Category: W.

Kafka and Tarr are our spiritual leaders, W. and I agree. They've gone the furthest, we agree.

But we need more immediate leaders, too. W.: We're stupid, we need to be led. We long ago decided that we could redeem ourselves only by creating opportunities for those more capable than ourselves.

It's our gift, says W., we know we're stupid, but we also know what stupidity is not. We ought to throw ourselves at their feet and ask them to forgive us.

We always stop short of this, of course. We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It will only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we decide. Only we should know. And we should only follow them in secret.

It never gets any better does it? – No. It's getting worse. It's going to get a lot worse. – We're doomed, aren't we? – Oh yes, completely finished.

It's only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out. They haven't really noticed us yet, that's what saves us. But when they do …!

The clock is ticking, we know. This is not our time, W. says as we walk through the newly coverted Victualling Yard. Who lives in these flats, we wonder as we pass through the wide boulevards. Who can afford them?

They're in the new world, the coming world, we know that. They're the kind who are going to wipe us out, not becaue they know we exist or bear a grudge against, but simply because they are of a different order. They can't help but hate us, I tell W., though they have no idea we exist.

W. likes to test me on Spinoza: What is a mode? What's a substance? What's an attribute? I tell him the Ethics is too hard. Get the Routledge Guidebook to Spinoza's Ethics, W. tells me. But that'll be too hard for you, won't it? Get the Idiot's Guide to Spinoza, then. But that'll be too hard too. Start with these words on a piece of paper: S-P-I-N-O-Z-A. Ponder that in your stupidity.

W.'s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows like ghosts, but now developers have moved in.

You must always live among the poor, W. says. This part of the city was once very wealthy, he observes. His own house was owned by a ship's captain, he says – imagine it! We stand back and admire its storeys.

The railway to London used to run through here, he tells me a little later. Passengers would disembark straight from their cruise liners onto the train, and went straight up to London. The houses are still grand, W. says, although most of them have been turned into flats now. They're full of alcoholics and drug addicts, he says. No one wants to live here.

The children like to bang on the window as we sit inside and drink Tequila. Ignore them, says W., don't give them any attention. He's not fightened of them, he says later as he closes the shutters. They're strangely lost, he says, you can see it in their eyes.

Their grandparents would have moved down from Scotland, like everyone around here, W. says. Thousands of them came down to the dockyards a couple of generations ago, but now there's no work for them now, nothing. So what do they do but drink all day?

He'd drink all day, says W., if he had nothing to do. Sometimes they punch him or throw ashtrays at Sal but that's alright. He'd be exactly the same, says W.

These are the last days, says W. It's all finished. Everything's so shit, says W., but we're happy – why is that? Because we're puerile, he says. Because we're inane. It saves us, W. says, but it also condemns us.

We've been singled out for something, W. has decided. We've been marked. Look at us in our flowery shirts, says W. We're fat and blousy, and everyone else is slim and wearing black.

We're men of the end, W. says. Do we take nothing seriously? Not even ourselves. Least of all that, says W. Something has given up inside us. A whole world has come to the end. And it laughs at itself in our pot bellies and our flowery shirts.

Every year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? It amazes W., who knows he will never escape and nor will I. 

I'm not getting out, he says, I'm stuck like everybody else. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism. And what was it last year? It was music, wasn't it? I was going to become a great scholar of music.

But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music? Nothing at all, says W., about either subject. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music? Nothing at all, says W. Not one thing.

There's no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I'm stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?

I'm filling in my esteem indicators, I tell W. Oh yes, what are they? He could do with a laugh, says W. How about humiliation indicators? Or soiling yourself indicators?, says W. Write about the history of your humiliations, says W. Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that's what you've done.

Every chance I've been given, I've not only shown myself a failure, W. says, but redefined the parameters of what failure means. I've destroyed those parameters, W. says, like some great marauding wildebeest. I've exhausted his good will, W. says, and the good will of everyone.

