Category: W.

W.'s ill and I'm ill, and it's his fault, since I caught it from him. My thighs ache, I tell W. on the phone. I'm staggering around like Widow Twankey. So do his, W. says, but he's unable to rise at all. He's bedridden, he says, and all he can see is the rain streaming down the windows.

W.'s been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

Kafka wondered if he cast a shadow on the sun, and W. wonders if I'm his shadow, or in some way his eclipse. A shadow is a region of darkness where light is blocked, W. reads. Am I his region of darkness? Am I that part of him that remains untouched by light? W. is tempted by this thesis. It would account for so much.

A shadow cast by the earth on the moon is a lunar eclipse, W. reads. Conversely, a shadow cast on the earth by the moon is solar eclipse. Each time, it is a matter of an interruption of light – of that opaque body that blocks the light from the space behind it. Mostly, W. assumes I'm his own shadow. But what if I am that body that blocks light from him?

'Your obesity', says W. 'The immensity of your thighs and arms'. Yes, it's quite clear: I eclipse him just as, in another sense, I am his eclipsed shadow. I stand in front of his light, but I am also that shadow that trails behind him. Which comes first, then: light or the shadow? It was the darkness of my stupidity that came first, W. supposes. Just as it will be the darkness of my stupidity unto which everything, in the end, will return.

Before God, we are always in the wrong, so Kierkegaard's Jutland pastor. Am I in the wrong before W.? Undoubtedly. But is he in the wrong before me? W. is responsible for me in some sense, he knows that. Terribly responsible. I am in some sense his own creation; I am the result of something that went wrong with him.

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the former – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say?

Of course I can speak, W. says, and I speak all too much; but perhaps, at another level, I cannot be said to speak, or my speech is infested with a shapelessness and formlessness that hollows out its significance. It's as though I've worn out speech in advance, W. says. As though I've said and written everything there was to say, and carry on regardless.

But why is it his fault?, W. wonders. What have I got to do with him? But perhaps, like the Rabbi who raised a golem from the mud, he conjured me up from his own sense of failure. Perhaps I am only the way W. is in the wrong, its incessant, unliving embodiment.

There is, of course, something quite disgusting in my endless desire to parade my buffoonery before the world, W. says. It's born not from humility – an entirely warranted sense that I will achieve nothing with my life, improve nothing, in fact the very opposite – but from a dreadful exhibitionism that is part of my buffoonery, indeed is inseparable from it. For what else is buffoonery but the desire to endlessly parade one's shortcomings? To perform them, insist upon them, to thrust them into the face of everyone?

I would have been happiest in the period of show trials and autoconfessions, W. says. I would have liked nothing better than to have confessed for imaginary crimes, the greater, the better, signing every confession the police brought to me and admitting my role in the greatest of conspiracies. And I would have liked my entire oeuvre to be swallowed up by the great confessional autocritique that would sprawl from volume to volume.

I did it, I would say. I was the worst of all. It was me, it was all my fault: what have I ever wanted to say but that? W., by contrast, dreams of a mystical kind of buffoonery that is no longer dependent on masochism and exhibitionism. Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard, in the guise of a Jutland Pastor wrote an edifying sermon on that theme. But before what is W. always in the wrong? Before what internal tribunal?

Of course, you should never try to repeat anything, not exactly. You can't go back: it didn't take Constantin Constantius to show us that, even if we did so for entirely for the right reasons. Even if it was in the name of friendship that we went back to do exactly the same thing. On Monday, having arrived at the conference days early, as we always arrive days early, we caught the train to Titisee and walked out along the lake to a guesthouse I had read about in my guide.

There it was, framed by great trees: the guesthouse that immediately welcomed us in, which sat us in the best seats overlooking the lake. W. ordered us a bottle of Sekt, which I'd never had and we were waited on for lunch by a graceful and gentle waitress. Did she bring us a sample delicacy from the kitchen before out main course? Didn't she advise us in her charming English of the pick of the menu?

We congratulated ourselves as we walked back to the station, and resolved to share our experiences, this time with our friends. You should share everything with your friends, W. has always said.

