Category: W.

Sometimes W. says we don't know how to live. We know nothing about joy. But then, at others, he tells me that our joy is what I always forget when I write about us. It's what's always left out, he says, our joy.

Were ever two people so joyous? We laugh until we cry, laugh until beer runs from our nostrils. We become giddy and light with laughter; we stagger like drunkards.

It's worse when actually are drunk, W. says. Worse when we attain that mystical plane of drunken inanity, when Sal tells us she's sick of us, and goes to bed.

Are we joyful, then? Our joy is not real joy, W. says. Real joy, after the revolution, will have nothing of inanity, nothing of giddiness. Our joy is not yet joy, our laughter not real laughter, and the beer that runs from our nostrils is not the golden brew that will flow after the dissolution of capitalism …

We have a lot to take in. The Student Union bar, that's where we'll stay to muse on it all. In the bar, ordering a beer, then a whiskey, then a beer, then a whiskey, then chips, then a beer, then a whiskey, then another beer and another whiskey, then more chips, and so on …

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink when he was a student, when he started to drink W. says. This is where they drank, the philosophy postgraduates. This is where they spoke, and of great things! he still remembers their conversations, he says. They still reverberate in him. And he remembers their guest speakers, and in particular Castoriadis, who played the piano!

Cornelius Castoriadis … the very name makes W. tremble. He stayed up drinking with them all night, the postgraduates. And smoking! Castoriadis smoked like a chimney. And he played the piano, and sang! What a fine voice he had, Castoriadis! And how encouraging he was of others to join in! 

The European piano-player isn't a selfish piano player, W. says. He's at the heart of things, jollying things up, but it's never about him. And now he imagines Castoriadis at the heart of Socialism and Barbarism, jollying things up … Now he imagines a revolution with Castoriadis at its heart, jollying up the revolution.

'What do you think Badiou would make of your fluffy pencil?', W. says. Now is not the time for fluffy pencils!, he would say. The pencil of the revolutionary is simple, functional, and without fluff. The militant pencil has no pencil top. No long haired troll. And the militant owns no pencil case.

'And what would he make of your pink notebook?' The revolutionary notebook is black, small and functional, W. says. With plain pages. No – with quadrille pages. For the thinker-revolutionary must be like a geometer. There must be graphs, axes, lines to plot, marking revolutionary trends. The trend of rising proletarianism. The trend of commodification. The trend of the contradictions of capitalism. That's what we must plot.

Essex, almost at the very back of the auditorium. There at the front, far away, Badiou, white haired, jolly. So that's Badiou! Badiou, whose thought is the most exciting W. has encountered in twenty years … Badiou, last of the great French philosophers. And a mathematical philosopher, to boot!

Maths!, that's the new thing. English departments up and down the land will have to hold maths classes … Philosophy postgraduates will be studying set theory. Clarity!, that's the other new thing. Imprecision and unclarity – last year's thing. Vague deconstructive maunderings – out! Mathematical precision, axioms, and algebraic notation – in!

And militancy, that's the third in the troika! It's time to be militant again, or least to think about militancy, the possibility of militancy. It's time for the pathos of militancy, at the very least.

So what's Badiou talking about, there at the front of the auditorium? Something to do with maths. It's hard. Even W., who has long undergone a maths turn, is stumped. And something about love. Ah, love! So Badiou is a passionate philosopher! Passionate without equivocation, directly, simply – a lucid simplicity in which you can speak of great and simple passions!

We need to learn from this, W. writes in my notebook.

Essex, what a terrible campus! The towers are like the towers of Mordor, W. says. Like the crags of doom. In the tiny bathroom on our floor, the light flashes on and off. A fluorescent tube, humming and flashing on and off. I bring W. to show him. It's like something from David Lynch, we agree. It feels like a symbol, but of what? There'll be a murder here, later, we agree. Or a suicide. One or other of us will throw ourselves from the tower, from one of the crags of doom. Or perhaps we'll both hurl ourselves down to the concrete …

Moses and Abraham spoke with God as with a neighbour, face to face, or as the Bible says, mouth to mouth, W. says. They spoke using everyday speech, with an intimate simplicity that was lost to their successors. And their dialogues with God were written down and shared, and brought together a people who, though prone to apostasy and never yet a nation of prophets, were only at one remove from their Lord.

