Our Collaboration

We’re collaborating on a paper. W.’s written his half and brought a hard copy with him on his visit, formatted in the way W. likes to format things, with a title page with details of his name and affiliation. ‘There’, he says, giving to me. ‘Where’s yours?’ And then, knowing the answer, ‘Why can’t you ever finish anything on time? What’s wrong with you?’

It’s true, I never finish anything, no matter how many months I take to write something. There are always huge gaps – most of the paper – where I have to ad lib. ‘I like to watch you flail about’, says W. He has to admit, I’m quick on my feet. ‘You always think of something to say. It’s impressive.’ Sometimes, in our presentations, W. will turn very quickly to me and ask me to elborate on his point. I can always think of something. ‘I was checking to see if you were asleep’, he tells me later. ‘You looked asleep. It’s amazing how you can wake up like that. It almost makes you look intelligent.’

W. is certain his IQ is a few points higher than mine (‘it makes all the difference’), but he conceeds I may be quicker. ‘It’s you curse’, he says, ‘it means you never have to do any work.’ And then, ‘you’re lazy. La-zy.’ I tell him I’m nothing of the sort, that I spend months in preparation for any speaking engagement. I work hard, but it never seems to come together.

‘It’s my decline’ I tell him. ‘Ah yes, your decline.’ W. is as puzzled by this as anyone. ‘To what do you attribute it?’ – ‘I drink less coffee’. – ‘Yes, yes.’ – ‘My job is much more busy than yours.’ – ‘Undoubtedly. But I never thought of you as flappy, but that’s what you are, aren’t you? Flappy.’ I have been flapping about our paper, it’s true. My half wouldn’t come together. There’s W.’s, all printed out, with a title page, and there’s mine, handwritten notes, a few printed paragraphs, and vast gaps in which I will have to ad lib.

‘Something went wrong’, I tell him, ‘I’m not sure when. I think my brain is softening.’ I think of a cactus that was bought for me that fell prey to a disease. When I came back from a week away, it had rotted from within and collapsed upon itself. ‘That’s my brain’, I tell W. ‘It’s collapsed.’

W. finds this the collapse of his protege quite fascinating. ‘When did it all start going wrong? When did you first become aware of it?’ There’s something spectacular about my decline, W. decides. Something Faustian. ‘What kind of bargain did you make with the devil back then? How did you appear so intelligent?’ And then, ‘well, he’s carried your soul off now, hasn’t he?’

Then, in a spirit of diagnosis, ‘Describe your work day to me. What do you do?’ I get up very early, I tell him. ‘How early.’ – ‘Never later than six thirty.’ – ‘I get up at five. earlier sometimes!’ – ‘Then I do two hours of work.’ – ‘What kind of work? What does it involve.’ – ‘I read …’ – ‘What kind of reading? In the original language? Primary, rather than secondary?’

‘I write …’ – ‘Ah, that’s your problem. You try to write too soon. You have to slow down. Read more slowly. That’s why I read things in the original. To read more slowly.’ – ‘Then I go to the office.’ – ‘Ah, your office,’ says W., ‘that’s what stops you from writing your magnum opus, isn’t it?’

For his part, W. is busy on his introductory volume. He’s finished chapter two, he tells me. ‘It’s terrible. What I’m doing to Heidegger – my God!’ And then, ‘You should write an introductory book, you know. It’s good for you. You have to be clear. Cle-ar. You’re never clear, are you.’ I point out that he always said it was me who taught him clarity. ‘Not clarity, you fool. Idiocy! You taught me idiocy!’

A little later, ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ I tell him. – ‘You should do another book,’ says W., if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine at your blog. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces.’

No more books, I tell him. I’ve had enough. ‘Yes, I definitely think you should do another book. Look at you! You need help.’ W. had set some reading for me on another collaborative project we’re working on. The idea was to recommend one another five books to read, and then report back. ‘Have you read them?’ – ‘What do you think?’ – ‘And what am I supposed to read? Give me your list of five books.’ I tell him I’m working on that, too.

‘So, are you ready to speak tomorrow?’, says W. – No. God, no.’ – ‘I am.’ He waves his paper in front of me. ‘Are you going to let me down again?’ – Definitely.’ – ‘Actually, I think it’s funny. Everyone does.’ – ‘I can’t help it. My brain’s softening!’ – ‘No, it’s because you’re lazy. La-zee. And because of your stupid blog. You should give it up.’ – ‘I thought you liked my whining.’ – ‘Oh yes, like a sad chimp, at the limits of his intelligence.’ And then, ‘are you going to flap now? I like it when you flap.’ – ‘No, come on, it’ll have to do, let’s go for a drink instead.’

The Kindly Ones

A husk of a day, which I finish by watching Ullman’s Faithless, from a script by Bergman, and hoping by watching I will keep Bergman living for a few years more. Is he still alone on his island? Does he still spend the day writing? I am alone here, but I cannot write for a whole day, or read. But I open a notebook as I watch the film, in hope.

I write, Zarathustra’s beard, remembering how it turned white at the end of Book Four, but how he strides out again as though young. I write, the unalterable, thinking of the field across which I walked alone, and the great cloud I saw above the city – ten miles wide, or twenty – and felt assured that the weather pays no heed to me, and nor do the laws of physics; they are what they are: unalterable.

And I write, the witness, thinking of Isabelle, the suffering child of Ullman’s film, who cries in her bed, surrounded by toys, as her parents row, then break up, as her father kills herself, as her mother screams when she is cheated upon by her new lover. The witness: thinking, too, of Duras’s remarks on the drafting of Destroy, She Said, where it was the presence of Stein, who barely acts, that allowed her to write the story. The witness, she says, who is present in Lol V. Stein and The Vice-Consul, though in different ways.

And I wrote, the suicide note, thinking again of the film: what is it supposed to explain? To write and finish writing; to draw a line under your life. A note: to whom is it left to decipher, and what can they make of it? And I thought of a failed note, begun and never finished, so that no line can be drawn and the suicide lives as a survivor. And my penultimate note, Rush-That-Speaks, remembering again the narrator of Crowley’s Engine Summer who is alive to speak to an unknown audience, just as Ullman’s Marianne is made to speak of her life to the old man, the old director, alone on his island.

It is Sunday, 7th January 2006, and the year is very young. Young, but I’ve already lost hold on the onward movement of days. The kitchen fitter comes Tuesday morning, early. The Loss Adjuster, so unlike Egoyan’s character, on Friday at 10.00, along with the company she’s employed to take care of the damp. Then, at some point, dehumidifiers will be installed, to suck the damp out of the air, and see if it is improving, as a whole, or getting worse.

Very well – and I am thankful that my week is marked out thus, that a morning will be allowed to be a morning. How is it I’ve thought in the past days of my old friend who is also, in some way, an outsider? What a dramatic term! But isn’t it the case there are those whom life has surprised by being what it is? By giving him a wife, and children, and a house. A marvellous gift – he wouldn’t deny that – but one which comes from far, and obscurely; which has reached him by some kind of chance. It chose him: very well, he said, and he’s a good husband and father. But how is it I feel he lives his life, as I do, at one remove?

My beard is getting white: two white patches, where there was one. There is red there, among the dark brown, in my beard: Nordic ancestry. Erik the Red. Alone in the middle of life, just as Bergman is alone at the end. All those dramas about rich actresses and directors, I say to myself of him. All those rich, spoilt Swedes in their great houses. So successful, all of them, I tell myself. When they fall, they do not fall very far.

But there is always more to Bergman, that’s for sure. I don’t like her, your Marianne, says Marianne to the old director in the film. And so Marianne, this Marianne (the real one drowned, we learn almost at the end of the film) is not the one who lived. Isn’t this what we saw at the beginning, when the old director called her into being, in her flesh and blood (her voice trembles, coming from nowhere: Who am I?)?

She is beautiful, of course. Too beautiful, always that. Beautiful enough that her beauty runs ahead of her in the world. She will not fall very far. Or what she calls falling is only a sham. Always, still, her beauty. This I tell myself, but also that the Marianne who speaks to him, the old director, is not the real Marianne, but a ghost, an image. He has called her into existence. She came to him, but she is unreal.

We dammed up a few days for ourselves at the beginning of the year, my Visitor and I. That’s how I thought of it: a few days, running thickly into one another like treacle: I can barely separate one incident from another: on what day did we …? when did we …? But now the year begins again; the water is pouring over the brink, and I must be ready.

Tomorrow is Monday. Tomorrow, work must begin. Write the review; finish it; it’s not a big task, after all. It’s nothing; in the old days, three or four years ago, it would take you no more than a fortnight, but now? Now, I would say, I’m someone else; I’m like the old director, though I can never quite summon him, the one who should work, who lives in the day, who is to do my bidding. He has never quite arrived, and is only here in outline.

Work!, I command him. Work for me! But I can barely reply to emails from my friends. Barely write to them, and it is not only that part of me lives back then, in the sweet, lush thickness of days. What is this weakness, as after a hot bath? What is this new reluctance, this laying down of all work in me?

Say this: for the first time, I have money enough to … Say this: for the first time, free of all debts, I’ll … There’s a stack of new books on my desk: all those I could not afford before, new, unread. Will I read them? I have tried, and failed, to harden resolutions for myself. To say: I will undertake this course or action, or that, and put on my seven league boots to stride through the year.

Once again – this year, like the last, such resolutions are blown away like grain from an open hand. You’ll achieve nothing and less than nothing, says the new year. And I’ll write from my failure and from my falling, even though I can no longer fall very far.

Once, I think I would have given a good deal to be able to write like this, such as this writing is. A good deal – but didn’t I know that it can come only in neglect, only when a shadow falls over the whole of your life, like that from the dark cloud I saw spread over the city?

Write by way of carelessness. Write as you know failure on the real field of your achievement; in truth, writing must be what you come to last, having failed elsewhere, even if writing was what you wanted from the first. Come to it then when it means nothing to you, or you know you could say in perfect honesty that you might give it up tomorrow.

Writing, I would give you up. Writing, it would be nothing at all. And once, to think, in front of every film, I sat with a notebook. Once, it wasn’t enough to carry vague ideas in my head like fireflies, but had to trap them before me in the sealed jar of a notebook.

And of what is there to write? Of failure, and of that gap in failure that lets writing begin. The ‘merciful surplus’, as Kafka called it, that let despair bloom and weariness leap joyfully into the air.

What have I done today? Failed. Failed, but what else? Filled the flat with the smell of bacon. Finished, mournfully the last of my Visitor’s pie. Texted her in mourning and then in joy when she texted back. Set a course for the office over the field. Sat by my unheated desk in an office block wrapped in scaffolding. Walked back listening to The Fall on my headphones.

And all the time, a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. And then I thanked the laws of physics for being what they were, and I thanked the leafless branches that seem to curve around the street lamp, and I thanked the hardness of the pavement I walked alone: something is certain, something unalterable.

The occasional, I wrote, earlier today – just that. The day, the occasion of writing, which may or may not be marked there – think, for example, of the rules governing the composition of haiku: a word for the time of day, a word for the season … but compare that to the conference paper that is to have no reference to the circumstances under which it was written, drawing life into its orbit only to send it out as an example.

How the occasional suffers in academic writing! Haven’t I the chance to unsnap its iron collar here? Isn’t that the gift I give the occasional, that it is not the genie I can summon and dismiss at will? Give shelter to the day, give it shelter. Shelter it that it can come close to you, the day, the everyday, as it remains blank and remote like an autistic child.

In what language does it speak? Within what labyrinth is it lost? I would write its suicide note, if I could, to finish it off. But writing can never trap the day, it cannot catch it. A dream catcher is not built like a net, and writing must not be a cage for an occasional, but show it freedom, show it that it is free on all sides. Only then might it come and lie down like a cat at the heart of your writing (turning around in a circle first, then another, and then tucking up its paws …). Only then, in its freedom, might it give your writing a reciprocal freedom, as the fairy gave life to Pinocchio.

The life of writing lies only in its idiom, and in the movement into the idiom. Lies only in that contraction of sense before it is breathed out, in the drawing of dull blood into the heart to be pumped out afresh. No resolutions. Only to lead writing like a horse back into itself. Only to disappear, like de Niro’s character in the final scene of The Last Tycoon, into the darkness.

How far can I fall? Not very far. But haven’t I been falling for a long time? All of my life? I ate too much bacon today – two packets. I didn’t read my books. I ate until I was too full, and walked out, and walked back. The warm flat, music playing from the computer: back, and to what?

