that we'll truly begin to work, as though drawn by a current into the centre of the channel?  

Momentum: to be thrown by thought, loosed, like a stone from thought's sling … And work, now, will not be mundane, but celestial. We will work as the stars work, as the planets turn in their orbits. Our work will as be one with the slow turning of galaxies, and the steady expansion of the universe out into the infinite … A work indistinguishable from inactivity, from the resting of a God.

W.'s been reading a life of Simone Weil with great envy, he says, sending me this passage:

… Weil's handwriting flowed with an almost supernatural steadiness, rapidity, and assurance in this period: page after page streaming out virtually without hesitations or corrections. She often worked around the clock, staying through the night in the office on Hill Street or walking home after the last underground train and continuing to work in her apartment for several more hours, all the while coughing steadily and violently[….] The physical collapse that occurred on April 15, 1943, was surprisingly only in having been so long in coming. Weil had written herself to the brink of death.

When will we discover the rhythm that will let us, too, work like maniacs? When that steady pressure that will make every day a work day, every day launched with a forward push from the day before …

It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.

We should insert this passage from Debord's Critique of Separation into every one of our presentations, W. says.

'Irony has two stages', says Pessoa's heteronym, Bernardo Soares, 'the one exemplified by Socrates when he says, "I only know that I know nothing", and the other exemplified by Sanchez when he says, "I do not even know that I know nothing"'.

That's our condition, W. says. We have no idea what we know or do not know. Or even that we do know or do not know: we have no idea of that, either. Do we know anything at all? Have we any idea of anything?

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.

Dereliction, says W., finally. Dereliction, I agree.

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. 

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!

And now W. remembers what a theologian once wrote: Theologians are people whose minds have been hurt by God. Hurt by God, and they are searching for what? We miss God, said the theologian, because God is revealed in the world, only because God is so devastatingly near. It is in the company of an intimate friend that one experiences the true depths of loneliness. God is near, and so we are lonely for God.

I remind W. of what Benjamin wrote in his essay on Brecht: Friendship does not abolish the distance between human beings but brings that distance to life …