But everything changes with the later prophets. Is it that God can no longer get through, or no longer speaks clearly? Or does the fault lie with the listeners, who are no longer able to hear God's call? Either way, when God's voice does break through, it is presented (Isaiah) as 'so powerful that the very door posts move', or, with Amos 'a roaring like that of a lion', or with Jeremiah, 'his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones'.

And God makes a new demand: that the prophet emblematise the message they were charged to deliver. Thus, when God asks Isaiah to deliver the message, 'the soil speedeth, the prey hasteth', to the king of Israel, warning him not to enter into alliance with Assyria against common enemies, it is not enough for the prophet to write down his message and disseminate it. Isaiah fathers a child whom he names 'The Soil Speedeth, The Prey Hasteth' (just as he had fathered two children before with equally significant names: 'A Remnant will Return' and 'God is With Us').

Likewise, to send a message to the king of Assyria parade his prisoners naked and barefoot, to shame Egypt, God asks Isaiah to wander naked and barefoot for three years. And to send a message that Israel will not put its neck under the yoke of Babylon, he has Jeremiah 'make wooden yokes and put them on thy neck'; and when a false prophet breaks them, to replace them with yokes of iron …

What does this mean?, W. says. The old intimacy with God is lost. The dreams of the prophets, like their actions, call for the work of interpretation, the attempt to discern meaning in signs and allegories. A work that must also be applied to the lives of the prophets themselves, who have become living signs, witnesses to what it is not enough simply to proclaim.

And of what of his horror of the equivalent of contemporary apostasy, and the falling away from the Mosaic tradition?, W. wonders. What of his horror of climactic collapse and financial collapse, of the contemporary end of times? I am his sign, sent to him by God, W. has often been convinced of that. I am the horror he has to share with the world.

'O my father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt': thus Jesus in Gethsemane, as told by Matthew. Jesus who, for the first time, doubts his mission. Jesus who has become 'very sorrowful and very heavy'.

But God does not answer, as he did Moses. No angel appears, not in this gospel, when Jesus speaks to God.

And the second moment of doubt, on the cross: 'My God, My God why has thou forsaken me?' That in the ninth hour, just before death. He cries again, Jesus and, as Matthew says, 'gives up the ghost'.

Jesus becomes very real for him in these moments of doubt, W. says. Other than that … What does it mean to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God? What, to persuade others that you are the son of David and the son of God?

For the Jew, the messianic can have nothing to do with a particular person, W. says. The messianic is about time, he says. The messianic epoch: that's what he loses sight of with the figure of Jesus, W. With Christianity. A sense of a time, of the openness of time rather than what is taken to be its fulfilment.

And what is this openness but speech? What is it but the openness of dialogue, in which one places himself in service before the other?

The parables: those are the other moments when Jesus seems real to him, W. says, when he speaks in simplicity to simple people. When everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue with all comers, with anyone at all.

Just as he, W., speaks with great simplicity to me! Just as W. tries to explain things to a simple person like me! 

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. – 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call, W. has explained not once, but a thousand times. And Moses. Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, W. has mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, he's said. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

Hineni: but perhaps there is a way philosophy is indebted to God's call, and the Greeks to Israel. For isn't philosophy, too, a matter of responding to your neighbour, hineni? Mustn't philosophy return to that space of the encounter if it is to remember that event of dialogue with which language begins?

Here I am. So Abraham to God, W. has said. So Moses, and so Noah. When God speaks to the patriarch, there is nothing elevated about the language. God does not speak from on high; he does not issue orders like a tyrant. He exhorts, it is true. He pleads. He questions. But he does so as a neighbour, and as one who speaks using everyday speech.

