Category: W.

We're method thinkers, W. says. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!

It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in English translation, in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only the mind! To the culture of the thinker, in this case, Danish culture of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the works, their engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.

But how are we to do that?, W. wonders. How, when we could only ever be the apes of Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's monkeys?

I'm to be his guide into the mountains of Kierkegaard, W. says. His sherpa. I'm to carry his things. What should he bring? His learning. His years of study of the philosophy of religion.

He'll instruct me as we climb, he says. He'll point things out, and when he gets tired, I can give him a piggy-back. Kierkegaard: in truth, I know more about him than W. There's the Danish connection, of course. My Danishness should be a help. Kierkegaard's Danishness has always bothered W. He lacks a context for him. He can't grasp his place.

Of course, this is doubly difficult for W. as a Catholic (and as a Jew). Perhaps there is something Protestant in me (through my Danishness), as well as Hindu (through my Indianness). Perhaps I have some instinct for Kierkegaard he lacks.

But then, of course, my knowledge of Kierkegaard is confined to trivialities. Gossip about his life, for example. About his relationship to Regine, or to his father. I don't understand his place in the philosophical tradition or, for that matter, the theological tradition. I have a purely regional knowledge of Kierkegaard; I don't know his place in the great chain of thinkers.

That's what W. will bring to our collaboration: his sense of the broader landscape. His grasp of the sweep of European thought.

Kierkegaard! Kierkegaard! There are too many books! They're too long! Too involved! How is one to begin to read Kierkegaard? How does one set off? With the very first book, proceeding to the second, and so on? Or should one read the major works first, giving a sense of the real themes that occupied the thinker, so that one can glimpse them in nuce when looking, later, at his earlier writings? Will weariness exhaust the reader before he reaches the explicitly Christian writings, the ones under Kierkegaard's own name?

Perhaps we should begin with them, the Christian writings, W. says. Perhaps that is what incumbent upon the scholar in our age: to take Kierkegaard seriously as a Christian thinker. But then, too, there is the question of Kierkegaard's relation to his contemporaries, to the Danish church, to opinion in Copenhagen. Perhaps one ought to begin with a biography. Is that how we should attune ourselves to Kierkegaard?

In the end, W. can't decide. He leaves it to me, he says. I'm to be his guide. I'm to direct his reading and our reading. What do I recommend?

What's happened? I've lost my ability to walk slowly, W. says. I'm no longer an ambler, like him. – 'You're in too much of a hurry!' It's only the slow walker who notices things, W. says. Who can take things in.

He's concerned for me. I look pinched, stressed. – 'You're taking all the nonsense too seriously'. I should work harder, that's the remedy, W. says. I need to read. I always get depressed when I don't read.

W. reminds me of our collaboration: we were to read Kierkegaard together, volume by volume, over the summer, sending our findings to one another. Kierkegaard, volume by volume! Don't I have the Hong and Hong editions lined up in my office?

W.'s always admired them – their sober spines, the varying colours against which the title appears, varying from volume to volume (Point of View in charocal, The Book on Adler, bronze, Fear and Trembling in a handsome burgundy). And then there's the sheer bulk of them, spanning my windowsill; it's quite moving.

How is it I know Kierkegaard's work better than him? What was it in him that appealed to me, the Christian to the Hindu? But then we have our Danishness in common, Kierkegaard and I. We have our Tungsind in common, I've insisted, our melancholy. My deep Hindu sadness sits side by side with my deep Danish melancholy, it's a terrible combination.

But W. has never believed in my sadness, nor my melancholy. – 'You're capable of neither'. Nor is he, for that matter. – 'We're frothy men. We're men of the surface'. But why, then, do we find the depths so fascinating? Why this row of sober books on my windowsill? Why has our collaboration led us to Kierkegaard?

Sometimes W. feels we're being tested. Sometimes he feels he's being tested, having to work with me. Like Job before the whirlwind, he wants to ask 'Why me?' Why him, indeed. Why me? Why has he been paired with me in our collaboration? Who shacked his leg to mine? Who tied us together like Siamese twins?

We're being tested, and Kierkegaard's our test, W. feels sure of it. Kierkegaard's the name of the mountain range before us. Oh God, the lofty, terrifying peaks of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript! Oh God, the fearsome ravines of The Concept of Anxiety! And what about the treacherous lowlands of the Edifying Discourses?

And what of the other mountain chains to which Kierkegaard's is joined? What of range of Hegel, of Kant, of Aristotle, looming in the mist? What, for that matter, of Luther and the Schoolmen? And what of those contemporaries of Kierkegaard, his interlocutors, the targets of his invective, who you would have to speak Danish to read? He thought he could count on me to read Danish, but I'm no good for that. What kind of Dane can't read Danish?, he sighs.

