Category: W.

There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part I believe that I would gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards …

Walter Benjamin. W. is reading my notebook and examining my collection of picture postcards. The Pilgrim's Mayflower Steps & Monument, Plymouth, he reads. A black and white photo of the old harbour, old fashioned streetlamps and cranes behind. – 'When's that from?', he asks, but the postcard is undated.

Then a picture of the Promenade from 1930, this one sepia coloured, apparently taken from the old Grand Hotel on the Hoe, and looking along the coast to the Barbican. Then a coloured drawing, picturing the Hoe from the other direction, with Smeaton Tower on the left and the war memorial farther off on the right, and Mount Edgcumbe visible beyond.

Then a fine picture of the lido on Tinside, bathers gathered on the steps, and the Citadel visible towards the top right of the picture. – 'There's writing on this one'. W. reads it out. 'Just to let you know we are having a lovely time. The rain here makes us feel tired and sleepy, am going to bed now. Look after yourselves …' 

And finally, a simple sepia view of children playing in front of Smeaton Tower: one toddler pushes another in an old-fashioned pushchair; a boy in a sailor suit sitting beside a spread picnic blanket looks into the camera. Where have all the adults gone?, we wonder. A girl in the distance, hands on hips, caught mid dance. She's strutting, we agree. W. is a tremendous strutter, and sometimes, when I beg him, he struts up and down the corridor like Mick Jagger on stage.

Benjamin was a great writer of postcards, I tell W. He always requested them back from his correspondents as a record of his travels, and even planned an essay on the aesthetics of the postcard, which he sketched, appropriately enough, on the back of a postcard to a friend:

If you pursued further the skewed bits of the petty-bourgeois stage of dreams and desires, then I think you will come across wonderful discoveries and perhaps we will meet each other at a point which I have been gauging with all my energy for a year without being able to hit it in the centre: the picture postcard.

Benjamin made his friends promise to return his letters, too, so he could use them as the basis of a diary. 'There are few more difficult tasks for a writer than a diary …'

Do I think he should keep a record of my emails to him?, W. asks. And what about our Microsoft Messenger conversations, our masterpieces? He'll write me a postcard, W. says, picking up the last one and writing Lars is a twat on its back. What will posterity make of that?

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too will it sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

That's from Benjamin, W. says. – 'Everything there will be just as it is here: Does that mean you'll still have a tiny cock? Ah, not even the world to come will make you well-endowed'.

A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything.

That's Bloch, W. says, reading from his notebook. He picks up a box of green tea and throws it at me. – 'Do you think that's enough to bring the reign of peace?'

'Everything lies in the hands of God except the fear of God': that's what it says in the Talmud, W. says. – 'But when you have no fear of God? When the word God, to you, means nothing at all, which it doesn't?' What is he going to do with me?, W. wonders. How is he going to teach me the meaning of sin? For you have to have some sense of shame in order to understand sin. And when shame is entirely lacking …

At least Moses had his Levites, his faithful! At least he had a vanguard who understood the real meaning of Canaan! The Hebrews, full of resolve at first, fell to whining about their hunger and the desert heat. They fell to building idols and to defying the covenant each had made with God. Only the faithful understood. Only they knew their aim was to become a holy nation, a kingdom of priests …

Each was to be a prophet. Each the outcome of a prophecy. For the promised land is the messianic age, where each, in his own way, has become the Messiah. The vanguard dissolve into the people; and there will be no leaders and no followers. Each will live in accordance to the Law. Each will wholeheartedly obey the Law.

And in that way, Canaan was no longer to be understood as a place, no longer as a bounded territory. We will reach the promised land only when we live fully under the law, only when we accept ourselves as sinners. And while we have not? Even the lushest countryside is a desert. Even the countryside of Devon beside us, lush and green, is but an infinite expanse of sand.

Of course, the Hebrew's commitment to God was greatest at the beginning of the march, when they'd just set out. They were leaving Egypt, leaving their captivity: that was the excitement. Who could be more willing? Who ready to sacrifice more?

Some commentators have claimed that, in coming together on the march, the once scattered tribes was already the prophesised  'kingdom of priests', long before they had arrived at the promised land. The holy nation, according to some commentators, was a people on the move, defiant and uncomplaining.

When did they begin, the murmurings of discontent? When, the frustrations about blisters and the desert heat? When the dispiritedness, when the demand for sustenance? The Pharoah at least fed his slaves! He at least gave them some modicum of shelter!

