Category: W.

Food is a sacrament, W. has always believed, which is another reason why he thinks I am so disgusting. You have no sense of food, he says, you could be eating anything. For a long time, he remembers, I lived only on discounted sandwiches from Boots.

He remembers me telling him of my circumambulations of town in search of discounted sandwiches. Your long circumambulations, W. says, that would take in every possible shop that sold stale, discounted sandwiches.

For a long time, W. remembers, I ate only gingerbread men, five a day. I would buy a packet of five stale gingerbread men from the discount bakery and a fourpack of own-branded supermarket lager from Kwik Save, the very worst.

No wonder you were always ill, W. says. No wonder you were always complaining about your stomach. Of course, I was poor then, W. remembers, but that was no excuse.

Gluttony has always appalled W., who has a small and delicate appetite. He always undertakes special measures when I come to visit him, to make sure there's enough food in the house. It was part of the reason why he brought his new fridge, W, says.

When I text him from the airport to tell him I've arrived, he opens a bottle of Chablis or Cava and puts the glasses on the table, and then unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats, along with olive oil and relishes. He'll have bread, which he will have made himself, and slices of smoked salmon.

Only the best!, says W. Only the best for my friends! Food's a gift, W. says, the greatest of gifts, which I descecrate every time I visit him.

W. and I both had our monk years. It surprises everyone who knows us. It surprises us, too. What do you remember of them, your monk years?, I ask W.

He'd taken a vow of silence, W. says, and lived a life of great simplicity. Of course, his fellow monks were all having affairs. Not with each other, W. says, but with hangers on. There are always hangers on around monasteries, W. says. You'd know all about that, wouldn't you? Was I a hanger on?, W. wonders. I was the guestmaster, wasn't I?, he remembers.

It was a lay religious community, wasn't it? W. recalls how I told him of welcoming monks and hermits from all over the world. Copts, Dominicans, Ukranian Catholics, the lot. I even taught them, didn't I? I was an English teacher and guestmaster, and lived for free in the highest, coldest room in the house. Of course we differ, W. notes, in that he, for a time, had genuine religious belief, whereas I never had any. It was entirely lacking in you, W. says.

But W.'s monk years had to come to an end, he says. There were barely any monks in the monastery, for one thing. They rattled around a huge building designed by the architect who had planned the Houses of Parliament. It was on a island in the middle of nowhere. W. used to take walks in the afternoons, he remembers, where he would surprise monks who were having affairs, walking hand in hand with men and women on the rocky shore.  

At the busstop by the hospital, W. shows me the dedication of book he's recently added to his collection. 'To my Rabbi …' It's dedicated to his Rabbi, says W.,wonderingly. W. has always wished he had a Rabbi to whom to dedicate his books. Or rather, he now knows that is what he should have wished for all along.

A Rabbi! He would have been part of something. He would have had a sense of belonging. Despite his interest in Jewish topics, W. is not really a Jew. His family were Catholic converts for one thing, W. say. And for another, he is not capable of believing in anything, not anymore. There's no-one more boring than an atheist, W. sighs.

Of course he looks very Jewish, W. says, especially since he's grown his hair long.  But however Talmudic he appears (and he has looked increasingly Talmudic in recent years, with his beard and long ringlets), there is the reality of his non-belief.

W. confides that he thinks he's on the brink of an idea. He's never had an idea before, so he doesn't quite know what it's like. But he thinks this is it: he's on the brink of an idea; a new horizon is opening before him. Have I ever had an idea?, he asks. Of course not, he says, why is he asking. Have you ever thought you were on the brink of an idea, and that people would haul you up on their shoulders and carry you around, cheering? 

Of you course I never thought I'd have an idea for a moment, did I?, W. says. I actually repel ideas and intelligent thought, W. says. Never for a moment would I be capable of thinking, W. says. Not for one moment!

When he was young, W. was sure that one day, if he worked hard enough, he'd have an idea. He lived in only one room of a house, in which there was only a bed and a work table. A bed and desk, W. emphasises. He rarely left it, his room, W. says. He worked night and day. Reading and writing were all that mattered.

What happened? He discovered drinking, says W., and smoking. He came late to both, but when he discovered drinking and smoking that was it. But he also wonders whether he began drinking and smoking from a sense of disappointment, from the knowledge he'd never have an idea and that there was no point in going on, he says. Yes, that's what happened, W. says: disappointment, and then drinking.