Messianic: Judee Sill (madly Christian, always a good sign), Jacques Ellul (madly Christian), David Shrigley (he has our sense of humour), Kafka (of course), Rosenzweig (who else?), Jandek, Karl Polyani, Jeff Magnum, Josh T. Pearson, Charles Crumb, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky (the Russian films), Harvey Pekar, Robert Bresson, Rickie Lee Jones' Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, Jean Luc Godard, Bill Callahan, Cat Power (early Cat Power), and Will Oldham (early Will Oldham).

Not Messianic: 'You', says W. 'Your cock'.  

The Elephant 6: it's a legend to W. The Elephant 6 Recording Co.: wasn't that what Jeff Magnum used to write on the DIY albums he gave to his friends? Ruston, Louisiana, that's where it began. Ruston, full of jocks, full of enemies meant they had to become friends, had to band together. Music was their shelter. Music the forest in which they would wander together.

What were their bands called? There were so many of them. Everyone was in at least three. What mattered was their collective: the Elephant 6. What matters is that they recorded songs for one another and performed for one another. What matters is the cassettes they exchanged, and their home-run record labels on which they put out each other's music in tiny editions.

Ruston, in the middle of nowhere. Ruston, nowhere in particular. The Jocks were too much. The isolation was too much. Who among them had the idea that they should all move together to Athens, Georgia, and start a new life there? The Athens, Georgia of R.E.M. and the B-52s. The Athens, Georgia, where rent was cheaper and people were more laid back and there was a music scene to be part of, which they'd never visited, but to which they decided to relocate en masse.

So they left their crash pads in Ruston. They left their shitty jobs. They drove across America. And they found new crash pads in Athens, and new shitty jobs. And they continued to make cassettes and give them to one another. Continued to write songs only for one another, living in each other's imaginations.

Then they scattered again, a blown dandelion clock. Then they came together again, this time in New York. They dug through thrift stores for records. They lived on coffee and cigarettes. They wrote songs through the night and into the dawn.

They lay on the grass in Central Park and dreamed of the future, of the new day into which they'd step together. Of a door that would open in the sky. Of living in the woods in a communist utopia, where they would make music with their friends and have no contact with the outside world. Of building geodesic domes and giant waterwheels for electricity and setting up speakers, blasting out sounds randomly. They didn't need anyone! Only each other!

They played gigs, mad gigs, like evangelists. They played to hear themselves through the ears of an audience. They played to hear each other play, their songs becoming new, becoming light, and floating up through the darkness.

And Jeff Magnum sang like a magic realist. His voice swooped and dropped and roared in a fever dream. He sang and he strummed and the band played their accordions and singing saws behind him. They played uillean pipes and the zanzithophone. They played fuzzed bass and flugelhorn. They played trombones and bells. They swapped instruments onstage to play like amateurs, like people who'd never played before.

Then back to Athens again, back to their crash pad with its tin foil walls and brightly coloured canvasses, with old keyboards and reel-to-reel machines, and a twelve foot Chinese dragon and a theremin. Back to the house where twenty people wrote and recorded and slept, where kids and dogs wandered in and out.

Was it there Jeff Magnum first read Anne Frank's diary? Was it there that he sobbed for two days and two nights, and rose on the third and composed songs aloud in the bathroom?

They heard him there, his friends of the Elephant 6, and knew something was happening. They heard him singing songs over and over, working them out without writing anything down. They heard him recast songs he had written over the years, breaking them up and mixing them with new bits and pieces of songs.

They heard his voice crack and strain as he sang about loving Jesus. They heard it wandering passionately off key as he sang about loving Anne Frank, and about Anne Frank's ghost. 

They heard his songs as a single, everlasting piece, images and motifs repeating themselves endlessly. They heard the song cycle of In An Aeroplane Over the Sea as it came together in the bathroom, and were ready with their many instruments to learn the songs and make them new.

Then they toured again. They were friends on the move again. They practised their songs on the road. They were a mad marching band, part marachi and part salvation army. They played carnival music and Bulgarian folk music. They played musique concrete and acid folk.

Who had ever heard anything like it? Who had ever heard songs sung with such urgency and desperation and compassion and tenderness? He sang to make people feel, Jeff Magnum said.

He sang about going back in a time machine and saving Anne Frank. He sang about Anne Frank being reincarnated in a Spanish boy. He sang about a two-headed boy in a jar and about siamese twins freezing to death in the forest. 

People felt, but what did they feel? He sang of the interconnection of all things. He sang of joy and death, or murder and birth. He sang of the past and the future. He sang of grief and being united in grief. He sang of the world's sadness, and of the joy of those who, together, saw that sadness and knew their friendship must include that sadness.

And he sang of friendship, too – and love. Sang of counting everything beautiful we can see, of a shower of stars against the blackness of night; of death, of the end of things and the end of love.

