Category: W.

Internal exile. That was my solution to the problem of Britain, wasn’t it?, W. says. Expect nothing from the world! Sit life out! Go on the dole! On the sick! Claim to be seeing things!, hearing things! Claim to be in the grip of imaginary mental illnesses! Get yourself committed!, confined in a secure unit! Pull Robert Walser’s stunt! Enter the asylum because of the safety of the asylum! Dream away your life in a serene captivity!

But then there was Kierkegaard, W. says. Then, for some reason, K saved me. Either/Or: that was the book I came across in an Old Hulme jumble sale, I’ve told him that. Either/Or: that was the book which awoke me from my bohemian slumbers.

Of course, my type usually lose themselves in conspiracy theories and books about UFOs, W. says. My type loses itself in the collected works of Colin Wilson, and in Dennis Wheatley’s Library of the Occult. What was it about Kierkegaard? What was it about Either/Or?

Was it the infinite variations on the expression of despair of A., the pseudonymous author of the first part of Kierkegaard’s book, which impressed me?, W. wonders. Was it his pages of laments? Or was it the call to arms of B., the pseudonymous author of the second part of Kierkegaard’s book, which spoke to me? Was it B.’s exhortations to look at oneself in the mirror?

‘There comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask’, Kierkegaard has B. write. ‘Do you believe that life will always be mocked? Do you believe that you can sneak away before midnight in order to avoid it?’ Had I reached my midnight?, W. wonders. Had I finally unmasked?

Either a life of shit, or a life of thought: isn't that what I said to myself?, W. says. Either a life of living unreflectively in the shit, or a life thinking about the shit: wasn't that it? And so shit began to think about itself, W. says. Shit looked at itself in the mirror. And I came to embody the spirit of shit …

Plato is turning in his grave, W. says. Kant is spinning in his grave. Did Hegel see what was coming? Did Cassirer?

We are not the murderers of thought, W. says, but we are complicit in the murder. We're not the ones who will slit thought's throat – but we stood aside, and let it happen.

The philosophical apocalypse. The philosophical end of times. Will it be clear, now, at the end of its history, what philosophy, all along, had wanted to say?

Philosophy will end neither with a bang nor a whisper, W. says. Philosophy will end in a  kind of thundering silence, he says. With an anonymous rumbling, which paids no heed to us at all.

No one will remember us (no one will remember him), W. says. No one will know what we tried to do (what he tried to do), W. says. No one will know what he had to put with …

The times are changing, W. says. An epoch is ending.

W. has the terrible feeling that we are going to be its gravediggers, he says. That the pit we have dug for ourselves – the disaster of our careers, the ludicrous posturing of our lives as thinkers – is the grave into which philosophy itself will be lowered.

Philosophy can't survive the catastrophe, W. says. Philosophy is going to be destroyed with everything else: that's what he fears. The philosopher is a person of leisure, W. says. A person removed from everyday worries. And who will have leisure in the times to come?, he says. Who will be free from the worries of life in the midst of the apocalypse?

He has the feeling that something terrible is going to happen, W. says. The other day, he found himself weeping without reason. He felt overwhelmed by an unaccountable sadness, by a total melancholy that seemed to be without cause. W. felt drawn to watch his saddest films, he says, and listen to his saddest music.

Is this what Kierkegaard meant by dread?, W. wonders. Is this what Kierkegaard means by anxiety? But he’s not anxious about himself, W. says. It’s not his own existence which worries him, his own soul. Something’s changed in the world, he's sure of it. Any minute now, and will become clear to everyone. At any moment, it will be there for all to discern.

The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast.

He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that … Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. — 'Your people, pillaging and marauding …'

Of course, I’ve always maintained that the Vikings have been misunderstood by history, W. says. They were a melancholy people, first and foremost, I’ve told him. A people of tungsing, of heavy-souledness, I’ve insisted.

