Category: W.

W. is continually turning over in his mind something Rosenzweig wrote to Meinecke:

Cognition no longer appeals to me as an end in itself. Whereas the questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me. This is precisely what I mean by 'cognition and knowledge as a service': a readiness to confront such questions, to answer them as best I can out of my limited knowledge and my even slighter ability. You will now be able to understand what keeps me away from the university …

This is why Rosenzweig abandoned academia, W. says. He was looking for another kind of speech. He was looking to be interrupted. Henceforward, he said, he would only inquire when he found himself inquired of, that's what he said. And inquired of by people, ordinary people rather than scholars.

Ah, have we ever been inquired of?, W. says. Would we know what it meant? Interrupt me!, he cries. Go on, say something!

Speech, speech. Will we ever understand what is meant by this word? Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless, that's what Rosenzweig argues, we remind ourselves. The old thinking, as he calls it, is content to think. The old thinker is alone, alone before the timeless. But the new thinking depends upon speech, which is bound to time and nourished by time. It neither can nor wants to abandon this element, that's what Rosenzweig says.

Which means the new thinker is open not to the timeless, but to the time of the other. What does this mean? When two people speak together, they speak each in turn, that's the secret, we agree. One says something, then stops, the other something else, then stops. Conversation moves from partner to partner …

The interval is everything for the new thinker, we agree. Speech depends upon a passage from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed. It depends upon an interval, and not, then, upon the power to speak that belongs to either conversationalist …

It's not about what I say, or what you say, we agree. Which is fortunate, because we make very little sense. It's that we can be interrupted which matters. It's that speech is always fragmentary. Which means speech, in dialogue, belongs neither to one speaker nor the other.

I send W. a quotation from my reading. I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves. Who said that?, W. says. Tarkovsky, I tell him. Write it in your notebook!, says W. We're to produce a collective notebook to go with our intellectual movement, W. has decided. There are some quotations we need to keep before us.

How about this one?, I ask him, and send him an excerpt from a letter by Knut Hamsun's wife: 

he has not a single so-called friend . . . he cannot be bothered to write letters to friends, and . . . in the course of time all people have become a matter of indifference to him. This may be a fault, but it is simply how Hamsun is . . . His work is his only friend, his only love, and the rest of us just have to accept this.

It made W. shudder, he says. It's the ultimate horror, to place work above friendship, he says.

In Rosenzweig's new thinking, W. says, friendship, intellectual fellowship is everything. We have to think together, together. We have to speak, says W. The new thinking lives by virtue of another's life, W. says. Whereas the old thinking is always a solitary business, the new thinking lives through dialogue, through the chorus, W. says. And through friendship!

My Hinduism has no depth, says W. He can't really believe in it. – 'Convince me', he says. 'Convince me you're a Hindu. Of what does your Hinduism consist?'

He still remembers when I told him of my Hinduism. I'm a Hindu, I said, and he laughed until beer came out his nostrils. And 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?

Another quotation. Peter, from Bergman’s film From the Life of the Marionettes, when he discovers his wife lying murdered: ‘The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?’ What do the fragments reflect?, W. wonders. 'You', he says. 'Your face. Your immense, ugly face'.

I never read philosophy, that's what Beckett said in an interview. I don’t understand it, he said. And when they asked him why he wrote his books, he said, I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel. 

How stupid must I have been to invent him?, W., W. asks me. I might as well have invented him, he says, for all the resemblance the written W. bears to him. I made W. from my stupidity, says W. I folded him from it like a paper plane. Through a weird origami, I gave him life. And then I set him, like a paper tiger, against me.

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it: E. M. Cioran wrote that, says W. And then, We're not humble enough, Cioran's quite right. But what would it mean to be humble? What would we have to do?

W. reminds me of something Kafka was supposed to have said. We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head. So God, too, wants to die?, W. says. It's not just us? But perhaps our desires are only God's: perhaps it is only the death of God that we want to see to the end.

Our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his, Kafka was supposed to have said that, too. A bad day, a terrible day, says W. God can dream of another day, but what about us? There's plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, Kafka said, but not for us.

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W. sends me a quotation for me to keep with the others, he says.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time – is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Ah, so beautiful, so true. It's from Cesare Pavese's diary, W. says.

W.'s disgust at the appeal to the natural. Nature is unredeemed, he says. It needs speech! It needs to be spoken of!

What would a world be without speech? Madness for the individual, chaos for the things of the world and mere violence to keep order between man, that's what Rosenstock-Heussy said, says W. It's what Sorel cried on his deathbed: We have destroyed the validity of all words. Nothing remains but violence …

Nature is violence, says W. Pure violence.