He's seen it before, W. says, in some of his more desperate students. In the half-wild ones, who've come off the streets after years on the streets. In the half-mad ones, who want only to lose themselves in some great task of scholarship, but who are made for everything but a great task of scholarship. 

In our time – and this is an indictment of our time - a figure like Kierkegaard becomes a magnet for all kinds of lunatics, W. says. It's desperate, he says, but also moving in its way: the way the work of Kierkegaard draws the lunatics towards the light. It led me in the right direction, W. says. It saved me; he has no doubt of that.

'First, for you, there was Kafka, W. says, and then there was Kierkegaard. First my obsession with Kafka – which launched you towards your undergraduate studies, and then my obsession with Kierkegaard – which launched you, threw you, towards your postgraduate studies. Because that's what you sensed, didn't you, even in the midst of Hulme? That's what was drawing you through Kierkegaard's books, one after another?'

It was a kind of path, up which I was running red-eyed and dry-skinned. A path, up which I went breathlessly, with my heart fluttering and my blood seeming to roar in my ears. – 'And you're still running, aren't you?'

'And what were you doing in Hulme Free State?', W. says. 'What was the failed Bohemian up to?' Half-sleeping in his room, shivering with cold, he says. Half-sleeping on his mattress, pigeons cooing outside the boarded-up window. Half-sleeping and wishing they'd keep it quiet out there.

In the mornings, going down the piss-smelling stairwell to buy milk, I'd be planning my day's reading and my day's note-taking, that's what I told him. As the speed began to hit, as my skin dried and my eyes dried, I'd be ready in my room with my books. As I began to sweat, I'd open my library copies of Kierkegaard, of the collected works of Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, and I'd be poised with my pencil over the page.

I read Philosophical Fragments as gangs of Hell's Angels fought outside over drug deals, and the Concluding Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments as I heard gunshots in Woodcock Square. I read Repetition in the laundrette, and Fear and Trembling as I queued for patties in SamSam's.

I lay out on the greens in the summer with the two volumes of Either/Or, and cracked open the spine of Stages on Life's Way listening to the pirate radio station broadcasting from Charles Barry. Didn't I spill warm beer from my can of Red Stripe on the pages of The Concept of Irony?

I opened the first of many volumes of the Journals as autumn turned to winter, and my breath froze in the air. I began The Concept of Anxiety as I stamped my feet for warmth by a fire of old plywood on an upper deck. And I filled my notebooks with my thoughts on The Writing Prefaces and The Book on Adler while the muggers waited in the dark corners of the decks with their stanley knives and screwdrivers.

Did I bother the Rastas about Kierkegaard? W. wants to know. He can imagine it, he says. He sees it in his mind's eye: a drug addled idiot talking Kierkegaard to the Rastas. Did I bother the hippies about Kierkegaard? W. can see that, too. A speeding idiot blathering about Kierkegaard to the hippies. And what about the ravers – did I bother them? He can see that, too: bug eyed ravers looking blankly at an idiot chattering about Kierkegaard …

Sometimes, W. thinks my idiocy draws me closer to God than he is, and all the more in that I profess no belief in God whatsoever. What does God mean to me? Nothing, says W., but on the other hand – everything, because it means nothing.

God means too much to him, that's his trouble, W. says. The idea of God. But I have no idea of God. I have no ideas, and this is what saves me.

What drove me to it? Why did I decide on speed?, W. wonders, but he knows the answer. I can't bear empty time, he says, he knows that. And there I was, after my studies, unemployed once again, and with no prospects for employment. I thought: life is too wide, too large. I want to constrict my attention. Want to focus on one thing at a time. 

Hulme Free State: that's where I went to score, wasn't it? It's where I went to live. Hulme, old Hulme, before it was regenerated. Old Hulme, with its Crescents of maisonette flats linked by old walkways – 'decks'.  Old Hulme, put up very quickly in the 60s, concrete panels locked together like a house of cards, but from which its council tenants quickly fled.

The concrete, once white – a futural white – turned chewing gum grey under grey Northern skies. And the empty decks and walkways, the greens between the Crescents, called out to every freak in the north. They came from every direction: hippies and ravers and bikers, travellers with pit-bulls and rastas in their colours. And now the bunker-like pubs were full again, and the bunker-like clubs played hard techno and lover's rock.

'And you came, too, didn't you?', W. says. I wondered into Hulme Free State, that's what the graffiti called it. I wandered among the condemned buildings, past the shattered TV someone had thrown from the top deck of Charles Barry (each Crescent was named after a famous architect: William Kent, John Nash, Robert Adam, Nicholas Hawksmoor …), past the piles of rusting white goods and mouldering furniture.

There were fires burning on the walkways, I noticed that, didn't I? Luckily, concrete doesn't burn. Especially wet concrete. Especially damp concrete. And the Crescents were always damp, I told W. that. Dark grey on grey – that was the damp, soaking through the concrete.