Since then, he's lived in the ruins of his impression of himself as someone capable of having ideas. He's felt ill for years, says W., which on top of his drinking and general disappointment may have prevented him from having an idea (until now), or be the result of him having an idea (until now). But W. thinks he may be at the beginnings of an idea. At its rudiments, he says.

W. points out a strip of trees from the window, which looks towards Plymouth and the sea. It's ancient woodland, he tells me. That's all that's left of it, that strip, he says, which runs right up to Dartmoor. There's a species of tree unique to the area that grows there: the Plym pear, he says. You can't eat the pears, though, they're like crabapples.

Why has he brought me up here? Why this vista from the staffroom window all the way towards the glistening sea? Infinite judgement, he says, mysteriously. That's my idea. Infinite – judgement. It's from Cohen, he says. Well, it's from Cohen's reading of Kant.

W. has been sending me his notes on Cohen for months. He barely understands a word of Cohen, W. has always admitted. In fact, he is singularly unqualified to read Cohen, lacking any understanding of mathematics, which is essential, or any real religious feeling.

Infinite judgement. Whatever does it mean? W.'s not sure, but nevertheless, he feels he's on to something. He's not sure, he says, whether he has made a genuine breakthrough, or whether it is all nonsense. Is he at the summit of his creativity or the peak of his idiocy?

Even now, despite everything, W. dreams of Canada. Everything would be okay if he got there, W. says. He could start again in Canada, turn over a new leaf. Imagine it! W. in Canada, close to the wilderness, as everyone in Canada is close to the wilderness, W. peaceable and calm, as everyone in Canada is peaceable and calm. He would be a different kind of man, says W., a better one.

Every year, I write long and elaborate letters to places of employment in Canada on behalf of W. I write of him as the finest thinker of his generation, or as the thinker surest to mark the age with his name. I take dictation from W., who speaks of his commanding presence and his extreme intelligence. He is a man-God, says W., no don't write that down. He is the best of the best of the best, says W., don't write that down either.

But we hear nothing from the Canadians. They remain silent and distant, as remote as Mars. To console ourselves, we imagine the endless plains of the Yukon. The Canadians are busy in the wilderness, we decide. They're boating on their many lakes or hiking through their many woods. They're an outdoor people, we decide, and not given to replying to letters of absurd overpraise.

It's our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There's nothing better than visiting a city on the periphery, W. says, just as there's nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).

And likewise our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essential peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have been fundamentally left alone. No one watches out for us, but on the other hand, no one has really noticed us, so we can get up to what we like. We are blips on no one's radar. Our fates matter to no one, and perhaps not even to ourselves. That's one thing that marks us very strongly, we agree: indifference to our own fate.

For haven't we noticed that the world is shit? Isn't it the most obvious thing that it's all going to shit? You can't struggle against it. You can't do anything at all. Those at the centre don't realise it. They haven't grasped their essential powerlessness. Only we have grasped it, we who live at the periphery of our own interests, no longer advancing our own cause.

For what would that be: our own cause? What would we want in a world of shit? First of all, distrust yourself, burrow down. Destroy all vestiges of hope, of the desire for salvation. Because it will not come good. It's leading nowhere. Nothing means anything. The centre does not matter. There's suffering everywhere – agreed. There's suffering and horror everywhere – on that we're agreed. But the first step must be to peripherise ourselves, and to peripherise ourselves with respect to ourselves.

All jobs are becoming the same, W. says. We're all administrators now, all of us. What do any of us do but administer? We administer and prevaricate about administration. Work time is either administration time or prevaricating about administering, which occupies a large part of W.'s day, he says.

He doesn't know how I just get on with it, he says. He's always marvelled at it: my ability to launch myself into administration, to get to work early, to sit at my desk and begin. It's incredible, W. says, though it also indicates there's something very wrong with me. There's something wrong with my soul, he observes.

For his part, W's given to endless prevarication. He can never make a start, no matter how early he gets in. He stares out of the office window, W. says. He makes himself some tea, he says and sips at it amongst the great parcels of books that get sent to him for review.

His life is absurd, says W. It's a living absurdity, and mine is no better, although I have the strange capacity to just get on with it. Where does it come from?, W. wonders. Who am I trying to please?

W., as usual, is reading about God. God and mathematics, that's all he's interested in. Somehow everything has to do with God, in whom W.'s not capable of believing, and mathematics, which W. is not capable of doing. And he's reading about God and mathematics in German, W. says, which means he doesn't really understand what he doesn't really understand. He'll send me his notes, W. says, they're hilarious.