A pool of light in the darkness. My desk at home, different to my desk at work. Two empty bottles of wine. A squeezed out tube of honey, shaped like a beehive. An old television without Freeview: all the items by which I navigate my life, landmarks familiar and unfamiliar, which fall under the protection of the occasional.

The Furies became the Eumenides, who guarded every home. And I think it is the Eumenides who are watching over me now. Do you see me?, I ask them. Do you see in your blindness, which lets you see only what you cannot? As I walk from the bed to the toilet in the night, I spread my hand on my belly. You’re getting fat, I tell myself. I’m getting fat, but my belly is round and hard, like my uncle’s. But how old was he then, when I saw him spreading a hand on his belly?

A husk of a day, when nothing happened, and everything did. The occasional is close, I tell myself. The occasional watches me, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, from the CD remote and the television guide; from the empty bowl of cereal and Fink’s book beside me. And now I hope Bergman is also watched, and I ask the Kindly Ones to give him blessing, he at the end of his life, and I in the middle of mine.

Cloudy Water

A swig of Lucozade one day is enough to ruin the next one; energy gained one early evening is energy lost the next morning. What was it I intended to do? But I’m lost from that and any task; I cannot rise to the day. Honey on ricecakes instead. I keep the curtains drawn.

Should I go into the office and read my email? But there’s email unanswered at my private address, too, and the eternal debt of letters to write. Other debts, too – abstracts and whole papers to put together. Why did I agree to speak there, and there, and on those topics?

Why should I have anything in common with other Jews, Kafka asks, when I’ve nothing in common with myself? But that ‘nothing in common’ need not be anguished. Isn’t it pleasant to be relieved from the tasks you have been set, and even from catching up with correspondence?

You’ve been let off, I tell myself, and now the day, and a year of such days opens in another way. This line from Handke’s journals: ‘I am deathly afraid, I pick up my pencil and am surprised how calm everything becomes. Afraid? No, not that. Vague. Lost somehow. ‘Dreamy’ as Richard Ford’s character would have it: is that the word? In lieu of – something.

Whence the book the character writes. Whence Handke’s mighty oeuvre. But from that first being-in-lieu – not a debt as such, but that hollowing that allows a call to echo inside you. To be called – is that right? Called – but only as you fall. To fall and be called as you fall; to place a few words side by side even as you forget them. Even as you’ve forgotten already what was written yesterday, and the act of writing of them.

But you can imagine day pressed upon day, one day, another, and each hollowed out exactly alike. Hollowed out in you, who become the echo chamber of what does not cease to reverberate. Perhaps there is a kind of speech that is the interruption of speech – that silence which places parentheses around the chatter of the day.

Isn’t this what Heidegger calls the call of conscience? But it is the converse I imagine: a kind of rumour, a movement of unsubstantiated gossip so light that it drifts willy-nilly from speaker to speaker. A speech that no one owns, such as the one Duras allows her characters to speak at the long party in The Vice-Consul – and shouldn’t I add the speech of the Grandmother in her apartments to the old antiquarian in Fanny and Alexander?

The interruption of firm and directed speech, then. A kind of gossip, then: a speech so light that it only bows the tips of the wheat in the field. A wind you hardly knew that passed, but it passed. And now I remember Red Thread(s)’ glacial writing, vast but also ignorable in its tiny forward movement. ‘Constant, incremental movement’: that’s how he thinks a daily act of writing.

An act as transparent as the day and that lets the day shine there. Shine? But the day is only transparency, that medium through which light might pass. Unless the day, like Duchamp’s large glass only slows light down, and now the medium is no longer a medium, and your writing is like the whiteness of a cataract. The day cannot see, not anymore. Blind day, that sees only what it cannot.

I think last year was made of such days, one lying down upon another. I imagine a flowerpress, and then a distillery – and the distilled essence of the day, opaque like ouzo mixed with water. Pressed days, one upon another until they hint at some kind of final, definitive shape: what is it I know that forms in a writing that begins anew day after day? But perhaps it is my curse not to know it, and it’s under that curse that I write. What does it mean to become a rorshach to oneself?

Analysis is supposed to allow affect to be reunited with thought – no longer will you feel without knowing how you feel. You’ll live in common with yourself once again – no more will your feelings drift like low cloud over the moors. But what when thought is only that drifting, the movement of clouds in the white sky? What when thought has opened wider than itself, and affects are so diffuse as no longer to be able to name particular moods?

Are you alive, and for whom? Do you live anymore, or are you only the image of the same white sky that looks at you without being able to see you? Under no one’s gaze you are nothing at all. A rumour on everyone’s lips. A kind of sigh that bears all speech, but that disappears when you try to hear it. And now you are neglected like that neglected speech of which you dream.

Word is placed against word, sentence against sentence; you write quickly, all at once, and only later do you break them apart into separate paragraphs. First of all, that rush of words, that drifting rush, obscure urgency. A passing in which no one passes: what does it mean to have fallen?

Idle speech, chattering speech: do not think you can draw it back to itself, Gerede to Rede. Do not think you can bear it in common, that which turns each of you from what is said to its whispering to-say.

I think this is what The Sportswriter does, and remarkably: to let what is written wear thin that of which is so brilliantly written about. Bascombe’s light joy, his insouciance, his dreaminess which, he says, he has in common with all sportswriters: the events he reports (but I am only 100 pages into the book) seem to speak without settling into the firmness of a plot.

Events retold only to give substance to the demand to write, to the call that comes only as he has fallen from his marriage. Fallen – and now he hears, for he is hollowed out, the imperative to set down events as they are given. Given – as he gives them again in writing, letting them push themselves forward as the tips of wheat might be bowed by the wind.

This is a writing that bows to writing. Like the second part of Blanchot’s Death Sentence what matters is to set down those events which allow the redoubling of the world, producing its image and not the world itself. No longer will day pass simply into day. Something must be kept, some opacity, a glass of cloudy water.

Drink! as Derrida commands at the end of his second long essay on Levinas. Drink, then – let the passing of days congeal in you. Let it clot your arteries and kill you. What does it mean to die without knowing that you’re dying? What does it mean to survive death? 

And now I remember D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’: he remembers his past life at a distance, Lawrence’s dead man. It’s far away from him now, and he can begin again, this reborn Jesus, who is no longer the Christ. Of whom, now is he the Messiah, when he has nothing in common with himself? Messianicity without messianism – is that the expression?

I think there is a kind of speaking that lets that same messianicity resound. I think you can hear it at the back of our throat (Lyotard on Malraux). I think it can be heard in the breath, which is only the continuation of that which we recieved from our Maker. But what if there is no Maker, and no one to animated the damp clay from which we are made? That clay, too, can speak – the body’s words, like a mouth full of blood, speaking to say nothing in blood bubbles, letting a life dribble from your lips.

Speech is prophecy; it runs ahead of us. Speech as it thickens and kills us by its clot. Speech as blood dribbles from our mouths. What is the line from Trakl? A cut on the forehead. Speaking of far things. But speech that is called speaks always of the far, and brings it close.

The future is here – but it is not mine. The future – but it is not mine. To have died and still to know the future, to know it dimly, like Lawrence’s character. To stretch dead limbs. To take air into the bottom of dead lungs. Smoothen the page with your dead man’s palm; take up your pen with your dead man’s hand. Write; speak.

To know a year of such days; to awaken dead and write from it each morning; to forget, with the forgetting of death. What is the future Lawrence’s character knows for himself? I open my curtains: the yard, the dried out soil of the potted plants. I go into the kitchen and run the edge of my hand along the damp walls. I switch the kettle on for tea: events, non-events, curling open like molluscs from their shells.

To what do they bear witness? To whose call do they respond? The sky is blue behind white. It’s five years and one day since I moved to this city, I tell myself. Five years and one day since we drove up in a hired van. It’s nearly one year since I came back from India, I tell myself. It’s a handful of days since my Visitor departed, opening this whole flat to me anew in her wake.

Anew: memory is thick in me. Memory like molasses, where no event stands out from the streaming of the others. It’s a few hours since I awoke, tired, into this Sunday, and forty minutes since I began this post. Separate your prose into paragraphs, I tell myself. Pull up your writing and let it stand by itself, like a ship that is pulled up to stand up in a bottle.

Have I spoken? Have I let speaking speak? (I’ll awaken my trolls with those kinds of questions. ‘You’re so pretentious’, etc …) Never mind those questions that ask for a judgement of which I am incapable. Never mind the answers that arise only to come apart in the turbulence of a call. This morning I know my year to have failed just as last year failed. Failed – and I fell, across the days, and opened my eyes as I fell, and unclenched my hands. And saw what failed to see me: the opaque sky, light that burned from nowhere.

Shouldn’t I write, I ask myself, until my hour is done? I am listening to Espers – the first and second albums. Richard Ford’s book is open in the other room. Hadn’t I dressed to go into the office? Shouldn’t I be there now, answering emails and tidying my desk? First of all, a title for my post. Idle Speech, I consider. No: too bland. Glacial Writing?  Too derivative. And now I know: Pressed Writing, as I remember the twin flower presses that were bought for us once, my sister and me.

Pressed Writing: and why do I also remember the musical box I wanted as a child to buy for my mum? What would I want one of those for?, she said, and I thought: small things are always secret, and it is nice to share a small thing with a small tune.

What made me think of that? Idle thoughts, drifting thoughts that unbraid themselves like a river that splits into distributaries: is that what has happened to my life, such that I can barely write to plan? Has its course become silted up – has its long streaming given way to islands of silt and the choking of channels? And isn’t that another way to understand this blog, and all of my blogging: clots in my arteries, silt-islands in the stream?

On

We are entertaining Blah-Feme, who’s been pressing me about the damp. ‘Is it getting better or worse?’ It’s not that simple, I tell him. ‘It must be – better, or worse – which is it?’ He has a look. Small coarse flakes are forming over part of the wall. ‘It’s the lime,’ says Blah-Feme confidently, ‘it’s leaching through the wall.’

I’m impressed; Blah-Feme is immensely positive. But when I ask him to place his hand against other parts of the wall, his expression changes. ‘It is very wet.’ – ‘I told you!’ And it is wet, perhaps as wet as ever, or perhaps not. Either way, the Loss Adjuster rang me to say she wasn’t sure the damp came from a single source. She sounds tender. ‘I’m not sure we’ll be able to cover it.’

She’s going to bring in dehumidifiers to see whether that makes a difference. ‘If it doesn’t, I’m not sure what we can do.’ She’ll be around herself in a week. How tender she is! The workmen she hired tell me she’s very stern. And yet she’s tender with me! I thank her.

W. always tells me how craven I am with waiters in restaurants. ‘You have to be more forceful.’ I always surprise him by my unassertiveness. ‘You’re essentially weak. You’re a weak person.’ The loss adjuster, who I’m told – and I can believe it – is normally stern, is being tender with me: how can I help my weakness?

I tell her I look forward to seeing her, and hope we can resolve the matter. My best business voice. ‘How do you think we can go forward with this?’, I ask her at another point in the conversation. ‘Go forward’ – we’re in it together, the Loss Adjuster and I. We have a shared project, about which we both care. ‘How can we go forward with this?’

How indeed? If the workmen are right, the insurers will do their best to get out of paying. What should I do – scrape the lime (if it’s lime from the walls)? Let it stay there, if, as Blah-Feme says, it’s evidence of the wall drying? For a time, I’m lightly panicked. I decide to eat everything in the kitchen. Thankfully there’s very little. I sit back on the sofa, bloated.

The damp! What is to be done! Nothing is to be done, I tell myself, not now. Be calm. But I wake up at four this morning, with damp on my mind, as well as that old schoolfriend of mine who turned out to be a paedophile. I lie awake think of damp, then the paedophile, in his secure unit and back again. And I think of the year behind me, and the year spreading out before me.

Disaster, and right at the beginning of the year! Fortunately, there is the great consolation (oh, it’s better than that!) announced in the word ‘We’ at the beginning of this post. I’ll be discreet. But tonight (last night), there’s no one lying beside me. I’m alone with my idiocy. Four AM! Why is it always four AM? For a week, I was able to sleep, I slept like a normal person, but then, after her departure?

I am not to speak of my decline, she says. And Blah-Feme agreed: ‘you’ll have to get him to stop that.’ That was over Blah-Feme’s table at New Year’s Eve. I had said, ‘more disaster. It’ll be terrible, a terrible year, just like the last one.’ No one was impressed. ‘You’ll have to get him to stop that.’ I did stop; that was the last such pronouncement from me. Where was W. when I needed him?