And so the fires made by squatters wanting to escape their drenched-through flats. Fires on the decks burning up old furniture and plywood from boarded-up windows. They didn't touch solid ground for weeks, some of those squatters. They sent others down for beer, chips and tabs, and kept to their eeries.

How did I come to squat in a boxroom next to the back balcony of one of the maisonettes? How did it end up with me scraping away the pigeon shit and boarding up the broken window? How with my dragging up a mattress and spray painting no drugs sold here on the security door to keep the smackheads away. – 'Someone must have liked you. Someone must have taken your side'.

In the end, I wasn't a very good Bohemian, W. says. I coughed too much to pull on the spliff when it was passed along clockwise. I got bored sitting with the others watching traffic on the benches outside the cafe. I wasn't ready to dream my life away. – 'You wanted to do something, W. says. To read, for one thing. To write, for another.

But at night, after the pubs closed, I used to sit with the other squatters on the greens, looking up at the police helicopter. I sat and listened, as they sat around me smoking and waiting for the Kitchen to open – the nightclub they made by drilling through from one flat to another.

I listened to the reasoning of the Rastas. Listened to talk of Babylon and the Babylon system – the city around us and all cities, all civilisation. Listened to them speak about the Almighty, and about the god-King Messiah, about Exodus, about the return to Ethiopia. 

I listened to a DJ rhapsodise about the religious significance of dub, about what happens when he slid down the faders and lets vocals and melodies drop out, leaving only the interlocking rhythms of drum and bass, and when he punched in the horns at full volume and punched them out again, and when he amplified snare rolls like detonations, and let the hi hat echo and explode and fizz out into white noise. He spoke of breaking up the lyrics, abandoning verses for fragments, replacing choruses with snatches of words, and of building up the electronic ambience in the dub, letting it gather humid and dark like a humming, squalling storm above the music.

I heard a ruined beauty, eyes shrunk to tiny dots, teeth missing, talk about God. Peace: that's what smack gave her, she said. Peace, spreading warmly out from her stomach – she knew it straightaway, with her first hit. She felt lifted, lightened. Her blood felt warm. She looked upwards, she said, sighed with bliss. What was lifting her up? She felt as light as air. Look in the mirror, someone told her. Why? She hated looking. But this time, she obeyed and saw an angel, a beautiful angel. And now, though her teeth were rattling themselves loose in her mouth, now her cheeks were sunken, her skin grey, she felt the same thing. The high's like nothing else, she said. It's religious. She understood what the word God meant, she said. Complete. You feel complete, she said, stubbing out her cigarette. You feel God when you arms and legs get heavy, when there's a tingling on the surface of your skin, as though it was being brushed by a shoal of fish.

The Most High, that's what they call God, isn't it?, the girl said. The Most High: higher than all highs, but those highs pointing up to him like aretes. She saw them in her mind's eye, she said, riding up ever higher, flashing the light back along their keen edges and converging on a single point: God, God.

I listened to an anarchist speak of the political significance of Hulme Free State, of the new world that was being prepared there outside the constituted forms of political power. He spoke of the direct democracy of the Paris Commune of 1871, of the Soviets, of Lenin's worker's councils. He spoke of the Action Committees of May 1968, of the nights of the barricades, of the general strike and the writings on the walls: Never Work! Speak to Your Neighbours. Alone, We Can Do Nothing. Alone, we can do nothing, the anarchist said. But here, we're not alone.

We looked around. Ravers, bug eyed, danced in tiny circles. French skinheads, newly arrived from Marseilles – they were said to be murderers on the run - went about menacingly, screwdivers hidden in their bomber jackets. Packs of ownerless dogs, tongues lolling from their mouths, loped through the night. We're not alone, the anarchist said.

They're shutting down the departments one by one. When will it be our turn? Soon, soon! It's a wonder they haven't closed us yet. But they're coming, the axe men. And they're raising their axes higher, ever higher.  

There's nothing left for us. Nothing left to do except drink and dance. He'll drink, W. says, and I'll dance. – 'Go on, fat boy, dance'.

We're on the beach, and a tsunami's coming, why does no one but W. see that? On the beach, and the sea's out, sucked out, as it is before a great wave comes. The animals sense it. The horses are bolting. The birds are flying home to roost. And there I am in my swimming trunks with an inflatable around my midriff, running down the beach to the sea.

Hello, is that gibbon research?, W. says when I pick up the phone. He tells me of his current woes, and asks me about mine. – 'Really! Is that what they're planning?', he says. 'You're doomed – dooooomed!' And what am I going to do about it? I should think about a dirty protest, W. says. A pre-emptive dirty protest, go on. Strip down and smear the walls with your shit. That'll show them.