I can't stand mirth. Cheerful people seem guilty to me, because they can't comprehend the mournful value of existence. I accept happiness only in children and the elderly, with all others I am intolerant. Tarkovsky said that, I tell W. Very wise, W. says. And he's quite right.

W. is reading from his notebooks.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

That's from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, he says. Morbid symptoms – is that what we are? Is that our significance? No doubt, says W. No doubt.

The chicken won't stop, says W. The crew on Stroszek hated the scene with the dancing chicken, he says. Herzog had to operate the camera himself. They'd never seen anything as dumb as that, they said, and refused to film it. Herzog tried to tell them there was something big about it. Something important. But no one would listen.

We have to develop an adequate language for our state of civilisation, Herzog said. We have to create adequate pictures, and if we don't do that, we'll die out like dinosaurs. We have to try and do something against the wasteland of images that surround us … But no one listened to him.

The crew were off for lunch, they said. We're not going to film that shit, they said. I'm going to film that shit, Herzog said, and he did. The crew didn't see it, no one saw it. But he saw it, Herzog, says W. And he sees it, W., says W.

Dance, fat boy, dance, says W. Do your chicken dance, he says. Do the funky chicken. W. likes to watch me dance, he says. It's so improbable. So graceless.

Why do you hang out with Lars?, everyone asks him. It's so he can watch me dance, W. has decided. He alone understands my significance, W. says. It's been up to him. Just watch him, then you'll understand, he says to everyone else. But they can't see a thing, W. says.  

The chicken won't stop: that's what's etched into the runoff groove of the last Joy Division album, isn't it. It's like a mantra to W. It should be pondered at length. – 'You won't stop, will you', W. says. That's part of the horror. That I show no signs of stopping. But it's part of my glory, too, W. says. Who put the coin in the slot? Who am I amusing? Him, just him, W. says. No one else.

Herzog trained that chicken, the one is Stroszek – did you know that?, W. says. For months, he would train it, withholding the food it would usually get after its dance, in order to extend the dancing period.

Herzog talks of finding images adequate to the world, W. says, to the horror of the world and the horror of the cosmos. The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand. The image of the chicken, the dancing chicken, is everything.

W. dreams of a thought that would the equivalent to that image. A thought, a single thought, adequate to the disaster, equal to it … In some sense, W. says, we'll have to exhaust thought. We have to run it ragged, right to its very end, like the car Bruno set running in circles outside the arcade. It has to run until it burns, until it catches fire. Then and only then something might happen.

What Marx should we take to the USA? Perhaps we shouldn't take Marx at all, W. says. We might get arrested at customs. We might get sent home for Unamerican activities, W. says. Perhaps we're already on a list somewhere. Perhaps they already have our photos.

Remember what happened to Stroszek and his friends, W. says. It's not as if we haven't been warned. Stroszek: didn't Ian Curtis watch the film just before he killed himself? He saw the chicken, W. says. That's why he killed himself. That chicken!, W. says, and shudders.

We have to watch Stroszek, to prepare us for our trip to the USA, and read Marx, W. says. You have to read Marx, W. says, if you're going to the heart of capitalism. The heart of capitalism, the heart of darkness, W. says. Look what happened to Stroszek himself!

What was left to him but suicide, after the collapse of his American dream? But just before he died, he fed quarters into a coin operated machine in which a chicken dance to music. After he dies, the chicken's still dancing. Still dancing, Sonny Terry's harmonica on the soundtrack …

We have to be prepared for the worst in America, W. says. For the very worst.

He was waiting for the end, but the end overtook him, W. says. That was the surprise: the end overtook him, when he thought he was perfectly prepared for it. It's a lesson, he says: the end will always come too soon. The end will be there, tapping on the window …

They'll put a sack on your head. They'll lead you through the forest. They'll make you kneel … Will you cry out for mercy? Will you accept your fate solemnly, with dignity? Will you piss and shit yourself in fear? Will you make a run for it before braining yourself on a tree?

For what cause are you dying? You don't know. You'll never understand. It's beyond you, your role in all this. What is certain is you must die. Your time has come. The time's overtaken you. You thought you had years – decades – but your time is now, you've outlived your time, this is it …

They'll put a bullet in your temple. You'll jerk backwards, fall …

W. is already falling, he says. He's already in some strange limbo. Nothing seems real. He's been numbed. Am I still alive?, he wants to ask people. Do I still exist? He stood up, sack on head, and has made a run for it, W. says.