Take his attempt to create a new kind of intellectual forum, W. says. What happened there? It went along fine for a number of years, everyone was impressed and pleased to be involved, and then what happened? I invited you to speak, didn't I?

How could he dream of what happen next?, W. says. I antagonised everyone, he says, him first of all as the organiser of the event, and my co-presenters next, by destroying any intellectual credibility the event might have had. It was a travesty, W. says.

It was as though I'd become a kind of mirror in which everyone could contemplate their own horror. They understood what they were becoming, W. says. They understood where the world was heading, and it was all too much. In your direction, that's where the world was heading!, W. says. Everyone knew it! Everyone sensed it!

And take our participation in a collective blogging enterprise, W. says, you ruined that as well, didn't you? Go on, remind me what happened. Tell me in your own words. He had to sort it out as usual, W. remembers. He had to sort out the mess I'd created.

You single-handedly brought the whole thing down, W. says, with your incessant, obsessive and ridiculous writing. You drove everyone crazy with your writing mania, W. says.

No one knew what to do, so they left it to him, as usual, to handle me. He had to get the message through, W. says, that I'd spoilt it for everyone, and especially him. He had to stop me somehow, which was well nigh impossible.

Sometimes, W. feels like Dr Frankenstein, unleashing a monster on the world. Sometimes, though, he wonders if he's the monster, and that I might be the diabolical inventor and destroyer of all things, including the world.

W. speaks of his obsession with the great Hungarian plain. Bela Tarr spent six months visiting every house and every pub on the plain, W. notes. He said he discovered mud, rain, and the infinite, W. says, in that order. Mud, rain and the infinite: nothing to W. is more moving than those words.

W. wonders whether we too have discovered the infinite in our own way. Our incessant chatter. Our incessant feeling of utter failure. Perhaps we live on our own version of the plain, W. muses. Am I am the plain on which he is lost, or vice versa? But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us in which we are both lost, he says.

He blames me, W. says. Somehow this is all my fault. You're dragging me down, W. says, everybody says so.

Some part of him simultaneously wants to be dragged down, W. has to concede that. But I am dragging him down even more quickly than he would want to be dragged down, he says. It's cataclysmic. How could he have guessed at the humiliations that lay before him? How could he have known?

But then, too, he must have wanted to humilitate himself in some sense, even as he was drawn to me as the means of that humiliation. What crime has he committed? Why did he want to place himself on trial? His immense sensation of guilt is mysterious, W. says, but it led him straight to me, his judge, his guillotine.

When he's in his cups, W. talks passionately about friendship. It's all about friendship!, says W. But what has it become, friendship, with us? It's soured. Curdled. Nothing has been made, nothing produced by way of our friendship. The opposite, in fact.

Why is it that we only take from the world, but give nothing to it?, W. says. Why are we so incapable of any real intellectual act? Friends should push each other to become greater than they are, but we've only made each other less than we might be.

In the depths of the night, lying awake when the world is asleep, W. poses himself great questions. What do you consider your greatest weakness? – Never to have come to terms with my lack of ability. What do you think is your greatest delusion? – I have the fantasy of joining a community of thinkers, and this prevents individual action and individual thought. What motivates you? – Fear and anxiety.

What's your greatest disappointment? – To know what greatness is, and that I will never, never achieve it, even if everything in my life was right. What's your worst trait? – Fear and anxiety cloud all my judgements and relations. What's your greatest intellectual gift? – I don't think I have any. I see my intellectual life as a crushing failure. I only continue out of debilitating fear.

Why do you think you've a failed as a lover?, asks W. What do you think you're lacking? What's missing in you? What crucial stage of development have you missed? Your parents brought you up properly, didn't they? Then you've got no excuse. Yes, it's your fascination with beauty that's your problem. You're not deep enough, romantically I mean. You need a woman who abuses you

Sal has complete contempt for me, says W., that's how it should be. Your partner should always have contempt for you. Abuse is the key. W. takes me back through his romance with Sal. It began with a mixtape, he says. Before he met Sal, says W., he only listened to Gary Glitter and Mahler. Sal introduced him to Will Oldham. You know what she put on my mixtape? I Send My Love To You.