The Vikings knew their time was over, I’ve told W. They knew that their Ragnarok was coming; that a new religion was coming that would sweep the old one away. It was because Christianity was coming to their northlands that they sailed to Holy Island and smashed the Abbey, I said to W. And it was a sense of their own posthumousness that drove them to pillage and maraud their way across Christian Europe.

And wasn’t it the same soul-heaviness which drove them to the New World, to settle in Newfoundland? Wasn’t it Viking heavy-souledness which led them southwards, down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico? They wanted to escape, I told W. To escape themselves! To leave themselves behind! that's why they founded Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa, and in pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies.

Of course, there’s a fundamental difference in our philosophy of walking, W. says. The Jewish walker walks forward, W. says. A trivial point, but one too often lost on the Hindu. Because the Hindu walks in circles, W. says. The Hindu only ever walks round and round!

For the Jew, W. says, every walk is an exodus, a leaving behind of the house of bondage. For the Jew, every walk is a politica act, a determined effort to found a new community in leaving behind slavery, to journey together away from Egypt. For the Hindu, however, the walk is only ever cosmological, W. says. — 'You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!'

It's like the wheel of rebirth, W. says. It's like the turning of the Four Ages. History, for the Jew, has only one direction, even if, in the end, it points beyond history. Only one direction — and so, for the Jewish walker, we are always walking towards Canaan.

The best Kierkegaard, is the last Kierkegaard, W. says, the Kierkegaard who has curdled and lost all moderation. We, too, must lose all moderation, W. says.

Just as Kierkegaard called an opponent a glob of snot, we, too, must call our opponents globs of snot, W. says. Just as Kierkegaard called the entirety of Christendom an invention of Satan, we must understand the entirety of Britain as the invention of Satan. Why don't I understand the extremes to which we must go?

W. has discovered absolute despair, he says on the phone. His module on philosophical poetry isn’t going well. The athletes just aren’t interested in Paul Celan, he says. Mandelstam means nothing to them. It’s even worse with his module on the phenomenology of suffering, he says. Sports science students are too cheerful for Cioran, he says.

He’s sure I bought my pink notebook just to annoy him, W. says. A pink notebook, with a pink ribbon as a bookmark, in which I write with a violet pen in violet ink, like a Japanese schoolgirl.

What have I been writing? ‘Cynothoglys’, W. reads. ‘Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Zvilpogghua – tentacles instead of a face’. What is this?, W. wonders. A made up language? And then, ‘Shathak – Death Reborn. Volga-Gath – Keeper of Secrets’. What are these?, W. asks. Norwegian death metal bands?

‘My name is legion’, W. reads. The ‘nihil negativum’, W. reads.

Then a drawing. A kind of goat with wings and a star on its forehead. A goat with breasts, W. says. And what’s this: a head with three faces?

Then pages of minute writing, almost too small for the eye to see. It’s a bit like Walser’s Microscripts, W. says. It’s a bit like the work of one of those outsider writers, which is discovered in mouldering piles in a flat. Ten thousand manuscript pages full of ravings, full of wild new mythologies …

W. has always thought that there are certain thoughts which come to you only in exhaustion, only once you’ve reached the end of your strength.

Hadn’t he reached this point with his friends among the Essex postgraduates time and again? Hadn’t he and his housemates … discovered the secrets of the universe after drunken nights at the bar?

The trouble is what exhaustion reveals it also keeps to itself, W. says. What could he and his friends remember the next day of what they had discussed? What of the truth that seemed to dawn between them?

It’s different with me, of course, with whom exhaustion leads nowhere. What thoughts have ever come to him after our nights of drinking? What does he remember the next day except for formless horror and for the kind of states only H.P. Lovecraft would know how to name?

‘When do you work?’, W. says. ‘When do you have ideas?’ But he knows the answer. I am too busy to work, I tell him. I am too occupied to have ideas.

