Category: W.

One day, I'll surprise you all. One day, I'll really surprise you … That's what you say to yourself in brown pub interiors, isn't it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They're full of a sense of great earthly mission. Just listen for a moment, that's what the drunk says. Listen – just listen!

And when he does? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.

Am I an idiot dreaming he's a genius?, W. wonders, or – this is unlikely – a genius dreaming he's an idiot? He looks for signs of genius in my idiocy, but sees nothing but idiocy. – 'Your idiocy runs all the way down', W. says.

But sometimes he thinks he finds cunning there, at the heart of my idiocy. A kind of idiot strategy. Am I preparing myself for the end? Is something preparing itself in me? Am I the rat, or the cockroach who will thrive after the catastrophe?

I know my time hasn't come, that's what W. believes. I'm waiting, he says, or something in me is waiting.

I send W. the creation hymn from the Vedas, one of my favourites:

There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? Was there death or immortality? Was there a sign of night and day? Who really knows?

Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. Only the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.

Ah yes, it's my sort of thing, W. says. Vague and spurious, W. says. Vague, spurious and full of pathos.

My troubles, W. says. I'd like to think I am a troubled man. My romantic troubles. My troubles at work. My life troubles. He's heard them all, W. says, and he's convinced by none of it.

They don't touch me, my so-called troubles. I like to moan and wail, W. says. In its way it's quite admirable, my moaning and wailing. The smallest thing will make me moan and wail. An imagined slight. A brusque email. A cloud on the horizon. 

In an instant, I'm wailing like an American ambulance siren. It becomes quite impersonal. It becomes the moaning and wailing of being, W. says. The moaning of a world that is as yet unredeemed.

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

In the end, no one wants to talk to me because I don't want to talk to them. They want to escape because I want to escape. I make them edgy because I'm edgy. – 'You want to escape! You want to be out of there!' Can I blame them that they want the same?

W. is always amused in those moments when the power to speak deserts me, and the other person has to guess what I want. It invariably happens when it's most urgent, and I have to be most succinct: a great stuttering and stammering. A great foaming at the mouth. – 'You can't get a word out, can you?', W. invariably says, laughing. 'My God! Gesture! Mime! What is it? More food? Something else to drink?'

You should never try and buy your own clothes, W. learned that long ago, he says. Sal buys his clothes for him, which is why he looks so natty. – 'You need a woman in your life', W. says. 'No woman would have permitted your vest phase'.

'Your vest phase', W. says, and shudders. – 'What were you thinking?' And then, 'It's not as if you have a body worth showing. You're fat, not muscly. And you're pale, you have that dreadful Northern European pallor, for all your Hindu genes'.

He remembers my excuse: my washing machine broke down. I couldn't wash my clothes! So  bought cheap vest after vest from Primark. Cheap vests, made by some third world child, no doubt, and from Primark! He remembers the bags of vests in my flat, dozens of them. Dozen of bags full of vests in military green, that cost no more than £2 each.

When it was cold, I would wear one of my jumpers over my vests, W. says. One of my golfing jumpers, not that I ever played golf. A mauve one, or an orange one. Didn't I have several lilac jumpers? Didn't I have one in coral? It was a terrible sight, W. says. A man in a vest with a golf jumper over the top.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, says W. The thought of our own stupidity for example – even that's beyond us. We'll never understand, really understand, the depths of our stupidity, W. says. Since we've failed, and could do nothing but fail, we can never really understand the extent of our failure, the extent of stupidity.

Oh he has some sense of it, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. But he's not intelligent enough! That's his tragedy, W. says. Mind you, if he were intelligent enough, wouldn't he kill himself out of shame because of his stupidity? Wouldn't he realise just how immeasurably he had failed? Ah, but if he were intelligent enough, he wouldn't be stupid, W. says.

W. has always surrounded himself with the young. After all, he's several years older than I am, he says. We're separated by almost an entire generation.

His generation, he says, still had hope. – 'The residues of hope'. Mine had nothing; hope itself was a luxury. – 'What chance did you have?', W. says.

'You don't want much, do you?', W. says. 'You don't expect a great deal'. As for him … W. comes from the last of the generations who looked for a great change, for a kind of revolution to occur, he says. – 'And it might have happened, too', he says. Didn't Godard make a film on his university campus? Oh, that was long before his time. But weren't there still communists outside the student union? It seemed like the beginning of times rather than the end of them, the endless end, W. says.