For a whole week I could sleep; it was beautiful. I used the phrase ‘it’s beautiful’, too often. That was tiresome, too. I said of blogging, ‘it’s beautiful’; of Youtube, ‘it’s beautiful’, of our Dogma rules, ‘they’re beautiful’, and all the way a small look of rapture crossing my face. I was lost, for a moment. But then there was her face (my Visitor’s) as I played the video of ‘Mr Me Too’ by Clipse. We watched excerpts of an old Nina Simone concert from the 70s. ‘What was she on?’ Her audience were terrified; we were terrified. She asked them to sing along; we felt commanded to sing along. The next day on the moor, I was still singing. ‘Feelings … nothing else but feelings …’

A whole week of sleeping. Of ales in the 15 good pubs in town. Of a hundred played CDs. Of six cooked breakfasts. Of empty bottles of wine and one of Plymouth Gin. A day in the bath. A day at the coast. Five viewings of ‘Drop It Like it’s Hot’. Two of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Karen Dalton. Fred Neil …

And meanwhile, the damp either drying or getting worse – which was it? ‘It’s going to be the year of psychoanalysis’, I told anyone who would listen. Fink has broken through the hard shell of my idiocy. The obsessive versus the hysteric. The psychotic. Pointers on therapy: beautiful, all of this. I feel lightened – less like an idiot – a psychoanalytic universe opens before me.

Satantango is out on triple DVD. It’s an omen. I should buy copies for all my friends. This will be the year for watching films again, I tell myself. A new TV, a DVD player (I’ve never had one). But isn’t it enough to hold on from one day to another? What can plans be to me? No plans: one day, then another; one step, another.

In the other room, The Sportswriter open face down on the pillow. The prose of Richard Ford will calm me, I tell myself. It will carry me safely from hour to hour: a bed of prose, a moving slow river. To be borne, and to let the calm line of his prose to run forward through me: calmness, continuity.

I want to flatten my hours, to smooth the day like a page. I’ll talk to no one, I tell myself. No conversation; there’s nothing to say. And let the line of prose run ahead of me inside me like a lifeline, but one thrown from the future, a calm future. That will carry me ahead of myself, in silence. A line of prose is a lifeline.

And to write here – what is that? Why that? Over Christmas, the great mistake of reading early journals. What foolishness to keep them? But I keep them, or they are kept for me piled horizontally on a shelf in the room I stay at my mum’s. Old journals – what pain! Prose that believed for me, that I thought spread itself like a wave on the shore of a future that would be completely different from my present.

Didn’t I stay in most nights, back then, as an undergraduate? Stay in, and for what? To be alone in a room, I think. To let calmness come back to find me, stretching out a hand from the future. But my prose then as now was that of an idiot; no – more so, because my failure was not marked across it, because, still young, I thought my prose really stretched back a hand.

In truth, I wrote because I was unsociable, and couldn’t bear that my days and nights might not be honed into an arrow to be shot who knows where. Separated from others I also wanted to pare down my aloneness, to make of it that missile before which the clouds would part. But the arrow that is shot must split your own heart open, the Zen master said.

But how to bare your breast to the future except as Mishima did – to slash it open? That was the question I asked myself a couple of years later, jobless and without prospect, and wasn’t that the purest thought: of a future without me? But I could never write those few lines Mishima celebrates in his remarks on the suicide pilots in the war, to whom a poetic sentence or two was necessary before they flew their missles into a ship. What idiocy!

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I couldn’t finish with writing – then, as now, I didn’t know when to stop, and what insolence there was in starting. Who asked for it? Who asked for a line? Or was it only my lifeline, feeble as it was, parasitic as it was, reaching forward only as a hand of prose reached back.

The Sportswriter upside down on my pillow, as Herzog once was, or The Loser, or Caught: books that believe more than I can, and perhaps more than poor old Green and the perpetually dying Bernhard, and arrogant old Bellow with his flyleaf boasts (‘the only person to be granted doctorates from Harvard and Yale’) and Richard Ford (but I don’t know anything about him). Books that believe more than any of us, including their authors.

It is enough for me to write something everyday, let alone continuous prose, let alone a story with plot and characters, let alone something theoretical. That new impasse began more recently. How is it I seem to forget everything the morning I begin to write – that my task can only be to bring myself to the brink of writing without writing a line?

Preparatory prose; prose that cannot begin: again, what foolishness. Prose interrupted by the nightly forgetting such that I might begin again, over again, in the eternal morning of my idiocy. And prose that never gathers to itself the assurance of a style: whose continuity, such as it is, is illusory, running ahead only as it apes the running ahead of the prose of others.

Who knows what I want? And who is the ‘I’ at the centre of everything written, and written here? Ah, I know him only by his alibis. Sometimes I call him Spurious, sometimes with my own name: which is he, the one who believes in nothing I do, but only in others, or in the books of others, that will survive all of us?

I think Sinthome (another saint-homme) canonised him recently – or was it me?, I’m confused. (Note: ‘to be anyone at all – what kind of question is that?’ was a question directed towards myself; there was no mockery there.) The saint whose writing – mine – in its near infinite seriality (one million useless words …) becomes what Lacan calls the Thing, without need of authorisation or recognition. Of course Sinthome was writing of himself – but also of me, on the other side (the same side) of the Mobius strip.

Another memory, this time of the last pages of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility, delivered, as part of the fourth volume of this massive tetralogy, on the day of his suicide. The elderly Honda goes to pay tribute to the Abbess of a nunnery to which she went sixty years earlier, after a failed engagement to Honda’s close friend.

Or did she? She remembers nothing of Honda nor his friend; and this lack of memory is the ‘Sea of Fertility’ of Mishima’s title – a four part novel that, at this point, seems to unravel itself. Honda turns back. And Mishima, who, in truth, finished his book a few weeks before, goes to his ridiculous, melodramatic suicide.

There is only the Thing, the image that, like the tain of the mirror, reflects nothing, even as it lets everything be seen. The Sea of Fertility: isn’t that a name for what the blog turns around, with its tales of damp, of my lovely Visitor, of the books that have been successively splayed and upturned on my pillow? And a name for that black hole at the middle of this new year and all years, that means that every day by writing, I will have to catch a lifeline.

Mishima died, the better to avoid the lack of authority and recognition that is our condition. Even the Emperor, for him, was unsatisfactory: shouldn’t he have resigned after the surrender of Japan in World War Two? The hari kari pilots, plunging their missles into ships after writing a few desultory lines of verse for those who survived them, died for nothing; Japan was dishonoured: how to remove this stain?

But it cannot be removed, and it seems there is nothing for which it is worth dying, and that is our truth, a terrible one. There is nothing for which to die; no way to draw a line under our writing. On, as Beckett wrote over and again. On – but what for, for what purpose? Nohow on: a beautiful phrase.

Take a spacewalk and sever the line that binds you to your craft. Drift away and watch the line snake away from you: isn’t that how you’d know silence? But open your inner ears and you will hear the roaring of suns and the ache of empty space. Open them, and noise will miraculously cross the vacuum.

Write. No how – on. There’s no way to mark the way. No canons of taste to guide you. Every day is the first day. You’re an idiot each morning. Every day, for the first time, you’re an idiot, and a saint writes in your place.

The Moment’s Edge

How to write my pages today? (True, the box in which I see my writing on the monitor is not a page – but when I copy and paste these lines into Word, solely to take advantage of the spellchecker, it is pages I see, black lines running through paragraphs). How to write, if only to push the dross of my life a little further on?

This is how I will deploy the glacial metaphor: what leaves itself of writing at the blog is the terminal moraine pushed by a glacer’s snout: a landscape over which the desire to write has passed, leaving strange formations in its wake. What leaves itself, what is left here, but desire has already passed, it is always passing, and where it seems to be it has already left, although it leaves its absence quivering in the air.

A morning like any other; another morning when I’ve risen too early and am lost in those hours where no one is awake. Is it morning? Only to those monks who rise at two. But they rise together and sing together, and who is awake with me at this time? This is no time to be awake. Bury yourself, then. Forget you’re awake. Write – call up writing like the sandworms in Dune, and hook open the gap between the worm’s plates that stops it from plunging back into the sand.

But write of what, as you ride along? Isn’t this the curse, that writing demands substance to become real? But then what of your life can you give it, when you’ve risen too early, there’s no day yet to reflect upon; no experience – and doesn’t that thought always come to me: that to rise early is to rise very young, whereas to write at the end of the day, when the rolling body of the earth has already tipped into darkness, is to write as an old man?

Two A.M. is a time of absolute youth. Absolute – separate – and burning unto itself like a star. But a star, now, that has nothing to consume – that does not live through that great, controlled explosion that keeps a sun burning for five billion years. Nothing to burn, and there is no burning – only the husk of a sun; the cinder after the nova’s explosion: what is there to write, before and after everything? Can I call it insomnia, this vigil that has outlasted the world and was born before it? An insomnia in which something else stirs itself and awakens in me, looking up in blindness to stars that burn in blindness?

I think it is at this time that the magnificent child in me is dead – Freud’s His-Majesty-the-baby: the one who rises in his parents’ eyes: the glorious child who, says Serge Leclair, has to be killed over and again. Over and again – but in this suspended moment, the edge of the plow as it pushes forward the snow, there is no child, not yet.

No one watches him, and he does not watch; if eyes open in him, they are blind, and they open only from the centre of his forehead: Bataille’s pineal eye, perhaps, or the third eye that opened on Shiva’s forehead, say the Puranas, when Parvathi playfully placed her hands over his other eyes, and the universe was plunged into darkness. That is why his worshippers have horizontal lines traced across their brow: a third eye intimates itself there – the god’s eye that is the condition of our sight.

What is that element that allows us to see?, asks someone in Plato’s Republic: what is it that allows our sight? The sun of intelligibility – the noetic sun that rises over reason: so it is our sight is given its measure. But for those other eyes, the eyes of vigilance? Sight goes mad; ‘night is also a sun’ (Zarathustra), and the lines across the brow remember the eye that cannot see but that rolls in blindness.

Isn’t that what is intimated when the eyes roll back into the head in orgasm, perhaps, or as another speaks in the seer’s place? Let the eyes roll back into the centre of the skull. Let them open themselves towards that darkness which also floods the universe. What is the element that allows our blindness? What unjoins the intelligible relation to the world?

To speak is not to see, says Blanchot. The Other is invisible, says Levinas. But you, too, are invisible – or it is that when the night burns like the sun, it also burns from where you should be; it takes your place. You are a piece of the night, dreaming of night. Or you are where the night has come to know itself, joining a future that has not begun and a past not yet finished at the moment’s edge.

And isn’t that what happens at two A.M.? You are part of the circuit of the night – part of that flow from future to past, and vice versa: of that great loop of the serpent on whose body burns what we see as stars. And the dross of your life is what burns itself up to reach there, and joins your body to the body of everything.

I send back the power of memory like a fisherman’s net. And like the great nets I use now, it is as if they scrape the whole seabed clear, and along with what I would catch – discreet memories – I have brought everything else along, too. Muddied water. Black water. And what I remember has blackness behind it as when you look at your room reflected in the window at night.

‘I can speak now’ says the stutterer cured by hypnosis at the beginning of Mirror. ‘I can see’: but what is seen? Think of it aurally – a great roaring or mumbling out of which only traces of forms arise, and even then, the same roaring. Think of a touch that passes through everything, but knows, still, the pressure of something like a countertouch.

Isn’t this what is spoken of in the oldest cosmogonies: the universe that comes out of chaos, determining itself, giving itself form? But dream of the chaos to come, and the great unloosening: isn’t that what happens when you wake at two A.M., at the moment’s edge? To come – or it was already here, suspending those relations that are measured by light.

‘I can see now’: you are seen; night watches at your heart; night hears itself; night has reached a hand through the void and found you, a pleat of the void. What is the opposite of a cosmogony? What names the coming apart of time, of space? Whose hand unfolds the folds and lays everything as flat and simple as a blank page? The opposite of God: God’s opposite, or a god gone mad: I think of Shiva’s great rages when he breaks from his hair grotesque grey beasts with clubs of nails and sticking out tongues to exact his vengeance.

Travel and the Idiot

We’re always renewed, I tell W., when we set off once again to speak in Europe. Always young and uncowed, full of fresh hope and new happiness, toasting each other in foreign countries and falling down drunk in foreign gutters. Are we really that shameless?, I ask W. But perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we’re shameless or not: we’ll do exactly the same anyway and will be eternally surprised at the rediscovery of our own idiocy.

But are we really that innocent?, I ask W. Don’t we, at one level or another, know our own idiocy? Doesn’t it saturate our awareness to the extent we can know nothing else? But by some miracle, we always regain just enough innocence, just enough forgetting for it all to begin again.