And so, a few days later, we walked out with them to the guesthouse, which we found closed, inhospitable; we waited, dawdling by the now busy road in the rain, cars roaring by us, until they opened, and this time there was no graceful and gentle waitress, and no sample delicacy. They seemed not to want to serve us; they took us to a damp corner of the garden and left us there for a full hour before they took our order. The Sekt was stale and flat, and when it came, the lunch devastated us. Even the walk back to the station was a disaster, car fumes filling our heads and the ceaseless rain pattering on our heads …

How many times did we apologise to our friends? How many times did we tell them that it wasn't like this last time? In our hearts, we feared they wouldn't believe us, despite our utmost desire to do our best for them. In our hearts, we feared they thought it was some vague kind of revenge for one of their misdeeds; we feared they would feel as apologetic as we did, given that all we wanted to do is to grab them by their lapels and say sorry, sorry, sorry.

Bishop Berkeley gave up philosophy to lecture on the healing properties of tar water, W. says. He gave it all up – he'd written his masterpieces by the age of 23, but he still had a long life to live, which he then spent advocating, in lectures and pamphlets, the entirely false thesis that tar water was the cure for all ills.

Of course in my case, W. says, the tar water came first, and there would be nothing but tar water. I began with an entirely false thesis, says W., from which I never departed or advanced. But then, W. says, it wasn't a particular argument that in my case was wrong. It wasn't a particular position that I reached through some process of induction or deduction. The very position from which I began – my very position was wrong from the first, and could only ever be wrong. What, henceforward, could I say that was not the equivalent of an endless, spurious advocacy of tar water?

Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard said that, in the guise of a Jutland pastor. Does this mean that I, unlike W. – or to a greater, much greater extent – am close to God? Is the man of tar water closer to the holy fool?

Unending bilge, that's what W. hears when I open my mouth. Bilge, a great streaming forth of bilge water or tar water: that's my entire written oeuvre, such as it is – how can I bear it? I must not know, W. surmises. I must not have guessed, which is why he was put on this earth to remind me, to goad me. His entire life will have been the attempt to remind me and goad me.

Isn't it in this way that he, too, might be close to God? Isn't it in the indefiniteness of his task that he will always remain in the wrong?

'You're never happier than when you make plans', says W. 'Why is that?' I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of fort-da like that of Freud's grandchild. But then, too, there's something wild about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which entail the very opposite of control.

There are never well thought-out tactics, never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who's been locked up for 20 years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won't the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?

But there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There's a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan is a kind of kite, that's how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky. 

My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books and series of books written together! For flurries of articles!

What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it's all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I do know it. Only something in me knows otherwise. Something that remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.

You would think that with my simplicity I would also have a simple love for humankind, W. says, but that's not the case, is it? I speak of my enemies constantly. I speak of my dislike and horror at this person or that person, and I can't help but show it. – 'You look quite ill in some company', W. says. I look sick with hatred and dismay.

Isn't that why I've arranged my life to avoid everyone? Isn't it why I take the most ridiculous measures to avoid bumping into anyone I know? But of course what I really want to avoid is something else entirely. What I really want to avoid is the person I become in the face of my so-called enemies, W. says.

Don't I in the face of the enemy invariably become the most obsequious person who ever lived? Don't I entirely give myself over to a kind of desperate toadying? I'm a fawner, W. says. He'll never forget how I greeted that fucker in a cowboy hat, as I called him, who I'd been avoiding for many days, when he finally caught up with me.

I might as well have curled up on his lap, W. says. In fact, I showed classic pack animal behaviour, W. says, by figuratively rolling over and showing my belly. The so-called fucker in a cowboy hat was the alpha male, and who was I? The omega male, W. says. The runt of the litter, my vast white belly on show for everyone to see.

W. has no enemies, he says, though people have taken him as their enemy. One of them even sits in the House of Lords, imagine – in the House of Lords, and all the while plotting W.'s downfall. It's not as if he, W., has far to fall, W. says. It's not as if he has a career to ruin.

Why would anyone plot against him? It must be his joyful indifference, he decides. People are resentful of joy, and they fear indifference: the fact that you're independent of their judgement. W. would have thought this would be my strength, perhaps my greatest strength: independence from judgement. How else could my life be accounted for? How else that series of disasters that I call my career?