'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 philosophical oeuvres with which he is familiar. – 'You see, I know something. What do you know?' I've read about things, he knows that, W. says. I've read about ancient Greek and about ancient Sanskrit. I've read about whole philosophical oeuvres. But reading about things is not a reading of the things themselves. 

'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? – 'Secondary literature! You're always reading secondary literature! No one reads secondary literature but you'. W. is a man of primary literature, he says, and always in the original language. Primary literature, and always as obscure and half-forgotten as possible.

No more, no more. Have we really reached the end?

I remind W. of the fate of Bhisma in the Mahabharta. This wise and virtuous man had been granted the boon of deciding the hour of his own death. There he lay, on the battlefield, his body filled with arrows.

It was time to die, white-bearded Bhima thought. He'd lived a long life! He'd seen it all, even the disaster that was the battle on the Kurushetra plains. Even the darkness that was soon to fall over India.

The fighting around him stopped. His nephew, Arjuna, sought to slake his uncle's thirst by firing an arrow into the ground to let a jet of water spring into his mouth. Silence reigned over the battlefield. And in the time that was left to him, Bhima spoke.

He spoke of what he'd learned in his long life. He spoke of his horror at the battle, that set uncle against nephew, friend against friend. He spoke of what was to come, and his horror at what was to come. And then his white-haired head fell back, and death came as a sweetness to him.

What will he say?, I ask W., now the end has come, the endless end? Of what will he speak? Of love? Of friendship? Of the life of thought? He'll speak about me, says W. Of not being able to get rid of me. Of me being here, even now … How did it end up here, with the two of us? What wrong turn did he take?

A thought adequate to capitalism, to the horror of capitalism. How are we going to find it?, W. muses. A thought that is at one with the end.

The chicken won't stop, says W. The very end is endless. Dusk and no night, no midnight stillness when we might come face to face with the horror. It's moving too fast, W. says. It's dragon coils are snaking.

Hang on!, says the world. Ride! And that's all we can do: hang on, ride. What did we think: that there would be time for the reckoning? That there would be a moment that would open up before our sentences were carried out?

But our punishment was decided long before we were born. Death, death, and before we were born. Until the lives we led were living deaths. Until our life was only a dragon-coiling from death to death …

One should think, W. says, looking out to sea, like the surfers on that beach. One should inhabit what there is to be thought like a fish the sea – no, one a thought should be only a drop of sea in the sea, belonging to its object as water does to water.

Pure immanence, says W. Being thinking itself, says W. What does being think in us?, W. wonders. Don't let these monkeys think about me!, being says. Especially him, monkey boy supreme!, that's what being says, says W.

A fold of order in chaos. A pocket – temporary and fleeting – in the formless void. That's what he dreams thought to be, says W. Thought, the pocket thought forms, should itself be temporary, fleeing, and open to change. Thought should ride along chaos, not resisting it, not holding itself back, but riding with it, belonging to it as water does to water. And when it is finished – a thought, a life of thought – it should be turned back inside out like a glove, and it will have been shown to have only been made of the material of the day, which in our case is the disaster.

A thought of the disaster that was itself as disaster: will that be our contribution? Is our catastrophe only an enfolding of the catastrophe of the world?

'A feeling of perhaps still having 'friends' but no longer any 'comrades' (= fellow workers or, at the very least, comrades who give you encouragement with the idea that they are working too)', W. reads from Leiris' journal. Giacometti had just died. Bataille. Leiris only had Limbour and Queneau, but they weren't comrades, for all his admiration of them. No comrades, W. understands what that means …

What does the Hindu understand of speech, of the significance of speech?, W. wonders. Of course, you don't have to understand the meaning of the Vedic mantras, haven't I told him that? It's enough just to hear them, an indecipherable murmuring, which is why they pipe them over loudspeakers in Indian hotels. It's good luck just to be in their presence, W. says. But this means the Hindu is never addressed, he says.

Of course, friendship's never been enough by itself, for W. Or it only echoes in a direction it cannot reach. One day, there will be no friends, W. says, only comrades. He dreams of it: comrades, marching together, marching alongside one another, with no need for preliminaries.

What will they march upon? A new Winter Palace? A new Bastille? No, he only sees them marching, says W. They're not heading anywhere in particular.

W.'s reading a book of Latin philosophical phrases. – 'Ah, here's something that applies to you: Barba non facit philosophum. A beard does not make a philosopher'. What does eo ipso mean? What's the difference between modus tollens and modus ponens? – 'Tabula rasa: I know you know that. And conatus – even you must know that'.

