Category: W.

Rat squeaks – is that what they are? Rat squeaks, says W., who is visiting. Without doubt.

We look out at the yard. My God, it's disgusting out there, says W. There are rat droppings on the concrete – black, elongated pellets, ten or twelve of them, some forming a haphazard pile, others scattered. Rat droppings! It must mean they're thriving, W. says. And they've been digging in your pots, too. They've been looking for bulbs to eat.

It was the bird feeder that brought them here, I tell W. Or rather, the bird food I intended for it. The bag of food was full of just-hatched flies, I noticed. I threw it away in horror. Swarms of flies kept from sweeping up the seed, I tell W. And that's why the rats came, I tell him, for the seed.

They would have squeezed under the gate, I tell him. It's only a two inch gap, but they can dislocate their shoulders to get in, I tell him. Another squeak, like strangled birdsong. Where's it coming from?, says W.? Inside the flat? Beneath it, I tell him. That's where they live now.

There's a five foot gap beneath the floorboards, I tell him, all the way to the mud. Once I pulled up the floorboards and shone a light down there. I saw three of them dashing into the space by the pipes where they've made their nest. Three of them, as though made of liquid, streaming back. Two little ones, and a little one, young, streaming. That's where they keep themselves, by the pipes, where they can get in and out.

What are they doing down there?, says W. Chewing, I tell him. They have to; their incisors never stop growing. If they stopped chewing, their incisors would eat through the walls of their mouth, I tell him. Imagine that.

They're chewing now, I tell W., in between squeaking, in their nest next to the pipes. – 'What do you think they're chewing?', says W. The pipes? Maybe, I shrug. But they're chewing something, theirs no question of that. They have to. Their incisors are constantly growing, I tell him. They'll grow through the roof of their mouths and through the bottom of their mouths, all the way down, through the jaw and out.

I should show him my American notebooks, says W. in the check-in queue at the airport.

Turnip greens, he reads. Big Joe Williams, he reads. Melody = bad, he reads. And one of your famous poems, W. writes. Preppies, it's called.

Tall/ sand in the hair/ white teeth/ pullovers/ deck shoes/ white shirts and blouses / yachts with white sails/ fuckers'.

Very perceptive, says W. Preppies are taller than us. They have whiter teeth – much whiter, it's dazzling. And their shirts and pullovers … It's marvellous, W. says. They're first born, as William James would say, W. says, not old and jaded like us. They're full of innocence, the salt is in their hair, they're facing the future with their caps worn backwards.

They belong on yachts, on a great fleet of yachts, we agree. They belong on the open sea, yachting along. We'd be their cabin boys, that's all we're fit for, we agree. They'd be upstairs, on the deck, and we'd be downstairs, scrubbing their things.

And then another one:

Everyone, / no matter where they come from,/ likes the same music./ The Americans like the Animal Collective. We like the Animal Collective./ Except for Jandek./ Only we like Jandek. The Americans have never heard of them.

It's true, that, says W. We asked countless people, Have you heard of Jandek?, and they always said no. – 'You told that Knoxville waiter about Jandek, didn't you?', says W. 'At great length. And our hosts. Our poor hosts! After all they did for us!'

They made us feel as though we were the most important people in the world, says W. of our hosts. Ah, the legendary Canadian hospitality. But they're stranded in Nashville, quite lost. What are they going to do?

Knoxville is a likeable city, we agree. The wide streets. The sense of air and elevation. Yee-Haw Industries, selling letterpressed posters … We feel our souls expand after the first leg of our long journey.

Of course, for Americans, our journey wouldn't have been long at all. They're great travellers. They drive from one side of their continent to the other. And then from the top of their continent all the way down.

But our hosts are exhausted. The Canadian contemplates the expanse rather than drive forth into it, they tell us. The Canadian looks to settle his soul, not to unsettle it.

As we lunch, the waiter refills our glasses with ice-water (that's what they call it over here: ice-water, not iced water, we note). He's so attentive. So unbegrudging. This is the legendary American service about which we've heard so much.

Sal tells him we have nothing like it at home. Waiting staff would put your eyes our as soon as look at you. Unless they're Polish, of course. We like the Poles of Plymouth. A gentle people, full of grace. They always travel upstairs on the bus. They like the views, the Poles.

Cormac McCarthy wrote a book about Knoxville, our waiter tells us. He's from round here. We should read The Road, our waiter says. It's great. Really depressing. The waiter tells us he wants to be a writer, that's why he's studying here. What does he want to write about? Oh, you know, everything, he says. 

I should show him my American notebooks, W. says. They're full of wisdom, aren't they? Oh you're a writer as well, says our waiter. No, he's not a writer, he's an idiot, says W.

We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us.

It's a sign that we belong to Old Europe, for all that we think we don't we agree. Imagine: there are people who have less of a relationship to history than us!

Our hosts are also people of history. They are as baffled as we are by the replica Parthenon. We take pictures of one another posing on the steps. We feel like replica Platos and Aristotles. W. says that I am a replica Diogenes, and that I should strip naked and masturbate in the sun like my forebear.

I should live the rest of my life here, he says, by the replica Parthenon in a barrel, and when George W. Bush visits to ask me what he, the leader of the free world can give me, I can tell him to get out of my sun.

At the beginning of things, I tell W. - a beginning which, in Hindu cosmology, will return after the end – Vishnu, appears in the cosmic void before his servant, Brahma, who has been charged with the task of creation. How shall I begin, Lord?, asks Brahma. Begin with a sacrifice, says his master.

But what shall I sacrifice?, says Brahma. Sacrifice me, says Vishnu. What shall I use, as the means of sacrifice – what as the knife, as the altar, the post and the fire?, says Brahman. Use me, says Vishnu. I am the offering and the reward.

What is sacrificed, then? If it is Vishnu to whom the sacrificial act is dedicated, then God has been sacrificed to God. The object and subject of sacrifice are the same. But Vishnu is also the means of the sacrifice – its knife, its altar, the ceremony itself. He is the chant and the fire, just as he is what is sacrificed and is also the presiding deity of the sacrifice. He is all those things.

But why, then, is the sacrifice necessary at all? Perhaps it is because the world, the whole world we see before us, is what is not yet sacrificed. Perhaps the world itself – all of us, all our lives – is the offering to be burned on the fire.

But even that is wrong, I tell W. For the sages tell us that the world, seen in the right way, is, in its entirety, already a sacrifice. Seen thus, all things – everything that is part of the world, and even the world itself – are already aflame. The world burns upwards to God just as God is in all things as the burning itself and the power to leap upwards.

Then perhaps we sacrifice to remind ourselves that all things are already sacrifice, and that our souls themselves are afire, licking up into heaven like flames. Perhaps it is for our sake that we sacrifice, not God's: to remind ourselves of our burning souls and of the flaming that is our world. For our sake: then God would ask us to sacrifice because we ourselves are sacrifice, and we are part of that great sacrifice that God also is.

In my best moments, I do resemble Bruno S. playing Bruno Stroszek, of Herzog's film. In my best moments, W. emphasises. Otherwise I resemble no one but myself, more's the pity.