Evening in the shuttered living room. A bottle of Plymouth Gin and two glasses. We speak about Dogma, our intellectual movement. We need to remind ourselves of the rules!, W. says. We need to write them down! Ah, but soon we'll be too drunk to write! We'll be too drunk to think!, I tell him. But that, too, is part of Dogma, W. says. 

Dogma is collaborative, W. says. That's the first rule. Your work must stand or fall together. It must be genuinely cowritten, being born from friendship and returning to it. He likes that, W. says.

Dogma is clear, is the next rule. The presentation must be intelligible to everyone. Everyone must follow its points, its development. Dogma is fundamentally democratic, W. comments.

Dogma is spartan, W. reads. You can only refer to one proper name. There must be no quotations. And the next rule: Dogma is impassioned. You must stand behind every sentence you write. It must be clear that the material you present is of utmost importance to you.

The next rule – rule five, W. says, Dogma is personal. You must use personal anecdotes. You must speak of your life and its intersection with your thought. Speak of your friends. Speak of your passions and of your misfortunes.

Rule six, W. says, Dogma borrows. You can plagiarise any part of your paper from any source. In fact, you should plagiarise! Rule seven. Dogma is reticent. What is spoken is not for reading. You must never seek to publish what you say, nor say what you have published. Your presentation must be absolutely relevant for the occasion at which you present it.

Rule eight, says W, Dogma is studious. You must work very hard indeed on your presentation. Nothing must be left to the last minute. There must be nothing slapdash.

Rule nine, says W. Dogma is full of pathos. Do not be afraid to weep, or to see your audience weeping. And finally, W. says, Dogma is secretive. You mustn't tell the audience the constraints you have accepted. If you are asked, afterwards, about your presentation, you may speak of it then, but not before.

Of course, no one owns Dogma, W. says. Not even us. Dogma is its own thing, W. says. We drink, and W. wonders whether we should supplement the rules of Dogma with a few more. Rule eleven, W. says, Dogma is experimental. More rules can be added, but only through the experience of Dogma.

He likes that phrase, the experience of Dogma, W. says. What does it mean? He's not sure, he says. But perhaps there's a clue in the twelth rule. What's the twelth rule?, I ask him. Dogma is apocalyptic, W. says. Dogma accepts that these are the last days. Catastrophe is impending. Bear this in mind as you write!, W. says. You must write only about what matters most!

At the same time, W. says, Dogma is a friend to religion – that's the next rule. Haven't we undergone a messianic turn ourselves? We should speak of these matters without embarrassment, W. says. We're converts, W. says, men of faith. We are ferociously religious, he says, quoting Bataille.

Do you think we should carry out a human sacrifice, like Bataille's group, Acephale?, W. wonders. But then, in some sense, he's already been sacrificed, W. says. He sacrificed his intellectual credentials when he started hanging out with me. When he started taking my non-thinking seriously.

Rule fourteen, W. says, Dogma is on the side of the suffering. You need to watch Bela Tarr films over and over again, to be reminded of the omnipresence of suffering, of ontological shit and cosmological shit. And what about Stroszek? Oh yes, you have to watch Stroszek, W. says. You have to watch the dancing chicken. You have to see what Ian Curtis saw when he saw the dancing chicken. When he looked into the chicken's eyes, W. says.

He'd put Satantango and Stroszek into his Dogma kit, W. says. What about Jandek?, I ask him. Oh yes. He'd put in Khartoum and Khartoum Variations, W. says. And maybe Glasgow Monday, as well. A Dogma kit, W. says. Maybe we should have Dogma uniforms, too. Like Devo. Or Klaus Nomi. He's a great inspiration to me, isn't he, Klaus Nomi?

The fifteenth rule: Dogma is communal, W. says. Respond, in your presentation, to the work of your friends. Mention, in discussion, the inspiration that your friends are for you. Of course, this is difficult in my case, W. says, since he is my only friend. My only real friend. The nutters and weirdoes I surround myself with aren't real friends, he says.

And what next?, W. says. Oh yes, Dogma is peripheral. It avoids famous names. It is shy of fashionable topics. Dogma stays on the outside, with the people of the outside. It has nothing to do with the centre, W. says. Dogma eschews the centre.

But then, at the same time, Dogma is affirmative, W. says. That's rule seventeen. Do not engage with those with whom you disagree. There's no point! Never let the critic teach you the cloth, that's what William Burroughs said, W. reminds me. It's a metaphor from bullfighting. 

Dogma is advocative: speak of those of whom others should hear, W. says. This is pretty similar to earlier rules, he admits, but it needs reaffirming. No, we need a genuine eighteenth rule, I tell W. Eighteen is a sacred number to Hindus. There are eighteen books of the Mahabharta, for example, I tell him.