I think this is why we’re so happy, I tell W. We’re always happy to be setting off on another of our adventures. And I think our happiness is why we are continually being invited everywhere; we’re popular because we’re happy, and because ours is the happiness of idiots. I think we remind people of the happiness of their own youths, and the sense that anything is possible.

For us, I remind W., the prospect of our adventures always fills us with happiness, and we are never more joyful than when contemplating the chance of another speaking engagement. It’s not that we don’t know we’ll disappoint everyone: we are under no illusions with respect to our abilities. Nor is it that we’ll make any advance at all with respect to our studies: we know they are perfectly futile, and that we have got nowhere.

It is the very prospect of travel and arrival; the very foreigness of those places to which we are invited that excites us. And we are invited, I remind W., and that is the miracle. We undoubtedly possess a certain kind of charm, for all our incompetence, or perhaps for reason of that competence. Idiots are charming, I tell W., at least initially. Of course, they soon wear out their welcome, and have no one to amuse but one another.

Do you remember the European professor who asked a whole circle of us how many languages we spoke, rather than read? ‘Oh we can read a whole bunch of languages …’ – ‘That’s not what I asked.’ None of us spoke a single language, of course. None of us had really been to Europe. He was disgusted, of course, I remind W. We were disgusted with ourselves, I remind him. We were mired in self-disgust, our whole circle. We hung our heads. If we could have hung ourselves at that moment, we would have done so.

In your 20s, I say to W., you are still permitted promise. ‘A promising young man’; ‘she really has potential’. Come your 30s, you are supposed to deliver. Everyone’s looking to you, everyone has faith in you, everyone’s hoping you’ll deliver, but we know in truth, that there will be nothing delivered, quite the contrary. And isn’t this the agony of your 30s, knowing that it will become very clear you are capable of nothing at all? The game will be up: it will be evident to all.

But somehow, we’ve escaped the crushing feeling of shame, I say to W. We’re endlessly crisscrossing Europe, but are completely free of shame! We know we should be ashamed, we talk about it constantly, but our actions attest to the fact that we think there’s still hope for us, that possibility remains possibility. It’s as though we were 21, I say to W. 21, and our whole life before us. But of course we are very far from being 21. We are at that age when we should have been crushed by our sense of failure. It should have winded us, we ought to be incapable of saying anything. And yet we are happy; we’re happiness itself. It is our idiocy that protects us, I tell W. It’s our idiocy that burns above us like a halo.

Our Idiocy

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

I say tragedy, I tell W., but I mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we’ve run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we’re about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.

The idiot, I tell W., does not want to be an idiot. But isn’t that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.

In our case, I tell W., although we know we’re idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause … but then we would no longer be idiots.

The essence of idiocy is activity; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.

It is rather like the film Memento, I tell W., except that the protagonist, instead of forgetting everything that happens each day, remembers it, but still does nothing to dissuade him of undertaking the most idiotic course of action given his circumstances – he kills those who would help him, and falls willingly into the hands of what, for him, will entail the very worst.

Farce , I tell W., and not tragedy, for we can never be said to run up magnificently against our limits. We have no dignity; it is not the limits of fate that we test – the great confrontation with our finitude, but only the limitlessness of idle chatter, that great spinning of puns and innuendo that anyone at all could accomplish.

Heidegger was right, I tell W., the philosopher must avoid the fall into such chatter: what is worse than gossip and idle curiosity? But nor is the idiot ever entirely ignorant: isn’t it precisely the way he is caught between knowledge and ignorance that makes his life farcical?

But there are different ways of living this ‘between’: like Plato’s Eros, the idiot is a wanderer, the son of Poverty and Plentiude. Unlike, Eros, however, he has drunk himself into a stupor with Aristophanes and the others over whom Socrates steps in order to make his way back into the marketplace.

And isn’t he unlike, above all, Marx’s proletariat who alone can repeat and retake the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century into order to become the true subject of history? The idiot is lumpen, I tell W., no question of that. But still, I get the impression the lumpenproletariat enjoy themselves in the moment, there and then – the idiot must always defer gratification. Isn’t he too busy dressing up as a philosopher in order to know he is only trying on ideas that will never fit him?

At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, I tell W., idiots come in pairs because only their double will be left, eventually, to amuse. An amusement that depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.   

You tell me I am happiest when I’m making plans, I tell W., but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening each morning into our idiocy.

Doesn’t Homer Simpson always have a madcap scheme? Aren’t Bouvard and Pecuchet perpetually beginning yet again to explore another branch of knowledge? It is always dawn for the idiot, who is too busy to notice the radiance of the morning, I tell W. Perhaps this is what tempted Dostoevsky to create a holy idiot, I continue, but Prince Mishkin is a solitary, and hence not a genuine idiot.

Brad Pitt’s character asks the serial killer at the end of Seven whether he knows he’s insane. I think it’s immaterial whether the idiot knows what he is or not; knowledge, for the idiot, has been dissevered from action: he knows what he is, but does it anyway, not with the resignation of a hero towards his fate, but in the eternal hope of one for whom the future remains open.

Our Friendship

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

I tell W. my greatest flaw is that I’m so mesmerised by my stupidity I can do nothing about it; that I sit and read my own prose in open mouthed horror until I’m afloat out over 60,000 fathoms, but no decision issues from my horror as it would from a sensible person.

I’m paralysed, I tell W., by my own inability, my signal lack of gifts. It amazes me. There’s nothing of which I am capable, I tell him. There’s no intellectual act I cannot sully; no sentence whose swift movement I cannot make stumble. In truth I stumble over myself, I tell him; I get in my own way. Were it not for the fact I existed, I tell him, I might have an idea.

And nor is funny, or surprising that I’ve never had an idea, I tell him. It’s quite obvious. It’s part of the course of things; its plain to everyone. In fact, I blame you, I tell W., for raising my hopes, for carefully nuturing my talents. Wasn’t I the only one who listened to you with your dreams of friendship and community?

But then, on the other hand, I tell him, you are free to blame me even as I have so singularly destroyed any hopes you had for spiritual friendship and intellectual community. In the end, I tell him, our friendship is founded upon the utter impossibility of our achieving anything at all.

Brod and Brod

‘Compare our friendship,’ says W. in my imagination, ‘to that of Bataille and Blanchot. Of their correspondence, only a handful of letters survive. Of ours, which takes place in the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, nothing survives, but nor should it. Of their near daily exchanges in the Paris of the early 1940s, nothing is known; of our friendship, everything is known, since you, like an idiot, put it all on your stupid blog.

‘Blanchot was above all discreet, but you are indiscretion itself; Bataille did not speak of his friend, but you are gossip and idle talk itself. Whereas both men were immensely modest, and weighed everything they said with great care, you are immensely immodest, and weigh nothing you say or write with any care at all. Whereas both wrote with great care and forethought, you write with neither care nor forethought, being seemingly proud of your immense idiocy.

‘How is it that we, who admire both the friendship between Blanchot and Bataille and that between Blanchot and Levinas have failed so signally in making anything of our friendship? I know: it’s entirely your fault. You’re an idiot.’

For my part, in my imagination, I tell W. that my absence occupies, for him, the same role as Palestine and manual labour did for Kafka: I am the correlate of his own inability, his own apishness. In truth, I tell him, we are both Brod, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, an apostle will not look out; when Brod looks into Kafka, only Brod looks back. You are my Brod, I tell W.; but I am your Brod, too. I am your idiot, but you are mine, and it is this that we share, in our joy and laugher, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

Wipes

‘Literature softened our brains,’ says W. ‘We should have been doing maths. If we knew maths, we might amount to something. As it is, we’ll amount to nothing.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with literature per se,’ says W., who cannot go a day without speaking of Kafka, and takes his books to read to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe to read on his own, ‘but it’s had a bad effect on us. Besides, I bet Kafka was good at maths.’ – ‘He was good at law.’ – ‘Oh yes, law, it’s a bit like maths. Perhaps we should drop out and become lawyers. Perhaps that would be the making of us.’

‘Of course, it would different if we read literature alongside philosophy’, W. says, ‘but literature, for us, could not help infecting our philosophy. Yes, that’s where it all went wrong.’ – ‘But don’t you admire the fact that we feel something about literature? Don’t you think it’s what saves us?’ But W. is not persuaded. ‘It makes us vague and full of pathos. That’s all we have – pathos.’

Before beginning to give our collaborative papers, W. and I always dab our wrists and then the skin behind our ears with moisturising wipes. ‘It calms you down,’ W. said. ‘A doctor told me on a train.’ He takes his tissues everywhere with him. ‘I learnt it from Sal. You see this is what women can teach you.’

They were handy when we were travelling across Poland. We sat there with flushed faces until W. got his tissues out. ‘Dab your wrists, where women put on perfume, and then behind your ears’, W. told us, giving out tissues. Suddenly a marvellous coolness descended. ‘You see!’

W., on the train, is reading Thomas l’obscur. I was reading Agamben and shaking my head. Why do you keep shaking your head. ‘This is a terrible book! He got to the party too late. The party’s over! Why won’t he learn!’ – ‘What party? What are you talking about?’ – ‘He doesn’t feel anything. All this pathos, but it’s all fake. And he’s so programmatic! Listen to this!’ I read W. a passage. He’s impressed at my vehemence. I have certain instincts, W. allows. Occasionally I’m right, he tells me. ‘It’s like a chimpanzee who knows a storm’s coming, jumping up and down and screaming.’

Meanwhile, the Polish countryside flies by. There’s no beer on this train, to our chagrin. On the way out, we sat at round tables as in a cafe, and we were brought bottles of beer. It was joy itself: everything was there: good company, good beer, cheap salty snacks, the sense of adventure. But now we are going home. ‘How’s Thomas l’obscur?’, I ask W. – ‘Too clever for you, fat boy’.

Once, W. had dreamt of becoming a writer. ‘I was young then, and full of hopes and dreams.’ But he knew when to give up, he said. Philosophy came along. ‘I was good at philosophy once.’ W.’s great period is one of our conversational defaults. Others are 1) our stupidity, 2) my stupidity, 3) W.’s stupidity, 4) my obesity, 5) the state of my stomach, 6) the state of W.’s stomach, 7) The greatness of one or more of the following, a) Plymouth Gin, b) Bill Callahan, c) Will Oldham, 8) the cleverness of certain of our friends, relative to us, 9) maths, and our inability to do maths, 10) classical Greece and our inability to read it, 11) the trouble that literature has brought us.

‘It would different if either of us had literary talent’, says W., ‘do you think you have literary talent?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘I know I don’t have literary talent. But I don’t think you know.’ – ‘I never said I had literary talent!’ – ‘But you don’t deny it enough. Anyway, it’s very clear: you don’t have literary talent. And just so you know, you haven’t got any philosophical talent.’ – ‘Do you have any philosophical talent?’ – ‘I’ve got more than you. Just a little bit more, but that’s enough.’ – ‘Your IQ’s higher than mine, isn’t it?’ – Just a little bit, but that’s what separates us, man from ape.’ – ‘And you’re from a higher class than me, aren’t you?’ – ‘Yes. I have manners. You have no manners. And you’re continually touching yourself. Look at you: you’re doing it now!’ I take my hand out of my shirt. – ‘Why do you like touching your chest so much? Does it arouse you? Keep your hands on the table where I can see them. Read your book.’

The Polish countryside rushes by. – ‘It’s very flat in Europe’, I say. – ‘What about the mountains?’ – ‘I can’t see any mountains.’ – ‘Not here, you idiot. But there are mountains in Poland.’ – ‘It all looks flat to me.’ And then, ‘Right I’m giving up reading. I can’t when you’re about.’ – ‘You weren’t reading!’ – ‘I’ve read from here to here.’ W indicates a paragraph. ‘It’s so boring!’ – ‘What sort of literature would you write if you could?’ – ‘I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you.’

‘Literature,’ W. muses. ‘It’s our downfall. To be fascinated by something we can never, ever do. And it’s not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our head against it, over and over again, like idiots.’ – ‘But that’s our joy,’ I tell W., ‘it’s saves us.’ But W. is resigned. ‘You have to know what you can do, and what you can’t do.’ Then he looks at me. ‘Where do you think your strengths lie?’, and then, ‘Do you have any strengths?’ – ‘You know what I always say: we have to find something only each of us can do, and do that,’ I tell him. – ‘Oh yes?’ – ‘Pathos, in our case. We’re very good at that.’

When in doubt, W. and I pile on the pathos. We read with great pathos, and write papers of great pathos. Confronted by a potentially hostile audience, we attempt to wear them down with pathos. When there’s an audience more intelligent than us, exactly the same: the pathos trick. ‘I’m sure they know what we’re up to,’ says W., ‘but somehow they’re charmed by us. It’s our pathos.’