Ah, but what they didn't understand was that the desert was a test; the people had been delivered from this suffering only to undergo suffering. Thus began the pedagogy of the desert, thus the attempt to purge themselves from the humiliations of their servitude.

For not the least of those humiliations was the desire to return to Egypt. To turn back, relinquishing the dream of a promised land: that was the temptation for a people yet to free themselves from a kind of inner slavishness. Was that why they built themselves a golden calf? Was it in imitation of the idols of Egypt, before which they prostrated themselves?

The people preferred the old gods, the old certainties. But there was a new world to be won! So the meek Moses became a slayer of men. So he punished the people, as W. sometimes has to punish me. It is sometimes necessary to sit on the Chair of Judgement. It's for my own good!

But then, too, sometimes W. is guilty of backsliding. Sometimes he years after the high table, after fellowship with his former allies. The old Gods: the fellowship of professors, the esteem of his peers. Must he leave them behind? Of course he must: he sees that, W. says, in his lucid moments. That's been my lesson to me. I, in my own way, have been his liberator.

But he, in turn, must be mine. Are we there yet?, I keep asking him, pulling at his tunic. And where's that milk and honey he was telling me about? But he faces forward, marching ahead of me. He faces forward, wondering how to teach me about the Law.

How many covenants were made at Sinai?, W. wonders. Just one, you might have thought – the one which bound the association of tribes in captivity into a nation.

Rabbis have always debated this question. One said 603,550 covenants were made, one for each adult male who pledged himself in service. But another said these covenants were made 603,550 times, each man pledging himself to another. For it was not enough for each to act justly; the people as a whole must be just: one must obey the law and see it obeyed. Each man, then, is equal before God (the rabbis do not tell us about women). Each is bound freely, responsibly accepting his responsibility in the eyes of his neighbour. And more: each was responsible for his neighbour. The one bore the other. And it was only thus that God promised not only a land overflowing with milk and honey, but that his people, God's people 'shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation'.

A kingdom of priests: that's what W. dreams of becoming. A holy nation. But we're not much of a nation, the two of us. Not much of a kingdom! If only we could find others to walk with us! If only there were others who would walk with us to the promised land! But our friends are scattered, and at war with one another. God knows, they have their own problems.

And us? We who walk with the sea on our left and the Devon countryside on the right? I am responsible for him, W. says. But what is much worse is that he is responsible for me, for all the sins I have committed.

Only the young can reach Canaan, by which was probably meant the innocent, the free-born. Only the young might become the holy nation, the kingdom of priests … And that means that I am the obstacle to W.'s crossing into the promised land. I am the uncrossable desert across which he has been doomed to wonder.

The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world.

That's Marx, writing in the aftermath of 1848, W. says. Have we gone under?, W. wonders. Are we going under now? We're on a walk, the sea to the left of us, our shadows on the right. We're walking, exulting in the ozone released from the foaming waters.

Only the young arrived in Canaan, we reflect. Moses himself died without entering it. And he bade the Hebrews to wander for 40 years in the desert, lest they bring Egypt, the memory of their captivity, with them into the promised land. 

For the escape from Egypt did not happen once and for all. The Pharoah's horses and chariots were drowned, it is true, but there is a Pharoah of the mind, too; and there are horses and chariots of the mind. We are all in bondage, W. says. We have no idea what freedom might mean. No idea of liberation.

Where is our leader?, he wonders. Where the Lenin to organise and discipline us? We need to be purged! Put up against the wall as counterrevolutionaries! Only then, without us, might liberation begin. Only then might we overcome our bondage.

Did the Hebrew people ever reach Canaan?, W. wonders. Oh, they reached it, alright, if that means merely crossing a line, crossing the Jordan. They arrived there after forty years of struggle.

Moses decided to remain in the desert until those born in the Egyptian captivity died. Only the young were to arrive in Canaan. Only those who no longer knew the bondage of their people at first hand.

Maimonides: 'It is not in the nature of man that, after having been brought up in slavish service he should of a sudden wash off from his hands the dirt of slavery'.

We're slaves, slaves, W. says. Look at us, my God. We'll do anything they tell us! Anything! – 'Especially you', he says. 'My God, you're the worse, dancing in your chains'. How far will we have to walk to wash slavery from our hands?  