The eighteenth rule, W. ponders. What would it be? Ah yes, you must always write of nuns and dogs. How we you have forgotten that? Didn't we miss out the rule about drinking?, I ask W. as he pours us more gin. We have enough rules, W. says.

'Compare your life to mine', W. says. 'What does it make you feel?' He has a three storeyed Georgian house, and I have a shitty underground flat. He has Sal, a woman who loves him, and I have no one, and am essentially unloveable. He is liked and respected by his colleagues – they shake his hand in the cloister - whereas I skulk about trying to avoid everyone with whom I work. Where did I go so wrong?

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

And I'm a stutterer, too, which makes things even worse. W.'s always amused when the power of speech deserts me, and my interlocutor has to guess what I want. It's at its worst when I have to say something urgently, or have to be succinct.

There's a great stammering and stuttering, W. says. A great foaming at the mouth. – 'You can't get a word out, can you?', W. says, laughing. 'My God! Why don't you gesture? Mime! What is it, ape boy? More food? Something else to drink?'

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says. Broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! I love it, of course. I'm at it all day in my office. How do I even begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense?

I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from dayto day?

W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He's seen too much! He knows where it's heading! He's seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … What am I thinking about? What thought's struck me? But he knows I'm only full of administrative anxieties, and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

When did it begin, W.'s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother's caravan park, he says, as a child. He made friends there. – 'Working class friends, like you', he says. 'Except unlike you they had a sense of loyalty'. They wouldn't betray him!

That was the fundamental rule: there was no betrayal. If one fell, when chased by the police, they would stop and carry him. If one was accused, the others would take the blame, each of them, in his place. It was like Spartacus, W. says. The cadre was what was important. The team. And hasn't that been what's he's sought ever since?

If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of four hundred miles away, that would be something. We're islands, he says. We're stranded at the opposite ends of the country.

He dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-swarm, who would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

Stonehouse. It's a rough part of Plymouth, W. admits, but he's happy there. – 'You should always live among the poor', he says. We thread through the refugees who gather at the end of the road. They're always standing about outside, the refugees, the sun on their faces, W. says. He likes that. They're men of the street, as he is. But where are their womenfolk? Where do they live? It's a mystery to him, W. says.

We're heading to the sea. That's what Plymouth means to him, essentially, W. says, proximity to the sea. He has to see it!, W. says. He has to be near it! It's as essential as oxygen for him. He is a scholar of the coast, W. says, which means he's bound to end up living inland, far inland, when he loses his job. He's a scholar of fresh air, which means he'll end up somewhere underground and fetid, just like me, W. says.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck little metal pillars into the road, with the names of famous residents written on them. What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality?

We pay to enter the lighthouse, and ascend its winding staircase. It was moved from the breakwater, the lighthouse, W. says when we reach the top. It's only ornamental now, with its red and white stripes. The real lighthouse is much further out to sea. We squint over the waves. The horizon is only ever three miles away, W. tells me. It's not as far as you think.  

W. takes me to his favourite cafe, to see if we can find the young Pole who used to serve us. He wants me to have a romantic interest, W. says. He wants to see me stutter and fumble. He wants to see me pucker my lips for a kiss. But she isn't there, and he has to listen to my caffeine theories instead, as he sips his cappuccino.

'You'll have to document all this', W. says as we walk through the shopping arcades. 'You need to document my Plymouth years'. W. takes me on a pointing tour of his favourite buildings.

I take photos of him pointing to particular architectural features he admires. He points to the brown facade of the new arts and community building. He points to the decrepit Palace Theatre. He tells me again how the old city was razed to the ground by the Luftwaffe, and how it was rebuilt in the 50s, according to the Abercrombie Plan.

I take a picture of him pointing directly up into the sky, from where the Luftwaffe came, and then, standing on a bench, pointing directly at the earth, where they deposited their bombs. I ask a passerby to take a photo of W. pointing at me, and of me pointing at him, and, finally, of W. and I pointing at one another.

I take photos to document W.'s house. I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with its internal shutters over the windows and its marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.

I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of W. and Sal's friends. I always ask why there isn't a picture of me there, but they never reply.

Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high old skirting board. The high windows, newly restored. The king sized fireplace …

It's here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I. It's here, late at night, that I make him listen in silence to Khartoum and Khartoum Variations. W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to it with him. Sal never stays for Jandek. – 'I hate fucking Jandek', she says. 'Don't play him while I'm in the house', she says.

I document the great bathroom, too - the greatest of bathrooms, we're all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The generosity of the airing cupboard, with its many towels. The copies of Uncut by the toilet. The stained glass window.

It's indescribably horrifying to W., the thought of leaving his house. But he'll have to leave it, he's knows that. They'll sack him. They'll drive him out of his city.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s office. His bookshelves – not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ('I don't hoard them, like you', he says), but all the essentials. His Hebrew dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His row of Rosenzweigs.