But if it is everyday speech that God speaks, it is only so as to reveal the hineni that is at the root of all speech, that each partner in dialogue utters in turn. That each utters not by saying the words, here I am, but by the fact of utterance, by the capacity to speak. The capacity that is the ever-renewed beginning of language in speech, the language of God and man, and the language of men insofar as God speaks between men, and perhaps is none other than a name for this beginning.

Hineni, doing before understanding: of course this must be very easy for me, W. writes back in his email, who understands so little. What is he going to make me do, his ape, his shadow? – 'Dance for me, fat boy', he emails. And a bit later: 'are you dancing now?'

W. has fears that the more he teaches me, the more he guides my career – if it can be called a career – I risk losing precisely what drew W. to me in the first place. What drew him to me, fascinated, even as it also allotted W. – or so he believes – his great task. Yes, I risk losing the spectacular ignorance with which everything I say, or think, or read, or write, is suffused …

How can W. maintain it, how can be encourage it, foster it – the opposite of everything he tires to teach me, but simultaneously the reason why, in the first place, he took me on with the aim of teaching me? Thankfully, my spectacular ignorance keeps breaking through the crust of my new learning, the crust of my supposed intellectual aptitude. My spectacular ignorance – which is not just the opposite of knowledge, but the destruction of knowledge, its constant, laughing mockery. My spectacular ignorance, which is not just a matter of the head, but a matter of the entire body, a matter of the smallest gesture, a matter of the grotesque non-shoes I wear on my feet, a matter of my continual complaints of the stomach …

There's no question, for him, that I torture him by means of philosophy – by presenting myself, however parodically, however laughingly as a philosopher, I torture W., who would never simply present himself as a philosopher, for whom the expression, the philosopher, is an honorific - a title that could only be bestowed upon one who thoroughly deserves it like a crown of laurels, one who deserves to be carried upon all our shoulders – I torture W. by calling myself, in all my lightness, a failed philosopher, or even a would-be philosopher, for my qualification of my relationship with philosophy leaves, nonetheless, that relationship intact.

Philosophy will survive me, of course -but W., whose relationship to philosophy is much less secure, much more precarious, if indeed it is a relationship at all, if indeed W. is not completely deluded about the possibility of such a relationship, which may well be the case, which probably is the case – W. may not survive.

The Jewish walker (i.e., himself, W.) walks forward, W. says. A  trivial point, but one too often lost on the Hindu. The Hindu walks in circles, W. says. The Hindu only ever walks round and round!

The God of salvation revealed himself in the journey out of Egypt. He revealed himself, that is, in a political act – in a determined movement out, away. For the Hindu, by contrast, the walk is only cosmological. – 'You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!'

It's like the wheel of rebirth, W. says. It's like the turning of the Four Ages. History, for the Jew, has only one direction, even if, in the end, it points beyond history. Only one direction – and so, for the Jewish walker, we are always walking towards Canaan.

Smokehouse fish, gourmet sausages, handmade cheese from West Cork … The Irish are essentially artisans, W. says, as we wander the English Market. They're artisans at heart, and it is as artisans that they'll survive, long after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.

Ah, that's what we lack, he says, the capacity to do anything with our hands. But we could learn!

Perhaps we should move to Ireland to sit out the catastrophe. We could move hear and rear rare breeds of goat and sheep. W. imagines me milking furiously. This milk tastes strange, I tell him, wiping it from my mouth. - 'That's not milk, you idiot, it's sperm', W. says.

Cork, the English market. The floors are slippy, W. warns me, and they are: the tiled floor that runs alongside the fish country of O'Connells is completely wet. W. admires the fish piled on ice. -' There's turbot', he says, 'your favourite'. And there's lemon sole, his favourite. Doesn't he always leave me, when we eat together at Platters in Plymouth, with half his portion of lemon sole? Does he always push a couple of his fillets onto my plate? He likes to watch me eat, W. says. He likes to watch me stuff his face.