God, muses W. He's going to write about God, he says. And about Messianism. How are my studies of Messianism coming along?, W. asks me. And then: should we really be writing about Messianism? In fact, that's how he's going to begin his essay on Messianism: saying he is in no way qualified to write on Messianism. 

But what about God? He's not really qualified to write about God either, W. says. God least of all. Of course it's all a joke to you, W. says. You'll write about anything – anything. You've no shame. Nothing internal prevents you from parading your ignorance.

W. wants to believe in something, he says, but I believe in nothing, nothing. It's a game to you, he says. Messianism, God: what meaning can they possibly have for you?

It's beyond masochism in my case, W. says. It's not that I want to punish myself by parading my ignorance, or not merely that, he says. It's something cosmic, he says. There's something cosmic streaming through you. There's a cosmic storm howling through your ignorance and your shamelessness, says W.

Our favourite pub, The Dolphin, on the quayside. A man in the corner spits onto the floor. That's you in five years, says W. The man continues to spit, spitting and spitting onto the concrete floor. He's drunk, as drunk as anything. I've always felt akin to alcoholics, W. notes. They're kings of the world to me. They know the apocalypse is coming, he says, which is why they drink, he says.

Why aren't I an alcoholic?, W. wonders. It's a kind of bad faith, he says. I should at least be alcoholic. I should be falling off barstools like the druknards in the opening shot of Werckmeister Harmonies. In some important sense, I haven't followed through, W. says. I'm not consistent. I'm hopeful despite myself, W. says. What's my secret?, W. wonders. What sustains my existence from moment to moment, given that the certainty that life is shit should give me no such sustenance whatsoever?

What does it mean to you, all your reading?, W. asks. I haven't read much, W. says, and I read less and less, but what did it mean to me, the little I have read? What could it mean?

Thinking depends upon seeing the world differently, says W., but I can only see the same. Thinking means questioning your assumptions, but all I am is one big assumption, which is really a presumption.

The world is shit, that's my presumption, W. says. In its way, it's impressive. The world is shit and life is shit: that's my single thought, W. says, and everything else is nonsense to me, isn't it? Ideas mean nothing to me, books nothing. The whole history of thought matters not a jot to me, W. says, since it's just a game. That's what I think it is: a game, says W.

In a sense, he admires it, W. says. I know one thing: life is shit and nothing else touches me. That's my starting point. It's where the world begins for me, isn't it?, says W.

All my faults can be traced to this fundamental assumption. My laziness, for example. The fact that I read nothing, and when I do read it's not real reading, which is to say disciplined reading, says W. And my conversational monomania, says W. Really I say the same thing over and over again, especially when I'm drunk, which I nearly always am. Over and over again.

And my obesity. I'm growing fatter for the apocalypse, aren't I? I eat incessantly – incessantly, says W., who has always marvelled at my appetite. I eat because you're depressed, and you're always depressed, not least at the amount I eat. Eating and drinking, says W., that's all I do. I'm going to eat and drink my way through the apocalypse, though that won't help me.

What have our lives become?, W. asks. Of course, I never expected anything, W. is clear on that. I'm from another generation to him, we agree, the generation of shit. Nothing to hope for, nothing to expect, so your whole aim in life is to find a warm pocket and survive there like some kind of parasite. Like a tick, W. says, or a leech.

What could I know of friendship, or community?, W. asks. What could I know of politics? Every year he sinks a little further, W. says. Every year he becomes a little more like me. What's it like to expect nothing and hope for nothing?, W. asks.

At the same time, he admires my admantine apocalypticism. It's very cold and pure, he says, like the sky on a winter morning. Your sense of the apocalypse is absolute, he says, you're sure of it. He's not sure of it, he says. He still believes something could save us, though he also knows nothing will save us. He knows nothing will save us, but he feels something will save us, that's the thing.

That's his Messianism, W. says. But there's no Messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I'm far beyond that. In me, some process has completed itself, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end. Friendship and community, says W. Politics, all that. What idea do you have of them? You're just a tick, says W., or a leech.

We've always known our limitations, W. and I agree, which is very different from accepting them. In fact, our entire lives have been concerned with not accepting our limitations, and battering ourselves against them like flies against a window.

Our limitations fascinate us, we agree. From the first, we aimed ourselves against them, in defiance not of the world that expected something of us, but our own expectations.