I close my eyes. ‘What are you contemplating? Your next magnum opus?’ And then: ‘you have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can’t do, in your case, everything.’ I look out of the window. ‘Europe is full of intellectuals’, I tell W., ‘they value the intellect out there.’ – ‘Do you think they’d value your intellect?’ – ‘I wish there was beer on this train!’ It’s hot. W. gets his wipes out. We dab our wrists and then behind our ears. ‘Ah, that’s better!’

Dance Like a Canadian!

‘Old Europe!’, I say to W. ‘We’ll never belong to it.’ We are passing through railway stations familiar to us from biographies of Kafka and novels by Sebald. ‘What is it, do you think? What’s wrong with us?’ W. is not sure, but he says it’s something we all share, the English. ‘The English disease’, he calls it.

‘The English’, I announce to W., ‘hate intellectuals.’ – ‘Oh yes, you’re an intellectual, are you?’ – ‘You see! You can’t even think of yourself as an intellectual. That’s because you’re English.’ – ‘I’m not English, I’m Canadian!’ – ‘You’re spiritually English, just as I’m spiritually English.’

I remind him of his photo album. Pictures of W., happy in Canada, with his family, who are likewise happy, and then pictures of W. in England. ‘The fall’, W. calls it. ‘The move,’ says W., ‘that’s when the disaster happened.’ His parents brought them back to England, to Wolverhampton. ‘Wolverhampton!’ says W., ‘can you imagine. Ah, what I might have been, had I stayed in Canada!’ He sighs.

Both of us dream of Canada. Academics are paid more there, and there’s more space. ‘That’s the problem with England,’ says W. ‘Overcrowding.’ But Canada is wide open. It’s the promised land. ‘Oh Can-a-da’ I sing, from Joni Mitchell. ‘If we made it to Canada, everything would be ok’, I tell W. ‘We’d breathe easier. We’d be unashamed intellectuals. We’d spread our wings. Imagine!’

W. is lost in a Canadian reverie. ‘We had a dog who was half-wolf, he says, ‘and she would follow me on my paper round, leading me by the arm. She took my hand in her mouth and led me, it was amazing. She never barked. And when we left, she starved herself to death, because she missed us so much. That’s loyalty.’

W. admires loyalty. In his paper on love, he called Sal, ‘small, blonde and fiercely loyal’. Someone asked whether she was a labrador. ‘You’re not loyal’, W. always insists. ‘You’d break the phalanx. You’d betray me – for a woman.’ He insists on this. When have I betrayed him in the past? ‘You will betray me,’ says W., ‘I’m certain of it.’

We speak about our friends from Canada. ‘They’re better than us,’ says W., and I agree. R. had told us he used to take his guitar round to his neighbours and they’d all sing together. ‘Do you think we would be singers, if we lived in Canada?’, I ask W. – ‘And dancers. Singers and dancers. Show me how you’d dance.’

I remind him of his Monkey Pirate Dance. ‘Ah yes!’, said W., ‘my high point!’ It was as a forfeit in a game of cards we made up at All Tomorrow’s Parties. I have pictures: W. with his trousers off, and Sal’s long tights pulled right up to his thighs, and an exuberant expression on his face, rolling from foot to foot, his arms bent. He sang a made up sea shanty: it was beautiful. ‘The Monkey Pirate Dance,’ says W., ‘how could I forget?’

‘We’d have grown up strong and true in Canada,’ I say to W. ‘We’d be men of the outdoors!’ – ‘Outdoors men! Exactly!’ W. used to apply for jobs in Canada. ‘There’s no point’, he laments. If only his family had stayed! But they came back. He was born over there, and they came back. ‘And that’s where it all started to go wrong,’ says W., ‘Wolverhampton! After Canada!’

‘Thank God I didn’t go to Oxford,’ says W., ‘that would have finished me. First Wolverhampton, then Oxford!’ He father said he couldn’t go to Oxford. ‘He was right!’ – ‘If you’d have gone to Oxford, it would have been too late.’ – ‘Canada,’ says W., ‘that’s where we should be. Things would be very different.’ – ‘But don’t you think it’s too late for us?’ – ‘It’s never too late,’ says W., except for you. You are, at heart, a betrayer. You will betray me for a woman.’

W. has seen Derrida dancing, he says. He does an impression. ‘The Derrida shuffle.’ It was on a balcony in Nice. ‘Everyone was dancing. Derrida was dancing, I was dancing …’ – ‘Do you think Levinas danced?’ – ‘Levinas was no dancer,’ says W. – ‘How about Nancy?’ – ‘Nancy was always too ill to dance.’ – ‘Heidegger played volleyball.’ – ‘Oh yes, Gadamer told me that.’ – ‘And Hegel, Schelling and Holderlin did a freedom dance around a tree.’ – ‘It was a freedom tree. There was no dancing.’

‘Come now,’ I say to W. later, ‘do you really think I’m a betrayer?’ – ‘Oh yes. You’re the type.’ – ‘Even if we moved to Canada?’ – ‘Oh yes. It’s a weakness in your soul. You’d betray me for a woman. You’d break the phalanx!’ – ‘What phalanx?’ – ‘The phalanx of our friendship,’ says W., grandly. Later, after coming in from the nightclub, we dance upstairs in W.’s lounge.

‘We’re non-dancers’, W. says. ‘But dancers admire non-dancers. They can’t dance like us.’ We remember dancing in Poland – your finest hour, W. says. I led Polish postgraduates in made up formation dances. ‘The Primal Scene!’; ‘The Return of the Repressed!’; ‘The Death Drive!’ – ‘It was beautiful’, W. remembers, ‘you’ll never have that many people following you again.’

‘Dance like a Canadian!’, I cry to W. in the upstairs lounge. He slides across the wooden floor in his socks and jumps onto the sofa. ‘Dance like an idiot!’, cries W. to me. I swing my arms like an ape. W. hums to the music loudly as he dances. ‘For dancers, we make good intellectuals,’ says W. – For intellectuals, we make good dancers!’, I say.

Vague and Boring

‘Love’, says W., reclining on his bed in the hotel room, ‘your favourite topic.’ – ‘Oh no. I’m not discussing love with you. Forget it.’ – ‘Why are you so afraid of love? Why?’ How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn?

Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal – this is always moving – but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another. ‘What do you think love is?’; ‘What is love, for you?’; ‘Have you ever loved anyone?’; ‘What do you consider love to be?’; ‘Do you think you’ll ever be capable of love?’; ‘What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?’

For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love. ‘You only love yourself,’ he says. It’s already very late, but in the hours before dawn, W. has decided to school me in loving. ‘Not sex!’ he says, ‘but love! Only you don’t know what that means.’

‘Your weakness is that you’re too susceptible to beauty. It’s your fatal flaw. It’s not about looks,’ says W. ‘Companionship. That’s what you need. If anyone needs a woman, it’s you.’ And then, ‘My God, look at you! You’re so scruffy. That jacket! You think you look attractive in that jacket, don’t you?’, says W. ‘It’s shapeless; it looks like a sack. It makes you look obese,’ he says, ‘which is why you always think you’re obese. In fact it’s the jacket that makes you look obese.’

W. keeps his suit very carefully for Saturday night, when he and Sal go out for cocktails. When I stay, and we go out for cocktails, he asks me, ‘What are you going to wear? You can’t go like that. Your shirt’s unironed, for one thing.’ W. says he’ll iron my shirt. ‘Go on, take it off.’ I take photographs of him doing up his shoelaces, ‘I’ve just polished these’, fag in his mouth.

‘How dry do you want them?’, the barman asks us. ‘Oooh, on a scale of one to ten, where ten’s driest, about eight please’, says W., the barman asks us what kind of Vermouth we want. W. tells him. ‘There are three kinds of Vermouth,’ W. tells me. I take a photograph of my Martini before I drink it. ‘When I’m feeling rich, I’ll buy you a Martini made from Navy strength gin,’ says W.

But in the hotel room, months later, all we have left to drink is Tequila. ‘The trick is, not to stop drinking’, says W. In Poland, he drank five shots in a row, stood up, and collapsed. ‘The Poles pace themselves,’ he says, ‘but we didn’t.’ And then, ‘where were we? Oh yes, love.’

Companionship, says W., is very important. It’s the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. ‘Sal and I get on,’ he says. ‘If you’re working class, like us,’ says W., ‘you show your affection by verbal abuse. That’s why I abuse you – verbally, I mean. It’s a sign of love.’ W. reminds me of what Sal said about a joint paper she saw us give: ‘"vague and boring." Vague and boring! It’s great. Your partner should be full of contempt for you. It’s a good sign.’

When we go out for cocktails, Sal always tells me to behave: ‘I don’t want any trouble out of you’, and then, to W. as well, ‘either of you.’ We have to behave. But as Sal gets more drunk, she gets lairy. Once, out for cocktails when they were staying with me, she fell asleep and then woke up disorientated and ready for a fight. ‘It’s your low body mass’, says W. to Sal, and then: ‘what do you think of his jacket? Disgusting, isn’t it?’ – ‘His jacket’s fine,’ says Sal. – ‘It’s velvet,’ says W., ‘no one wears velvet. And look at it! It’s cut like a sack!’

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

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

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

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

All evening, Sal lairishly berates W. and I. ‘Why don’t you write your own philosophy?’ – ‘She’s right’, says W. ‘Why don’t we? You explain.’ And then, to Sal, ‘open your eyes! Isn’t it obvious!’ Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. ‘His book was better before he started working on it’, she tells me. It’s true, W. admits, that he cut so much of it that parts make no sense at all. ‘Still it’s better than your books, isn’t it? You should see his books,’ he says to Sal, ‘my God!’

Monk Years

When W. was 13, despite the fact he had not been brought up religiously, he demanded to be taken to church. ‘It was a great moment’, he said. What brought it on? W.’s not sure. ‘You’ve never been religious, have you?’, he says to me. ‘I’m Hindu‘, I say, and he laughs till beer comes out his nostrils.

‘You – a Hindu. Go on, tell me something about Hinduism.’ – ‘There’s only one God in Hinduism.’ – ‘Oh yes?’ – ‘I learned Sanskrit for a while!’ – ‘Speak Sanskrit to me, then.’ I try to chant a sloka of the Upanishads, but it’s forgotten. ‘Are you still Catholic, then?’, I ask him. ‘Oh you’re always a Catholic. There’s no choice’, says W.

He’s Jewish as well, through his mother’s line. Was that why he learnt Hebrew? Partially. W.s decided I should take up Sanskrit again. ‘It’ll do you good. You’re full of pathos. It’s a gift. You should become religious.’ Sal thinks W.’s drifting back to religion. She gives him a year. ‘It’s all this Rosenzweig’, says W., ‘it’s very plausible.’ He tells me about it. ‘See where Levinas got it from?’

W. went over to Paris to study with Levinas, in his Talmudic classes. He phoned the great man’s house, and then put the phone down as soon as Levinas picked up. ‘His voice was so high pitched!’ I tell him Heidegger’s voice was high pitched, too. ‘Have you heard the recordings?’ – ‘We should have gone and shat in his well’, says W., and it’s true we were close to Todtnauenberg, back in the summer. ‘And burned down his hut.’

Later, he says, ‘You need a religion.’ I tell him I’ve got one. ‘You’re not a Hindu,’ he says. – ‘It’s a cultural identity’, I tell him. ‘Like being Jewish. We leave the word religion to you Westerners.’ W. finds this very amusing. I continue, ‘Haven’t you read the Heraclitus seminar? Heidegger says there was no such thing as religion for the Greeks.’

For his part, W. knows religion’s not a matter of belief. ‘It’s about life!‘, he says impressively. – ‘Ah, Michel Henry.’ Yes, W.’s been reading Henry. ‘It’s about the deformalisation of time!‘, says W. ‘- ‘Ah, Levinas.’ Yes, W.’s going to write on Levinas and Henry. – ‘And don’t forget Rosenzweig!’ – ‘Everyone’s writing on Rosenzweig’, I tell him.

This doesn’t deter him. He read Rosenzweig very slowly, in German, every morning for a few months. ‘I didn’t understand a word.’ Still, it was a good exercise. He’s gained from the experience. ‘Every morning, getting up before dawn.’ He would go into the study and sit at his desk before he did anything else.

‘Did you have a cup of tea?’ No: the tea could wait. ‘How about coffee?’ Coffee for later. ‘Were you nude?’ No, he wasn’t nude. He sat in his bathrobe and read. I’m impressed. ‘I always begin with coffee’, I tell him. That’s where I go wrong, says W. Nothing must distract you, not even coffee. You have to read! What about Sal? He left her lying there, in the warm bed. ‘Is she impressed by your commitment?’ – ‘She thinks I’m an idiot.’