But, in the case of my enemies, W. finds something else entirely. He's seen me give a thumbs up, a grin on my face, in response to the fucker in a cowboy hat. It was a great surprise, W. says. And it taught him that I wasn't so much independent from the judgement of others, but doltishly unaware of it, oblivious, except in the case of those I called my enemies. Which meant that on the one hand, I was more stupid than he thought, and on the other more constrained.

Yes, my relationship to the fucker in a cowboy hat is undoubtedly my weak point, W. says. He's not sure why that is.

The fucker in a cowboy hat has always been renowned for his memory, W. says. He's said never to forget a face, it's legendary. Didn't I spill a pint of Guinness over his stetson a few years back? Didn't I spill stout over his special, prized velvet stetson? That's what I feared, said W., that he would remember and enact his vengeance.

He was looking for me the other night, that much is clear, W. says. And he found me, didn't he? In the dingiest corner of the hotel bar. In the dankest corner, and there I was, and there he, W., was too W. says.

And W. was witness to a scene he can scarcely believe. He saw it all: I gave the fucker in a cowboy hat my customary thumbs up, I complimented him and agreed with him about the weather. And then, apropos of nothing, I apologised for the whole business over the spilt Guinness, and offered to dry clean his stetson.

Of course the fucker'd entirely forgotten the whole incident, which W. found so funny he nearly pissed himself. There I was, W. said, the omega male before the alpha one. There I was, belly upturned, exposed like a beaten dog, my own enemy …

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. Our trips are always a fiasco. It's always a matter of turning up at the wrong venue, indeed sometimes the wrong city at the wrong time, indeed sometimes the wrong date. We arrive either much too early, sometimes whole days early, or too late – sometimes days too late, and the venue is deserted, no one's there. Or we arrive in the wrong place, having forgotten the address – or rather, having forgotten and then misremembered the address, as well as the time of arrival.

If it is a trip abroad, then it is almost always a matter of flying in to the wrong airport in the wrong part of the country, and having to take a lengthy train journey, or even of arranging another connecting flight at great expense. Or we leave it too late, when there are no hotels to be booked, and we have to book one in a neighboring city, or even a neighboring country.

For how long were we stranded in Freiburg, for example? For how many days, after it all ended, did we wander the streets? 10 days in the Novohotel! 10 days, with the same oppressive breakfast! 10 days, in the hotel bar! 10 days of desperation! It was all my fault that time, W. says, which is not to say it is not his fault at other times. But the Novohotel! In Freiburg! Of all places!

It nearly broke us. It took a great deal of effort simply to get through the day. We stuck to a routine; we decided only routine could save us. First breakfast – an indifferent, stolid, Freiburg breakfast – then out to one square or another for orange pekoe tea. First breakfast, always terrible, particularly the salmon I inevitably overdosed on, and then to the square for a cup of excellent tea. And of course the coffee's terrible in Freiburg. W. had to fight against vomiting his coffee every morning at breakfast. Nearly vomiting! Every morning! Over his plate of cold meats and German rolls!

The orange pekoe tea was an oasis in our day, though, we agree. An oasis at eleven o'clock, before the city got really hot. After that, it was quite impossible. What were we to do? Climb the observation tower again? Visit the cathedral? Inevitably, we wandered up and down the streets, wondering what had happened to us. Dazed, passing the time until dinner, there we were in the streets practically weeping.

How did we manage? We barely managed. Cocktails were a great help, we agree. Caiperenias, for one thing. Pina coladas, for another. My God! But in the end, there was only endless horror, only the endless turning over of days, only the inevitable breakfast and the inevitable orange pekoe tea in the square which allowed us to recover from breakfast. But we never learn from our mistakes, do we? We never begin to learn. We're incapable of it.

Of course, W. is familiar with my desperate love for my city. He shares it, after all. When was he happier than when I led him up one of the hills on the Town Moor to survey Newcastle?

It was a bright day, W. remembers, and though we'd already spent many days drinking, I hadn't yet turned, as I am wont to do, he says. Yes, I hadn't yet come to resemble Blanche Dubois as I usually do when I spend many days drinking. I was neither maudlin nor vicious.