Of what did we think we were capable? From where came that ferocity of hope? It's a kind of idiocy, very pure, we agree. We're idiots, we agree, idiots who do not quite understand the depths of their idiocy, which is theological. We're mystics of the idiotic, we agree, mystical idiots, lost in our cloud of unknowing, which is vast.

Idiocy, that's what we have in common. Our friendship is founded upon our limitations, we agree, and doesn't travel far from them.

If there's one thing he's learned from me, W. says, it's not to work in the evenings. Two hours of work – real work – is enough, W. says, and that's what I taught him. Of course, I never even manage that, W. observes. Two hours – when I have ever worked for two hours? When have I ever worked at all? But he admires my resolution never to work in the evenings and never to work at weekends.

W. would like to be a layabout, he says. He'd liked to do nothing at all, not even work. But he thinks of little else but work, he says, and when he's not working, he feels a terrible urge to work and a guilt about not working. It's Protestant guilt, W. says. We all feel it, W. thinks, even him, who is a Catholic from a Jewish background. It's everywhere, says W.

He knows my views on the topic. He knows I think it should all stop and right now, he says. But haven't I fallen into the administrative trap? Aren't I in the office dawn until dusk, administrating? W. had thought I'd be the one to break from work. He thought I'd give it all up and go somewhere else.

This country, says W., is terrible. He tells everyone he meets to leave. Leave immediately, he says. Of course, when he left, he only came back, W. says. His time in Strasbourg, that great, peaceful city, taught him only that he was British, and couldn't live anywhere else. There's something wrong with him, he says. And with me, he sees it too. We're British – and worse, he says, English, and though we despite England and everything it stands for, we're stuck here.

Despite everything, though, W. still dreams of Canada: that's his escape route, he says, his line of flight. It's Canada that would teach him to work less. Canada with its great lakes and great forests. The sheer expanse of Canada soothes him, W. says. The fact of Canada. It's not like England with everyone swarming around, W. says. The Yukon: if only he could there, W. says. He'd be a gentler person, W. says, a kinder one. His soul would expand like the open expanses of Canada,, W. says.

There's something sick about us, W. says, something depraved. Only it's not just about us, says W., but about the whole world. We're seismographic, W. says. We register the great horrors of the world in our guts. That's why you're always about to soil yourself, says W. It's why you have a continual nosebleed and always feel sick.

Many illnesses have passed through W.'s body. We're weak, he says, the runts of the litter. Something has come to an end with us. We're the end of the line in some important way. It all finishes here, W. says, pointing at his body and then pointing at mine. Especially here, says W., pointing to my stomach.

My obesity always impresses him, W. says. My greed. The way I eat, the amount I eat. He'd call me a carnal man, W. says, but that sounds too grand. You're just full of greed. What would I be like if I didn't go to the gym?, W. wonders. It's all channelled into my enormous thighs, W. says. They're grotesque, he says. You're out of proportion. And my great fat arms.

For his part, W. takes no exercise. He hasn't felt well for many years – eleven or twelve. There was a time when he'd go for great walks on the moor, he remembers. He had a walking friend, of course. You can't go walking on your own, that would just lead to enormous melancholy. That's what I always say, isn't it: that going out walking on my own would lead to enormous melancholy?

W. also feels it. He's essential agrophobic, W. says. He's only really happy holed up in his room, working. He'd prefer never to leave his house, says W. Or indeed his office. He'd like to hole himself up like Howard Hughes, he says, with bottles of toenails and urine. It's only the love of a good woman which saves him from that.

Now and again, he thinks he should walk to work, or cycle. But it's too far, and all uphill. It would only depress him, W. says. In the end, he's not cut out for exercise. He'll lead a short life, says W., as will I. a short, unfulfilled life, which will come to nothing. What it all been for?, W. asks. Nothing, he says. We're runts of the litter, W. says.

No one should drink as quickly as I do, says W., no one. Or as much. You drink too much, W exclaims. Of course, W. remembers when I barely drank at all. I wasn't a drinker then, W. says. I lived with monks at the time, which explains a great deal. What happened?, says W. What changed for you? I know: it was finding friends. You didn't have any friends before, did you? All you had were potatoes, your potato friends.

W. remembers coming to stay with me, and being made potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Potatoes were your mainstay, said W. I tried to convert him to my potato diet, W. remembers, and he agreed, I did have quite a way with potatoes, I cooked them in interesting ways, but in the end he thought I was insane. No one can live entirely on potatoes, W. says. Not even you.

