Category: W.

Am I concerned about posterity?, W. wonders. Am I concerned about what people will think? Obviously not, W. says.

So many typos! I complain about the errors in my typescript. – 'You are a typo', W. says.

My own corner, that's where I should stay, W. says, and I am staying there. My own corrner, with my own interests, which are contracting by the day, W. says.

Pathos is not enough, W. says. He wants precision, too: jewelled writing.

This is no time for sloppiness of thought, W. says. Lines have to be drawn, demarcations made!

W. is becoming a jeweller of philosophy, he says, whereas I will only ever be one of those elephants who splashes with a paintbrush.

Ignorance falling into ignorance, W. says. Ignorance redoubled, and lost in ignorance: that's what happens when we converse.

Administration is our good fortune, W. says. Our endless bureaucracy. Because we can still believe that if we had time, we could produce a masterwork.

My apprenticeship in stupidity. – 'You served your time'. I ran up against my limits, not once, but a thousand times. And I wore my limits away, as a river, over millennia, can wear away rock. – 'You made them irrelevant'.

In the end, they opened, they became a kind of landscape, a wide, flat plain over which there rolled great storms of idiocy. – 'They were fierce', says W., 'but you endured'. And then, when the storms had passed? A calm sky, a limpid sky, the stars flashing … I'd come to the highest, widest place. I'd been tested and survived. – 'Your stupidity was very pure'.

Life? What do we know about life? We can barely sit at a table, W. says.

My troubles, W. says. I'd like to think I am a troubled man. My romantic troubles. My troubles at work. My life troubles. He's heard them all, W. says, but he's convinced by none of it.

An idiot drools: that's my life, that drooling, W. says. An idiot scratches his head: that's my life, that scratching, W. says.

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You – wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics …

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition – that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon – further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write … And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night … Then, just after you turned off the light … A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner … 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea – the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique …

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life – the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter …

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist – you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

I am an apocalypticist, a resenter, W. says. I can speak only in great generalisations, in great dark gusts.

They want us to say something, W. says. He's not sure what.

I have to control myself, W. says. My tendency is to scare them off, students. It's to bellow and fuss and to deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. always tries to speak calmly, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who am going back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe the Plymouth Postgraduates with soft words and sympathy.

Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Empty bags of kettle crisps and empty bottles. Spread blankets and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop.

This is what he calls a political protest, W. says.

Life is shit: that's what it reads on the banner strewn across the humanities building at W.'s college. The students are occupying again, W. says.

What are their demands?, we wonder. What do they want? Ah, what are our demands?, we wonder. What do any of us want?

W. went to a lecture on dolphins recently, he says. Turns out they're not intelligent after all. They made a terrible mistake, trying to communicate with them for all those years. There was no point at all; they're quite stupid.

They're related to sheep, dolphins, W. says They're ungulates, basically. They're sheep who decided to go back into the water.

Of course, he was always sceptical about dolphins, W. says. When was the last time you saw a dolphin cathedral? When did you last meet a dolphin philosopher?

Lenin died of the same brain disease as his father, W. says. He must have known it was coming, the series of strokes, and then the long decline, which saw his mental powers dissipate altogether. He must have known he'd end up wrapped in a blanket and wheeled along in a bath-chair, one hemisphere of his brain having turned entirely into cottage-cheese-like mush, and the other one about do the same.

His nurses tried to teach him the word worker again, and revolution. His aides tried to teach him the words peasant and people; they tried to teach him the words cell and congress. God knows, his wife even tried to get him to say kulak, a word he used to spit out in hatred, but from his lips came only the nonsense word vot-vot.

Vot-vot, he said to express agreement and disagreement, satisfaction or annoyance. Vot-vot, he said, with various inflections, as his brain died. Vot-vot to the visiting Trotsky, soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union; vot-vot to Stalin, soon to become its absolute ruler. Vot-vot: and isn't that my word, too, or something like it?

What do I actually understand?, W. wonders. What do I really know? Idiocy is unwitting, he says. It doesn't really suffer itself; that's its lightness. The idiot's an innocent, a child. Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks to himself. What fun! And he laughs too, but what does he understand of what he's laughing at?

Everything's funny! He's an idiot – and that's funny, too. Vot-vot, the idiot says. Vot-vot! But W.'s not laughing anymore. The laughter's stuck to his throat.

'Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering'. W. is reading from a webpage that collects the sayings of vagrants. That's attributed to the Singer, he says.

'"A handshake can judge you': that's Black Sam', W. says. And then several quotes in a row: 'We're all stange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics'; 'You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have one spark, just one spark'; 'There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?' Who's that?, I ask him. – 'Black Sam again. It's like something from a Malick film', W. says. And then, 'What would your saying be?', he asks. But he knows the answer. 'Vot-vot', he says.