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. folds out the sofabed and dresses it. He draws the curtains and makes it look homely. He has to fumigate the room after I live, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship. How does he do that? He opens a volume of Cohen, W. says, and says my name backwards three times.

Then, finally, W. and Sal's room, calm, generous and large windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. It's where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.

'Compare this house to your flat', W. says. 'What does it make your feel?' I'm a failure, W. says, but then so's he. These are his last days in his house, he knows it. His last days … he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It's building up out there, W. says, it's massing, like the stormclouds over Plymouth Sound.

They'll turn him from his house, and from the temple of his scholarship. He'll have to wander the streets like a rat. – 'They'll turn us all out', W. says, 'even you'. I'll have to stagger out from my pit. They'll prise me out like a grub, W. says. They'll put out my eyes with sticks, just as they'll deafen him with sticks.   

Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I'm always amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite delirious. I can barely contain my excitement. It's as if I'd never eaten before. She can only imagine what kind of life I lead.

She refuses to visit my flat, of course. It's too squalid. And there's rubble in the shower. How do I wash? Do I wash? And there's no food, of course. Nothing. I can't have food in my house, I've told them, because I eat it all. I binge. I stuff myself. I make myself ill almost immediately. So there's no food.

Then, too, I've no fridge, and nowhere to store food. There's no electricity in the kitchen, and besides, it's dismantled, ready for another round of damp-proofing. The walls are so wet! it's like touching the skin of a frog. It's clammy.

Sal can imagine a terrible plague spreading from the flat. A new kind of illness, which travels by damp spores. And the flat's so dark! It's like being buried underground, staying at the flat, she says. It's like being buried alive. And you haven't told her about the rats yet, W. says.

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

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

Where death is, you are not, says Epicetus. Where I am, I should not be, that's the truth of it, W. says. Do I understand, really understand, the reality of my situation?, W. says. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I'm not really aware of myself, says W., which is my saving grace. Because if I was …

It's enough that W. knows. It's enough that he's aware of the reality of my situation. He tells other people about it, but they scarcely believe him. They have to blot it out. Screen memories replace real ones. When he tells them about me, about the reality of my situation, they recall only owls with spread wings swooping through the night.

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

At the bus stop, W. tells me about his current intellectual projects. They can be summed up under the general heading, capitalism and religion, he says. The 'and' is designed to be provocative, W. says. He wants to provoke the new atheists, he says.

There's nothing more infuriating than the new atheists, W. says as the bus comes. Nothing worse than what they take religion to be. He wants to show that belief in a world beyond this world has nothing to do with religion, he says. Religion has to do with what is sober, real and objective, he says. The true object of religious belief has always been this world, the world as it currently is.

Of course, by religion, it's Judaism he has in mind. And by Judaism, he has in mind the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig. If only the new atheists could read Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says. If only he could read, really read, Rosenzweig and Cohen! , he says.

Capitalism and religion. What's the significance of the copula? What does it mean to think one alongside the other? Of course, he'd appreciate my input as a Hindu, W. says. What would a Hindu make of all this?, he wonders. But he knows I have no answer. My Hinduism has no depth, W. says. He can't believe in it, not really. – 'Convince me', he says. 'Convince me you're a Hindu. In what does your Hinduism consist?'

He still remembers when I first told him of my Hinduism. I'm a Hindu, I said, and he laughed until beer came out of his nostrils. Where was it? In Freiburg? In Wroclaw? It's as improbable today, my Hinduism.

'You know nothing about it!', W. says. If he drew a Venn diagram called Hinduism and a Venn diagram called Lars, where would they intersect?

But about capitalism, now. I might have something to say about capitalism. For wasn't it in my long periods of warehouse work and unemployment that I came into contact with the essence of capitalism?

Capitalism and religion. Somehow, I'm the key to his project, W. says. I'm the key to the copula, though he's not sure how. In some way or another, I'll be his Virgil, W. says. I'll lead him through the circles of my hell.

At Whitesands, the bus stops to let on a group of Poles, no doubt some of the migrants who have moved to Plymouth in the last few years. W. has a great admiration for them, he says, the Poles of Plymouth. They've brought grace to his city. Grace and refinement.

As we take the ferry across to Devonport, W. muses upon the troubled history of Poland – how the borders of the country have moved outward and inward over the centuries like a concertina, accompanying the melancholy music of war, genocide and occupation, the great lament of Old Europe. He hears it still, W. says. It sounds through his blood. Didn't his father's family come to England, generations ago, because of old European pogroms? Isn't he, too, a Polish immigrant?

We remember the Polish waitress who served us at W.'s favourite cafe. How gentle she was! How generous! She had everything we lacked, he says. A delicate intelligence. Wit. I was moved, W. says. Even he could see that. I blushed. I fumbled for words.