In those days, W. remembers, the only friends I had were potato friends. Didn't I draw faces on them, and animate them like some idiot child? That's what W. imagined. You and your potatoes, W. says. Your only friends.

It all changed when you actually found some friends. You left your potatoes behind, W. said. You went out into the world. My God, the amount you used to drink! And the way you drank! So quick! So remorselessly!

For his part, W. is a steady drinker – a heavy drinker, but a steady one. He paces himself – he learnt it from Polish drinkers, who begin slowly and continue slowly, but drink through the whole night. Visiting Poland taught W. a great lesson about drinking.

There comes a stage in your life when you have to drink, W. says. There's nothing for it. The world is shit, life's shit, and if you thought for a moment, really thought, you'd kill yourself. W. went through a period of drinking everyday, he says, just as I went through one. He had to, he says, it had all become too much for him. He learned it from me, he says, drinking through your despair.

He was a melancholy drunk, W. says, lying in front of the TV with a bottle of wine. I, on the other hand, was an exhilarated drunk, writing rubbish on the internet all night, when I wasn't out in the pubs. Of course, W. never knows when to stop drinking. He never stops until he passes out, he says. Imagine it: passed out, in front of the TV. That's why he cut down his drinking, W. says.

I ruined my digestive system, W. remembers, that's why I stopped drinking so much. I was continually on the verge of soiling myself, it was disgusting, says W. When he came to stay and followed my drinking regime, it was exactly the same: he was on the verge of soiling himself. He had a glimpse of the horror of my life, which was completely different to the horror of his life. Your digestion!, he remembers. What did you do to yourself? No one should have lived as I did, says W. He's amazed I survived.

Whatever happened to W.'s publisher? Once the most generous and gregarious of men, he insisted upon travelling hundreds of miles to visit W. and take him out to dinner. They spent days going over the proofs, which were properly proofread (not like yours, W. says, which was farmed out to Malaysia). And he'd decided on a full colour cover to the paperback – an expensive undertaking, W. notes. Granted, the final version still had typos on the first page (to my amusement) and even in the blurbs on the back (which I found even funnier), but it was a handsome volume, and one of a series of handsome volumes.

But what's happened to the publisher? He's gone out of business, that much is clear. You can't get the books anywhere, which always amused W. As soon as it was in print, it was out of print, he said. It was always and already out of print, he said, which was fitting, he said. Luckily, he got a box of free copies, says W., which he sent to his friends. Were it not for that, no one would believe it had existed, W. says.

To W., it's completely inconsequential whether the book is in print or not. You should always publish with friends, he says, and the publisher was a friend. But where is he? He doesn't reply to emails or telephone calls, W. says. Doubtless there's no longer a computer in his office, nor a telephone, he says. Doubtless the office has long been stripped and demolished, he says, and he's sitting sobbing in the ruins, W. says.

You should always publish with friends, W. notes, and that's all he wants from his vanished publisher: a sign of friendship, of their shared failure. That's all he would want from any of his friends, who are all failures, whether they know it or not.

If it can't be explained to Sal in the bath, then it's not a genuine thought, says W. That's his test: the bath, Sunday night, he tries to explain his thoughts to Sal. She's merciless, says W. She demands that everything be absolutely clear, he says. She doesn't tolerate vagueness or prevarication. She wants to understand, and if she doesn't, it's invariably my fault, W. says. 

Do you remember what she called us when she heard us speak? Vague and boring, says W. You were vague, and I was boring. Or was it te other way round? Either way, She's more intelligent than us, W. says. And she can actually do things, make things, he says. She's more to give to the world than we do.

In fact, all of his friends prefer Sal to him, W. says. Whenever they visit, their first question is always, Where's Sal? They're always disappointed when it's just him, W. says. In fact, even he's disappointed, says W. What is he without Sal? How would he think or write anything if it were not for their weekly bath?

W.'s great fantasy, and he must admit, he says, that's it's a fantasy, is of forming a community of writers and thinkers, linked by mutual friendship. Friendship, says W., is everything. Real work is collective, and we've each to spur one another on, he says. Together we'll be capable of more than we might do on our own. That's what's he's always thought, says W. It's what he's always dreamt of.

Above all, we have to avoid the traps of careerism, says W. Loyalty and trust, that's what matters: we have to be prepared to die for one another. Literally that: to die for one another, W. emphasises. It's all about the phalanx, W. says. The phalanx you would immediately betray, says W.