Any moment now, he'll brain himself on a tree. Any moment, and the bullet will hit him in the back of the neck. And in the meantime? He runs with no idea where he's going. He runs, sack on head, hands tied behind his back, like an idiot …

Unemployment, that's what awaits him, W. says. The dole queue, which might as well be the queue to the knacker's yard, W. says. They might as well cook him into glue, W. says. He's finished, it's all over.

Unemployment: I'll have to prepare him for it, W. says. After all, I've spent most of my life unemployed, haven't I? I've spent most of my life either unemployed or resigned to unemployment. Even now, I'm waiting only to be made unemployed again, W. says, he knows that. I know it's my destiny: years of unemployment, a whole life unemployed …

But he got there before me, W. says, who would have thought that? He'll be there, wandering Bristol streets, drinking his way through the afternoon. He'll be there, slowly fading into the wan afternoon light …

Sometimes he thinks he should make a stand, W. says. That he'll go and live in the hills and storm the university in five years time. That he'll become a new Che Guevara, dying die gloriously, beautifully young, but of course it's impossible. He's already been defeated, W. says. He's outlived his time, and the Bristol streets are opening around him …

He'll be waiting for me to come and join him, W. says. He'll be waiting for me, tapping on my window, and whispering that it'll be my time soon.

Of course, W.'s letter of protest against his sacking would itself be grounds for sacking, he says. There's so many typos for one thing, W. says. So many poorly reasoned arguments, supported by specious or non-existent evidence: that's his letter of protest, W. says.

But it was more important to him that it was written from the depths of despair and from the heights of passion, W. says. It was more important it was a letter of the heights and the depths, which means by itself it would be a sackable offence.

The typos are magnificent, I agree. He didn't correct a single one. Not one! And he even apologised for his typos in the final paragraph, did I notice that? I did. As if it weren't possible to correct typos retrospectively! As if it would have been a compromise too far to have proofread his letter!

But then such a letter could only be written at white heat, W. says. Only from the depths of despair and the heights of passion.

W.'s throwing himself on my mercy, he says. Oh he knows I'm merciless, that I will only offer him the most grotesque parody of mercy, W. says, but that's the point. He's fully aware I'm the last person who can help him – that bringing me along to the meeting with his employers is the most foolish of ideas.

Why not take a lawyer?, I ask him. He's allowed to. No, he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape. I should just sit there beside him with spittle on my lips, he says.

Perhaps it will scare them. Perhaps they'll look upon him in an entirely different way. Did you see who he had with him?, they'll say. What he had with him? My God, we shouldn't make his life any worse, that's what they'll say, W. says. And perhaps then they'll show mercy.

He's among the lawyers now, W. says. Amongst them, intermingling with them … they're all much taller than him, he's noticed. They have deeper voices.

Hadn't I counselled him to retrain as a lawyer? It was another of my mad plans, he remembers. We were to retrain as lawyers and to set up a company to accomplish real work in the world. We'd be on the side of the poor and defenceless. We'd carry the poor and defenceless in our own arms …

But who is there to carry him now he needs support?, W. says. Who will bear his weak and fragile body? The lawyers are no use, W. says. What case does he have? How can they make sense of his plight?

I should retrain, W. says, if only to support him. I should leave my job and take on his case, it's only right. For isn't his current predicament my fault? Wasn't it entirely the result of my encouragement and misadvice? He's my charge, W. says, my ward. He's my responsibility.

He was like a mayfly of thought, W. says. A single day, that's all he had. A single day – the whole of his life – in the sun. He spread his wings, rode the thermals upwards, felt the rush of the whole landscape beneath him – all thought, all thinkers … And now it's at an end? Now his life has a thinker has passed into oblivion?

I will have to remember, W. says, that's my task. He has granted me the great task of memory, of memorialising. I'm to write the introduction to his collected works; I'm to assemble them from his extant notes, his drafts, his marginalia. I'm to leave a record of his table-talk. Because he's heading out now, into the ice, W. says. He may be some time, he says, borrowing the words of Captain Oates.

What was it all for? What sense did it make? And what sense did he make of it, his life of the mind?, W. says. And what was my role in all of this, a Brod to his Kafka? Alas, he'll never know, he says. The ice-crystals are already forming on his beard. He feels cold, slightly weepy, and wants to sink down into the snow to die …

W.'s been asked to write his story, he says. He's been asked to give his account of the whole sorry saga. He might as well send them all the W. posts from my blog, he says. He might as well let me write his saga, since I seem to know more about it, to feel more about it, than he does.