The walker, the real walker, can have no destination, W. says. He walks is a means without end. A pure means, uncoupled from the purpose that might channel the walker. In this way, the street is as open as the desert. As open as an ocean – a pure expanse. You can wander this way, or that. Make this turn, or that. Freedom – for you are without the aim that would determine your course.

Of course, the walker must also be a great student, a great learner, W. says. There is a pedagogy of the streets. Other walkers have been there before you – you need to learn about them. Marchers, demonstrators – about them, too. And about history – the great sweep of history, even if, in the end, history is the burden from which the walker longs to escape.

We must walk, W. says, we have to walk. We have to continue to walk, and in so doing, to continue the walk of others before us. Mandelstam writing his poems on the hoof, Kierkegaard his philosophy. Benjamin's flaneur straying in Paris. Ghandi heading to make salt on the beachhead of Dandi …

To walk to leave the house of bondage behind, as Moses left Egypt. The walker is always heading towards Canaan, W. says. It's always a question of going out, away, towards the promised land. But, in truth, there is no such land – or that land is only another place to wander, another version of the desert.

I've lost my ability to wander, W. says. But did I ever have it? Did W. only imagine my ability to promenade? Of course, he is a man of the promenade, W. says. He walks slowly, his torso held erect, looking about him. He's interested in the world, not like me, who am always bent over, always looking at the space on the pavement immediately in front of my feet.

He's open to surprises. – 'But you're open to nothing!' When the chuggers approach him on the street for a donation, W. thanks them and politely declines. When marketers ask him to contribute to a survey, he looks them in the face before he says, no thanks, thank you anyway. But I look down, W. says. I glower, and when a stranger approaches me, I hold up my palm to say: stop!

'And you walk so quickly!' What am I trying to escape?, W. wonders. – 'Yourself? Well, in that case, you're doomed'. Once, he and Sal saw me from afar, a pedestrian among other pedestrians. They saw me as a stranger might see me: a derelict walking at a furious rate, head down, glowering. What was wrong with him?, they wondered. What's his problem? And then they saw it was me, and they know all about my problems.

'What does God want?', Kierkegaard writes in his journals, 'He wants souls able to praise, adore, worship, and thank him – the business of angels. And what pleases him even more than the praise of angels is a human being who, in the last lap of this life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty, nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that God does it out of love'. 

That God does it out of love: what can that mean to us? But we're not on the last lap of our lives, not yet. Then will it become clear one day? Will it all be revealed to us?

If he's cruel to me, it's out of love, W. says. It is meant as the highest kindness, when he sits on the Chair of Judgement, listing the many compromises of my life, my betrayals and half-measures. Who else would have taken notice? Who else would have thought to teach me the meaning of sin?

Ah, would that he had a similar tutor! If only someone had the same interest in him! But perhaps my ingratitude is only a version of God's cruelty. Perhaps my moaning in protest, as he sits above me on the Chair of Judgement, is a way for God to test the extremity of W.'s love.

Is there hope for us, any hope?, W. wonders. We're hungover. The light hurts our eyes. Perhaps in our own way, we have prayed, W. says, as we reach the Hoe. Perhaps that's how we'll be judged: as idiots, it is true, but as prayerful idiots. We had a sense of what was good, a sense of what was right. And a sense of God, too – perhaps we even had that.

But there is something, too, that we lacked. For did we ever suffer enough? Were we not always too blithe, too light-spirited? 'The destiny of this life is that it be brought to the extremity of life weariness', Kierkegaard wrote in his journals. The extremity of life weariness: how hungover would we have to be to feel that? How much would we have had to drink? 

It is a time to make distinctions, fine distinctions, says W. of our collaborative paper on Kierkegaard. We should write in a series of numbered points! We should incorporate equations, if we could! And diagrams! It is a time for graphs, W. says. For geometry.

Our inclination has always been towards the vague, the amorphous, W. grants. We lose ourselves in grand vistas, in the account of the huge disasters to come, for example. In our would-be prophetism. In our wholly spurious sense of the infinite.

Wasn't it Kierkegaard above all who warned of the despair of the infinite, of leaving the finite behind? Wasn't it Kierkegaard who warned of the dangers of the imagination unlimited by anything concrete? The fantastic, the unlimited: that's what Kierkegaard warned against. And we have to heed his warning!

But then, too, Kierkegaard warns us of the opposite kind of despair: of finitude's despair, which never dreams, never roves far from what it takes to be the self. But the self of finitude is a paltry, secular thing. For it is only from the infinite that the religious comes, Kierkegaard says.