That's the ultimate paradox, W. says: how is it that one with such faith in friendship should end up with such a friend? Would I die for him? No. Would I immediately betray him, given any opportunity? Yes. In fact, I've already done so several times, W. notes.

Where did it all go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same: me. It's my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.

Despite everything, W.'s always placed his trust in the young, he says. He has great hopes for them, although he knows they'll come to nothing. They're more crushed than we are. They have fewer hopes, he says. But they're gentler, kinder. The young are soft, says W., but it's not a weak softness. They're not meek, just mild.

W. has always surrounded himself with the young. After all, I'm several years younger than him, W. notes. We're separated by almost an entire generation. His generation, he said, still had hope – the residues of hope. Mine had young, hope itself was a luxury. What chance did you have?, W. says. We knew we never had a chance, I say.

The young, W. muses. What is it about the young? For the most part, of course, the young are part of the infernal machine. They've been swallowed up; they've disappeared. But there are pockets of them left, a few scattered here and there, despite everything, who live in a manner entirely different. They're marginal beings, W. says, surviving on benefits and part-time jobs. They expect nothing; they don't want to make their way in the world.

They know it's all shit, that everything's shit. And this, in the end, is what separates W.'s generation from mine, he says. You know that everything's shit, says W. It's in your bones: it's – all – shit. Still, the generations that have followed mine are different again. It's all shit – they know that, but don't mind; they know the world's not for them and they can't change a thing. They know they'll have to survive on handouts and part-time jobs.

Sometimes we go out to be among the young, W. and I. We mingle with them, drink with them. We're greatly in favour of them. They know all too much, I say to W. They know everything, he say; they've seen it all. They know the world's not for them, and it's all shit. If only I'd known that, said W. He's not sure what would have become of him. Maybe he would have turned out like me, he says, happy to be alive, happy to have a corner to survive in.

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

Why am I such an obsessive?, W. ponders. Take Jandek. That's all you listen to now, isn't it: Jandek? There's nothing else on your iPod. I always need some marker on the horizon to head toward, W. notes. You need to measure yourself by something.

W. laments that I'm no longer open to pop music. Coming downstairs on a recent visit, I find him sitting on the sofa in his dressing gown with a cup of tea, listening to Jens Lekman. It's pure pop, W. exclaims. Nothing makes him happier, especially in the morning, W. says, than to fill his house with Nights in Komedia.

Of course you only listen to Jandek, W. says. He tried to have a Jandek party the other night, W. says. He couldn't play any Jandek until Sal, who hates Jandek, passed out around 5.00 in the morning, but there were still a few people up, young people.

How long do you think they could stand Jandek?, W. asks, how long? He pauses dramatically. Three seconds, he says, that's all they could take. I think one of them shat herself, he says. 

For his part, W. appreciates Jandek, although Sal has thrown away all the Jandek CDs I burned for him. He appreciates Jandek, whereas I am obsessed with him. It's all you listen to, isn't it, Jandek? W. says whenever he puts Jandek on – whenever I send him a fresh batch of Jandek CDs - he finds himself leaving the room. He can't be in the room with it, W. says. He goes out, and then upstairs or downstairs, but he can't endure Jandek, even though he appreciates him, W. says.

When I visit, it's different, W. acknowledges. My presence in the room helps him with his Jandek listening. It's because it amuses him to see obsession in person, W. says. The look on your face, says W., it's hilarious. You look like a fascinated ape, he says.

W. has a certain respect for my obsessions, W. says, although they're absurdly narrowing. Your whole life has been nothing other than a series of obsessions, W. announces, and this is your latest one. W. is more measured than I am, he notes. He's interested in many things, in a whole expanse of things, for example, the whole gamut of Swedish pop.

That's what he listens to in the morning after he's read his Cohen, W. says. Two hours of Cohen - from four to six PM – without so much as a cup of tea, and then his cup of tea and Swedish pop, W. resting in the fact that he's already done a morning's work. It's a kind of reward to himself, W. says, his Swedish pop. It's an essential bridge between his morning of work and the rest of his day. It's the hinge of his day, W. says, his Swedish pop.

Of course, you would know nothing of this, W. says. When do I work? What do I all day? You're an administrator, W. says. You administrate all day, and then you put on Jandek and weep into your bovril.

I am a flounderer, says W., anyone can see that. I'm perpetually floundering at sea, says W. That's the word for you: flounderer. There's nothing that doesn't set you off balance.