I am best positioned to record the story of his decline and fall. I am closer to it, somehow. He knows it fascinates me. He knows that it's somehow just out of my reach, the story of his brief ascent, and then his decline and fall.

When his bloody end comes, as it doubtless will, W. says, I will be there to write the obituary and the memorial essay. I will present the story of our friendship as a story of our times. I will narrate his lifestory as the allegory it has become. A story of a man cut down in his prime. A story of a man of pure heart destroyed by cynicism and opportunism.

W.'s account of his story is all the more moving because of its typos, I tell him when he sends it to me. It's like the speech of Moses, prophetic but tongue-tied. Well, he simply sat down and wrote it, W. says. He sat down, and two hours later, there it was, his testimony, the record of his downfall, in its crude and simple truth. Doubtless it will stand alongside the autobiography of Solomon Maimon as an account of a mind destroyed by external forces. Doubtless scholars will pass it among themselves to remind themselves of their comparative good fortune.

What's to become of him now?, W. says. If it wasn't for Sal, he'd simply lie down and wait for the end. Or he'd head out to seek relief from his wretchedness in the dockside bars, before stumbling into the Sound and letting himself drown.

The end has come, as he knew it would, W. says. He's set down his account of the end, of his tribulations, and now? It's up to me to tell his saga as only I know how, W. says. It's up to me to write the W.-iad, the story of his defeat and humiliation.

The axe has fallen, W. says. They want rid of him, he says, and quickly. No one's heard anything like it. Have I? No, I tell him, I've not heard anything like it. It's without precedent, W. says. They're all but running him out of town on a rail. Even I, with my Hindu fatalism, could not have suspected this.

A few weeks, that's all he has. Six weeks -seven, no more than that. It's all very well for me sitting reading Solomon Maimon in my office, but he's about to be tarred and feathered, W. says.

What's worse is that no one wants to see him. No one wants to see a dead man walking, W. says. It will remind them only of their shame and their lies. It will remind them only of the horror of their moral compromise, which even they can feel.

What would I do in his situation?, W. asks. What's the Hindu solution? He should apply for a job in the Lebanon, I tell W. He's not going to the Lebanon, W. says. He should go straight to the Lebanon, and become a scholar of Arabic, I tell him. Oh yes, is that what you'd do?, he says. I'd become a scholar of Averroes, I tell him, and write on the board from right to left. He's not going to become a scholar of Averroes, W. says

He should apply for work in Zambia or Botswana, I tell W. Would I apply for a job in Zambia or Botswana?, W. says. I applied for jobs in both Zambia and Botswana, I tell him, but fortunately I didn't need to go. And nor would I rule out Zambia or Botswana in the future, I tell him, when I, too am a dead man walking, because that time is coming, isn't it?

Zambia and Botswana are out for him, W. says. He's going to come to live with me, W. says. He and Sal. I'm going to have to support them, W. says, since it's my fault he's in this predicament. I'll have to give them my flat, so they can live as I do, in the squalor. I'll have to go and work in Zambia or Botswana, and support them.

Our lives are being destroyed, W. says, as we head back to town on the Metro. For Marx, capital expands across society in two stages, says W. Firstly, there is the formal subsumption of labour under capital, where capital takes over the existing modes of production, such as artisanal work, and extracts profit from them without changing the nature of work at all.

Here the effects of capital are purely local, and it is perfectly possible for capitalist relations to co-exist within non-capitalist modes of production. There comes a certain level of scale – a step-change, Marx calls it - of the first subsumption, when it turns itself into the second. Here, the power of capital becomes global, and not merely local.

We can no longer distinguish between society and capital. Capital invades every particle, element and moment of our lives. It extracts profits constantly, repeatedly, and without interruption. Society is capital and capital is society, and there is now no outside to capital at all.

Even in Canada?, I ask W., when we get off and head back across the moor. Oh no, probably not in Canada, says W. How could you subsume the lakes and the forests? How the Yukon itself, in all its expanse? How the teepees of the Canadians who wander through the Yukon on foot or by bicycle?

For the rest of the world, it's different, W. says. The whole of our lives have been subsumed, and we cannot think of the justification, legitimation or even sanctification of any human activity which is not immediately capitalist.

Later, we hear on the news that a body was found on the rocks, a mile or so down from where we watched the rescue efforts from the railings. A swimmer was swept away. A swimmer, a teenager, was drowned and his body washed up on the rocks, hours later.

Have they found a body? They've found no body. We gather with the other spectators along the railings at the edge of the beach. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore to where sand gives way to rock. The currents are very strong, the man next to us says. You never know where a body will end up. By the ambulance, a teenage boy with a towel around his shoulders sits with his head bent down.