Sal improves me, says W., she makes me better than I am. That's what you need. And then, after thinking a little, W. says, you have to feel proud of your partner. Of her achievements. W. feels proud of Sal, he says. Have you ever felt proud of someone?, he asks me. Are you proud of yourself?

The living room is filled with examples of Sal's ceramics. We could never do that sort of thing, says W. Look at us. But Sal, he says, has a natural gift. She's gifted. Not like us. He feels proud, he says. All my friends prefer Sal to me. That's a good sign. At the ceramics show, he went to buy a piece of glassware without knowing who it was by. It was Sal, of course, who had made it. You see?, says W.

Love, says W., reclining on his bed in the hotel room, your favourite topic. Why are you so afraid of love? Why?

How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn? Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal – this is always moving – but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another.

What do you think love is?; What is love, for you?; Have you ever loved anyone?; What do you consider love to be?; Do you think you'll ever be capable of love?; What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?

For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love. You only love yourself, he says.

Your weakness is that you're too susceptible to beauty. It's your fatal flaw. It's not about looks, says W. Companionship. That's what you need. If anyone needs a woman, it's you.

Companionship, says W., is very important. It's the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. Sal and I get on, he says. If you're working class, like us, says W., you show your affection by verbal abuse. That's why I abuse you – verbally, I mean. It's a sign of love.

Listen – can you hear it?, says W. You can hear them, can't you?, says W. You can hear what they're saying, can't you? It's echoing everywhere. It's whispering in the wind. Idiot. You're an idiot.

Everything is telling you this. The stars are telling you this. The full moon is telling you this. You're an idiot: it's cosmic. The universe knows it. Everything knows it and it was known from the first: you're an idiot.

We were never witty, W. and I agree. We are not raconteurs; we do not have conversation, as we imagine others have conversation. Of course W. can do an impression of a wit, of a conversationalist, he can sit with others at the high table, but he is at home, much more at home with my crudeness and simplicity.

Idiocy, we decide, is very different from stupidity. Stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. W. does a good impression of an insider (as I cannot), but it is still an impression; they'll sniff him out. Is he really one of them? Does he really belong at the high table? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, we reflect, begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet outside the high table and outside themselves. Idiocy speaks,we decide. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. Idiocy is a kind of lightening, we decide. It lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that's how idiocy discovers itself. That's how it lets itself be discovered.

There's a bottle of gin between us, and slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. There's an empty ice-tray and a motley pile of open jewel cases and dirty CDs. 'Listen to this!' – 'You've got to hear this.' Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that – but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn't idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, we wonder. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, we reflect, we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.

You're never witty, says W., that's a sign of intelligence: wit. W. says he is sometimes witty, but, more generally, he's never witty. I never bring it out in him, W. says. I don't make him more intelligent.

W. is more intelligent than me, he decides. But what about those illuminated moments when the clouds part, and I have ideas? It's true, I do have moments of illumination, W. grants, but they are sporadic and lead nowhere.

Write it down!, write it down! W. often cries in the midst of my moments of illumination, but when I read back my notes, I find only incomprehensible scrawls and random words without sense.

Kafka was always our model. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. says, again and again. It's always at the end of the night that he says this. We have drunk a great deal, the sky opens above us, and it is possible to speak of what is most important.

At the same time, we have Kafka to blame for everything. Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature in person. We were finished. What could we do, simple apes, but exhaust ourselves in imitation? We had been struck by something we could not understand. It was above us, beyond us, and we were not of its order.

We're looking out at the sea. A great shadow seems to move under the water. I can see it, says W., look: the kraken of your stupidity. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

We go up to W.'s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. 'How is it possible for a human being to write such books?' Above all, it's not possible for us; that first of all.

It is enough that Rosenzweig and Spinoza existed. Enough that they were alive once and wrote these books. The books are like facts, great looming facts, like mountains, like the flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it would be for us, and especially for us, to write such books.