W. tells me of his months as an artist's model, being painted by Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt. Lenkiewicz only wanted to talk about philosophy, W. says. He was obsessed with philosophy. He bankrupted himself buying philosophy books, all kinds of books, W. says.

Lenkiewicz bought a derelict church and filled it with books, piles and piles of them, it was quite extraordinary, W. says. W.'d look through the mouldering books with Lenkiewicz, the painter picking up a volume here and there to show him. He had Spinoza's Ethics in a first edition. Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption. He had the pageproofs of Kierkegaard's Discourses on Imagined Occasions, worth thousands of pounds.

Lenkiewicz was painting W. in  series of works called Obsession, W. tells me. He always painted in series, Lenkiewicz – projects, he called them. He had a Vagrancy project and a Street Drinking project. He had a Mentally Handicapped project. But W. was part of the Obsession project, or he was supposed to be. Lenkiewicz died very suddenly, just like that, and it was all over. They had to sell all his paintings to meet his debts. They sold his books too – they had to sell the whole church full of books …

Do I see him as an obsessive?, W. says.

The train to Manchester.

The hours pass. It's a long journey, infinitely long. We're beginning to forget our pre-train lives. We're beginning to forget who we were once were, out there, on the other side of the glass. Have we ever been anything other than voyagers? Have we ever been anything other than children on a journey, amusing themselves with their nonsense?

Is his melancholy deeper than his philosophy?, W. wonders. Or is his philosophy deeper than his melancholy? He's never quite sure.

We're landfill thinkers, W. says. Landfill philosophers. But he doesn't mind. He has the sense of edging forward in the darkness, he says. He has the sense of digging his burrow, of pushing on in dark times.

And what kind of burrow am I digging?, W. wonders. What kind of tunnel can a mole make without claws, a mole that's gone mad underground?

Perhaps thought needs its buffoons, W. says. Perhaps thought can only begin with the exhaustion of thought, and who are we if not its exhausters?

There's no laughter like postgraduate laughter, we agree. There's nothing as dark. Nothing as knowing. It's death-row laughter, we agree. It's the laughter of those condemned to death. Because they are condemned to death, the postgraduates. Exposed to the greatest of thoughts, the greatest of books, they're condemned to a life without meaning, without succour, to a life of shit in a world of shit …

The postgraduates wear us out, as they always do. It's like looking in a terrible mirror. It's like seeing ourselves, robbed of self-satisfaction, robbed of our pandering. To think that we, too, burned with the same black fire! And to think that by some strange miracle, by some lapse in the logic of the universe, we actually found jobs. To think that we – we – found ourselves in academic jobs.

The postgraduate is the angel of the academic world, we agree. They're between worlds – mediators between the world of full-time lecturers and the netherworld of the undergraduate. They teach – they often take seminars – but they are not a real part of the teaching staff. They study, it is true, but they're not entirely students, either.

They have a sense of what they want to achieve: an academic job, an academic career, but they know that there are very few such jobs, and very little chance of a career. They've fled from the world into academia, but they know they will most likely find themselves back there, as though they'd entirely dreamt up their postgraduate lives. 

Will they be workers in the world, dreaming of being postgraduates, or postgraduates, eternal postgraduates, who are dreaming of working in the world?

And then there is the torture of study itself. It's not enough to want to escape. Not enough to hole yourself up and dream. How many postgraduates fail to complete their dissertations! How many of them stumble in their studies, and fail to get up? How many of them fail their exams? 

And for those who pass? For those who work their way to an MA or a PhD? There are barely any jobs in the universities. There's barely anything for which to apply. Now it begins, the time of horror, when you and every other idiot's competing for a job. Ah, what horror, when you learn it is the same skills necessary to get on in the world that are necessary to get on academia!

But here we are among them, the angels, the postgraduates. How slim they are! How tall, all dressed in black, and smoking their cigarettes! How intense they are, talking of their work, and weighing up the conference speakers. How focused, talking of ideas and only ideas …

Sometimes, you need to be among the postgraduates, we agree. Sometimes you need to feel them alongside you, full of life, full of brilliance.

It's like swimming with dolphins, we agree. It's like snorkelling through a shoal of fish. You feel tiny electrical shocks on your skin. Your hair feels as though it's standing on end. Ah, what brilliance! What fleetness!

Haven't we always found ourselves drawn to postgraduate keenness? They have antennae for the new. What they don't know about the latest ideas! What they don't know about the latest thought from France! 

But it is the fact that they feel the horror of the world behind them that makes our desire to be among them essential. They know the horror of Britain. They're fleeing it; that's what drove them into further study. And it drives them through their studies, that horror. It stands behind them like a drover.

Conference evening, on Greenwich lawns.