Religion needs imagination! It needs the abstract even as it needs the real; it needs the concrete. Our task- the great task of the self in willing to be itself - must be to hold them in tension. It is to affirm the infinite and the finite, not one at the expense of the other.

It is the same, for Kierkegaard, with dipolar relationship between possibility and necessity. Possibility's despair is, he says, a lack of necessity – a sighing after mirages that take no account of the limits of individual existence. Necessity's despair is the loss of possibility, and with it, the meaning of faith, of freedom.

For necessity is only a kind of fatalism, a determinism, and hence a denial of God as the ground the self. There remains only the calculus of probability – of the chance of this happening, or that. Possibility, thereby, is withered, etiolated.

The self of necessity, then, is secular, bourgeois, the philistine who knows that this world is all there is. What sense does he have that 'with God everything is possible'? How can he pray, when prayer depends on that same 'with God, everything is possible'?

With God …: a beautiful sentiment, W. and I agree. Prayer: a beautiful idea. And to think we know something of it in our vagueness and grand vistas … To think that's what we've been doing all along, trying to pray …

And now W. is dreaming of prayer-graphs and Godly equations. He's dreaming of a celestial rigour, of the sharpness of fine distinctions aquiver with the divine.

'He lives the life of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely …' This could be a description of me, W. says, were it not for the word 'intellectual'. In fact, it is a report about Marx from a Prussian police spy. But then I'm not much of a bohemian either, W. says. At least there's some grandeur to the Bohemian's dissipation.

'Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do'. A great deal of work – if only we had that, W. says. If only the sense of something urgent to communicate, something on which would steer us through the days and nights!

'He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world'. W. lies on the sofa at midday, he says, but then he hasn't worked through the night with tireless endurance. Oh, what it would be to lie down, sleep as untroubledly as a child, knowing that one had done some real work!

We await our Marx, we agree. We await a bearded thinker, a serious thinker to diagnose the crisis of our time, who, even now, is probably locked in the British library or some other library, reading, writing. To diagnose it, and to lead us out of it, a new Moses! To give us a new word in place of communism for the hopes of the left! A new word, for a new left, and for a new world for the left, after the last revolution!

To him, our Marx, we will be the rubbish to be cleared. We won't deserve to be called allies. Foolishness!, Stupidity! That's what our Marx will write in the margins of our work. Total idiocy!

Oh, how joyfully we will read his polemics against us and others like us! We'll be happy when his cannonballs shatter our philosophical windows, and when our names are only known as among the obscurest of the opponents he railed against in one of his jeremiads.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', wrote the old Marx. Our self-styled friends: the phrase makes us tremble with passion. So the new Marx will find us out. We'll be judged! Found wanting! 

'A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little manikin' … that's what the old Marx called Rudolf Schramm. 'Ferret face': that's what he called Arnold Ruge. – 'And you, what will our new Marx call you?', W. wonders. 'A toad. A squat man. A man with a micropenis! A nanopenis! A man with a quantum penis!'

W. finds this very funny. Of course, our new Marx won't spare him, either. He'll dismiss W. in a phrase! In a word! A deviationist, he'll write. A dullard. Yes, that's how W. will be known to post-revolutionary history.

He wants to blame someone else! W. wants to blame someone else for his despair. Me, in actual fact. It's all my fault, he wants to say. But what if it is not? What if the fault lay elsewhere, and even within W. himself?

He shudders. The ground beneath him seems to plunge. After everything, his studies, his researchers, he really being sent back to himself? He thought he could blame me, he says. Thought that I was the single source of his problems, oh not me as an individual so much as what I embodied and exemplified: an era of cynicism and opportunism, an epoch with neither breadth nor depth, an age of information in which no one knows anything.

But he thought, too, that he might show me the way, that, clutching me to his breast as he soared into the skies of philosophical speculation, that I, too, might be changed. Hope, that's how he saw it: that I, his charge, his ward, might be redeemed as our time might be redeemed. Promise, that's how he thought of it. Our friendship – always asymmetrical, always dependent on one knowing so much more than the other – was also a hope for our time.

And if he felt despair in company, as he so often has, it was only a modification of hope; it still referred to the open sky in which we would soar. And now? If it is all W.'s fault, and not mine, then what are we to do?

Kierkegaard writes about despair because he wants to cure it, W. says, reading from his notes. He wants to cure us of that sickness unto death which, for him, is really a kind of sickness of oneself, of being oneself.