Our greatest flaw, says W., is that we are so mesmerised by our own stupidity that we can do nothing about it. We've sat and read our own prose in open mouthed horror, but no decision issues from his horror as it would from a sensible person.

We are paralysed by our inability, our signal lack of intellectual gifts. It amazes us. There's nothing of which we are capable, he says. There's no idea we cannot sully, no quotation whose brilliance we cannot paraphrase into mush.

W.'s greatest flaw, he tells me as we walk along the quayside, is that he believes that with a group of friends, a community, thought might be possible. It is what our friendship, after all, has singularly failed to accomplish: thought is, in fact, utterly impossible for W. and for me, he says, but especially for me.

It's in no way funny, or surprising that I've never had an idea, W. notes. It's quite obvious. It's part of the course of things; it's plain to everyone. W. blames himself for raising my hopes, or giving me the impression my talents were being nutured.

By what idiocy was he drawn to me? Was it that I was the only one who listened to his dreams of intellectual friendship and intellectual community? But then, on the other hand, I am the one who so singularly destroyed any hopes he had for intellectual friendship and intellectual community, W. says. In the end, our friendship is founded upon the utter impossibility of our achieving anything at all.

W. is perpetually, grindingly disappointed with himself, he says. He suspects that I am not as disappointed with myself as he is. In fact, I seem rather pleased with myself, he says. But W. is not pleased with himself, he says.

At Mount Batten, up by the tower, which is locked, W. speaks of his overwhelming sense of shame. We do nothing, he says. We're parasites. What are we doing with our lives?

Later, W. speaks of his dream of a community, of a society of friends who would push each other to greatness. We speak of our absent friends over a pint of Bass. If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable! They would make us great! Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.

For his part, W. has always considered himself a small man. Once, our friend X., a nightclub bouncer, picked W. up and twirled him round over his head like a cheerleader's baton. W. didn't mind. He always feels safe with X., he says. X. makes him feel secure and safe.

Do I make him feel safe?, I ask W. No, he says, just thin. W. says I'm getting fatter. You're not going to last long, he says. You haven't got many years left. Look at you. When I die, W. says, he's going to be my literary executor. Delete, delete, delete, that's what he's going to do.

Our first leader was always an example to W. and I. I'm not very interesting, he always insisted, but my thoughts are interesting. My thoughts! As if he had nothing to do with them!, W. exclaims. As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptable for something infinitely more important.

He was completely serious, W. remembers, not like us. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatittude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?

W. and I reminisce about our second leader. He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of his everyday life, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. said. We agree: how frankly and absolutely he spoke of himself, and to anyone who asked. Frankly and absolutely, as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking was possible. A level of which we have no idea, W. says.

He was completely serious as well, says W. of our second leader, not like us. We're the apes of thought, W. says, but he was completely serious. Everything was serious for our second leader. Nothing mattered but thought, the life of thought!

W. and I reminisce about our third leader. Everyone knows to keep quiet when she speaks, W. says. She speaks very quietly herself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. She lives in a different way to everyone else, that much is clear. She lives a different life, and her quietness is a sign of her elevation.

It's what everyone in the room knows when she speaks: she's better than the rest of us, cleverer, she occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it would be impossible for us to think. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in Northern forests!

We lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to listen. For a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.

There are many kinds of Messiah, W. has learnt. The idiot Messiah, the stupid Messiah, the inadvertent Messiah, the irritating Messiah (that's you), the weeping Messiah (that's me), W. says. Of course everyone knows than the Messianic is really about time, W. says. What does Messianic time mean to him?, W. ponders. W. says that he's not quite sure, but it seems incredibly important.

Our comparative prosperity is a continual source of bewilderment to W. How did we survive? How did we find employment? It's a sign of something, W. says, but he's not sure what. How were we able to make our way in the world, even if we did not get particularly far? Who left the door open just a chink, merely a chink, so that we could gain admittance?