But sometimes I achieve a kind of pathetic grandeur, W. says, almost despite myself. There I sit, in the squalor. There I am, a squalid man, amidst the squalor, a bottle and a glass close at hand, some discounted sandwich boxes lying empty around me, and I'll say something truly striking. I'll make some pronouncement. I'll speak as though from the apocalypse, W. says. I'm like a savant. It's like a possession.

Bruno Stroszek speaks of himself in the third person, that's the secret. Haven't I told W. that everyone around me ends up speaking of themselves in the third person? That's the effect I have on people, W. says. Alienation. I turn them from themselves. From their seriousness. Which can be a good or bad thing, depending. Didn't I lighten W. up? Certainly. But there's such a thing as being too light. There's such a thing as being in danger of floating away.

Stroszek. W. supposes he can only resemble Bruno's elderly neighbour – what was his name? Scheitzer. Scheitzerhund. Just Scheitz, I tell him. Scheitz had an interest in animal magnetism, W. remembers. He bothered people with it. He confused them. Just like him with his interests, which are equally improbable, equally irrelevant. Messianism – who wants to know anything about that?

What was that town they ended up in?, W. says. Railway Flats – was that it? Railroad Flats, in the middle of America, right in the middle, equally far from any coastline. And why are we going to America?, W. asks. why did we accept the invitation? Wasn't the film a warning to us? Couldn't we see how it'd end up?

W.'s favourite Hindu stories are those of tragic decline, he says. The doctrine of the Four Ages, for example, he says. He likes that. In the first Age, virtue, dharma is like a four legged cow, in the second, like a three legged one, and so on, W. says. And in our age, the lowest age, the cow can only hop about on one leg.

W. wants another tragic Hindu story, he says. This one, I promise him, will conclude with his favourite line from the Maharabharta, 'and darkness fell over India'. And darkness fell over India: that's the way to end an epic, W. says.

Years have passed since the great battle of Kurukshetra. The Pandava brothers have ruled wisely and justly for decades. Then comes word that Krishna – the avatar of the divine, who was born on earth to fight for virtue – has been killed. Krishna's death means only one thing, the Pandavas know. The third Age had be succeeded by the fourth, the lowest, the Age of Iron. Now it was time for them to renounce the world.

The Pandavas and their wife depart from their kingdom as pilgrims, dressed in animal skins, heading through the mountains towards heaven.

'Their wife – you mean they only had one wife?', says W. One wife, I tell him. Draupadi.

At some point on their journey – none of them is quite sure when – a stray dog begins to follow them at a distance. Shouldn't such an unclean beast be driven away? Let it come with us!, says Yudhishitra. Perhaps it, too, is weary of earthly existence. It seems even a dog can know the end is coming.

Their journey is a terrible one, full of dangers. The path rises steadily upwards; a blizzard sets in. Draupadi, their wife, has disappeared. She must have fallen, they lament. But how could that be? The path to heaven is a test, says Yudhishitra, the oldest and wisest of the Pandavas. You have to be without sin, pure of heart, if Indra is to carry you there in your bodily form.

Why, then, did Draupadi fall? What sin had she committed?, His brothers ask. Because she did not love her husbands equally, Yudhishitra says. Of the five of us, she favoured Arjuna.

They press on, the road leading ever upwards. Then, suddenly, the two youngest brothers, Nakula and Sahadeva, are swept away by the wind. The remaining brothers hears their cries as they fall. How could Nakula and Sahadeva deserve such a death?, his brothers ask Yudhishitra. Weren't they wholly virtuous, wholly without blame? Ah, but they were vain and proud of their looks, Yudhishitra says. That's why they fell.

The brothers press on again, as the path rises yet higher, and the whole field of the Himalayas spreads beneath them. Then, in quick succession, the great warriors Bhima and Arjuna fall from the path. Why did they fall?, Yudhishitra asks himself, the stray dog still beside him. How could his brothers have failed the test? But he knows the answer: they were too proud, Bhima of his skills with the mace, Arjuna of his with the bow. So they, too, had to fall.

'Why would you have fallen?', W. asks me. He knows why he would have fallen, he says. His stupidity, his laziness. The way he's failed his friends. He thinks of one of them who is sunk in autistic isolation, of another lost in perpetual self-doubt, and still another who has exiled himself to a culture where no one understands him.

What has he done for them?, W. laments. Nothing to make them greater. Nothing to help them. Nothing to redeem himself, in all his mediocrity. What a failure he is!, W. sighs. Ah, that's why he would have fallen. 

But then I wouldn't even have on the journey, W. says. I would never have even set out. The fourth Age, the Age of Iron would have suited me just fine, W. says. I would never have tried to leave it behind. Anyway, he says, get on with it.

On and on the path winds, I continue, struggling towards the glistening mountain peak where Indra, King of the gods, waits to transport the faithful to heaven. How strange that I have outlived Draupadi and my brothers!, Yudhishitra says to himself. How strange to be all alone!

Then he sees it: Indra's golden chariot, glistening in the distance. Heartened by the sight of the end of his journey, Yudhishitra runs up what remains of the path, the stray dog behind him. Indra stands before him. Will you take me to heaven, Lord?, asks Yudhishitra. You may come with me, Indra says, but your dog may not.

But I have taken the dog under my protection, Yudhishitra says. He and I are the only survivors, and he has been my loyal companion. Could he not accompany me for the final stage of my journey? But Indra shakes his head.

Loyalty, W. says. He understands that even as he lacks it. Have I been following him on his philosophical journey? Is he leading me upward, onward, against all my instincts, which are taking me irrevocably downwards and backwards?

Then a thought horrifies him: has he been following me, albeit not on a philosophical journey, but on an anti-philosophical one? Is the road upward – his road – really only a road downward – my road? Is his road onward leading hm only on my road backwards? Anyway, go on.

Without this dog, I continue, I will not enter heaven, says Yudhishitra, with great firmness. At that moment, a miraculous transformation occurs. In place of the dog, there stands the god Dharma, the very incarnation of virtue. Yudhishitra bows his head. Indra, too, bows his.

I was testing you, Yudhishitra, says Dharma. Because you would not relinquish your protection of the least creature, I know your virtue. You are worthy of entering heaven.

Yudhishitra leaves the earthly domain behind in Indra's chariot. How glad he is to have escaped the Age of Iron! How glad to have left behind a world with no avatar to steer it towards virtue!

The gates of heaven open before him, and Yudhishitra is carried into the light. For a time, he stands quite dazzled. But when his tired eyes adjust to the light, he is horrified by what lies before him. His former enemies – the very foes he and his brothers had destroyed at the battle of Kurukshetra - laugh and feast at great tables, whilst his brothers and his wife are nowhere to be seen.

Draupadi and your brothers are in hell, atoning for their sins, Indra says. We are all sinners, Yudhishitra thinks to himself, and perhaps each of us must spend a little time in hell atoning for our sins. But why, then, are our enemies, the very enemies of dharma, as Krishna called them, feasting in heaven? 