Later, W. shows me his Rosenzweig books. ‘What you have to understand is that Rosenzweig was very, very clever. We’ll never, whatever we do, be as clever as him. We’ll never have a single idea, although he had hundreds of ideas.’ I ask whether this was because he was religious.’ – ‘Religion’s a serious business,’ says W. ‘You need a religion. It would be a channel for your pathos.’

If there’s one thing he’s learnt from me, says W., it’s pathos. ‘Saying nothing, but with great emotion.’ He’s always impressed. ‘You’re so serious.’ I tell him I am serious. ‘No’, says W., ‘it’s because you’re working class. You think you have to be serious when you give a paper, but you don’t really have to be.’

‘I don’t think we’re serious enough for religion’, says W., later. ‘We lack something.’ We talk about our religious friend X. ‘He’s serious’, says W., ‘it’s very clear.’ Of course, X. is cleverer than us. ‘Oh yes, much cleverer.’ He’ll amount to something, and we’ll amount to … – ‘Nothing.’ Exactly.

‘We’re chatterers’, W. decides, ‘like monkeys. That’s what we do – we chatter, night and day.’ I agree, we’re great chatterers. Hours pass, where we do nothing but chatter. Whenever I visit, W. announces in the afternoon that he’s going to take a nap. But he never naps, because he would rather sprawl in the sofa, as I am sprawled at the dining table, and chatter.

Very occasionally, the chatter will come together into an idea. Not our ideas, but the ideas of other people, strung together in an interesting fashion. This is how we write our joint papers, each of which has to have a new rule, a writing constraint. Right now, W. wants to get nuns into our papers. ‘There has to be a nun.’ He tells me about Raymond Gaita’s nun, and how he might steal her from his book. ‘It’s a good book,’ says W., ‘with a great nun.’

Recently, W., who has no dog, has been writing of his dog. ‘Paragraphs and paragraphs,’ he says, ‘full of pathos.’ And last year, there were the great pages he wrote on his children. ‘My finest pages!’ He nearly wept upon reading them, says W., ‘and I wrote them! Amazing!’ ‘There should always be a dog in your paper’, says W., ‘but only if you don’t have a dog.’

We’ve both known many monks, we agree, and independently of one another. Both of us have had what we call our monk years, W. as a not-quite-novice, and I as a member of something like a lay religious community. ‘But you were never religious were you?’, says W. – ‘No. But I knew a lot of monks.’ So did he, being a lay member of the Trappists. It was a silent order, W. remembers. ‘That must have been difficult.’ W had liked the peace. He wasn’t as inane back then. His head wasn’t full of chatter. ‘It was before I met you.’ And then: ‘when did we first meet?’

I tell him I remember it well. ‘You were holding forth on Deleuze, and on the poor translation of his study of Foucault.’ Oh yes, W. remembers. ‘It was 1996.’ – ‘I was still serious back then’, said W., ‘those were my serious years, when I was close to my peak.’ He had no need of pathos back then. Or nuns, or dogs. ‘I didn’t have to keep you entertained’, he says.

Meanwhile, I’ve jotted down our ideas on the back of a newspaper. Topoi koinon – idle chatter – Rosenzweig – the future before the present – the infinite rising up in time – Hermann Cohen, The Jewish Sources of Religion. Ordinary time = pre-individual; messianic time, principle of individuation – I speak only as a response.’ I read it out. ‘Sounds impressive,’ says W., ‘I like the Greek – did you add that, with your formidable knowledge of ancient languages?’ and then, ‘Right that’s enough work. I want some gin.’

Protégés

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

W. has little interest in literature apart from Krasznahorkai. ‘He’s great’, he says, and we remember again our favourite scene from Tarr’s Damnation, for which Krasznahorkai wrote the script. ‘The best bit of dialogue I’ve ever heard’, says W.

W. has decided very firmly that I’m working class, and nothing will stand in the way of that. He rescued me from the warehouse floor. ‘Am I your protégé?’, I ask him. – ‘How old are you?’ I tell him. ‘You’re too old to be a protégé.’ – ‘Does that mean you’re going to get another one?’ I think W.’s always on the lookout. ‘You have great faith in the younger generation’, I tell him. But I think W. wants to be a protégé himself.

We decided some years ago that what we needed was a leader. ‘We need to be pushed’, says W., ‘we’re incapable of doing it on our own.’ We consider candidates. ‘We mustn’t tell our leader that he’s our leader’, says W., when we decide. Of course it’s the first thing we tell him, in a pub near Greenwich. ‘I think we scared him’, says W., later. Which one of us told him? Was it W. or me? Next time, we agree, we mustn’t make that mistake! We have a candidate in mind. We’ll be much more careful this time.

‘Of course you can’t be ambitious once you know you’ve failed’, says W., ‘if there’s one thing we know, it’s that we’ve failed.’ – ‘Definitely.’ W.’s favourite question: ‘at what age did you become aware you were a failure?’, or ‘When did you know, absolutely know you had failed?’, or ‘When did you stop denying it to yourself, your failure?’

For his part, W. gave away his notebooks and writings. ‘I’d write all the time, but I realised I would never be Kafka.’ And then the traditional apothegm we use when we say, Kafka, just as Homer uses formulas such as the ‘wine dark sea’: ‘How was it possible for a human being to write like that?’ We pause in reverence.

W.’s lifestory turns around Kafka, he reflects on the train. He studied at the university he did because it was permitted to study European literature in translation there. Of course they lied: ‘we didn’t read Kafka at all!’ For a time, W. thought he might become Kafka. ‘He was all I read. Constantly, again and again’, and he speaks lovingly of discovering the brightly coloured Shocken editions of Kafka in his school library.

Our inaugural Dogma paper was on Kafka – the room was packed, and he spoke very movingly (of course, my paper was inept. ‘What were you going on about?’) And, in a difficult situation, W. always asks himself what Kafka would do. ‘You have to know you’re not Kafka’, W. insists. ‘All this writing! You should stop it!’

W. stopped writing after his undergraduate years. ‘I knew I’d never be a genius.’ He gave his notebooks and writings to a girlfriend. ‘I haven’t kept a scrap’, he says, as the German countryside rushes by us. We are standing, drinking beer. German teenagers are playing early Depeche Mode on a ghetto blaster. ‘Do you think you’re a genius?’, W. asks me. – ‘God, no.’ – ‘I think you still have a nostalgia for the time when you thought you might be a genius.’ I turn the question on him. ‘We’re failures, the pair of us’, he says. ‘But we know we’ll never amount to anything. That’s our gift. Our gift to the world.’

‘You can’t blame me for criticising you,’ says W., ‘it’s your fault, you bring it out in people. It’s because you’re helpless. You invite criticism.’ I tell him this maybe the case. But isn’t a certain kind of person who likes to criticise?, I ask. W. says the blame lies squarely with me. ‘It’s entirely your fault.’

Kafka and Tarr are our spiritual leaders. ‘They’ve gone the furthest’, we agree. Apparently the latest Tarr production is in trouble. ‘We should send him some money.’ But we need more immediate leaders, too. ‘We’re stupid. We need to be led.’ We long ago decided that we could redeem ourselves only by creating opportunities for those more capable than ourselves. ‘It’s our gift’, says W., ‘we know we’re stupid, but we also know what stupidity is not. We ought to throw ourselves at their feet and ask them to forgive us.’ – ‘I think that might scare them.’ Our leaders are easily scared.

I keep a mental list of W.’s favourite questions, which he constantly asks me so as to ask himself. ‘At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?’; ‘When was it that you first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?’; ‘When you look back at your life, what do you see?’; ‘How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it it?’

‘What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to nothing?’, W. asks me with great seriousness. – ‘I never expected it to amount to something!’ – ‘Yes you did. You’re the type.’ Another question, a very serious issue for W.: ‘Why have your friends never made you greater?’ This is W.’s great fantasy, he admits: a group of friends who could make one another think. ‘Do I make you think?’, I ask him. – ‘No. You’re an idiot.’

Then: ‘what do you consider to be your greatest weakness?’ W. answers for me: ‘Never to come to terms with your lack of ability. Because you haven’t, have you?’ – ‘Have you?’ W. wonders for a moment. – ‘No.’ I ask him what is most distorted about his understanding of the world. ‘I have this fantasy of being part of a community, and this prevents my individual action.’ And then, dolefully, ‘I don’t work hard enough.’

But he works night and day, I tell him. – ‘Oh compared to you, I work. Compared to you, we’re all busy.’ W. likes to berate me for my lack of work. ‘What time did you get up to work this morning?’ – ‘Seven.’ – ‘I was up at five. At – five!’, says W. But he laments the fact that he watches television in the evenings. He used to work in the evenings, he said. In fact, he worked all the time. A room with a bed and a desk and his books, that’s all. ‘That was my peak’, he says. ‘When are you going to peak? Are you peaking now? Is this it?’

W. doesn’t know how I can live with myself. ‘Why don’t you do any work? Why? Send me something. Something you’ve written. Stop writing your stupid blog. How much time do you spend on it?’ An hour a day, I tell him. ‘Well that’s not too bad.’ He remembers how much I used to publish. ‘Of course publishing is not work’, he says, ‘nor is writing.’ You have to read, W. insists. He gets up in the morning, very early, to read. When he can’t sleep, he’s up straightaway, and to read.

In the evening, before bed, he reads Krasznahorkai, but in the mornings, he’s up long before the dawn to read philosophy. ‘And what are you doing at that time in the morning?’ – ‘I’m asleep, like sensible people! Besides, some of us have to work!’ It’s true, W. has come late to administration. He managed to avoid bureaucracy until recently. It gets him down. I, on the other hand, he observes, am a very gifted bureaucrat. ‘It takes a particular kind of person to be good at that sort of thing’, he says. I’m very organised, I tell him. I’m an orderly person. ‘It’s to do with being working class’, W. insists. I don’t expect as much from life as him.

W. always flails about when he has to administer. He pings me obscenities. He rings me up, and asks me how much I’ve eaten. This seems to calm him. I always exaggerate. ‘I’ve eaten too much’, I tell him, ‘far too much.’ – ‘Go on, tell me, what’ve you eaten?’ I tell him he’s a feeder. ‘Go on, tell me!’, W.’s getting excited. – ‘Do you see yourself as a nuturer?’, I ask W. – ‘No. Yes. Tell me what you’ve eaten! How fat are you now?’

Built to Last

‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk. ‘All set?’ We’re all set. W. is a great advocate of walking: ‘it’s what we’re made for’, he says, and speaks of the walks he used to take on the weekend.

‘We’re essentially joyful’, reflects W. later, ‘that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle.’ He finds this very amusing. We are in the little boat that carries us across to Mount Edgcombe. ‘But why is that, do you think? Why are we content?’, I ask him. – ‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Well nor am I.’

We look out over the water. W. tells me again about the Dukes of Edgcombe, and how one of them married a barmaid at the pub near the dock. Then we go into the grounds, the great sweep of law going up to the mansion on our right, and the entrance to the gardens ahead of us. The geyser always makes us laugh as it gushes unexpectedly into the air.

I take pictures of the tulip garden, where W. comes to read Kafka. W. has always disliked pictures. ‘Use your brain‘, he says. ‘Remember.’ The worst thing, for W., our mutual friends L. and R. told me, was when they took photos of someone without asking him. W. was appalled. True, he has a photo album at home, but he was given it recently. He has his memory, says W., and that’s enough for him.

‘So is it lack of ambition that makes us joyful?’, I ask W. It’s partly a question of temperament, W. decides. Stable family lives, and so on. We are free from insecurity. ‘Are we free?’, I ask – ‘Well you always think you’re obese.’ – ‘That’s true.’ It’s a beautiful day. The gardens give way to a great landscape, planned two hundred of years ago. ‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, I say. Then, on our left, the sea, a beach of pebbles, and, across, the city, and ships going to and fro.

‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W., and he’s right. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out of the water. There’s a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: ‘We should go on a trip, one day.’ And then, ‘we’re not going to go anywhere, are we? We’re men of habit. Simple beings. Everything’s got to be the same. That’s our strength.’

‘I never think about my death, or anything like that’, I tell W. Nor does he. – ‘It’s all melodrama.’ – ‘And there’s nothing I want more than I’ve got’, I tell him, and recall how frustrated I get when I watch Bergman’s characters moaning about their lot. ‘They have these great big houses – it’s amazing.’ W. laughs. ‘Tell me about your flat again. It’s shit, isn’t it? You’ve got the worst flat of anyone I’ve ever met. My God, I don’t know how you live there.’