He knows what I do all day. He knows I’m busy with bureaucracy and administration. But what about my evenings?

He sees me, in his mind’s eye, opening a bottle of wine in the squalor of my flat after a day at work. He sees me, booting up my laptop, getting ready to write.

My problem is that I think writing about ideas is the same as having ideas, when in reality they are entirely different. You have to stop writing to have an idea, W. says. You have to pause and wait.

Of course, it’s worse for me when I do stop writing, W. says. It’s worse when I collapse into my bed and try to sleep. He pictures me staggering around my flat in the early hours, preparing for bed. He sees me ranging around my flat like the abominable snowman, my dressing gown flapping around me …

‘You can never sleep, can you? You’ve never been able to sleep’, W says. He sees me in his mind’s eye, lying sleepless in bed, full of great paranoid imaginings about the way I think they’ll sack me. He sees me lying there, quite panicked, fearing that I’ll be sent back to the dole queue. And he sees me falling asleep at last, collapsing into unconsciousness at last, just as dawn begins, and the birds start singing, just as – on the opposite end of the country, W. is waking up, ready to begin work. He sees me dreaming fitfully about working out my notice and exit interviews. He sees me mouthing the words, No!, No!, in my half sleep … And he sees my eyes open again, the Leviathan awake, rolling out of my bed like a Spital Tongues Gargantua …

W.’s decided to stage an intervention, he says. He’s had enough. He’s going to intervene in my life.

‘Your life is the complete opposite of everything you know is right’, W. says. I’ve taken everything that Blanchot’s done and said and done and said the opposite.

‘When are you going to take philosophy seriously?’, W. says. ‘You haven’t read anything in years. Are you retiring from philosophy?’, he asks. ‘Have you given up?’ I haven’t, I tell him. – ‘Then why don’t you write some philosophy? You have to externalise yourself. You have to experience your shortcomings’.

W. knows my problem: I don’t want to do actual work, W. says. I don’t want to face the sheer anonymity of it all. – ‘No one’s going to pay any attention to you’, he says. ‘No one’s ever going to care what either of us is going to write. But you have to believe you can change things. You have to believe that you can write something great’.

That’s what W. believes, in his heart of hearts, he says: that our collaboration might lead to something great. Why can’t I see it? Why have I given up on him? On us?

It’s not that I don’t write. There’s all my writing on my blog, he says. Writing that is largely about him, of course. W. says this … W. says that … No one I actually respect would write anything like that. Do you think Kafka would have a blog? Would Blanchot?

Despite everything, I want to be liked, W. says. That’s my problem. I want an audience. That’s why I’m so deluded about the internet. That’s why I believe so vehemently in the blogosphere. – ‘It’s a way for a maniac like you get some attention’, W. says. The real thinker understands that that kind of attention destroys the possibility of thought, he says. Thinkers have to be obscure, W. says. Kafka was obscure. No one knew anything about him. Blanchot was obscure. The thinker has to become imperceptible: didn’t Deleuze and Guattari say that? The writer has to be el hombre invisible: didn’t Burroughs write that?

He knows all about my nosebleeds, W. says. He’s seen enough of them.

He remembers my Freiburg nosebleed. I appalled the Germans, W. says. I horrified them. He remembers my great American nosebleeds. I bled in Nashville, in a faux honky-tonk bar. And then I bled in Memphis in a faux blues bar. Bar tenders brought me tissues. Preppies looked away … And haven’t I told him of my nosebleeds of my days as a temporary contractor in Bracknell? The shirts I have soiled … The office desks … How many times did they have to let me home early, in disgust? How many times did they ring up my agency to complain?

Blood running from my nose … Blood pooling in my philtrum, and along the top of my lips, my great fat lips … Blood colouring my teeth, until I look like a jackal … Sometimes he sees it as a kind of martyrdom, W. says. I bleed to remember all the suffering in the world, just as Johnny Cash wore black to remember all the suffering in the world. I bleed because others bleed, in some kind of animal sympathy.