Has Indra gone mad? Does Krishna's death mean the end of justice in heaven as well as earth? It is not only Kings who rule unwisely in the Age of Iron – gods, too! It seems as though Kali, the lord of confusion, has taken the place of Dharma himself.

Take me to my wife and my brothers, Yudhishitra says to Indra. Take me to hell.

Hell, says W. That's what happens when friend turns upon friend. Disloyalty! Careerism! Didn't I send him a print by Daniel Johnson called In Hell There Are No Friends? – 'No friends!', says W. 'Or only friends like you'.

Hell is a fearsome place, I continue. It reminds Yudhishitra of the last days of the battle at Kurukshetra, when blood and gore covered the battlefield and smoke rose from countless fires. He hears voices crying out for the misery to end. He hears voices lamenting their eternal damnation.

This is what the world itself will become, he thinks to himself, in the last of the Ages. Strife and chaos are everywhere. Who now can remember the rituals surrounding the sacrifice? Who the very name of God?

At last, he hears the voices of his brothers among the hubbub. He hears Draupadi, crying in pain. He's found them, and is glad. Will you return with me to heaven?, Indra says. It is where you belong. No, says Yudhishitra. It is better to remain in a hell of good souls than a heaven of evil ones. Here I will stay.

Then, in a flash, Krishna himself, now in his spiritual form, and in whom Yudhishtra can see the whole universe and all the gods, appears before him. The Pandava falls to his knees. Around him – another miracle - what was hell is now heaven. His brothers and his wife feast and laugh, and there is no sign of their former foes. 

That was your last test, Krishna tells him. You have shown yourself to be truly virtuous. And then – in a moment unprecedented in the Maharabharta – he bows to Yudhishtra in tribute to his dharma, divinity bowing to humanity, the last avatar to the last virtuous man. And then come the closing lines of the epic, the most moving of all: and darkness fell over India.

'And darkness fell over India', W. says. 'You were born'.

Redemption, says W. when I return from the bar. That's what the new atheists refuse to grasp.

The peculiarity of the Jewish religion (and by this he means the religion of Cohen and Rosenzweig), W. says, is that it is immediately and directly ethical and political. The idea of God is not first of all metaphysical, from which an ethics or a politics can be deduced. Its only meaning is ethical and political, from which the shortcomings of metaphysics can be deduced.

What the new atheists entirely miss, W. says, is that religion is not a metaphysical affair. It's about ethics!, says W. Politics!

The highest expression of Judaism lies in the Messianic Idea, where social justice comes to the world as a whole. The idea of the Messiah in Judaism is always a social and political vision of the world, as opposed to the personal and individual viewpoint of the idea of the Messiah in Christianity, W. says.

It is the hope that the past and the present might be redeemed in the future, that world history will not be merely the repetition of the same violence and injustice against the weak and oppressed, W. says. It's the hope that the present, and the conditions that hold sway over the present, will not be endlessly repeated.

The future might irrupt at any moment; the present might be broken from the past of which it appears to be an indefinite continuation: that's what redemption means, says W. That's what religion means, he says.

He'll tell me where philosophy goes wrong in dealing with religion, W. says over pints at The Trout. The problem must be understood from the perspective of Judaism, and in particular the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig, he says.

Redemption for the Jew, says W., doesn't lie ahead of time, in some distant future, but is already within the present, deep inside it. What matters is our relation to it. The world to come is not a utopia, if we mean by that word a world which is different from our own, made from different material and reality, but it is the same world related to in a different way.

Everything is about relation, says W. very emphatically, the logic of relations. That's what Rosenzweig takes from Cohen when he writes about the three elements of religion, God, man and world, which correspond with the three points of triangle. We can certainly think these elements abstractly, but we cannot live them so. They only have a lived religious meaning in their relation to one another.

Religiously, therefore, you can only testify to the correlations between them, such as between man and God, God and world, or man and world, but never man, God or world in abstraction, W. says. That's how metaphysics tries to deduce them, man, God and world, as abstractions, as though these terms were not relata but substances in themselves that one could prove in isolation. But this is where metaphysics goes wrong, W. says. And it's where the new atheism that springs from metaphysics goes wrong.

The new atheists mistake religion for what philosophers have made of religion, W. says. They mistake it for the religion of metaphysics, which is to say an entirely philosophical sense of religion.

Metaphysical philosophy, as in Plato's idea of the Good, seeks a justice beyond time, W. says. Religion seeks a justice in time. Eternity is in time, that's what religion says, says W.

Religion breaks with the perpetual flow of time, W. says. It's conception of the future is not merely as the continuation of the present. It's not an indefinite series of now-points stretching into an imperceptible beyond, whose eternity is merely additive. Religion – and here W. means Judaism, and especially the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig - is the active intervention of the future that illuminates the present in its totality.

For the Jew, the future is not swept away in the great river of time, W. says. Rather, it calls to an end the illusion of its interminable neverendingness, which conceals only the entropy of time. Eternity is not a moment outside of time, banished to the endless cycle of 'before' and 'after', but enters into time by directing it towards justice and peace.

The new atheists understand nothing, W. says as we head towards The Trout. But what can you expect? They've read nothing, they know nothing, and especially concerning Judaism. And especially concerning the Judaism of Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says.

Religion is not a matter of a world beyond this world, W. says, which is best left to philosophers and metaphysicians, but the world as it currently is. As it is! The world here and now. This very instant! But only insofar as it harbours redemption, W. says. Only insofar as it is close to eternity.

For the Jew, says Rosenzweig, the world is always double. Every relation to something in the world, to a 'this', is also a relation to a 'that' in a world to come.

The present and the future worlds are not separate or divided from one another, as though the future were something that took place along the lines of the present although more distantly – as though the present were only a journey into the future that was always open and indefinite.

Rather, the future of redemption exists alongside the present, as a moment within or deep inside the present. Thus, in blessing things, the Jew is turned in two directions at once: towards this world in which things are used and consumed, but also to that world to come.

'What kind of person were you in your warehouse, in your former life?, W. wonders. What did they make of you back there?'

He can see it in his mind's eye, he says: I was everyone's monkey, everyone's jester. I was the everyone's houseboy, the slave who danced in his chains whilst they prodded me with sticks, W. says. I was a dancing bear, a grinning court dwarf …

How I must have loathed it, W. says. How keen I most have been to escape! 'You longed to stand upright. You longed to have your blinkers removed and your iron collar unlocked … And you longed for the bit to be removed from your mouth …'

It's no wonder I am an apocalypticist, W. says, a resenter. It's no wonder I can only speak in great generalisations, in great dark gusts …

'For a long time, you couldn't speak. For a long time, no one would listen to you. And now …'

Only W. listens to me, he says. Only he listens, really listens, to what I have to say. It's like a distracted buzzing in his ears, W. says. It's like a humming on the edge of his awareness. I speak as a solar wind sweeps through empty space.

Of course, I don't know what I'm saying, not really, says W. I'm not really aware. I'm like a witchdoctor whose eyes have rolled backwards in his skull. I'm like a pentecostalist writhing on the floor. And nor can he, W., really understand what I'm saying. It's import. It's secret significance.