The other day, I tell him I spend whole days ringing various companies to get them to look at the damp. ‘It’s Talmudic’, I tell him, ‘everyone’s got a different interpretation.’ Yesterday, the workmen came and took the ceiling down and fitted new joists next to the old, rotten ones. Then they hammered boards over the joists.

‘What do you think’s causing the damp?’, I ask them. They’re baffled, but we can hear water, flowing. ‘How long has it been like that?’ – ‘A month or two.’ – ‘Can’t be good.’ He shook his head. ‘But the water company won’t come out.’ On the phone, W. recommends Offwat, the industry regulators. I rang them this morning, and so the water company’s coming out tomorrow.

‘How’s your house?’, I ask him. He tells me again how the foundations were dug up by the previous owners, and layers of sheeting mean damp is an impossibility. ‘It’s built to last’, says W., ‘not like yours.’ I tell him the plumber says it might need a rebuild – ‘the bricks have rotted away.’ W. is amazed. ‘You know how much my house cost me?’ He names an absurdly low figure. ‘So how much did yours cost you?’ I name an absurdly high figure. ‘My God. You’re fucked.’

I tell him the slugs have gone. ‘That’s one thing, at least.’ It must be the frost. ‘You’ll get rats next.’ – ‘Oh yes, rats.’ And we laugh. I’m waiting for the damp to come back in the bathroom, I tell him. I can smell it, it’s there, behind the plaster, waiting to soak through. It’ll be really bad this time, I tell him. Black. The shower upstairs is leaking again, I tell him. ‘It’s like Tarkovsky, all that rain inside.’ W. impressed. ‘You’re really fucked’, he says, in admiration.

But we’re out walking, the gardens before us, and beyond them the landscaped view, and then the ascent into the woods, and beyond them, the pub. We’re anticipating the beer. ‘I hope they’ve got honey beer’, I say. ‘Oh yes, great,’ says W., excited, ‘now put that fucking camera away’. I tell him to smile. ‘Think of posterity’, I tell him.

‘You don’t actually know anything, do you?’, says W. ‘You’ve got no body of knowledge.’ W. has Hebrew: ‘You see, I know something. What do you know?’ I look up into the sky. – ‘I’ve read a lot.’ – ‘Secondary stuff. You’re always reading secondary stuff. It’s your weakness’, says W., ‘or one of them. No one reads secondary stuff but you.’

He’s undoubtedly right, I tell him. How much does he teach? He tells me: very little. I tell him how much I teach: a lot more than he does. – ‘You really drew the short straw, didn’t you?’, he says. – ‘Which one of us do you think will get sacked first?’ W. thinks it’s him. He doesn’t mind, though. He’ll retrain as a lawyer. ‘We can set up a practice. We might do some good in the world.’ – ‘It’ll be the making of us!’ We laugh. -‘What good do we do, really?’ – ‘None whatsoever!’ 

‘These are truly the last days,’ W. quotes, over honey beer. – ‘How long do we have left?’ – ‘Oooh, not long. We’re fucked, everything’s fucked.’ This as we look out to sea. ‘But we’re essentially joyful’, says W., ‘that’s what will save us. Actually, it won’t – we’re too stupid.’ – ‘We’ll be the first to go under!’ – ‘Exactly!’

The houses are derelict at the bottom of W.’s street, the windows broken. Sometimes you see children’s faces. ‘Do they live there?’ – ‘I think so,’ says W., who always tells me to ignore them when they bang on his windows. ‘You’re scared of them, aren’t you?’, he says to me, as he lights a fag. ‘That kind of poverty …’, I say – ‘It’s terrible. It’s like that round here,’ says W.

The kids yell at him because of his long hair. ‘They hate us’. Once someone came out the pub to throw an ashtray at Sal. ‘Even she was sacred.’ He shakes the match to put it out. ‘Nothing ever’s going to happen anywhere,’ says W. ‘It’s beginning here. The ship’s going down, with all hands.’ Only those of us at the periphery can see it, he says. ‘That’s where you can see what’s going on. Look at it!’ The windows are broken. Some are boarded up. Rain. ‘This is where it’s all going to begin’, he says. ‘It’s like Bela Tarr! Have you bought Satantango yet? It’s out! 17 quid for 7 and a half hours!’

When L. and R. were staying with him, they took a lot of photos, W. said. ‘It’s all documented. The impending end. But it’s nothing to your flat, is it? Have you told them about your flat? I did. And they’re going to stay with you, aren’t they? They won’t be told,’ says W., ‘I tried to tell them. It’s disgusting, I said, but they said it couldn’t be as bad as all that. I said, it is as bad as all that! I’ve never seen anything like it!’ W.’s enjoying himself. He likes hyperbole. ‘To think, they’re going from my house to your flat!’

‘The best thing’s your yard,’ W. continues. ‘When it filled with sewage, and it was really hot, and you couldn’t open your back door or your windows, do you remember? The smell. You could smell it, with the back door closed. It was disgusting! And your kitchen! It was horrifying!’ W. had helped me dismantle the old kitchen ready for the builders. ‘I hope you’ve thrown everything out. All those pots and pans.’ I tell him the new ones have gone the same way, and are covered in mould. ‘No wonder you’re always ill’, says W. ‘You’re going to kill them’, of L. and R.

W. tells me again about the layering that prevents his house from getting damp. ‘We bought it from interior designers’, he says of his house, ‘I didn’t have to change a thing.’ But he did buy a big Smeg fridge, I remind him. Oh yes, he bought that. And he spent a bit of money on the kitchen. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’

And then: ‘compare your kitchen to my kitchen, go on. How big’s your kitchen?’ – ‘Six foot by six foot,’ I tell him. W.’s kitchen is much larger: fifteen foot by twenty foot, he says. And it’s not damp, he points out. And his fridge is full of food, because he’s not greedy, like me. ‘I don’t go and scoff it all’, he says, ‘I’ve got self-control. Do you know what that is? Self-control?’ W. is not a glutton, he says. Nor does he drink when he’s on his own. ‘I’m not like you.’

A little later. ‘Food is for the other,’ W. announces. ‘It’s a gift.’ He tells me he’s bought slices of Emmenthal and some cold meat for me. ‘You’re the other’, he says, ‘so I have to feed you.’ – ‘From your own mouth? That’s what Levinas says.’ W. opens his mouth. -‘Do you want some? Do you?’

‘Men love verbal play’, W. decides. ‘What we’re doing now. Sal doesn’t understand it. Men love verbal humour and abuse’, he says. ‘It’s a sign of affection, of course, he says, ‘I feel affectionately towards you.’

Sometimes, I remind him, he likes to explain things about me to other people like an indulgent mother. ‘The thing about L. is …’, he’ll begin. Or: ‘What you have to understand about L. is …’ And best of all, when he’s feeling very tender, ‘What I love about L. is …’ – ‘Is that it, then?, I ask W., ‘do you love me?’ – Yes, I love you’, says W., ‘You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you.’

The Sacrifice

As authors become famous – but it is the same for any artist – their lives must become more cluttered, and the way back to the solitude of the work more difficult. How to find your way back to what called you then, when you were young? Youth calls to youth inside you: how to call yourself back?

I am never young enough, say that. I have never been young enough, say that. But doesn’t youth dream of itself in you? Doesn’t it call itself to itself, and spread the shore before you, in its spreading simplicity? And then you are young again. Then, and for the first time: young, when youth burned ardently inside you, and resolve was pure, adamantine.

But this is a youth that has to be won. The origin is difficult to reach; how to leap upstream? How to struggle your way back? I would like to speak, say that. Now, for the first time, I know what it is to speak, say that. Youth – at last. Youth – at the end of life, not the beginning.

How to train yourself to write at a stroke, at a single stroke, like a Zen calligrapher? How to live and die in the purity of an act that gathers all of you up, all your life, all experience, and sets it aflame by the light caught on the sword that flashes out in the dawn. Aflame – as if all that you lived was fuel for the fire by which you will burn.

The period of asceticism, in India, follows a life as a householder: you must have lived, married and had children before you can wander out as a sanyasin. Shiva, the ascetic god, was accused by the other gods of never having lived in the world. In an eyeblink, Shiva caused himself to be born; he lived, married, brought up his children and then died. He opened his eyes to the gods who bowed and asked for his blessing.

And writing, too, can only die to a life already lived. Isn’t this the meaning of writing from experience? You must have lived, but must, too, be ready to sacrifice that life by writing, must heap it up on the funerary pyre and leap into it as it burns.

Perhaps. But there is also the substantiality of that life, and of the living relationships that bind you to others. Did I really think, when I was young, I could sacrifice what I had not yet gathered – that there was a shortcut to the life of the sanyasin? In truth, I was not yet sufficiently young – or I did not know as youth what could only be achieved if I lived in the world among others.

Perhaps it is necessary to think the sanyasin alongside the householder: that both lives might be entwined together, and need one another. For of course, nothing is sacrificed by writing, not really. And isn’t it the greatest of joys to meet one’s friends, to eat with them, as I did last night? And wasn’t that why this dark morning was so much the more alive for me, when, in lieu of writing – as I am always without writing – I could at least know and write of what is impossible?

Sometimes I wonder if it was only writing that Yukio Mishima sought by his coup, his seppuku. Writing, or youth – those young men he loved (he would receive prostitutes dressed in the uniform of the Peers’ School that he attended) – could be given only by death (seppuku was also a sexual fantasy, for him, performed each night, and driving his lovers to leave him).

Three times, in The Sea of Fertility, a young man is reborn. Three times, youth is to come to youth. The fourth volume of the tetralogy is sent to the publishers on the day of Mishima’s death. The fourth, The Decay of the Angel, where the youth did not die, but lives on, aging, in blindness. Unbearable! So Mishima, in whom, he said, words fell like rain, Mishima who barely needed to revise his prose, had to give himself death in order to find youth.

What does the West mean for Mishima? Substantial life, his house furnished in a European style. And the East? Death, just that, and the vanished life of action (the sword, and not the chrysantheum). But perhaps there is no action – not even writing – that does not rest upon substantial life. No flashing swordstroke whose sense is given immanently in action.

Shiva closed his eyes, and had lived a life by the time he opened them. The gods asked for his blessing, and retreated. But remember, too, Shiva had a consort – first Sati, who caused herself to be consumed by flames when she saw her husband snubbed by her father, and then, after a long period, Parvathi, who seemed, in the comics I used to read, so real a person.

My favourite scene, from my favourite comic (Sati and Shiva: on the cover, they are both garlanded, and riding Nanda the bull): Shiva after the death of his first wife, meditating alone on the mountain, purple skinned, long haired, the river Ganges flowing from his matted locks. But Shiva had already lived a life, and he meditates alone until his second wife will come to him.

1 + 1 = 1

Tired, with a cold coming on, I know in some sense I’m getting in my own way, and that this will only get worse with age, and the morning will carry with it a reminder of my own heaviness, of the reluctance of my body to let me write.

By what kind of training is it possible to rise, and write? How can the phrases which allow the beginning come to arise? How to find that silence that is their backdrop, the sense of the sea that comes forward to sweep the beach clean?

I get in my own way; I stumble over myself – for how long can coffee, which I drink only in the morning, alone, and at the head of the day, give me the confidence in beginning? Only slightly ill, and it’s impossible. Tired, and it’s impossible – but then, by what chance is it sometimes eminently possible, the seemingly highest act?

Of course I am not speaking of what is actually written: that doesn’t matter. Reading back, as I do rarely, the same disappointment. Not even a beginning, I tell myself. Not the barest of beginnings. But still, in the day that began with writing, and that seems borne along by what began there, before dawn, there seems a beginning, a way of being braced against what happens, a few sentences being set against silence, arising against it, as, I imagine in my delusion, a calligraphic sign, drawn at a stroke, arises against the whiteness of the page.

But it is delusion, just that. Nothing begins here, but this isn’t why it is necessary to write. It is not even failure that drives me, though there is no question of my failure. To wake, to begin, and to carry the origin forward in beginning: just that. To have allowed it to speak, the origin, as it rustles in writing, passing like the wind in the leaves in Tarkovsky’s film: no, I can never say that has happened, not here.

But writing has faith enough in me. Writing, as I wake calls to be written. But even that is not true: it is just what I wish were the case. I wish it now, slightly ill, but not ill, writing – but not really writing – in the darkness. Writing in lieu, writing of what is lost by writing, and wishing the wind from the impossible would tousle my hair: perhaps.