W. has always feared for my emotional balance, but it's getting worse. Take what happened on the way to the Jandek gig, he says. You thought we were lost, horribly lost, when we were actually not lost at all, he says. You were asking everyone where the gig was, he says, all those tramps. What do tramps know about Jandek?, says W. Why were you bothering them?

And then, on the brink of the venue, at its threshold, you collapsed, didn't you?, says W. It was a horrible spectacle, says W., a grown man who'd lost control. You were weeping at the threshold!, says W. with great emphasis. You wanted to turn back, didn't you? To get a taxi going the other way? W. was concerned, he says. It was never as bad as that, he says, not before. Weeping at the threshold! A grown man!

Still, he learned something about me from the whole episode. Or rather, it was reconfirmed for him exactly the kind of person I am. A flounderer and a weeper, says W. At the threshold.

I'm a terrible influence on W., everyone says that. Why does he hang out with me? What's in it for him? The great and the good are shaking their heads. Sometimes W. goes back to the high table and explains himself. I am something to explain, W. says. He has to account for me to everyone.

I don't feel I have to answer for myself, W. says, that's what it is. I've no real sense of shame. It must be something to do with my Hinduism, W. muses. You're an ancient people, but an innocent one, W. says, unburdened by shame. On the other hand, it could be simply due to my stupidity. I'm freer than him, W. acknowledges, but more stupid. It's an innocent kind of stupidity, but it's stupidity nonetheless.

It's been my great role in his life, W. says, helping him escape the high table. He's down among the low tables now, he says, in the chimps' enclosure.

W. says my horror of books is gleeful, unlike his horror, which is just horror. Bookshops fill me with a kind of gleeful joy, W. says, whereas he just feels sadness. The packages of review copies keep arriving, he says: his office is full of them and he can't bear to open them. All those books! It depresses him, he says, but no doubt it would fill me with gleeful joy.

I'm perfectly suited to the end times, W. says. It's a perfect fit. Glee, that's your Grundstimmung. I'm not capable of sadness, says W., not really. The apocalypse doesn't really perturb me. W. spends all day in his office, surrounded by books in parcels (which keep arriving, he says), mourning the end of civilisation, whereas I take glee in the coming end.

He's like the Fisher King, says W. He's wounded, mortally wounded, and there's nothing left for him to fish in the waters of the history of philosophy. Am I one of the knights who tries to cure you?, I ask W. Am I Percival? No, W. says, I am his wound and his impotence and his dream is someone will come along to save him from me.

W. is still lost in Cohen, he says. What's it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.

I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.

I'm impressed, I tell W. You're always impressed!, W. says. Anything could impress you, monkey boy.

W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six o'clock, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.

W.'s come to the section on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is?, he asks me. It's a transverse section through a cone, I say. It's something to do with Kepler. Now it's W.'s turn to be impressed. You have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example. Remember when you told me when I asked the German word for badger? Der Dachs, I say to W., that's why you get dachshunds.

Anyway, W. says, there are three types of conic section: hyperbolic, parabolic and the other one – it isn't anything -bolic, it's just normal. I think that's what it's called: normal. Anyway, which one are you: hyperbolic or parabolic? Do you view yourself as a hyperbolic man or a parabolic man?

What is decisively new in Kant's conception of reality is that it does not exist in sensation nor even in pure intuition, but is a presupposition of thought and this is true also of the categories such as substance and causality. This is why reality is to be distinguished from actuality, Wirklichkeit.

Sometimes, W. dreams we will become mathematical thinkers, I the philosopher of infinitesimal calculus, he the philosopher of conic sections. 

Mathematics is the organon, says W. pedagogically. Do you know what organon means? He didn't know himself, W. says. It comes from Aristotle, and refers to an overall conceptual system – the categories and so on.

W. is growing increasingly certain that the route to religion is a mathematical one. Maths, that's what it's all about. Take Cohen, for example. And Rosenzweig. Of course no one can understand Rosenzweig on mathematics and religion, W. says.

For his part, W. has been reading his Hebrew Bible again, and wondering how to mathematise it. He's serious, he says. He is currently in an email exchange on the topic with one of his cleverer friends, he says.

The infinitesimally small is not a concept of thought, but of science, and the science of magnitudes, Groessen. But does not the idea of magnitude presuppose intuition? Thus there appears to be a contradiction between thought and intuition. How can the infinitesimal be a magnitude and at the same time not an intuition?