Sometimes W. feels as though he is the Pythia to my Oracle. He asks questions of me, but he can't understand the answers. He has to interpret them in his own way, W. says. I am, for him, a sign to interpret.

We are ferociously religious, says W., quoting Bataille. Are we? Oh yes, W. says, 'especially you. Especially you!' That's why he hangs out with me, W. says, he's sure of it: my immense religious instinct, of which I am unaware.

It's all to do with my intimate relationship with the everyday, W. says. It's to do with my years of unemployment and menial work, W. says.

When he thinks of religion, he immediately thinks of me working in my warehouse, he says. He immediately thinks of me, in the warehouse, with no hope in my life.

Only the hopeless can truly understand the everyday, W. says. Only they can approach the everyday at its level.

Ah, the banality of my life! The banality I've experienced! The despair! 'Your forklift truck training. Your motivational team meetings …' Why didn't someone put me out of my misery? Why didn't I book yourself into a suicide clinic?

He imagines me, he says, like the chimp who is teletransported in The Fly and becomes a singled mass of bones, flesh and fur. Still twitching, says W., still cooking and emiting a little gasping noise. He imagines me as one of the strange figures of Bacon's Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, he says, trussed up, its wings severed, making what he imagines is a subdued whining.

Someone should have battered me to death, W. says. My body should have been sawn into pieces and thrown into the bushes …

Ah, but that was the my encounter with religion, unbeknownst to me, W. says. Religion has to do with the everyday, W. says. Didn't I keep photocopied pictures of the Hindu gods in my cubicle? Weren't they blu-tacked to my filing cabinet and overdesk cupboards? Ah, the pity, the horror, says W. The pity and the horror!

There's nothing more infuriating than the new atheists, says W. as we walk through the Oxford Meadows. Nothing worse than what they take religion to be.

Belief in a world beyond this world has nothing do with religion, W. says. The world beyond is the business of metaphysics! The religion of philosophy: that's metaphysics. Whereas philosophy conceives of religion as an illusion, wish fulfilment or hallucination, metaphysics itself is a form of religion, W. says. Whereas philosophy has characterised itself as sober, real and objective over against the illusion of religion, metaphysics itself is a form of illusion, and religion has to do with what is sober, real and objecive, W. says, he's quite certain.

The true object of religious belief has always been this world, the world as it currently is, W. is certain of that. It's philosophy that got it wrong. And it's philosophy that infests our current understanding of religion.

Of course, by religion, he has in mind Judaism, W. says. And by Judaism, he has in mind the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig, he says. If only the new atheists could read Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says. If only he could read, really read, Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says. He's on the brink of it, W. says. He's on the brink of religion, real religion, which is only interested in this world.

Hindu stories!, W. says. I am to tell him another. I take him back to the great battle on the plains of Kurukshetra, and of Krishna's strange role in advising the Pandavas to break the rules of war.

The thirteenth day of battle saw Arjuna's son killed by Jayadratha. The great war leader vows that he will avenge his son's death by sunset on the next day, or throw himself into the funeral pyre.

Hearing this, his enemies set six of their greatest warriors the task of guarding Jayadratha. Try as he might, Arjuna could get no closer to his foe. In the last moments of the afternoon, with the rules of war dictating that all fighting stop at sunset, there seemed no choice but for Arjuna, leader of the Pandava armies, to follow his son into death.

Seeing his plight, Krishna, the King who became Arjuna's charioteer, takes action. This avatar of God, who participated in the battle on condition that he did not fight, lifted his chakra over the sun like a great cloud. Night seemed to fall all at once. The six warriors guarding Jayadratha took off their armour and turned to head back to the camp. Strike!, said Krishna, and Arjuna loosed the arrow that killed his enemy.

'What's a chakra?', says W. 'Do you have a chakra?' And then: 'go on, get on with it'.

On the fourteenth day of battle, I continue, Yudhishthira, the oldest of the Pandavas, makes a terrible mistake, issuing a challenge to the great warrior Duryodhana. He promises that if he defeats any of the Pandava brothers in single combat, then their armies will stop fighting.

Duryodhana chooses to duel with the mighty Bhima who, it quickly appears, is no match for his opponent as a warrior of the mace. What, then, is to be done? All seems lost.

Once again, Krishna steps into the fray. Like a boxing coach at the end of a round, Krishna advises Bhima during a break in combat to watch for a moment when he might strike at his opponent below the waist.

Bhima is aghast. That would be to break the rules of war! How could he maintain any virtue as a warrior after such an act? He has no choice, Krishna says, because of his older brother's wager. The Pandavas must not lose. And so Bhima watches for his moment, strikes, and his enemy falls dead.

'Anything goes!', W. says. 'My God, you Hindus!' And then: 'carry on'.

On the seventeenth day of the war, I continue, Krishna intervenes again. All are weary; bodies lie everywhere. The wounded cry out. The battlefield is slippery with blood. Karna, now leader of the enemy armies, has to dismount from his chariot in the midst of combat to free a wheel that has become stuck. According to the rules of war, no one should attack a dismounted chariot warrior. But Krishna tells Arjuna that attack him he must; Karna's might and leadership is such that the Pandavas will only lose against the army he commands. And so the great archer shoots Karna dead. 

Why did Krishna, an avatar of God, counsel his friends to act dishonourably? Why, when he had accepted a position as a lowly charioteer, did he advise the Pandavas to break the rules of war? How can a lie be superior to the truth?

Some say Krishna had his eye on a greater duty, a higher dharma, than that which ruled men on earth; others that the enemies of the Pandavas deserved nothing else: weren't they unrighteousness, adharma, incarnate, no matter which men of virtue fought amongst them?

Others still say that the battle marked the transition from a higher to a lower Age – doesn't the Mahabharata end with the words, 'and darkness fell over India'? – and that cynicism and opportunism were the only means left. This is an age of lies, the truth has become lost, promises mean nothing, virtue has disappeared …

'You Hindus are so fatalistic', W. says. 'The world is illusory to you, isn't it? You can do anything you like. Nothing really matters'. Religion, for W., must take a stand against cynicism and opportunism, in this world, the only world, if it can do nothing else.

Hindu stories! Hindu stories!, W. cries as the bus makes its way through the night to Nashville. I'll tell him a great one, I promise, the greatest one of all.

The Maharabharta, the great Indian epic, tells of a battle between two great armies, many of whom knew and loved one another in peacetime. Uncle was set against nephew; friend was to fight against friend. These were the end of times; this was the last battle, or rather, the battle that would set the paradigm of everything to come, in this, the last and lowest of the great Ages.

Arjuna, the great archer and leader of the Pandavan army, felt unable to fight. Why should he kill members of his own family? Isn't that a great sin against dharma, duty? He throws his bow aside and he sinks down in melancholy. 

Krishna, a king in his own right, but who has agreed to participate in the war only as Arjuna's charioteer, begins to speak. Only the atman, the absolute self is permanent, says Krishna; the body is doomed to die. The soul outlives the bodies it puts on and then discards them like worn-out garments. As such, neither the living nor the dead deserve our grief; Arjuna has not understood what is ultimately real.