In fact, W. still cherishes my comprehensive account of the history of Newcastle delivered from the top of the hill on the Town Moor. My account of the history of the city and its buildings, which I pointed out to him one by one. My interest in local history surprised and delighted him, W. says. It ennobled me, he says; I stepped forward in a new way in his imagination.

But then, of course, he knew I was making it up; knew it was all nonsense; he knew it all along. How could it be otherwise? W. has never like facing up to the fact that I'm a faker. He always wants to imagine the best for me, and me at my best. He has the highest hopes for me, W. says. He's always had them.

W. had to piece together the history of Newcastle for himself, he says. He read tour guides and websites; he consulted plaques on our walks. He traced the course of the culveted rivers that run beneath the streets and speculated upon where they run out into the Tyne. He consulted Ordinance Survey maps of the riverbanks and insisted upon reconstructing the medieval city in his own mind, walking the route where he thought the city walls once ran.

You ought to know everything about your home city, W. says, if only to know what you're about to lose. It makes it more poignant, more mournful, W. says: your inevitable loss of your city. Because we will lose our cities, W. says, it's inevitable. Just as he will be forced out of Plymouth, I will be forced out of Newcastle. Just as he will be kicked out of the city he loves, I will be expelled from the city I profess to love, despite the fact I know nothing about it.

W. has no great love of nature, he says as we walk through the gorse towards Cawsands. The sublimity of nature, mountain peaks, the surging ocean, all that: it means nothing to him. He's a man of the city, W. says. And if we're out of the city today – apolis, as the Greeks would say – it is only to return to it refreshed, catching the bus back from Cawsands to Plymouth.

At most, he admires the sea as it borders the city, just as he admires the edge of Dartmoor which you can see from his office. But then, of course, he likes to approach the city from the countryside – Plymouth from Cawsands, say, or Plymouth from Jennycliff: either way, there's nothing better than seeing the city – his city – sprawled across along the edge of the Sound and running up right back to Dartmoor.

His city, W. says, but not for much longer. By what cruel fate is he being made to leave? Why is he being forced out? Of course, he knew the time would come; he always knew it, which made his relationship to Plymouth that much more intense. He knew it would slip through his fingers, W. says.

What does Plymouth make me feel?, W. asks. I tell him I'm always overjoyed to visit him. I think of the city as my own. The presence of The Dolphin on the quayside is unbearably moving to me. And the presence of Platters, a few doors up from The Dolphin restores my faith in the world. Turbot at Platters: does W. know how often I dream of that? Turbot and a bottle of Chablis: doesn't my life peak at that point?

We left a massive tip last time we visited Platters, W. remembers. How much was it? £50? £100? It was madness, pure madness, W. says. I'd stopped him from drinking any more Chablis, W. remembers. Hadn't we been drinking all day? Weren't we heading to Plymouth Gin for a nightcap?

We left a massive tip, the greatest of tips, W. says, in tribute to Platters. Because it's all so fragile. It's all coming to an end. What will happen when the owner of The Dolphin and Platters sells up? What'll happen when the owner – and it is a single individual who owns them both – decides to sell on his businesses? Disaster, W. says. The end of times. Thankfully, he'll be long gone, and will never have to see it. That's at least one horror that will be spared him.

It's our fault, it's all our fault, we should at least admit that, W. says. It's our fault and particularly mine. My fault, W. says, because my existence couldn't help but contaminate his. And his fault, somewhat at least, because he continues to allow his existence to be contaminated by mine.

But what can we do about it? To whom should we apologise? Each other? I should certainly apologise to him, W. says. I owe him a lifetime of apologies. But doesn't he owe me an apology, too? Doesn't he, by his continual presence in my life, perpetuate the disaster?

He gives me license, W. says. He gives me encouragement – but why? In the end, perhaps I'm only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can't you see I'm burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he's burning, W. says. He's the one who set himself on fire.

A double suicide – is that the answer? But who would stab whom first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?

Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn't the end already overdue? Shouldn't it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We'll close our eyes at last. There'll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …

Of course, I should take my life immediately, that would be the honorable thing, W. says. I should climb the footstool to the noose … But it would already be too late, that's the problem, W. says. The sin has already been committed. The sin against existence, against the whole order of existing things.

That I should have lived at all is a disgrace, W. says. It's the disgrace, the disgrace of disgraces. But about the fact that I do exist, nothing can be done.

Of course, he could stab me. In fact he's offered several times. Sometimes I've asked him to. Sometimes I've proposed a double suicide: he stabbing me, and I him. But then, of course, it would do nothing; it's already too late. There's only the fact that I exist, and the fact that his, W.'s, existence has already been utterly contaminated by my existence.

Do I understand, really understand, the reality of my situation?, W. says. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I'm not really aware of myself, for W., which is my saving grace. Because if I was …

It's enough that W. knows. It's enough that he is aware of the reality of my situation. He tells other people about it, but they scarcely believe him; they have to blot it out. Screen memories replace real ones.

They remember only owls, W. says. When he tells them about me, about the reality of my situation, they recall only owls with spread wings swooping through the night.

What kind of life do I have for myself?, W. wonders. What do I experience of the horror of my own life? Because it's obvious to everyone, that horror; it's the first thing they see, but do I see it?

Do I have any real sense of the disgust my continued existence should engender? But then, how could I? It would be like a pig that developed a disgust at its own excrement. I'd live in contradiction. I'd breach the law of the excluded middle. I would exist knowing only I should cease to exist, and how could that be endured?

Where death is, you are not, said Epicetus. Where I am, I should not be, that's the truth of it, W. says. I'm like one of those unreal numbers in mathematics. You have to suppose they exist, in order to carry out mathematical operations, but they don't actually exist. Only I do exist, which invalidates in some way the whole order of existence, W. says.

Of course, I've ever been able to sleep, W. knows that. I can never get a full night's rest, and this is no surprise. I'm up all night, wandering from bedroom to bathroom, eternally disturbed by my own digestive system, eternally awoken and reawoken.

Something inside me won't allow me to sleep, W. says. There's something unsettled, some debt that has to be paid. I'm my own ghost; I haunt myself, looking for some kind of retribution, something that might bring it all to an end, though it will never end.

Yes, that's my insomnia, W. says: the thwarting of the natural sense of an ending – of an end and therefore also of a beginning. My stomach won't allow that, W. says. My disturbed digestive system will allow nothing to end or to begin.

'How many times do you get up at night? 10 times? 20?' He's never experienced anything like it, W. says. He hears me when he visits for the weekend. He's in the living room on the blow up mattress, and there am I, going up and down the hall. Up and down, up and down …

It doesn't wake him up as such, W. says. He would barely remember my eternal trudging, the eternal flushing of the toilet if it did not accord with the restlessness he feels between the walls of my flat. When he gets up, for example, bleary-eyed from drinking … When I clear a space amidst the half-finished wine bottles and cheese packets to make us coffee … When he brushes plaster dust from his jacket …

'What do you think is wrong with you?' But W. knows already. It's not even the damp. It's not even the filth on the kitchen counters or the cans of stale beer. No, they are symptoms of the same ailment. The whole flat is a symptom, my whole life … my very existence on the earth is already a sign.

But it is a sign for him, for W., which he has to decipher. My very existence on the earth is like some kind of cautionary tale. 'No one should live like you', says W. with great vehemence. 'How can you bear it?' He, W., can't bear it. He shouldn't have to.

Why is he drawn back to my flat again and again? Why does he want to see where it happens, or fails to happen? Because nothing ever happens here, does it? Nothing ever goes forward. How can I work in this mess? How can I read, or write?

But of course I never read or write. It would never occur to me. I'm lost a long way behind reading and writing. My inability to read or to write is the least of my worries.

Is this why he works so hard?, W. wonders. Is it his horror at my very existence on the earth that forces him on?

You have to have a balanced life to have the right perspective on things, W. says. You have to have things in order. What perspective can I possibly have from my flat, which is to say, my pit underground? What valid judgement could I make about the world, given that I spend so much time below pavement level?