We have to look at capitalism as a religion, W. says. Perhaps all our political problems are really religious problems, he says. Benjamin said capitalism is a kind of cult, W. says. It is that mysterious force that supposedly sustains our lives, and money is the god we worship.

Schuld, the word for guilt in German also means debt, W. says. Capitalism functions on credit, so we are all guilty. Debt is only the other side of credit, and it is always the debt of the poor which pays for the credit of the rich. 

Consume!: that is the unspoken religious commandment of capitalism, W. says. This commandment sustains the fantasy that the moment of paying back this debt can be endlessly postponed. Hidden within this fantasy is the real material destruction which makes endless debt possible in the short term, and impossible over the longer term.

The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression in the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards, spread out over a few hundred meters, paddle out on their floats. Sometimes they dive, and then reappear, but they've found nothing. Much higher up, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe they have special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.

The apocalypse is coming, W. says. All the signs say that. It's the real future that underlies the false future of capitalism. It is the reality of the real material destruction that underlies the infinite cycle of credit and debt …

Whitley Bay, walking by the abandoned sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. It's not like the quayside in the city, with its frenetic overdevelopment. There is no art gallery here, no music centre. Only decay. Only the signs of decay.

Deleuze says somewhere that politics is finished, W. says. It's finished! What he means is the possibility of significant political discourse is finished, despite all the noise about so-called politics. Is there not more political chatter and noise than there has ever been? But we know it barely matters if one votes Left or Right in our so-called democracy, W. says, since there is little to distinguish between the parties. Professional politicians (and politics has become a profession just like any other now) do not offer us ideas, thoughts or concepts, but only ways of managing the free market. The only difference between is the degree of this management and nothing more.

A search and rescue helicopter hovers over the sea. Someone must have gone missing. Someone's disappeared. As we draw closer, we see an ambulance on the beach, and bodysuited lifeguards running into the water with floats.

What does it mean to be on the Left?, W. asks. Does it mean anything? Deleuze says we can forget the possibility of a left wing government, but we can have an attitude that is of the left. He says that there are two types of people in this world. Those who begin with themselves (and Deleuze gestures with the same movement as he speaks), and then go outwards to their house, their street, their city, their country and so on until they reach the world. And then there are those (and he uses the opposite gesture) who begin with the world, with the periphery, and go backwards through their country, their city, their street and finally end up with themselves.

The latter is not a point of view, W. says. It is a complete transubstantialisation of the self. To be of the left is to belong to the latter. It is to realise that one's place in the world is always a usurpation of others and I am already implicated before any confession of guilt.

The yard's undisturbed, I tell W.; no evidence of the rats today. No digging in the plant pots for bulbs, no fresh droppings. And no sight of them plunging into the drain and out, or poking their noses from the black wooden box built around the pipes in the corner of the yard.

Are they dead? Or are they nesting, the three of them, in some combination working to produce the next generation of rats: imagine it! Another generation, born in the black box and crawling out! September's their last month for breeding, and there's three of them. But perhaps they're dead instead. Dead and rotting in their black box nest.

Should I open its cover? Should I hammer open one of the black planks? Are they dead? Rotting? I should smell them soon, the three dead rats in the black box nest. Three rats who crawled in, ate the poison and died. But perhaps they crawled under the flat to die. Perhaps they crawled in through the hole in the wall where the pipes enter the flat and have died there, under the floorboards.

Meanwhile, the yard, ratless. No more droppings. Fat flies that buzz around the black box – what do they mean? Dead rats, three of them, among the pipes? Dead, rotting rats?

Are the rats dying? I'm watching them from the kitchen window, I tell W. on the phone, emerging from the black wooden box constructed over the pipes that they've taken as their nest. Three rats – two large ones and one small, all brown, their heads poking out of the box to sniff the air before sliding, as though greased, into the drain. And then up again a moment later, snout first, sniffing …

They're going into the drain to drink, I think, I tell W. They must have eaten the poison the pest control man laid down in their box the other morning. It dehydrates them. They crave water. I think they might be dying now.

Rats eat in little bits, the pest control man said, I tell W. A little, and they seem to wait, and they eat a litle more. This means the poison must seem innocuous to them, neutral. It has to be kept deliberately weak. It acts slowly – over one to three days, the pest control man said. And how many days is it now?, W. asks. A couple of days, I tell him. My God, he says.

If they die underneath the flat, I'm in trouble, I tell W. Imagine the smell, rising up from beneath the floorboards … My God, says W.