Krishna now proceeds to teach the wisdom of Yoga, which points a way beyond karma, beyond the path of action, and beyond the duty, dharma, that enjoins one to work. The wise man, the true Yogi, acts without desire, in pure detachment. Free from earthly passion, untroubled in the midst of woe, he draws his senses from the world as a tortoise draws its limbs into its shell. In this way, the Yogi is close to the eternal soul, to atman, and thus to supreme happiness.

Does this mean Arjuna should become a Yogi? Should he relinquish the world and follow the path of contemplation? Action is necessary, Krishna says. One must act, even as all work causes bondage. One must act, but in view of the good of all – of the cosmic balance of the whole.

'What's your dharma, do you think?', W. says. 'Have you set the universe into imbalance?' I've set him into imbalance, there's no question of that, W. says. Him, his career, every aspiration he's ever had … 'Anyway, go on'.

Now, I continue, the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the Lord, begins to soar. Krishna explains it was he who taught these doctrines to the ancients, including Manu, who formulated the laws under which all Hindus should live. He was at the beginning, and he will be there at the end.  

At this moment, Krishna reveals his true identity to Arjuna: He is an avatar of God, being reborn - as many have been reborn before him – to protect the good and to destroy the wicked. He has lived through many births, reappearing to teach Yoga when the sacred wisdom seems to have been lost.

Then Krishna, though a man, is also God. And as God, he explains, he is also all things in the universe.

What does this mean?, Arjuna wonders. What does it mean that Krishna is God, and as God, everything? He asks his charioteer whether he can see him as he really is. Krishna grants him his wish. Arjuna sees the entire cosmos turning within Krishna's body. He sees the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He sees, in the fire, a million divine forms, and the manifold forms of the universe united as one.

And there too he sees the battle on the Kurukshetra plains, pre-ordained and necessary for the balance of the cosmos. He sees friends and relatives on both sides; he sees the ones who will die and the ones who will live.

And he sees that the battle is part of the great sacrifice that is the universe also is. The battle is part of God, as all things are part of God. It is part of Time, which destroys all but also lets the new emerge the ashes of destruction. This is what is revealed in Krishna's celestial form.

Now Arjuna can see his actions in a clear light. He picks up his bow and remounts his chariot. Krishna blows his conch, and the battle began.

'What does your celestial form look like?', says W. – 'Go on, show me'. Actually, he thinks he's already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. – 'Your vast, white belly. Your flabby arms. The trousers that billow round your ankles …' What does he see turning in my body? A vast quantity of alcohol and discounted sandwiches.

Whose avatar are you?, says W. Who caused you to appear? The avatar of shit. The avatar of obesity …

He sees more, W. says. He sees all the people I've wronged, for thing, as well all the people's he's wronged. He's sees the sins we have committed. He sees the carbuncle of our stupidity swelling from the plains. He sees the winds of our stupidity stirring up the deserts of our ignorance.

And now he sees more still. W. has a vision of the apocalypse itself. Fortresses spring up in the dust. The desert grows, the scorched earth where nothing will grow and nothing can live. Great wars between nations, and when there are no more nations, a war of all against all. 

And what's this? What final horror? He sees our very friends turning upon one another. Our friends, our dear friends, turning one upon the other! It's all my fault, he says. He can tell.

Can't he see in me, the decline of all things? Can't he see Time itself as entropy and dissolution? Can't he discern the boiling sea and the burning skies? And isn't that the earth itself, a fireball plunging through space?

Now what?, W. says. Is he going to blow his conch? Am I? Ah fuck it, he says, and we go back to looking out of the window.

Tell me a Hindu story, says W. Okay, then.

Doubtless the battle of the Mahabharta is meant to stand in for other kinds of battle. Didn't Ghandi say just that? Life itself is a battle, and full of injustice and cruelty. Then the story of the Pandavas, who, because of injustice, led their armies against their enemies has a spiritual significance, for doesn't it dramatise the ongoing struggle for the rule of goodness, of duty, dharma, as the Indians might put it?

But dharma, too, is subject to decline; the doctrine of the Four Ages confirms this. And so when we read of the conduct of the Pandavas, guided by Krishna (who has accepted the position of charioteer, refusing to fight directly) we should not be surprised if some of their actions are less than righteous. For doesn't Krishna guide them into breaking the all-important rules of war? They break other rules, too …

The battle on the plains of Kurukshetra set family member against family member, friend against friend, pupil against teacher. I'm not sure how Drona, the teacher of the Pandavas, end up standing against them in battle. Of warriors, he was among the most feared; not even the gods could defeat him so long as he held a weapon in his hand.

When he saw his side was facing defeat, Drona became furious enough to use the murderous and terrifying brahmastra, the greatest weapon of the day. Now he was truly invincible, destroying whole divisions of the Pandavan armies.

What to do? Krishna tells the Pandavas that Drona can only be killed if he lays down his weapons. But how can he be made to do that? Drona would do so only if he heard his son Ashwatthama is dead, Krishna says. For his son was the very meaning of his life, the very reason he relinquished a brahminical life in order to became a warrior.

Krishna, the avatar of God, comes up with a ruse: someone should lie, Krishna says. Someone should tell Drona that his son is dead. When he heard this, Yudhishthira, the oldest and most virtuous of the Pandavas, the son of Dharma himself, was horrified. How could he, or any of his brothers, lie to their former teacher? How could they allow themselves to be tainted with dishonour?

But Krishna was insistent. Wait much longer, he said, and Drona, in his rage, would destroy the army of the Pandavas. And so the mighty Bhima, Yudhishthira's younger brother, locates an elephant called Ashwatthama that belongs to his own armies and strikes him dead with his mace.

Ashwatthama is dead!, Bhima cries out to Drona. Not believing him, Drona asks Yudhishthira whether this is true. His former pupil, incapable of lying, cries out that Ashwatthama has been killed, adding in an inaudible whisper, Ashwatthama the elephant. Drona, as Krishna predicted, lays down his arms in despair. The former Brahmin, the teacher of the Pandavas, allowed himself to be beheaded on the fifteenth day of battle.

What's it all about?, W. says. He thought Krishna was the avatar of God or something – hadn't I told him that? Some say he was serving a higher duty, a higher dharma, I tell him. Others that the third Age had given way to the fourth, and there was nothing left to him but cynicism and opportunism.

W. will have none of talk of a higher dharma, he says. Religion is about seeking justice in time, in this world, not outside of it, he says. All this fatalism, he says. Cynicism! Opportunism! Religion should have nothing to do with that, W. says.

For him, says W., my Hinduism emerges most strongly in my Hindu stories. He always asks for them when we go travelling. In airports, for example. On long train journeys. And tonight, sitting on the floor of the bus station in Memphis, he demands to hear another.