Sometimes it sees it as part of my Hinduism, as a part of the streaming of all things. As part of a great Hindu streaming, in which you can see all the gods, all the mortals, the beginning of the universe, and the end. My nosebleeds are cosmic, W. says.

Sometimes, he sees it as a Scandinavian phenomenon, a pagan phenomenon: as a kind of sympathy for Baldur, the bleeding God. It was said that Balder bled because the world had gone dark, and all promise had disappeared. It was said Balder’s wound wouldn’t heal until Ragnarok, at the end of times. And isn’t that the way with my nosebleed, too – that I bleed because our world has gone dark, and because our promise has disappeared. And won’t my nosebleed not stop until the final hour?

Plan A’s collapsed, we agree. So what’s plan B? There is no Plan B. There’s only fantasy after the collapse of Plan A.

‘Show me your reading face’, W. says. ‘Go on. What’s the expression on your face as you read?’ He makes a puzzled face. Is this it? He makes a sad face. Is this it? He scratches his head like Stan Laurel. He makes hooting noises like a chimp.

He remembers them well: my work years, W. says. My writing years. I used to sleep in my office, in my cupboard, didn’t I? I used to live in my office, showering in the gym, living on discounted sandwiches (as I still live on discounted sandwiches, W. says) …

How much I wrote! How much I published! I was like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, W. says, gone mad and deaf in my belfry, ringing out the bells of my stupidity …

Even he was inspired, W. says. Oh, not by what I wrote – it was complete rubbish, he says. But by my shamelessness in publishing it at all. One essay after another, one essay and then another in every kind of academic journal, W. says, across every discipline you could name.

It was pell-mell, W. says. Completely shameless. Completely opportunistic …

Ah, but my work years are long past. What do I do all day?, W. wonders. How do I occupy myself? Do I read? Write? Do I continue to refine my knowledge of Sanskrit? Of ancient Greek? Do I continue to try to understand mathematics, and keep up with the latest developments in the sciences?

Ah, he knows the answer, W. says. He knows how I live.

A hot day. Dundee's famous micro-climate. – 'You don't sweat much, do you?', W. says. 'It must be your Hindu genes'.

Indians have more sweat glands: haven't I told him that? You'd think that that would make you sweat more, W. says.

At the same time, I have the thick skin of a Scandinavian, W. says. Thick skin, to keep the Viking warm during the long winters.

And there's blubber under your skin, W. says. I'm as warm as a walrus, no matter how cold it is, he says. As warm as a sperm whale, diving beneath the Arctic ice. I am insulated by my fat, just as my head is insulated by my stupidity.

A fathead, that's what I am, W. says. But perhaps you need a fat head to dive into the depths of thought. Perhaps you need a kind of insulation, he says. Perhaps only the fat-head can think, W. says. Well, he'll dive with me, a whelk on the side of a whale.

At the conference. Why don't I ask questions anymore?, W. wonders. Why don't I intervene, after the presentations?

He remembers the questions I used to ask, W. says. After every presentation! My voice, booming out! My voice, resounding beneath the vaulted ceilings! For a time – a long time – no conference presentation was complete without one of my booming questions. There'd be no conference discussion in which I didn't have my say.

W. remembers the questions I asked in the warmest and stuffiest of lecture rooms. He remembers my interventions in the final hour of a long day of presentations. In the final minute! I cut through the fog. I broke through the torpor. It was marvellous, W. says. – 'Your lucidity. Your far-sightedness'.

Then what happened?, W. wonders. How did I end up so sullen and uncommunicative? I became silent. Surly. I sat with folded arms, and took no notes.

W. remembers the notes I used to take. Pages and pages of them! With diagrams! In different colours! He remembers the array of pencils and pens I used to line up beside my notepad. He remembers my underlinings and exclamation points. He remembers me writing No!, or Yes! beside my notes in capital letters.