I'm always looking up at things, W. says; I have to. I look up to see the plants and the algae in my disgusting yard. I look up to the concrete and the rotting bricks. I barely know the sky exists, W. says – and the sun – when was the last time I saw the sun?

Besides, it's always grey above my flat. It rains ceaselessly, a sick, grey kind of rain, that lets nothing grow. The plants in the yard are dead. Sticks in pots, and algae spreading everywhere, a vile green carpet. Moss. And ever-present concrete, that and the rotting bricks, and who's ever heard of rotting bricks? Concrete and bricks whose surface you can scrape off with a fingernail: that's what the walls of my flat are made of, aren't they?

It's no wonder it's always damp. No surprise that I cough constantly. Even he, W., has a cough, and he's only been visiting for the weekend. No, the flat is not a place from which I can be expected to make any kind of valid judgement. It's set my thoughts askew, permanently askew. I can only have damp thoughts and rotting thoughts. I can only have thoughts that unconsciously look up to what they might have been if they were thought by a strong and vigorous thinker.

It's as if the world were my nightmare, W. says. As if the whole world was nothing but a fever-dream of mine in which he, W., had no real existence. But then, too, sometimes W. imagines it as a kind of gnosticism: I'm the bad demi-urge, the destroyer of things, and he's the divine principle that cannot be destroyed. We're opposites, trapped in an eternal tussle like the wrestlers in that old episode of Star Trek.

But in the end, W. knows he's no match for me. The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction, and there I am laughing in the midst of the apocalypse. In truth, I'm like a little piece of the apocalypse. A sample, like those tiny pots of paint you can buy in B & Q to try out a colour on your wall. This is what it's going to be like, that's what W. discovers in my company. The apocalypse is going to be exactly like this.

My instincts are wrong, W. says. They always have been. How else could I account for my life, with its lurches and shudders? How that desire for ruination that has marked every one of my relationships.

It's a wonder that our friendship has survived, W. says. In fact it's always worried him: is he one in the long line of nutters and weirdoes with whom I've been associated? He doesn't think of himself as a nutter or a weirdo, says W., but still.

If there's anything like a pattern in my life, in my associations it's exactly that, W. says: a great veering towards nutters, towards weirdoes. Which means he can only conclude that he too is a nutter or weirdo.

But how would he know? To what criteria could he appeal? And that's the horror, says W.: that friendship with me means losing all sense of what being a nutter or a weirdo might mean.

I must have a death drive, W. has always said. My God, look at me! Look at what's happened to me! The disasters I've brought upon myself!

I'm happiest only in the midst of the catastrophe, W. says; it's when I thrive. I only really come alive amidst death, that's my secret. I'm only happy during some great collapse.

Which is why I welcome it, the coming apocalypse, W. says. It's the only context in which my life will make sense. Everything will make retrospective sense only then, at the end of times.

It's like the opposite of God's judgement, W. says. The opposite of prophetic witness. It's the witness of shit, W. says. The witness of the generation of shit, who have no faith in anything but destruction.

The generation who come after me are different, W. says. They're gentle souls with beards and pot-bellies. And the generation before, his generation, W. says, were still full of hope – they still thought something could be done.

But my generation, the generation of shit … – 'You have no sense of hope', W. says. Or our hope is twisted into our hopelessness and is indistinguishable from it. Our lives are spasms and twitchings, nothing more. Our lives are contortions, some non-living reflex twitching like a frog's leg touched with electrodes.

W. can barely comprehend it. What notions do we have of will, of intentionality? What of directedness and purpose? At least his generation could raid the historical dressing up box for costumes, as Marx put it, W. says. At least they could strike revolutionary poses and dress up as revolutionaries, even though it was never going to lead anywhere.

And then, too, we're different from the generation who succeed us, whose hope is entirely turned to the private, to the domestic. A furry hope, a hope of burrows and hobbits, that kind of thing.

But we, the generation of shit, are different. – 'What can you hope for but the end? That's when you'd be happiest, if the end came right now, if there was only a week or two left, that's when you'd come into your own and everything would make sense'.

I'll be dancing on the pyre, W. said. I'll be laughing in the flames. It all makes sense! Suddenly, for the first time, everything makes sense!