He wants to hear a story of decline, he says. W. always wants to hear stories of decline. He's never been so moved as by the closing words of the Maharabarata: 'And darkness fell over India'. Imagine that!, says W. What a way to close an epic! But of course, that's when it began, I've told him, the Age of Iron, the lowest in the cycle of the Four Ages. 'Tell me again!', W. says. 'Tell me of the long decline!'

In the Age of Gold, I tell him, every living creature was content; there were no differences between them – no high born or low born. There was no hatred, no weariness. No shelter was necessary – one lived in the mountains or in the sea; every creature enjoyed an equally long lifespan. Heaven and earth were one.

In the Age of Silver, differences began to appear between creatures; unhappiness began, weariness and nostalgia. Rain fell; it was necessary to take shelter in the trees, and lifespans declined by a quarter. Furthermore, morality began to atrophy as heaven and earth came asunder. Humans now had to take on duties, initiating sacrifices in order to make gifts to the gods in heaven.

In the Age of Bronze, fear appeared for the first time. Warlords sheltered humans behind great walls. Cities sprang up on the plains. Lifespans fell a further quarter. Lies became become common. Virtue guttered like a candle flame in a draft and threatened to disappear. Heaven and earth had never seemed farther away. But still there were sacrifices in which gifts are given to the gods.

In the Age of Iron, our age, which began in the times of the Mahabharata, power is all, war is all. Honesty and generosity reside only with the poor, who flee the city to hide in the valleys from the warlords. Nobility gives way to the rule of money. Everyone dies young: in time, none will live longer than 23. Drought will lie upon the land. People will starve. Animals will crawl to their death. Nothing will grow on the plains, and the forests will turn into deserts. The oceans themselves begin to dry up. The very name of God will be forgotten, and sacrifices cease entirely.

And then what?, W. asks. What comes next? The Age of Iron will last for many thousands of years, I tell him. And then? Then Kalkin, the last avatar of Vishnu will appear, set to restore the world. He'll ride a white horse and wield a fiery sword. And he'll perform the sacrifice that destroys the world and lets a new one rise up in its place. And so the whole cycle will begin again.

The Hindu always thinks in cycles, W. says. – 'You're a cyclical people'. He, as a Jew and a Catholic, is a linear person. The apocalypse, for W., promises redemption. For the Hindu, the apocalypse will seem only a new beginning.

No doubt this captures something very different about us, W. says. – 'Can you really – really – understand the horror of the apocalypse? And can you really – really – understand the glory of redemption?' For the Hindu, the apocalypse has already happened, as it will happen again. Kalkin has already redeemed the world, as he will again. – 'What can you know of the End Times?'

It's what he's long suspected, W. says. I see nothing but chaos and degradation all around me, W. knows that. Nothing but perversity, greed and conflict, but it doesn't touch me, not really. Even our age, the worst of all, will see the birth of another of God's avatars, I've that consolation.

But then W. has the Messiah!, I tell him. Ah, but the Messiah is very different to Kalkin, W. says. Besides, Messianism is best understood in terms of time, not some idiot on a horse. He'll explain that to me another day, W. says.

Sacrifice exists for itself in Hinduism, independently of humans, and even independently of gods, that's what I told him, W., and he often ponders it.

What does it mean? Either way, what matters is to become the sacrifice, I've told him. What matters is to awaken the highest Self, Atman.

Is that what I attempt to accomplish in our presentations?, W. wonders. Is it to sacrifice – the burning nature of all things – I aspire in my ruination of my life? Undoubtedly.

But W., too, is being caught in the sacrifice. What's happened to him since he took up with me? He's going down, everyone has told him that. He's be warned! Reprimanded! Don't hang out with Lars: the advice has been quite categorical.

Do I want to sacrifice him, too? Will he be cast upon the sacrificial fire?

Why do I want to humiliate myself?, W. wonders. Why, over and again? – 'Your papers. Your books …' It's a mystery to him.

Is it masochism? Undoubtedly. But this masochism itself has a source. It's Hindu, W. says. It must be.

Didn't I tell him one fevered night about the centrality of sacrifice in Hinduism? Of the centrality of sacrifice and self-sacrifice? Hasn't he heard me make febrile connections between Durkheim, Mauss and the Vedas?

Light the sacrificial fire, in the Hindu religion, and it is you yourself you set aflame. You sacrifice yourself, but this reveals the continual sacrifice that is your Ultimate or Highest self, Atman.

The Atman itself is sacrifice: didn't I tell him that? Then sacrifice is not only a matter of destruction. Didn't Prajapati, the lord of the gods, create the world by dismembering himself in sacrifice? Didn't the world come into existence only as he reassembled himself in sacrifice?

Now he understands, W. says, or he thinks he understands: my life, the disaster of my life, is an attempt to belong to the sacrifice.

Not to know your own idiocy, that's the greatest curse, W. says. Not to know it – to take yourself for a non-idiot: there's nothing worse.

My case, in this regard, is interesting, W. says. Do I know my own idiocy? Do I take myself to be a non-idiot? Neither. In some important way, I've escaped idiocy. It's almost mystical, W. says. – 'You're indifferent to what people think of you – look at the way you dress. But you don't take yourself be better than them. Or worse. Or anything'.

How many times has he watched me humiliate myself in public? How many times has he been implicated by this humiliation himself? On some level, W. supposes, he wants, as I seem to, to be humiliated. Is it because the world, for us, is nonsense? Is it all maya? Yet W. still wants to intervene. He still gives presentations, as do I. What is it we're looking for?

He wants to go back to his room for a nap, W. says. This is always his intention. An afternoon nap! A power-nap, as he calls it. He learned about it from a learned lecture at the university. Sleep for 20 minutes, and you fool the mind into thinking you've been asleep for much longer. 20 minutes! That's all he needs to regain his composure, W. says.

But I never let him nap, W. says. In fact I scorn his desire to nap and even the very notion of a nap. I keep him up all night with my inanities, W. says, and then I keep him awake all day with more inanities.

Of course, he's being unfair, W. agrees, as he is the night-owl in our friendship: he is the one who insists on staying up later than anyone, of following the night through all the way until dawn. How many nights have ended for us just as dawn was brightening the sky, and the first birds were starting to sing? How many nights with Satantango on the TV and The Star of Redemption open on the desk?

W. is a man who wants to see the night through he admits. But the afternoon … that's my time, W. concedes. That's when I come into my own. When everyone around me's tired and can put up no defence. When everyone's too tired to make me shut up, that's Lars-time, W. says. The afternoon: it's when I'm at my weakest and he's at his strongest, W. says. That's when I can really get going. It's when I wear everyone out.

I've always feared the afternoon, of course, that's what I've told him, W. says. He's always been struck by that: for him, the afternoon is a time of repose, of the gathering of strength, but for me, it's a time to fear.

It must be my years of unemployment, W. says. Didn't I say my afternoon sagged like a drooping washing-line? Didn't I complain of the eternullity of the afternoon, of its infinite wearing away? It was post-Neighbours time, the afternoon, that's what I told him. Post This Morning, post Vanessa Feltz, and deep into the time of Amercan cop-show repeats.