What happened?, W. wonders. Do I still have questions in my head? Do questions still burn somewhere inside me? There's no sign of it, W. says. I sit, W. says. I slouch. I let it all wash over me – presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker. I let the waves break over me.

It means nothing to me now, does it, W. says. All thought, all philosophy. I am a mollusic on the shore, W. says. I am a pebble on the beach, simple and impermeable. I am lost in the single, as the waves break over me.

How did I become so passive, so inert?, W. wonders. When did I give up any effort to think? When did I stop externalising myself in questions and comments?

He knows the end of times suits me, in some way. He knows that it might allow me to come into my own.

It's as if the world were my nightmare, W. says. As if the whole would is nothing but a fever-dream of mine, in which he, W., has no real existence.

It's a kind of gnosticism, W. says. I'm the bad demi-urge, who made everything go wrong, and he's the divine principle which struggles for the good.

But in the end, W. knows that he's no match for me. The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction, and happening on my terms. And there I am laughing in the midst of the apocalypse. There I am, a little piece of it – a sample, like the tester pots of paint you can buy in B & Q.

This is what it's going to be like: that's what W. discovers in my company. The end times are going to be exactly like this.

How do I bear it, my day to day reality?, W. asks. But it's quite clear: I don't bear it. My life is in a state of collapse, anyone can see it. Lars is in the final act, W. always tells himself. It can't go on, can it? But it does go on, W. says. Empires have collapsed more slowly.

And there's my smile, W. says. My dreadful smile. It's as though I were enjoying some kjind of revenge, W. says. As though I was exacting a kind of revenge on myself, for what, he doesn't know.

'You have that look which says: everything's over, it's all finished', W. says. 'But it hasn't finished, has it? And it won't be finished until that dreadful smile, the mockery of the whole of existence, is wiped from my face.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, W. says. But what when your friend is your enemy? What, when you friend is your saboteur and discourager?

W.'s question: 'Would you consider yourself a man of ambition, a man of persistence, a man who will leave a legacy?' And then, 'Are you a man who has honoured philosophy, or dishonoured it?' Are you a man of wisdom, or a man of folly? Are you a man of sound judgement and discrimination, or a man of foolishness and panic?'

And then: 'What do you think is your best feature: your wit? Your grace? Your elegance?'

W. is in a questioning mood. – 'Would you call yourself a moral man?', he asks. 'Would you call yourself a man of honour?' And then, 'Do other people look up to you? Are others moved by you, inspired by you?' And then, 'Do you think you've touched other people's lives – in a good way? Have your students changed the way they live because of you?' And then, 'Do you think you deserve the title, lecturer? Do you think you stand in the tradition of other great lecturers in the past?

More questions. – 'What do you think you've imparted to your students? What do you think they've taken from you?' And then, 'What does teaching mean to you?', he asks me. 'What is your method of teaching? Do you think they've learned from your example?' And then, 'Do you regard yourself as an inspiring presence, or an inhibiting presence? Have you been an open road, or a living obstacle? Have you pointed beyond yourself like a seer, like a prophet, or have you only ever pointed to yourself as a living warning?'

'Do you teach by example?', W. says. 'Do you tell your students about your life, about the way you've sought to exemplify the philosophical ideal?' He tells his students about my life, he says. He uses me as an example. Of the vices of thought. Of thought's compromise and destruction. Lars is where philosophy crashed and burned, he tells them. Lars is where philosophy shot itself in the head.

The university of the outside … The truly open university …

W. wants to discover the opposite of Britain within Britain, he says.

He thinks of Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus, and Rosenstock’s Camp William James. He dreams of Arendt, Strauss and the University in Exile …

They didn’t go far enough, W. says. Mind you, none of them were British. They didn’t understand how far they had to go … And isn’t it of that that W. dreams of now: of a university set up by those who knew how far they would have to go? How far from Britain they would have to go, W. says. How far from Oxford, from the old order, W. says. And how far from the Beast, from the new order, W. says.