Cynicism and opportunism, that's where it's ended up, W. says. We're all cynical, and we're all opportunists.

The rules of the game, which we're all obliged to play, are artificial. Nothing means anything – we all know that. The rules themselves are without meaning. But we must play, and that is our cynicism. We play as we are played, dice thrown across the universe …

We're players, W. says. We have to play. Flexibility, transferable skills … That we can adapt is all. That we can land right side up when we're thrown across the universe …

He's being thrown, W. says. They're about to throw him somewhere else, W. says, away from his city. He's losing his city, says W. He's losing everything.

And when he comes too, back broken, facing the sky without stars? When he awakens into a night without dreams, without rest? He'll smile and thank them all, W. says. He'll smile and thank them for ruining his life.

Our last visit to Turnchapel. Our last wander up Jennycliff. Up – to the bunker and the empty gun sockets – and then down, along the backs of the cottages, towards the path to Bovissands. Our last trip there, too, we muse, standing in the sea with our trousers rolled up over our ankles.

Ah, where can it go from here but down!, W. says. He has feeling of disaster, of imminent disaster. He's been expelled, exiled, from everything that was familiar and good. The disaster has reached him at last, even here in distant Devon. He thought he might outlive it, the disaster, but it's caught up with him now.

The stormclouds that mass in the distance are coming out to meet him. The sky's darkening, the air has grown heavy … Any moment now, the lightning will come, W. says. Any moment, and he'll go up in smoke.

We're upstairs on a bus hurtling through the countryside. Branches crash against the windows. Where are we heading?, W. wonders. Why did I want to get on this bus, which is the opposite of the bus which takes us from Cawsands to Plymouth? Whereas that bus mounts the hills and lets us see the glistening sea, this one plunges us into a tree-filled dusk, in which nothing is visible at all. Whereas that bus gives us great vistas and a feeling of space and freedom, this one robs of us of anything but our own reflections against the darkness, and the feeling of utter catastrophe.

How much further can we sink? Much further. We're in free-fall now, and all there is is falling. Free-fall, on the bus to hell, against whose windows the branches crash.

In the depths of the night, lying awake while the world is asleep, W. asks himself the great questions. Why did it all begin? Why, anything at all? It's the fact of existence that confounds him, as it has confounded so many philosophers.

But above all, it is the fact of my existence that confounds him, and that confounds him alone. Why? How? Who put me here? Who's responsible? Was it a joke? A kind of cosmic trial? And why was I placed before him? This is the question, the question of questions, W. says.

W.'s overwhelmed by work, he says, broken by it, by the prospect of it. 'Another day full of dread', he says to himself, as soon as he arrives in his office. Then he emails me: 'Another day full of dread'!

But I'm already at it, W. knows that. I'm already working, and without complaint. How am able to just get on with it?, W.'s always wondered that. We're carthorses, trudgers in the mire. But there I am, just getting on with it, despite the absurdity of it all, despite the meaninglessnesss of everything.

It must be a Hindu thing, W. says. A karmic thing. I'm working to escape the wheel of rebirth, aren't I? Or at the very least to be reborn as something better than I am.

Sometimes, W. feels a terrible sickness, he says. He wants to vomit it all up – and not just everything he's eaten, everything he's drunk. Everything: his whole life, all that he is, his past, his present. To expel it. To get it all out, all that has been, as though he were only a foreign body in his own skin.

Everything – but more still, for doesn't he want to vomit up the world, too, everything that has happened, everything that is happening, the very fact of existence? Somehow, he is responsible for it, the catastrophe of the world. Somehow it all begins with him. – 'With you', he says.

Sometimes W. wants to send up a great cry of dereliction. Not his dereliction, he says, but dereliction in general. Abandonment.

Who has abandoned us? Who has left us behind? In truth, we left ourselves behind. We deserted our duties, for what sense could we make of our duties? We deserted our responsibilities, for what sense could we make of our responsibilities?

We left it all behind, all the better to understand dereliction. For wasn't that what we wanted: to meet with dereliction in the middle, having thrown away our lives? Wasn't that the answer: to give ourselves over to dereliction so that dereliction, true dereliction, might find us?

When will it come? We're waiting. We're at the crossroads. We've come this far (we've sunk this low). Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul at the crossroads to become a great guitar player. We would sell ours, but who wants to buy them? Dereliction has deserted us – is that it? Even abandonment has deserted us – is that it?