Colombo-time, W. says, I could never bear that, could I? Instead I go out for walk, that's what I told him. Instead, it was time for a cycle. Anything to be active! Anyting to have something to do! I'd head up to Tescos for a £1 box of sushi, wasn't that it? I'd head into the library for another video, all the time full of fear, all the time fearing – what? How did I put it?

It's no wonder I'm no night-owl, W. says. No wonder that I'm always worn out by dinnertime. Don't I have to revive myself, whenever I visit, with a fourpack of Stella and some pork scratchings? Isn't that always my pre-dinner snack?

W., meanwhile, would have been refreshed from his nap, if I'd allowed him to sleep. He would have come downstairs, a man refreshed, reborn, having had a power-nap, he says. But instead, I always insist on conversation, W. says. I always insist on wearing him out, he lying on the sofa, I sitting up at the table. I always insist we make some plan or another, W. says.

It's always planning-time, world-conquest-time, W. calls it. I have to pretend to some kind of hold on the future, W. has noticed. It's like a climber throwing up a grappling hook, or Spiderman swinging by his squirted webs. I'm never happy in the moment, W. says. I'm never happy in the belly of the afternoon.

W. always walks slowly, measuredly. – 'Slow down!', he tells me. I know nothing of the art of the stroll, W. has always said. I know nothing of the pleasures of the flaneur. A free man should always walk slowly, the Greeks said that, says W. The slave hurries, but the free man can take all day.

We walk slowly in the Spring air. Crossing the railway bridge, we see the river has burst its banks. The meadows are flooded. A  film of water through which clumps of hedgerow poke. Horses wade. What are we going to do?

We decide to take the long route, by road. As we walk, W. asks me about my latest researches and tells me about his. – 'What have you found out?', he asks me. Nothing! Very little! No surprise there, says W. He, on the other hand, has found out a great deal. He's been reading voraciously – voraciously – in the Hebrew literature, and, on the other hand, deepening his study of mathematics.

The trick is, he tells me, to spend immense amounts of money on your mathematical books, so you guilt trip yourself into reading them. £130 – that's how much he spent on Cohen's The Principle of the Method of Infinitesmals and its History. £210 – that was what Mathematics and Theory of Platonic Ideals set him back.

Of course, I'm content to read everything online, W. says. I don't know what it means to handle a volume. And besides, old books, with their learning, frighten me, he knows that. Old hardbacks with scholarly footnotes. Old libraries – what do I know of them? I'm a man of the new age, W. says, just as he a man of the old age. He's an anachronism, W. says, he knows that, and I am a harbinger.

These last few years, thought, the capacity to think is retreating from W. He's losing them one by one, his faculties, the organs of thought …

Species trapped on islands see changes in scale. They can become large – grotesquely large, says W., with giant tortoises and the like and Komodo dragons. Or they can become small – minaturising over the generations, W. says, like that species of human who lived until recently on that remote island. What were they called?

Homo Floresiensis, I tell him, after the name of the island, Flores. They shared their island with pygmy elephants and giant rats, I tell him. They hunted the rats on the back of pygmy elephants, or the pygmy elephants on the back of the rats, one of the two, I tell him.

Homo Floresiensis! They had great flat feet like yours, W. says, reading Wikipedia, and an improbably small brain, no doubt like yours. And they murmured rather than spoke. They whistled and hooted, just as I am a whistler and hooter.

I've become a Homo Floresiensis of thought, W. says. It's terrible. Didn't I used to appear intelligent? Even W. is forgetting. That's how it seemed, he says, improbable as it sounds. And now?

It's your flat, W. says. The squalor of your flat. It's the squalor of your life, your isolation, which is the equivalent of the island of Flores. But haven't I become larger rather than smaller? I'm like one of those giant rats, W. says. He's going to climb on a pigmy elephant and hunt me.

W. too is becoming a Homo Floresiensis of thought, that's what he fears. Isn't he becoming shorter by the day? Aren't his feet getting bigger and flatter? Isn't his brainpan shrinking and his chin looking a little more sloped?

He's following my example, W. says. He's declining, W. says. He's beginning to forget the higher ideas. Good God, he can barely count! He can barely add two numbers together! Is this what happened on the island of Flores? Is this where our collaboration has led him?

Sometimes in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps, do I remember her? Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.

What has he learned about me through his studies?, W. wonders. What's become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. He first thought: here is a man I can think with. Here is a companion in thought.

Wasn't I the one he'd be waiting for? Wasn't I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I seemed clever, too, back then. I spoke well. My voice resounded. – 'Your voice', W. says, 'what happened to it?'

Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W., too, concluded the same. Our collaboration – when did it begin? Several years ago now. Several years …

W. sought a thought-partner, for a companion in thought, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay. He saw me falling off into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn't I? Or perhaps it was never there, W. wonders that, too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely an illusion, being what W. wanted to see.

A thought-companion, isn't that what W. wants? And instead what does he have? What has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.

Hadn't he become fascinated by my decline? Wasn't he watching, fascinated, for every twist in its story? He'd become an anthropologist, W. decided. No, a chimp-specialist. I'd brought him closer to chimp-observation than to thinking.

Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. – 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'.

What, for example, have I been doing all summer? Did I remember the task he set me? Did I remember to set aside at least two hours a day, for my study of Rosenstock-Heussy? Did I remember my Rosenstock-Heussy hours?

He, W., has been studying Cohen as we agreed. He's been reading the most obtuse and difficult of books, in German, and about mathematics, and says he'll send me his notes. 'But what about your notes?' Do I have them ready for him?

What happened to the pincer movement we agreed to undertake on German-Jewish philosophy? I was to approach it from one side (the easy side, W. notes), and he from the other side (the difficult side, W. says). I was to approach the mountain of German-Jewish philosophy from the east face, as it were (the easy slope), and he from the notoriously difficult west face (the difficult slope). He was to be a mountaineer of thought, and I – though no mountaineer – was to be something of a hill walker (of the low hills, the minor ones).

Heaven forefend that we would climb together! W. would never ask that. Never one reader-climber attached to the other by rope. Never two reader-climbers looking for handholds and footholds on the cliff face of Cohen's work.

German and mathematics, W. says. He knows it lies beyond me. I'm not his climbing-partner. He knows it would end up like Touching the Void, anyway. I'd have lost him down some cavern. He would have fell, doubtless trying to save me from some great reading-error, and I would have let him fall, disregarding both my error and his attempt to correct me, and even severed the rope that bound us together.

Yes, he would have fallen, and I, cutting the rope, would attempt to find the easy way round, the simplest of routes. I'd be reading my Idiot's Guide to Cohen instead. My Cohen in Sixty Minutes. And I'd come down the mountain whistling. I've read Cohen, I'd say. And meanwhile, W. be lying there groaning.

Lost in a labyrinth, you should take the same turn every time if you want to escape. The same turn, that's what I've always taken, W. says. The wrong turn. Every time! How have I managed to get it so wrong? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct? 

And now I'm taking him with me. Why does he follow me?, W. wonders. It's not as if he has no choice. He chooses to follow me, that's the thing. It's his choice – or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?