How many speakers we've heard! How many ideas! Sometimes, we have to admit, we were bored. We fell to drawing monkey butlers in our notebooks. Sometimes, W. wrote an obscenity in big letters in my notebook, or I drew something obscene in his. But at other times, we were exhilarated, set on fire by thoughts. Sometimes, we felt caught in the updraft of someone else's ideas. We felt flown like kites by the thoughts of others.

But now we're tired, after our day. Our limbs feel heavy; our eyes are closing.

There's only one thing for it. – 'Take me to the postgraduates', W. says.

We dream of the book we might write together, which might appear under both our names. Our Anti-Oedipus, he says. Our Anti-Duhring. Our System-Programme.

It won't be a book about a book, we think to ourselves, but a thing unto itself, standing on its own two feet. Not a book about books – a commentary-book, or an introductory book – but a book that would live its own life, running through the forest like Baba Yaga's hut.

A book that made itself, somehow. The book granted Pinnocchio's wish to be a real thing. A living book, a living flame, a star which consumes only itself.

A book that does not need us, that's our dream. A book that has its own adventures, far away from us, cleverer than us and better than us, a book which surpasses us in everything.

And who will we be, cast into the outer darkness by its glory?, W. says. Who will we be, measured by our book, by the greatness of our book?  We will be sons of the book, we agree. We'll be fathers on the book which will give birth to us as its sons, that's what we dream of. That our book will give birth to us as it dismisses us and sends us away. As it pushes us away with a laugh and leaps into the world …

The last thinker of Essex Postgraduate legend will come on the last day, which the Germans call the youngest day, W. says. He'll come in the last hour of the last day, wreathed in clouds, in the last minute, and every thinking eye shall see him. He'll come in the last second, and all the enemies of thought will wail because of him.

And he will set down the book the carries with him, that is known as the Book of Life. And he'll unlock its seven seals, one by one, the Book, and stand back as, with each seal, a miracle is wrought, an alteration of the world as it is.

And when he opens the first seal? A white horse will go out, with a white rider, dazzling with light, and raze the universities of the southeast. And when he opens the second? A red horse will go out, with a red rider, dripping with blood, and raze the universities of the southwest. And the third? A black horse will ride out, with its black rider, cloaked in the night, and raze the universities of the northwest. And the fourth? A pale horse will ride out, with a pale rider, clothed in winding sheets, and raze the universities of the northeast.

And when he opens the fifth? Those expelled from their jobs, those sacked from righteous departments, will have white robes given unto them. Postgraduates who never finished their studies, who broke themselves against the texts of Heidegger and Levinas and Deleuze: they too shall receive white robes. Undergraduate geniuses, brighter than a thousand suns, who never received funding for postgraduate study: they too shall wear robes of white. Thinkers outside the university, who lived their entire lives in dreadful jobs, thinkers of unimaginable integrity, unimaginable determination: they too will be white-robed. Thinkers too mad to think, institutionalised thinkers, alcoholic thinkers of the gutter, who were never given a chance: they, too, will be lifted up and clothed in white.

And the sixth? There will come a great thought-quake, a shaking of books. The sun of thought will become as black as a sackcloth of ash, and the moon of thought as red as blood. And the false stars of thought – the careerists and pontificators; the popularisers and dumbers-down; the depoliticisers and despiritualisers will fall unto earth. And the false heaven of thinking, full of Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy, of Philosophy in 60 Minutes guides, of Critical Thinkers series, of Guides to the Perplexed will be rolled up like a scroll …

And the enemies of thought will hide themselves in the dens and the rocks of the mountains, and will say unto those mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face of the last thinker, for the great day of his wrath is come …

And the seventh? When the seventh seal of thought is opened? No one knows what will happen then, W. says. No one can imagine it. Every enemy of thought shall seek death: that's what been prophesised, and they shall not find it. Every enemy of thought shall desire to die, and have death flee from them.

There will be great disasters: the trees will be burnt up, and all the green grass burnt up. Great mountains burning with fire will be case into the sea, and the sea will become blood. Flesh and blood will rain from the sky, and bodiless voices cry out in the night.

The Leviathan will wake. The Behemoth. And the Beast will reign in Babylon, the regnerated city. And the remnant who will survive, the 144,000 who will have the last thinker's name written on their foreheads, will ready themselves for the last battle, for the Armageddon when Babylon is smashed and the Beast vanquished.

And then? A new City will appear in heaven. A new dispensation. The University of New Jerusalem: that's what they'll call it. The University where all are students, and all teachers. The University without courses or curricula, where each learns from the lips of the other. The University of Speech, where each addresses to the other and is thereby awoken. The University in Flight, where what matters is to move with thought, to dance and sing with it, and not to remain still. The University of the Periphery, which will be at the edges of everywhere, and wherever you turn.