The 80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we are driven out from Liverpool Station. It's going to be terrible. W. lived in Liverpool in the 80s, W. says. He knows what it was like here. He shudders. We're finished. Doomed. How long do you think we have?

W. feels like the boy in Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns all the way round, 360 degrees, ending up facing in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. Why can't you follow orders?, he's asked. You told me to turn, he says. And then, I don't understand, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, a voice comes. Another cadet, off camera.

His parents are dead. He's turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That's what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox and whistling, tears running down his face … I don't understand, that's all he will say. It's all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Streets boarded up. Whole sections of the city abandoned. A world without pity. Without mercy. Great walls raised against the sea from which the migrants will come (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up, melting, from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there'll be blackness everywhere. We'll die lingering deaths. We'll die in the sludge, very slowly.

I don't understand, that's what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. I don't understand.

God, your flat is filthy, W. says. You don't have any idea how to clean up, do you? W. suspects it's a Brahminical thing. I don't want to do any menial labour! I don't want to clean!

Detachment, that's what I'm cultivating, W. says. The maximum possible tension between outside (the squalor of the flat) and inside (the ultimate self, atman). I'll be like a drawn bow, ready to shoot myself towards enlightenment, W. says.

Hinduism! That's what accounts for my fatalism, W.'s sure of it. The world is all maya to me, a great illusion, isn't it? It's like a dust-storm or mirage, W. knows what I think.

Am I secretly working towards moksha, enlightenment? W.'s sure of it. I'm working in darkness to escape the wheel of rebirth.

No such escape for him, W. says. And no fatalism. Hindus are a cyclical people, he says, but time for W. is linear, and goes all the way to judgement day. And he will be judged, W.'s sure of it. Especially him. Somehow, it's all his fault.

'You were never religious, were you?', W. says. Im a Hindu!, I tell him. 'But you were never really religious, were you?'

My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It seems to bring me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don't struggle with faith, or with the idea of faith.

W.'s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It's a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn't quite know. Sometimes he feels as far from religion as possible, and the word faith is ashes in his mouth. Faith! he says, what need have I for that?

Of course, he as born a Jew – he's Jewish through his mother's line, but his father's family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase, W. remembers, at the age of thirteen. He demanded to be taken to church! And he was taken. Thirteen!, W. says. That's when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.

Since then, it's Jewish pathos he feels most strongly. The Messiah hasn't arrived, W. says. The Messiah's not a person at all. It's about time! The messianic is an epoch, W. says, though he doesn't expect me to understand that. The messianic is about politics, about society, he says, though he's sure I don't understand that, either.

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity, Herzog says, says W. It's a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world, Herzog says, says W. – 'Of course, he hadn't met you'.

Saturday night, Plymouth quayside. Don't look in their eyes!, W. warns me of the milling crowds. They're about to turn. People get glassed here all the time, W. says. – 'Do you want to get glassed?' No.

Still, we are among the people, W. says. We're in the midst of everyday life. Didn't Rosenzweig say theological problems must be translated into everyday terms, and everyday problems brought ino the pale of theology?, W. says. Didn't he say that philosophical problems must be translated into those of everyday life, and everyday life brought into the pale of philosophy?

This is where we should start, W. says, right here on the dockside! But first of all we need to drink, W. says. First of all we have to meet the everyday at its own level. Everyone's drunk, and so we too must be drunk. Everyone's lairy, so we, too, must become lairy. Everything depends upon translating ourselves into everyday terms.

He saw it, W. says later in the taxi on the way home. For a moment, he thought he found it, the interval around which speech turns. For a moment, he sensed its presence – the life of speech …

The speech of the other. The time of the other. What do these abstractions mean?, we ponder over gin in W.'s living room. It demands a new way of listening. We must no longer try to apprehend the other. We must no longer presume we have anything in common. There is no unity here. No common space. What matters is the foreignness between us, W. says. What matters is what escapes our mutual understanding.

Did we understand him?, we wonder of the babbler we met on the quayside. For what was he asking? What did he want from us? Directions? He knew where he was. Drunken bonhomie? But he could have found that anywhere. He saw something in us, W. says. We saw something in him. An interval opened. Life broken in. Were we inquired of?

Speak!, says W. Tell me something! But I can tell him nothing. The interval between us is sterile. It has nothing to do with the hope of a logic of relations that W. holds above everything. But for a moment back there on the quayside, the crowd all around us … For a moment, what did he sense? The interval spoke, says W. He heard it. Between the drunk and us. Between the two of us, drunk, and the other, also drunk …