For the most part, Kierkegaard argues, we refuse to confront the real object of despair; we confuse it with our failure to achieve particular markers of success, to attain this job, say, or to begin this romantic relationship. This ignorance not only masks the real causes of despair, but even that despair itself. For one's failure seems only accidental, and one can still dream of achieving the marker in question, upon which our hope would hang.

In the meantime, the loss of the job in question, or the prospect of that romantic relationship is also a loss of self. You might wish to be another self altogether: one with more talent, perhaps, more physical beauty. If only I were cleverer, more handsome … But you are still yourself, and that appears to be the tragedy. Still yourself: but the goal is to despair over oneself. To despair, without dreaming of being someone else, being better in some particular degree.

Despair, now, becomes conscious. I am aware of that I am both the subject and the object of my despair. Aware that it came from me, and concerns me and that, somehow, my existence in its entirety is a problem for me. To where can I turn? Upon what can I rely when I become conscious of the real source of my despair? This is the question that terrifies W. For hadn't he always blamed me for his despair? Hadn't he always assumed it was all my fault? If only I could be rid of him, that idiot … If only I could ditch him somewhere …

Left wing melancholy. Left wing despair. How is Kierkegaard going to help us with that?, W. wonders. Can he help us with that? He reads out his notes.  

Despair comes not from without, but from within, Kierkegaard says. I inflict it on myself. Although despair seems to be about something external to me, it is really over oneself. By the same token, though, I am free not to despair. I am free to hope. But this requires, first of all, that I become aware of my despair. Only then might I understand that the real sickness unto death is the desire to be rid of myself when I cannot be rid of myself.

And to be rid of the world?, W. asks. To be rid of it, the whole of our crisis-ridden world?

Kierkegaard wants us to remain ourselves, only deepening our self-relation. He wants us to choose that inwardness in which I might discover real religious commitment. He wants us to find ourselves, which means not merely to know oneself, as Socrates recommended. 'Know yourself', he wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'.

The mirror of the Word. It is only when when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered and died for the sake of the sinner, that despair becomes hope. Only then that I might will to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and our redeemer.

Ah, this is leading us nowhere, W. says. He's too Jewish for Kierkegaard! To identify the Messiah with a person, with Jesus, isn't that the mistake? Messianism is primarily about time, W. says, that's what Kierkegaard seems to miss.

W. thinks of Job on his ash pile. Job, afflicted with boils, his possessions destroyed, his offspring killed, who sat scraping his skin with broken pottery. Job, who, when his wife told him to curse God, reproached her: 'shall we receive good from God and shall not receive evil?'

Never did he question divine providence. Never, even though he cursed the day he was born.

And of what of him, W.? Many times he's thought to curse my presence in my life. Many times to shake his fist at the sky, to cry, why me God?, why me? But no answer comes. No whirlwind.

Is he still being tested? Am I his trial, his burden? Elihu counsels Job that he should expect no explanation for his travails from God. God is not to be questioned. Then is it only when W. stops shaking his fist at the sky, when he stops cursing, that the whirlwind might speak?

I am his Abraham or his Isaac?, W.'s never been sure. Will I take him to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah, or is that his role? God's told him nothing, W. says. He's listened in vain for the command to lead me to the mountain.

But what has God told me? If I know anything, I'm keeping stum. In fact, I've been especially quiet lately, and W.'s caught me looking off into the distance, as if looking out for a local equivalent of the Biblical mountain.

But perhaps the sacrifice has already occurred. Did God stay my hand when I ruined W.'s reputation by my buffoonery? Did he tell me to sacrifice something else in W.'s place when I publically humiliated him? He's an Isaac whom God did not deign to save, W. says.

Kierkegaard warns that the despairer might not embrace the eternal, W. says. That he will not, despairing over himself in his weakness, as one incapable of such an embrace.

And he warns of another temptation: that such despair leads not to an excessive weakness, but an excessive strength – to that prideful refusal of the embrace, to the rejection of any sense of his own perfection, such that he might turn himself over to the perfection of God.

And a third temptation, which is really an exacerbation of the second: that the despairer wills to be what he is in his imperfection, that demonically, pridefully, he rises up to spite his creator. But what would I know of these, the final temptations? What, when hope was still alive in me?