Cloudburst. Rain runs slantwise across the train windows as we rush through the stations of southwest without stopping. Trees in full leaf. Fields spreading. I think the countryside is very beautiful, very lush, but W.'s in no mood to appreciate it.

'Nature is a corpse', he says, and shows me the lines from Schelling he translated and copied out: 'A veil of sadness is spread over all nature, a deep unappeasable melancholy'. It's the mirror of our melancholy, according to Schelling, W. says. The darkest and deepest ground in human nature is melancholy, just as the darkest and deepest ground in nature is melancholy. Nature is a corpse just as we are corpses, W. says.

I excel at only three things, W. says: smut, chimp noises and made-up German.

Our aim must be to Judaise Kierkegaard, W. says in an email.

Is God testing him?, W. wonders. Am I his test, his desert? Ah, when will we come into the Canaan of my intelligence? When to the promised land of my idea?

Laughter in the summer air. My God, this world is mad, mad! Oh God, couldn't we laugh ourselves to death? If we started to laugh, really started, we wouldn't be able to stop, how could we? If we really laughed, really laughed, we could laugh forever, laughing at laughter, laughing at the whole dreadful imposture, at our dreadful imposture. They could cut off our heads, tear us apart, and we'd still be laughing, and laughing at ourselves laughing, as we were strewn along the river ….

One day, says W., shit opened its eyes. One day, to the surprise of everyone, shit got up and walked around. – 'You were born'. It was a miracle, W. says. Shit found a voice; shit spoke; shit wrote – how extraordinary! But it was still shit, says W. – 'You're still shit'. I haven't understood that, have I?

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar – a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

But what would I understand of any this?, W. wonders. What conception could I have of the ceremony of reading, of the rituals that must surround it?

He knows how I read, of course, W. says. There are books piled all over my office. Books leaning against other books. But it means nothing! You can have all the books in the world, but if you know nothing about reading, then …, W. says.

He's seen me at it, my reading, W. says. I open one page – another – and then what? I make a beginning, I open a book, and not always at the start, and what happens? I invariably open another, W. says. Another and then another.

Anything so as not to be alone with a book, W. says. Alone and undistracted, he says. Alone with a span of time opening ahead of me. Haven't I always feared empty time, W. muses, the time in which something might happen? And don't I, for that reason, fear – really fear – what might happen to me when I read?

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books – that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library. – 'It's always new for you, isn't it?' And this, W. supposes, is why I never really finish the books I read, but pile them up, one on top of another. I never finish them, says W., but I let them lean, one against the other, on my bookshelves.

They must be undergoing a crisis of some kind, they always are, we decide of those who come to join our table. – 'Never listen to us', W. says. 'We give bad advice, don't we?' Very bad, I agree. But still they listen. We must have the air of people in the know, I say to W. – 'We have the air of idiots', says W.

W. likes to ask questions of the people who join us, who are invariably tongue-tied and confused. – 'What's your favourite colour?', or 'Do you have any recurring dreams?' When all else fails, W. tells us about his. It encourages confidances, he says, and besides, it amuses me.

He's driving a car on an endless highway, W. says, which is funny, because he can't drive. And then what?, our guest will inevitably ask. That's it: the car, driving, and the highway. Well, here I am, driving again, that's what he says to himself, in his recurring dream. He's not sure what it means.

'We'll be in the bar', that's what we always tell them. 'That's where you can find us: the bar'. Constancy is always admired, we agree. People in crisis need to know where we are. We spend all day in the bar, which requires great stamina and pacing. We're calm drinkers, and full of amiability. There are only a few people we absolutely want to avoid.

'The point is not even to try to engage', we tell those who seek us out for advice. Or, 'Give up now: that's our advice'. Or, 'There's no hope for you, you have to know that'. Then we buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. Our table guests are invariably cheered. – 'See, it doesn't have to be so bad!' Hours pass in the bar. – 'The key is pacing', we tell them.

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. They must find us, deliberately seeking us out, since we who are the last people to whom anyone would want to speak. But we're friendly, if nothing else, and it amuses us when people throw themselves upon our mercy. – 'You must be really desperate. We're the last people you should talk to. It'll get you nowhere'.