Of course, it's completely shut now, W. says, there's no doubt about that. The door is closed, and there are no more to come after us. Our end will come soon, W. is sure. Maybe no one will notice us. Maybe we'll slip beneath their attention. That they're too busy to deal with us, says W., is all we can hope for.

What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – You. You are a sign of the end, says W. Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won't have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer.

Do you think it's possible to die of stupidity? I ask W. Do you think a creature could have been who was so stupid they died of sheer stupidity? I ask him. Not as a consequence of that stupidity, I note, but from stupidity. And shame, I ask him, do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die? And what about boredom, I ask him, do you think you could die of that? Because I'm burning up with stupidity and shame and boredom, I tell him. I'm burning up and I think I will explode from stupidity and shame and boredom, I tell him.

We've opened our veins to the future, W. and I agree. Our wrists have been slashed and are open to the future; we hold our upturned bleeding arms ahead of us. Death, that's what we want, and that's where we're headed. We're pledged to death, but in great comfort. Our flats and our houses will bear us forward, but in truth, they are only ships of death, just as our country is only a supertanker of death.

Europe still belongs to history, W. and I decide; but we are essentially posthistorical. England has risen like a new island in the middle of the sea. It has removed itself from history; there's nothing here. Oh, there are castles and so on, but they are meaningless. There's the present, and barely even that -but we live from the future, from the brave new future that will see returns on our investments.

Our country is nothing but a trading floor, W. and I decide. Nothing is historical; nothing has any historical weight. Europe, of which we are not a part and can never be a part, is essentially old. The phrase, old Europe is an oxymoron. Old Europe is where things once happened, and continue to happen in their way. The Europeans live in history, as we do not. We are plugged directly into the future, but they are rooted in the past. They speak all the languages of Europe, but we only speak English, the language of the future, the language into which everything will be translated.

Of course this translation will always be incomplete, we decide; there will always be languages and idioms of languages, just as we will always be idiots. But the need to translate is all – the need for the brightest, the best to make themselves understood in English is everything. Translation is imperative – it is the streaming of vapour trails in the sky, infinitely far above the languages and idioms of old Europe.

Europe is fallen, we decide, and we, who are not European, can only pass across its surface like skaters. Old Europe may well be old, but only to itself, we decide, and not to itself. It's historical depth is something of which we are only half-aware, we decide. It troubles us, it makes us feel guilty, but in the end, we can have no relationship to it.

Wars were fought across the body of Europe as they have not been across the body of England. The English fought their wars everywhere except England, and so the body of England has always remained untouched. But of course, there is no body of England, not really, not anymore. It's been seized as investment potential; its value has not yet been realised. How much we would earn if we ever sold our houses! But we will never sell our houses. Our mortgages pledge us to the future, which is to say, to our death.

When the great ice sheets come down as far as Nottingham, it will only be what we deserve. When they scour London into the earth, it will be our just desserts. We'll have nowhere to go, they won't want us in Europe. They'll have their own problems over there, we decide.

Meanwhile, the great work of translation is ongoing. The best and the brightest Europeans speak English much better than we do, we decide. They're better than us, more intelligent than us, but they are still weighed down by history, we decide. They're still historical beings, whereas we are posthistorical beings, with no roots and no memories. Because we don't remember anything, we decide, not anymore.

We've lost the past, although we've no idea we've lost it, nor what it might mean to have lost the past. We don't miss it. It's gone the way of the welfare state: it's a relic, its root have been cut from it. It's senseless, in this, the new world. When the glaciers come rolling down from the North, it will only confirm this great senselessness, we decide.

For our part, W. and I have long been reconciled to the apocalypse. 'It's coming.' – 'What will we do?' – 'My God, look at us! What do you think we can do!' In the meantime, stay at the peripheries, each at our own end of England. In what European cities haven't we been drunk? What European skies have we not seen from the gutter? But we stick to the periphery in our own country. Best not to be noticed. Best not to be seen.