Each of us, in his own way, is approaching the end.

In W.'s new office, his desk is pushed up against the wall. There are no windows, though he knows it's raining outside. It must be. In my office, the windows are so filthy I can't see whether it's raining or not. W. hears the distant sound of sobbing and wonders if it's him. I hear a distant mewling, and wonder if it's me.

Why can't we give up? Why press ourselves on? Why, despite everything, do we cling to life? It must be some instinct, W. says. Some residue of natural life. But then, too, our instincts have always been wrong. They've always led in the wrong direction. We're not just careless of our lives, we've wrecked them. 

It's all our fault, W. always insists. Somehow, it's all due to us, and especially me. I should bear the brunt, W. says. I should be a human shield. 

Am I concerned about posterity?, W. wonders. Am I concerned about what people will think? – 'How will they make sense of you? What will they make of your mighty oeuvre?' Will they open a library in my name? Will there be a plaque?

In the end, of course, I give nothing to the world, only take from it. What can the notion of a legacy mean to me? Of selfless devotion to a task? I was given a chance, and ran with it. The door was open for a moment, and I was through, never looking back.

They must have regretted letting you in!, W. says. But in truth, no one was looking. In truth, the wind, by chance, shook the door open for a moment, and that was that. No one saw me. I disappeared into the crowd. I imitated the others, acted like them, even though I was still an ape from the savannah.

Wasn't I happier back there, on the outside? Wasn't I happier there, the endless plains stretched out around me? There was no thought of posterity, no thought of a legacy. But then, W. supposes, I carry a version of the savannah along with me, even now. I'm immune in some sense. I'm not touched by it all.

Hard to believe, W. says, that I have no idea of posterity, or of leaving a legacy. No sense of duty to the traditions of which I am apart, to my great predecessors and to the thinkers, much cleverer than us, who will come. Don't I feel part of something? Don't I feel a sense of indebtedness? Apparently not, W. says. I carry the savannah with me, my internal savannah, across which shamelessness roils like a tropical storm.

'How long do you think you have left?', W. asks. 'How long do you have?' I don't look well, for one thing, W. says. How old am I now? Well, I'm not aging well, he's certain of that. For his part, W. looks eternally young. But he eats well, and looks after himself, not like me. He takes a sea walk every day, he makes sure of it. A walk along the sea cures all ills, W. say, but of course it doesn't.

He won't live long, W. is sure of it. He hasn't got long left. Which one of us will outlive the other? Who will get to deliver an encomium or obituary? He was a fat, stupid man, his for me will run, W. says. Or: he ran to fat and had no ideas, not one. Or: he wasted our time, especially mine. Or: he was a man with an infinite number of excuses. Or: it was never his fault, that's what he said, time and again, but of course it was, it was entirely his fault. 

Only my viscera are honest, W. decides. Only there, deep inside my body, buried under layers of fat, is there anything like honesty. In a way, it's comforting, W. says, although it doesn't make me any easier to be around. That there's a kind of internal limit to my pretension.

You're not going to get away with it, that's what my stomach says. I'm not going to let you get away with it. That's my curse, W. says, and my judgement. It's what the samurai realised when they committed ritual suicide, their entrails glistening in the sun.

Sincerity belongs to the guts, W. says. And what of my terrible purgations – what of that terrible voiding that is like a parody of seppuku? It'll never come to an end, will it?, W. says. It's the double of my endless logorrhea, a trail of shit that runs along every line I write.

My stomach betrays me, that's how I put it, W. says, when in fact, my stomach, with its endless problems, its growling and grumbling, acts only in my interests. – 'It's trying to save you', W. says, 'Don't you understand?' It's sending a message like a gaseous cloud, W. says, as though something were dying inside me. As though something had crawled inside me to die. 

That's why I look so bilious and green. It's why we had to seek out an emergency scheisse bar in Freiburg, W. says. The emergency scheisse bar: isn't that what I have to search out in every city, almost as soon as I arrive?