I should find myself a Plymouth Pole, W. says. That might be my way to redemption.

You can only get so far as a Hindu scholar with Hinduism for Idiots as your guide, W. says. Why haven't I learnt that yet?

You don't actually know anything, do you?, W. says. 'You've got no body of knowledge. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course, and he can play classical guitar. And there are whole oeuvres with which he is familiar. He's read his way through Husserl, for example. He's not bewildered by Leibniz. – 'You see, I know something. What do you know?'

Socrates knew he knew nothing: that was his wisdom, and the beginning of all wisdom, W. says. But there's a difference between knowing nothing and knowing nothing, he says. There's a difference between knowing you know nothing and setting forth again in your ignorance, and wallowing in your ignorance like a hippo in a swamp.

'You don't want to know', W. says. And I'm drinking to forget what little I did know. There's nothing left for me, he says. Nothing but the empty sky, and the Zen-like emptiness of my head.

You have to court women, W. says. You can't just jump into bed with them. He courted Sal for eight months, he says. He plied her with gin, and she made him mix tapes. It was best of times, W. says. The uncertainty. The intoxication.

But what would I know of all that? There's no tenderness in me, W. says. Lust, yes. A kind of animal craving. Foam on the lips. I'm like one of those monkeys in the zoo with an inflamed ass – what are they called? Oh yes, mandrills. I'm the mandrill of romance, W. says.  

Man is the sacrifice, say the holy texts. In sacrifice, the priest identifies with what is offered into the flames. If it is ghee, the priest becomes the dripping ghee. If it is a cake of vegetables, then the priest is each of the vegetables. The priest re-enacts the death of Prajapati, the Lord of the gods and the first sacrificer, whose dismemberment was also the birth of the world. Then the priest dies to let the fire be reborn. He dies as offering; he offers by proxy his lower life, the dross of his body, to the sacrificial flame.

The ascetic likewise is a kind of living fire, I tell W. Upon ordination, he lies on an unlit funeral bier. His marriage is dissolved, his possessions redistributed, and he is released from his duties to his ancestors. He is a dead man – but he's also become deathless, for another part of him has transcended his earthly body. He's sacrificed himself; he's a living sacrifice, a living torch, even as he wanders alone, greeting no one, asking for no alms, and showing indifference in his dealings with all things.

Rubbing himself with ashes, sitting in a thorn bush or on a bed of nails, the ascetic aims only at self-liberation, at escaping rebirth. As he starves, his soul, atman, glows brighter in his eyes. As he thirsts, his inner fire licks up to God. As his limbs atrophy, he is God alive on earth; his soul, atman, is at one with Brahman. That's why it is an honour for the householder to receive the ascetic as a guest. It is why feeding the ascetic is the greatest of boons.

Is that why he feeds me?, W. wonders. Is that why he took me in? I've destroyed everything. I've left it all behind. And am I not compelling him, too, to leave his life behind - his career, his intellectual reputation? We're wandering as ascetics, naked but for loincloths, our ricebowls our only possession. We're wandering in living sacrifice, ascetic-idiots, humiliating ourselves in service to God: that's how I see it, isn't it?

Only God can make an offering to God, I tell W. That's why the priest making the sacrifice must undergo a purification. It's why an internal purification of trusting readiness, of the immersion in meditation, must be accompanied by the renewal of the forehead mark and the washing of the mouth.

Only God may worship God; but how does one become God? By sacrifice, say the holy texts. In the public rites of the srauta, milk, curds and ghee are offered to the fire, or sometimes vegetable cakes or stalks of the soma plant instead. Sometimes an animal sacrifice is necessary; there are even human sacrifices – though its victims were set free and a proxy burned in their place.

Fire brings these offerings as smoke to the sun. And when rain comes from the sky, a kind of cycle is completed: plants grow, crops grow and the creatures of the earth are nourished. But if God is to worship God, there must be another kind of sacrifice. If God is to return to God; if that cycle, too, is to be completed, then one must sacrifice oneself.

Man is the sacrifice, say the holy texts. To light the fire as a priest is to set oneself aflame. How else is the dross of one's lower life to be burned away? How else is the altar to truly become the falcon that soars up to the heavens? Man is the sacrifice; only God can make an offering to God: then the goal of all purification must be to die for the world, to take the world into oneself and let it burn.

And it is to absorb heaven, too. For the holy texts tell us also that the gods themselves are sacrifice. The gods, too, are vessels to be smashed; they, too, must be set aflame if there is to be a sacrifice. If you see the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha. For the Hindu, the god is only a portal to God, and fire opens the door. The god is the wick and God the flame; the gods burn even as the soul of the priest springs up in the fire.

I'm offering him to the flames too, aren't I?, W. says, shuddering. His life, his whole career … Haven't I destroyed them both? It's all leading in one direction, he says. It's like The Wicker Man.