What advice do we give? What do we tell them? You have to know you're a failure, we tell them. That's absolutely essential.

It's always worried him, W. says: is he one in the long line of nutters and weirdoes with whom I've been associated? He doesn't think of himself as a nutter or a weirdo, says W., but still.

If there's anything like a pattern in my life, in my associations it's exactly that, W. says: a great veering towards nutters, towards weirdoes. Which means he can only conclude that he too is a nutter or weirdo.

But how would he know? To what criteria could he appeal? And that's the horror, says W.: that friendship with me means losing all sense of what being a nutter or a weirdo might mean.

My stomach betrays me, that's how I put it, W. says, when in fact, my stomach, with its endless problems, its growling and grumbling, acts only in my interests. – 'It's trying to save you', W. says, 'Don't you understand?'

That's why I look so bilious and green. It's why we had to seek out an emergency scheisse bar in Freiburg, W. says. The emergency scheisse bar: isn't that what I have to search out in every city, almost as soon as I arrive?

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, the fact that there's a kind of internal limit to my idiocy.  

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.

There's something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he's not quite sure what it is. Shame – is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do. They would have known their inability to think and to write and given up.

Why don't we stop? There's a short story by Kafka, a fragment really,  W. says, that reminds him of our predicament. A man in a great hurry gets lots on the way to the station and asks a policeman the way. Gibt sie auf!, says the policeman, give it up! That's what we should do, says W. Give it up!

He would say I exhibited a philosophical masochism, if he did not know better, he'd say that all my studying – my supposed studying, my let's-pretend studying, was a way of punishing myself, of running myself up against my own limits – of destroying me, or that part of me which has the temerity to believe it can think – not once, but over and over again.

Yes, that's what he'd say – that I set myself, as a course of reading, books I could not possibly understand by authors whose depths I could not possibly fathom – that I set myself, as a course of thinking, the pondering of topics entirely beyond my powers – so far beyond them, indeed, that they mocked and laughed at my alleged powers – that they mocked and laughed at me – that I, studying, ostensibly studying, really mocked and laughed at myself.

But then he knows it's not for my benefit that I study, or pretend to study – or fail, in ostensibly studying to study, that I'm not thinking of myself at all, of punishing myself (as I should be punished), of mocking and laughing at myself (as I should be laughed at and mocked), but of punishing him, W., of mocking and laughing at him.

Philosophical sadism, that's what he calls it, W. Philosophical cruelty, aimed directly at W., directly at him, and solely to spite him.

In the end, W.'s sure, I bought my pink notebook just to irk him – just to get on his nerves, by adverting, by its pinkness, to the fact that I had a notebook, that there were notes to be taken, that I was to be taking notes, that I had the temerity to be taking notes, that I could present myself unashamedly as a note taker, and all this in front of W., for whom notetaking has always been a seriousness business. In front of him, who enters his thoughts on the thoughts of others at the front of his notebook in black ink, and enters his own thoughts at the back of his notebook in red ink, following the advice of our now-deceased friend, and in his memory.

Ah, our friend, who was cleverer than us, better than us, kinder than us, who had a more promising future than we had, who had things to say and write. Our friend, who advised us on the taking notes, advice W. took very seriously, indeed, to the extent that it guided henceforward all his notetaking, and even increased his desire to take notes. Advice, though, which I took up in my own way, smilingly, even humously – or so W. imagines it -taking notes only to spite and irritate W., who knows that my notes could only even be the parody of notes, and hence the desecration of the memory of our friend and his advice.

And it was a pink notebook – ostentatiously pink, flamboyantly pink, waving it in front of W., pink, waving it in front of him and thereby mocking him and compounding my mockery, which consists merely in taking notes – in the fact that I have the temerity to take notes at all. A pink notebook, with a pink ribbon as a bookmark, in which I write in with a violet pen and in violet ink, like a Japanese schoolgirl.