In the end, my so-called intellectual life is the emergency. My so-called intellectual life and my shamelessness about my so-called intellectual life. – 'Don't your lies bother you?', W. says. But he knows that at some level, they do. Something inside you is honest, W. says, at least there is that.

'Your stomach never lies', W. says. 'It's got more integrity than you have'. That's why I'm always in such an appalling state. Something in me must know, W. says. Something must know my lies and pretension, and that, in fact, my life is only a lie and a pretension.

'Have you ever had an honest thought? Have you ever been true to anything?' The answer is no, W. says. It's always been no. A great no should be roaring in the sky. The no should deafen me, W. says, and deafen everyone who speaks to me. No!, he cries. No!

'It's your guts that betray you', W. says. They're honest as I am not. They're witness to the truth in their own way, shit everywhere, shit spattering the toilet bowl.

'What does faith mean to you?', W. asks. 'What could it possibly mean?' When W. was 13, despite the fact that he had not been brought up religiously, he demanded to be taken to church. It was a great moment, he says. It changed everything for his family, who started going to church themselves. But, like everything, it fell away. What happened? Where did it all go? How was he capable then of what is impossible for him now?

Sal thinks W.'s drifting back to religion. She gives him a year. – 'It's all this Rosenzweig', says W. 'It's very plausible'. And then: 'You need a religion. It would be a channel for your pathos'.

Of course, faith isn't about belief for Rosenzweig, W. says. It's got nothing to do with belief. Faith is an act – the act of speaking. – 'Speak to me', says W. 'Go on, say something! No, not about blowholes! Say something serious!' He should start, I tell W. He should set an example. But I drive every thought from W.'s head, he says. He can never be serious when I'm around.

'Who am I?': that's not the first question, for Rosenzweig, W. says as we wander into town. The most important question reaches us from outside. It comes from without. 'Where are you?': that's what God asked Adam, W. says. Adam tried to hide, of course. He fled into the thickets. He was frightened, not of God, but of who he would become before God. Of the one he would become as soon as he said 'here'.

'Here': are we capable of saying that? Are we capable of coming out of hiding? Because we are hiding, W. says, like worms in the earth. We fled into the thickets at the first opportunity. We covered ourselves in mud …

Today! The Messiah is coming today!, says W. with great urgency. That's what Rosenzweig says. God commands each of us today – right here, right now! Where are you?, W. says. Go on, tell me! Where are you? In the shopping mall with him, I tell W., looking for chocolate.

Loving is stronger than death, muses W.: what do you think that means? Do you have any idea? With love, for Rosenzweig, W. explains, you leave behind the natural order, the boundaries of self and ego. Immanence is broken: that's what it means to love. Love is stronger than death, stronger than solitude, stronger than autonomy: that's what Rosenzweig says, it's very moving.

Are we capable of love?, W. muses. Is he? Am I? – 'Have you ever been love with anyone, I mean, really in love?' W. doubts it. I read too many gossip magazines, for one thing. Love's not based on fantasy, as I seem to think. It's an ethical act. – 'But you're not capable of that, are you?' I'm fundamentally a fantasiser, says W., and know nothing about the living reality of other human beings.

Everything is about speech for Rosenzweig, W. says we pass by the refugees who gather in the sun at the bottom of the street. It's about being addressed, and addressing the other, the neighbour in turn. The commandment to love your neighbour is, for Rosenzweig, identical to that of loving God.

But this means the word 'you' should terrify us, W. says. It terrifies him. It implies a pained awareness of imperfection and terrible guilt. W. feels it, he says: he always feels guilty before the other person, even me. He should give me the food from his mouth, he says, as we eat pain au chocolats. - 'Do you want some?', he says, opening his mouth. Should he feed me like a baby bird? 

Of course, by speech, what Rosenzweig really has in mind is the liturgy of the synagogue, W. says. Speech, for him is collective, and it is lived as Judaism, in the Jewish liturgy. That's how God is witnessed, and the neighbour. Likewise, if God speaks to us, it is only through the Bible.

Broken immanence: that should be the name of our new intellectual movement, W. says, or of an 80s pop band similar to Flock of Seagulls. The Broken immanentists: is that who we are? But to have a movement, you have to have ideas, to stand for something. What is it we stand for?