W. despairs, he says. He despairs of me, for one thing. He despairs of my presence in his life. And he despairs of himself, whose fate is linked to mine. But quite apart from that, he despairs of the earthly, and especially me, who am an embodiment of the earthly, of the limits of the earthly! Of W.'s limits with respect to the earthly!

W. has, he thinks, a sense of the eternal, although Kierkegaard warns you can go wrong there, too – there is a form of despair, he says, in which the imagination runs wild; in which, no longer limited by anything concrete, it resorts to conjuring up dreams and fantasies.  

Is that the eternal, for him, simply a dream and fantasy? Is his notion of God – of unconfinement, of freedom – only the correlate of confinement and imprisonment? But then his notion of God is only the hopeless dream of his salvation from me, who am the real cause of W.'s despair.

The Eternal … what idea do I have of that?, W. says. Of the Power which created me, and before which I am always in the wrong? None at all!, W. says.

It's lucky that W. has some sense of despair, he says. Lucky that he is around to educate me, and show me me that the despair of the earthly is the way to salvation. Salvation will come, W. says, but first of all, I will have to choose despair. 

You have to have a sense of defeat, total defeat, W. says. The earthly itself must appear a wall, a blank wall, upon which you can make no purchase. But it must be a wall against which you are willing to run, again and again. A wall against which you must bash your head like a madman. Bashing it so that it – or you – might be destroyed.

In the case of the world versus you, back the world, Kafka said. But there is another option, W. says. You must realise that there's more than the world. That's the point I need to reach, the uttermost reach of despair. Then and only then might you know that the eternal is backing you.

If he knows about despair, W. says, it is because I have taught him it. Oh, not because of what I know, of what I told him. It's clear that I don't know despair, for all that I talk about it, for all I recommend he reads The Sickness Unto Death. No, it's only in relation to me – to the travesty of my existence on earth – that he can conceive of what the despair of the earthly might mean. It's only my presence – the travesty of my presence – that brought him to the uttermost.

Ah, it takes a long time for hope to disappear, W. says. Takes time for it to be entirely worn away. Didn't I have hopes of becoming a world-traveller? They were soon dashed. And didn't I have hopes – anti-hopes – of addicting myself to some substance so as to give my life meaning? I failed at that, too, didn't I? Something in me wanted to live. Something that didn't want to disappear into the squats in Old Hulme.

'You were a survivor, despite yourself'. It was like Eye of the Tiger, W. says. It was like Rocky IV, when he runs up those steps in the sun. – 'You wanted to live!' I wanted to live. So what then? What as I ran up the steps towards the sun? It was Kierkegaard who saved me, W. has no question about that. He finds it moving, even. An ape-man reading Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, in his room in his squat on the top floor of an Old Hulme low-rise. A young ape …

But if Kierkegaard saved me, it also prevented me from pursuing my despair to the end. If it gave me hope, it was by destroying that pathos of despair which depends upon the absence of hope. For I wasn't able to despair over the earthly, as Kierkegaard commends, W. says. And wasn't it only by means of such a despair – over despairing over the earthly as a whole, and accepting the fact that there was no happiness to find in the earthly – that Kierkegaard said I might embrace the eternal?

'Tell me, when did you reached your greatest despair?' W. wants to know. When did I discover the sickness unto death, if I have discovered it at all? Ah, it was the outcome of a long process, W. knows that. When did it begin?

I began in joy, as all children begin. I lived in pure immediacy, as Kierkegaard would say, and I had met no obstacle that would challenge my joy. I knew no disappointments, or at least none that would change my understanding of life.

When did it change, that understanding? When did I, as Kierkegaard would say, come against 'something earthly': some disaster over which I despaired? When I disappointed myself, as I had already, no doubt, begun to disappoint others? When did I lose pure immediacy?

There must have been so many things! – 'Your growing obesity. Your tiny penis'. So many things, but W. wants to focus on just one, which he may have made up: the day I discovered the limits of my intelligence, W. says.

He sees it in his mind's eye, the young student working round the clock in his room. He sees it: dawn, then 7.00 AM, and the student had worked the whole night through. 7.00 AM, 9.00 AM, and the student taking Pro-Plus pills to push himself, bleary eyed, through another day.

'You covered your walls in brown paper, didn't you?' I'd told him that. Told him I'd written logical proofs and apposite quotations all over my papered-over walls. I'd gone a little mad. I'd worked a little too hard, but I'd come up against, hadn't I: the limits of my intelligence? It was as though I was too big to think. As though I was imprisoned in a cell in which I could never stand up, or if I did, if I stood up, I would only have broken my neck. Would only have died gasping, back broken, on the floor.