The university of the streets … The university of perpetual protest …

We remember the activities of the Committee of Writers and Intellectuals during the Events of May 1968. Blanchot, ‘pale but real’, Duras beside him. Mascolo. And students, hordes of students. And workers!

They wrote handbills and bulletins. They collectively authored the now famous slogans. Tomorrow it was May: that was the title of one of their tracts. Tomorrow it was May …

The university of unconditional welcome … The university of hospitality …

W. reminds me of Deleuze’s seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander off the streets. Vagrants twitching in the audience … Alcoholics shouting abuse …

You have to trust the author you’re studying, Deleuze used to tell his audience. You must silence the voices of objection within you. You must let the author speak for himself, analyse the frequency of his words, the style of his own obsessions. His thought invents coordinates and develops along its own axes …

Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in his cloud of cigarette smoke. Sometimes, he’d pause to take questions from the floor – mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Sometimes, Deleuze would pause in his analysis of Spinoza to let the hubbub die down. He’d look up, with his tender eyes, surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.

It’s like Jandek, W. says … Didn’t I teach him everything he knows about Jandek? Didn’t I instruct him? Didn’t I take him through the later albums one by one? I Threw You Away. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds … What titles! What album sleeves!

Jandek only sings about suffering, I told W. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Jandek begins at the end, at the very end. And he somehow goes on from the very end. He somehow continues, beginning at the end and not relinquishing the end, a man alone in a room with a guitar, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder running. He goes on, plucking or strumming open strings, leaving them to rattle, crying and howling and moaning and gasping …

Jandek doesn’t teach us about the end of the world so much as the endlessness of the end, W. says.

I don’t know what to do except/ Sit in a chair/ Maybe walk around/ Once in a while/ But quick, back to that chair …

Let me tell you about my blues/ My blues have turned black/ Black, black, black, black, black …

The things Jandek’s known, W. says. The things he’s experienced. Jandek’s gone outside, W. says. Jandek’s stayed outside …

The university of fate … The university of hope … W. reminds me of how Tarr only cast his friends in his films. The same friends, every time. Ordinary people. Ugly people. Drunkards.

Tarr shot everything in one take’ W. says, in awe. One take – and these were non-actors. If the shot went wrong, the shot went wrong. Tarr would simply begin again, and over again. And some of these shots were fifty minutes long! There was the TV version of Macbeth that he made which comprised two takes. Just two takes … and one of the actors was a terrible alcoholic who kept fluffing his lines … Never mind, never mind, Tarr would simply start shooting again, once again from the top, once again …

The university of vagrancy … The university of prophecy …

W. recalls how Herzog cast Bruno S. in his films. Who else could play Kaspar Hauser other than a real outsider, a man who had never acted, a man who had no interest in acting, but was only himself in the two films he made with Herzog? Kaspar Hauser: himself. Bruno S: no one other than himself!

Bruno – the real Bruno – always spoke in the third person, which W. really admires. ‘Bruno is sad. Bruno is angry’. I should take it up: ‘Fat boy hungry. Fat boy want dinner’. Seriously, though, there was always that distance … as though he were also someone else, something else, something impersonal, like fate.

They are closing all the doors on Bruno, and oh, so, politely.

Bruno’s getting pushed aside as if he didn’t exist. …

Bruno was a kind of prophet, W. says. An anti-prophet, who only sees doom, only ruination. He knows in advance that it's all going to fail. We're going down: he knows that. The end times have begun: that’s all he knows.

Bruno knows it will end, that it's all coming to an end, but he hopes nonetheless. He hopes nevertheless, against himself and against fate. He hopes: and that’s what you can see in him, too, W. says … That’s what Herzog must have seen in him. It’s pathetic. It’s nothing, nothing. The faith of a child, the hope of a child …