Either way, we'll remain in the labyrinth, the pair of us. We'll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until we've forgotten we're in a labyrinth. It's becoming our world, says W. Our whole world, and isn't that his horror?

He's like an actor who's forgotten he's acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn't know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that's it, isn't it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …

W. wants to know more about my typewriter. What kind of typewriter was it? An electronic one, I tell him. It had a little screen where you could see the words you typed. it had a 70 character memory, I remember that. – 'So it wasn't a mechanical typewriter at least', W. says.

It was light, I tell him. You could take it anywhere. – 'And you did take it anywhere, didn't you?, says W. You took it to the Greek islands, didn't you? You slept with it near you in your rucksack, didn't you? There it was, in your rucksack: your electronic typewriter, how marvellous.

'What's the opposite of talent?', W. says. 'What's the opposite of ability? That was your curse', he says, 'to be possessed by the opposite of talent, the opposite of ability. It never stopped you, did it? Something in you didn't want to be stopped. And it led you to Greece, didn't it? It led you all the way to the Greek islands.

'Were you cursed, do you think?, W. says. Did you commit some terrible deed in a previous life? What accounts for it?' It interests him, he says, the question of my compulsion. He wonders where it comes from. There I was, with my typewriter. There it was, in my rucksack, ready for me to get it out, charge it up …

Did I have an adaptor? Yes, I had an adaptor. W. imagines me plugging it in, my typewriter, first into an adaptor, and then into the wall. There it was, humming away, W. says. He imagines it humming. Humming and ready, its LCD screen blank and waiting, with its 70 character memory.

'What were you going to write?', W. says. 'What were you about to write? Were you waiting for inspiration? Yes, that's it, isn't it: I was waiting for inspiration, for the divine afflatus. I was waiting like the author of the Book of Revelations to be touched by the divine. The apocalypse: that was always my favourite word, wasn't it? Images of angels and devils fighting in heaven …

'What's the opposite of talent?', W. says. 'What's the opposite of inspiration?' My typewriter! Did I ever get it out in Greece, during my trip to Greece? Did I ever once peer at its grey LCD screen, waiting for black characters (you could enter 70 at a time …), waiting for inspiration to type my black characters, my fingers too fat for the keys (W. always imagines that: my too fat fingers, my pudgy little fingers …)? Did I get it out to type in a cafe as I blinked in the sun? Did I open it in the building site where I slept rough?

I didn't open it all, I tell him. I didn't type a thing. And what did that teach you?, W. asks. What did you learn from the whole fiasco? 'Anyone else, W. says, would have been shamed in stopping writing and any attempt to write. They would have abandoned it there and then, without fuss. But the opposite of talent led you astray, didn't it?, W. says. The opposite of ability, which isn't simply inability'.

Radical stupidity, W. says, thinking of radical evil. Radical idiocy, which isn't simply idiocy, which is to say, the absence of intelligence. No, radical idiocy has its own force, its own momentum. In truth, nothing was going to make me stop, not then, despite everything. Nothing was going to make me stop, just as nothing prevented me from actually travelling out to Greece, with my typewriter.

With my typewriter!, W. cries. With my electronic typewriter!

Your trip overseas. Your period as a world traveller. It's W.'s favourite story. You'd flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn't you?, W. says. You'd flown there as a world traveller, never to return! Did you speak the language? Had you made preparations for your visit? Did you know anything about the culture and mores of the country you were going to? The answer is no in each case, says W. You just went, didn't you? Off you went as a world traveller.

What did you expect? What did you think awaited your there? No sooner than your plane had touched down, no sooner than you were through the airport, but someone would recognise you for the wit and bon vivant you were, someone would invite you for lunch, someone for cocktails – you would be already on your way to becoming a local sensation, a favoured visitor from overseas, a man to be welcomed and passed around, introduced here, introduced there.

Soon, you'd be the centre of a whole circle. Soon, right at the heart of things, the social world orbiting around you, you'd caused a kind of frisson, women were throwing themselves at you, men were vying for your company. Your conversation was legendary, your learning magnificent, you could talk on every topic, from the petty to the world-historical.

Yes, you'd be recognised for what you were, at last. The world knew you, lauded you, carried you on its shoulders. All it took was a trip to another country. All it took was some resolve, a plane ticket, and there you would be, in a country that would celebrate your talents.

Was that what you dreamed of, W. asks, with your plans for world travel? Is that what you thought awaited you on the other side? And instead, what happened? You lurched from disaster to disaster, didn't you? No sooner were you off the plane than you were beaten down by the sun – beaten by it. You'd never experienced Mediterranean heat before, had you? You'd never seen a cloudless sky. And that blue – the fierce blue of a sky without clouds. It was too much for you, wasn't it?  

You became curiously mute. You'd been stunned into silence. You didn't say a thing. What could you say? What could you have said? Nothing was going to happen to you. You'd be picked up and carried along by no crowd. There was no one to whom you could prove yourself.

Who was interested in you? Who knew your name? If you were a little younger, a paedophile might have followed you around. A little younger, a little cuter, and some pervert with a camera might have taken pictures. But then, there, in the Mediterranean heat, no one wanted to know you. No one spoke to you, even out of pity.

Because you had the wrong personality, didn't you? The entirely wrong personality. You were not a world traveller. You were not a go-getter. You weren't a hail-fellow-well-met kind of person. You were surly, as you are now. You were churlish. You kept to yourself – who else would have you? You spoke to no one – who would want to listen?

What had the Mediterranean have to do with you? – that was your thought, wasn't it? What had it to do with you, the remorseless sky, the heat, the beaches, the sunbathers? And what were you to it in turn - the towns of white houses, the cafe bars, the tavernas? Where did the Venn diagrams intersect: the Venn diagram of the Mediterranean and the Venn diagram of Lars?

You slept rough, didn't you? You slept in a building site and then out in the open, on the rocks, the loop of your rucksack strap around your arm, for security. You slept on a beach, didn't you, and the sea came up? You thought: I'll sleep on this beach, how romantic, and then the sea came up and soaked your rucksack. The waves came in and you had to flee, didn't you, world traveller? Up they came, the waves, and off you went into town, towards God-knows-where in the darkness, because there you were lost, hopelessly lost on a Mediterranean island.

Why had you travelled to that island to the first place, anyway? Why did you book a ticket there, to island, among all the others? It was something about the Book of Revelations, wasn't it? It had been written there, hadn't it? Did you think some great vision was going to befall you? Did you think you'd see the end of the world? What did you see on the beach, as the waves came up? What, as you were driven into town, looking for somewhere sensible to stay?

How long did you last out there in the Mediterranean? How long, in your new life as a world traveller? A few days, that was it, wasn't it? A few days – a handful – instead of a lifetime. And there it was, green England, that you could see from your plane window. Green England – lush, verdant – and not the rocky Mediterranean. Had you had any visions?, W. says, rocking back and forth in laughter. Had you finished a new Book of Revelations? Had something of the apocalypse been revealed to you? Ah … it's his favourite story, W. says.