So I stooped. I wrote my notes with my big hand. I read books I couldn't understand. Then I shut the flap of my bureau and stared into space. Was that when I reached it, my first despair? Was it then that it shattered, the pure immediacy I knew as a child?

There are men with whom W.,, a small man, feels safe, and others with whom he feels intimidated. Take our friend the bouncer, who picked W. up and spun him round his head. Never did W. feel unsafe! Never did he feel he'd be dropped, or otherwise come to harm. He was held right up to the ceiling, right beneath the light fitting in his living room, but felt no fear.

But in my presence, W. is very often afraid. On that pedallo in the Black Forest, for example. I was pedalling, my enormous thighs working furiously, while he was perched up on the back seat, terrified. I even sang to him to calm him down, songs of the thirties and forties, but he wasn't calmed. My voice, my terrible voice singing 'We'll Meet Again', my thighs, and the rocking of the pedallo: he shudders to remember.

I'm a squat man, not a stocky one, W. says, looking at me critically. I like to call myself stocky – that's what I tell people: I'm a stocky man, but the word that comes to W.'s mind is always squat. -' You're a squat man, with a tiny penis'. But if I am squat, a toad of a man, what is he? Chubby perhaps, but not unduly so. In need of exercise, maybe. But in the end, he's not an extreme case, as I am. And he has a normal sized penis.

We're lucky we have Sal, W. and I have always agreed. Sal demands an explanation: how often have we said that to ourselves? Sal demands an explanation: for her, our vagueness and pathos is not enough. She's not satisfied with our equivocations. She expects better from us. – 'Even you! She expects better from you!'

This always amazes W. Doesn't she know my limits? Hasn't she been acquainted, very thoroughly, with my idiocy? But Sal demands an explanation, even of me. She won't let us get away with anything! How well W. remembers that time in Nashville, where I was expounding my theories of community. I spoke of alterity, I spoke of the relation to the Other Even W. was convinced. Even W. was swept away. He's really on to something, W. thought. Perhaps, all along, I've misjudged him.

But Sal demanded an explanation. What did I mean about community? And about alterity? And about the relation to the Other? No more vagueness! No more equivocation! I went white as a sheet, W. said. The blood drained from my face. I'd been found out, I knew that. I sputtered. Well …, I said, and began some spurious explanation. But Sal was having none of it.

Sal demanded an explanation, and I was unable to give her one, wasn't I? But that wasn't the end of it. I was silent for a moment. I bowed my head. And then, in a new voice – a calm, measured voice W. had never heard before – I said something that actually made sense. It was a stunning moment. W. was surprised. Our Nashville hosts were surprised. But Sal wasn't surprised. – 'See', she said, 'you just have to explain yourself better'.

Bored in the office, W. visiting. He picks up a box of green tea and throws it at me. – 'Do something'. W. has a slapstick sense of humour, he says. Well, it's my slapstick that amuses him. My stumblings. My prat-falls. – 'No one could call you a graceful man'.

He, W., is surprisingly lithe. He could have been a gymnast, with the right training. Can I imagine him, soaring above the crowds in his tights?  

We're the opposite of Job's comforters, W. notes, it's true: we do not seek to discourage while offering solace. We're the encouragers of thought! Thought's enthusiasts! What thinker, in our midst, have we failed to cheer on?

We were there on the front row with our notebooks, furiously writing. The thinker spoke, and we wrote. And then after, knowing the audience's reaction could not fail to disappoint, could not fail to leave the thinker feeling yet more isolated, yet more alone, we all but bore him upon our shoulders, cheering. We all but deafened him with our cries.

What did you mean by this point, or that one?, we ask him. We go through our notebooks. What did you mean by this, or that? Stupid as we are, our interest flatters him. We're like a dry run, in our stupidity, for an encounter with a fellow thinker, an ally of thought, in conversation with whom our thinker could rise to his true vocation.

And what would we do, if, with our thinker, another thinker came along? What, if a conversation between thinkers truly began, if idea met with idea like eagles rising into the air? We wouldn't get out our notebooks: W. makes me promise that. I wouldn't take out my camera, my infernal camera: W. makes me promise that, too. And we wouldn't chatter; we wouldn't say a thing: W. doesn't have to tell me that.

Mute, awestruck, we would only listen as to the tongue of angels, to what we couldn't understand.