W. says he's since discovered that Groessen, in the last paragraph, can also be translated dimension. He's not sure what the implications of that might be, though.

How depressed are you?, W. asks me. Very, I tell him. W.'s in his office in the southwest of the country, and I am in mine in the northeast. W. says he's looking out of the window and thinking of his failure. How has it come to this?, he's thinking, over and over again.

Unopened parcels of review copies of books surround him, W. says. His office is thick with them. What can he do? W. says I am the only person who would be interested in such books. They sicken him W. says. They're like the ballast attached to a body to make sure it sinks, W. says. And he is sinking, he says.

It's different for you, W. acknowledges. You get some satisfaction from office work. It makes you think you've done something. W. can't bear it, though. Why does he come in, then?, I ask him. What's the point? He could take a few days leave. But W. feels something significant might happen in the office at any moment. He has to be there, W. says. What? What will happen? He doesn't know, says W. Something momentous.

We're bottom feeders, W. says as he often does. We live on scraps. Soon there will nothing for us, then what? I tell him the apocalypse will decide it all for us. It's coming, we agree. One of our intelligent friends says so. In 2014, wasn't it?, W. asks. 2012, I tell him. He's revised his estimate. Four years, says W. How will we survive until then? What will we do? Meanwhile, W.'s waiting in his office, the rain falling.  

Above all, W. admires my apocalypticism. When I speak in a calm and certain voice of the great disasters that are about to engulf us, he stops everything to listen. He clears space for me, stands back, and lets me speak as though I was a witch-doctor or a holy fool.

If there's one thing I'm right about it is the the slew of great disasters that are about to sweep us away, W. says. I've always been right on these matters, W. says, just as I am wrong on every other matter. In fact, it's my chief attribute, W. thinks, my sense of the apocalypse and the absolutely seriousness with which I talk of the apocalypse.

Sometimes, W. thinks he chooses his friends on the basis of their apocalypticism. If they manifest no apocalypticism, how can someone be his friend? One way to tell, says W., is their reaction to that song by Godspeed, what is it? oh yes, Dead Flag Blues. He plays it to everyone, W. says, and reminds me of the lyrics. These are truly the last days, says W. That's what you understand, isn't it? It's the only thing you really understand.

So what are you working on?, says W., knowing the answer. Nothing, nothing, I tell him, it's enough just to survive from day to day. I'm not like him, I tell W., I don't expect much from life, or from myself. I'm the troubled type!, I tell him. I'm perpetually troubled! W. finds this immensely funny. Your mighty oeuvre!, he exclaims. Your great contribution to humankind! How do you think you'll be remembered? What'll they put on your gravestone?

What's that name Hollywood directors use when they want to disclaim involvement with a film?, W. asks me. Alan Smithee, I say. That should be what we sign our work, says W. We're Alan Smithees! Nothing we intended to write was how it turned out! It wasn't our fault! It was everyone else's fault! It was the system's fault, for allowing us to write!  

What will he write about next?, W. muses. What'll be his next project? He's casting about, he admits it. Wasn't he supposed to learn Greek this summer? Protestant guilt keeps driving him into the office, he says. In he goes on the bus, thinking he ought to be doing something, but not quite sure what. He sits in the office among the parcels of review copies of books he keeps receiving. There are dozens of them, piled up all over the place. They depress him enormously. He can't bear to look at them.

For my part, W. notes, I still have a stupid excitement about books. It's because you're illiterate, W. says, because they're slightly above the level you can understand. Whenever I visit, I insist on opening the parcels and filling up W.'s shelves, reading him the funniest of the blurbs. It must be the bright covers that attract me, W. muses, whereas they depress him horribly. All these books!, he says, with weary horror. Look at them!

Conversation with W. Why has everything become so absurd?, I ask him. Why has it all come apart just at the moment when we might have got somewhere? But W. reminds me of what we both know: that any success we've had is premised upon exactly that absurdity.  

We're like captains of the Titanic, we tell each other. W.'s already steered his ship into the iceberg. It's wrecked – all hands lost. W. remains on the bridge, the last man standing, but there's not long left. It'll be your turn next, says W. How long do you think you'll last?

The iceberg's looming, I tell W. I'm mesmerised by it. So was he, says W. He knew it was coming and that it could only come. He knew that any success he had had was premised upon this greater and pre-ordained failure. He's dignified in defeat. Not like you, he says, gnashing your teeth and wailing from the rooftops.