What would I like to say? What is there to be said? Only what sets itself against silence and lets it speak. Only what lets silence and in its struggle into existence, the one against the other. Struggle – or play, one rising higher as the other rises, finding their way into a sky I would like to spread around me, like the seven headed snake that spreads its canopy above Vishnu.

A sheltering sky. But where what shelters exposes, like the slit in the nomad’s tent that is the opening to God. A sheltering silence, slashed in the walls of sense: not the record of passing days the prisoner keeps by scratches, but its opposite, as if every day was the first day, and 1 + 1, as is written on Domenico’s walls in Nostalgia, always equals 1.

How young you have to be to write!, I exclaim in my stupidity. How young so that you no longer get in your own way! But perhaps this is a youth that can only be achieved with age, and that a great clearing away is necessary so that the shore is revealed in its spreading simplicity. 

Footprints

I rise very early to write something or other; but what? Enough just to write – or rather, to be brought to that moment before writing anything, with a sentence fragment or two floating in my head and a sense that that fragment calls for others, and that soon a post will be knitted as sentence joins itself to sentence.

Just to write, and by so doing, have a kind of headstart on the day – to have made my place before the light comes, to have set up a kind of base camp. Sentence fragments come (but whose voice carries them?), but I think what matters is the origin against which they set themselves back.

I can begin, sentence linking to sentence, but the origin, without beginning, accompanies me. I think of it falling back, silently. And then I wonder what it would be to make sound out of silence, to speak not by adding noise to the world, but by subtracting silence from noise, as you draw with your finger on condensated windows.

To speak by subtraction – to let silence sound and to speak thereby: isn’t this what Blanchot means when he claims it is by a violent tearing away that the writer begins to write? That it is by stopping his ears to the Sirens whose song has already drowned him?

But to begin is not to draw the origin into the beginning. Something of it remains, murmuring, non-silent, to rush into the silencing of its noise through which the act of writing can begin, as, perhaps, water rushes in to fill the imprints your feet leave on the sand.

He says somewhere it is the tone of the work that differs from writer to writer – the way, perhaps that murmuring noise is allowed to call in the work. The way the Sirens call, but in a different way with each author. As if those finished books were footprints the sea fills up, until the impression is nearly erased. But still the imprint, still the traces feet leave on the shore – a momentary silencing that cuts into the anonymous streaming of noise.

And isn’t that the company you seek by reading? The footprints of others, of Man and Woman Fridays – the others who sought also, in my fantasy, to write upstream of the day, to go where the river runs clearest, and youngest? I know I have company; there are others who want to push their way to the head of all waters. And by this relationship, I know a kind of amity with them, with the others, whom I know only by their traces, half washed away. 

A Nuptial Art

I think it’s another way to write, only permitted in our new medium, that can make an essay not a series of assertions, but a bundle of questions barely held together, like a raft afloat. The Japanese, I read, speak by indirection – or perhaps they’d call us, if they had our words, too direct, too quick to come to disagreement (or, perhaps, agreement: for isn’t it unbearable to be thought to agree?).

I have wondered whether they might not be nuptial arts, comparable to martial ones: arts of gentleness, but then remembered Mishima’s impatience with what he thought was the feminisation of Japanese culture: didn’t he work on his laugh to deepen it, just as he transformed his own body to give it the muscle and girth of his imagined St. Anthony?

But Mars is not strong in my birthchart, and nor do I seek to make up for its lack; once again, unlike Sinthome, I have a marked dislike of discussion, being suspicious always of what I take to be its frame. Insinuation, quieter movement, and in the end, a writing that does not seek to deal blows or to parry them, but that lets continue the movement of others, though in another way, because it is itself only motion, like a river into which tributaries pour. Only I imagine this river running backward, and the distributaries that join it are like a river’s delta. How can a river leap back to its origin?

To be touched – and sometimes touch, according to a choreography that our writing knows, I think, and before we know ourselves. There are spheres, of course, in which such an approach is unwelcome, and sometimes it is necessary for bloggers to relaunch, to begin again, because, as I would put it, their voice has become too harsh.

A nuptial art instead, then – but is this only an evasion, and an art of evasion? isn’t it necessary, sometimes, to write in your own name, to take responsibility? One response, which K-Punk makes, is to show how a nom de plume can have as much consistency as a real one, but isn’t there another? How to bear no name in particular?

In Japan (my imaginary Japan), it was possible, I read to take different names as would accrue to you as you crossed different thresholds in your life. As a child, one name, as a worker, another, and in my retirement, another still. Perhaps this was never true. But couldn’t you bear more than one name at a given time, or, perhaps, to bear a name and also the other of all names?

Spurious is the name of a blog, and Lars is its author: that is true. But mightn’t the former name that origin from which the latter can never quite be born? I think anonymity is too crude a name for what is needed. Pessoa divided himself into heteronyms, as I imagine a flock of birds might come apart in five directions in the air. Five new flocks, each different (was it five names under which he published? more?), and held apart in different ways. And there is Kierkegaard, whose case is yet more complex …

Spurious, adjective. 1. Not genuine, authentic, or true; not from the claimed, pretended or proper source; counterfeit. 2. Of illegitimate birth; bastard. Synonyms: false, sham, mock, feigned, phony. Antonyms: genuine.

I find it easy to know people when there is some gap of space or time that calls for writing. In this age of email, I am still disturbed by the near simultaneity of communication it permits – but not as disturbed as when the phone rings, and I find myself having to lend presence to what I would say by my voice. But perhaps that voice, too, speaks in its another way, and, it also lets time pass, and spaces open, such that it does not merely communicate across a distance, but lets distance speak.

As with the mellifluous, searching voice of the narrator who speaks to his mother in Mirror – what sweetness!: it, too is present, even as it is set back away from what I would want to say. And do not forget that scene in Lost Highway, where the Mystery Man speaks – laughs – both in person and then acousmatically on the phone. Let speech say itself again, and speak its condition. Let writing write all the way back to the origin.

I think there is an etiquette for writing of this kind, although I’m not sure what it might be. Some know it, I think, and others do not; or perhaps this only my fantasy, and I am drawn to those who, in some way, resemble me. Who are the blunderers, I ask myself, that find it easy to speak, and write? – and then I laugh at my intolerance, knowing it to be without significance.

Perhaps it is our fantasies which individuate us, and which allow us to find others, with similar fantasies, who are like us. I feel as though at the foot of some great, ruined edifice – that I’ve come too late, and something good and great has been lost. But then I know, too, that I could only come now, when it was ruined, and there is something of me that is a wrecker, and that in some way its ruination is my fault.

How, in my weakness, could I have broken the tower? But there are many like me, shameless wreckers, who ape a language they have not earned, and speak by way of what they caused to fragment. But this, too, is a fantasy: there was nothing safe, no monument, and the time in which there were men and women of taste is itself a fantasy.

It is as if a secret has been revealed: that my shame has revealed the shame of a great imposture, and that what was great was never so, and the booming voice of culture is revealed as the wizard behind the curtain. Not genuine, not authentic, not true; of illegitimate birth, or born too late; with what name dare I speak, who speak for all the shameless? Even Beckett, even Bernhard rested in what did not seem to them to be the wreckage of Old Europe. Schubert and Brahms: the sweet, great legacy of nineteenth century Germany. And in what do we rest? Who speaks?

Dream of an etiquette that allows distance to speak. An intimacy that passes by way of distance, letting those solitudes it links be what each of them also is: Aristotle’s god? his beast? Or the one who has not yet settled into a name, or one in whom the nameless looks to lose itself. I think it is the origin that speaks with us, trailing from our sentences. And the origin that summons speech, that it may be wrecked somewhere between us, so that it speaks, also, of what fails to speak, and lets non-speech continue in what is spoken, in what is written.

Perhaps a blog turns great sails to catch this wind, and to move with it. Or it is the like the chime whose noise gives body to the passing wind. The ancients thought the great movement of the sky found its correlate in practices on earth; as the bowl of heaven turned, so it gave momentum to what turned down here; the macrocosm reached the microcosm; all were united.

I think the ruined tower of my fantasy is the shattering of what unifies, and that behind the sky of stars, there is another sky, which opens beyond sidereal space. Let us speak according to this block, this break. Speak as it is neglect that passes through us like photons from blown out stars.

The Gift of Idiocy

‘We’re full of joy’, W. says, ‘that’s what saves us.’ But still, we’re realistic. We compare ourselves to our friend R. who’s clearly better than us. ‘He gives, we take.’ – ‘He has ideas, we don’t.’ W. is warming up to the game, ‘he engages with the world, whereas our engagement is mediated by books we half understand.’ – ‘He tries to change the world, whereas we’re parasitical on people who try and change things.’ – ‘He makes people feel witty and intelligent; we make them feel depressed and demotivated.’

We’re both laughing. ‘Every day, for R. something new might occur. But for us, every day confirms that nothing new, for us will ever have happened.’ Laughter: why do find our failings so amusing? But it does save us, we agree on that, as we walk back from the supermarket. We are content with very little: look at us, with a frozen chicken in a bag, and some herbs and spices, and walking back home in the sun. ‘The gift of laughter,’ I say. ‘The gift of idiocy’, says W.

Inanity

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. I think they find us, who are usually the people to whom no one wants to speak – there’s no advantage in doing so – and we are always ready. We are friendly, if nothing else, and there’s only a few people we’ll do anything to avoid. And besides, it amuses us when people throw themselves on our mercy. ‘You must be really desperate. We’re the last people you should talk to. It’ll get you nowhere.’

We tend to speak in chorus. What does it matter which one of us said the following, to the young postdoc at a prestigious university. ‘You must leave at once. It’s terrible. You shouldn’t spend another day there. You’ll go mad. You see people like you don’t belong there. They’ll hate you. They probably already do. They’ll sniff you out straightaway. There’s no point. You have to fail. You have to know you’re a failure. That’s absolutely essential. If you don’t know you’re a failure, then nothing.’

W. looks at me. ‘You know you’re a failure, don’t you?’ I agree: ‘oh, very much so.’ – ‘And I’m a failure, aren’t I?’ – ‘Definitely.’ And then to the postdoc: ‘You’re the wrong class, you see. It really matters. We’re the wrong class too, aren’t we?’ – ‘Very much so.’ – ‘The difference is that I can pretend to me middle class, and he can’t’, says W. I agree. ‘He gets all surly’, says W., ‘like an ape.’ – ‘I can’t help it,’ I tell the postdoc.

On the other hand, I saved W. from the high table. – ‘I’m your id.’ W agrees. – ‘Everyone says the same thing: since I’ve been hanging out with that L.—, my work’s really gone downhill.’ We laugh. -‘He’s destroying my career’, says W., ‘really. He’ll destroy yours, too.’ And then we start again: ‘You have to leave straightaway. Get a job somewhere else. Go to the periphery’; and in chorus: ‘always stay at the periphery.’

More recently, another stray joined her destiny to ours. ‘Do you like to network at conferences?’, W. asks her. She looks at us both. We laugh. – ‘Of course you don’t!’ Why else would she be hanging out with us? We decide she must be undergoing a crisis; they often are, those who join our table. Still, we are on hand to give out advice. ‘Never listen to us. We give bad advice, don’t we?’ – ‘Very bad.’ But still, she listens, as the postdoc did a few years previously. ‘We must have the air of those in the know’, I say. – ‘We have the air of idiots’, says W.

We hold court in the bar. ‘We’ll be in the bar!’, we tell everyone. – ‘Constancy is always admired,’ I tell W. He agrees. – ‘People need to know where they can find you.’ Days pass in the bar. It requires stamina and pacing. We are calm drinkers, and full of amiability. There are only a few people we absolutely want to avoid.

W. likes to ask questions when people join us. ‘What you’re favourite colour?’ The postdoc’s not sure. – ‘Puce’, I say. – ‘What colour’s that then? Get me another beer.’ Sometimes, at my encouragement, W. tells us about his recurring dream. ‘I’m in a car, driving along, which is funny because I can’t drive. I’m on a big motorway.’ – ‘That’s it?’ – ‘Yes. Whenever the dream begins, I always think, here I go again.’ He turns to me. – ‘Do you have any recurring dreams?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Oh.’

In some company we’re a bit desperate, and flail about for conversation.  ‘What’s your favourite drink?’, W. asks. And then we speak of ours. – ‘Plymouth Gin. But get the old bottle. It’s changed now.’ – ‘They’re going for the American market. There are adverts on the underground.’ And then we speak of Martinis. ‘At the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, they import three different kinds of Vermouth.’

W’, I can see, is getting desperate, and needs calming down. ‘I’m becoming hysterical’, he says. We should go out and find good cocktails, I decide. It will restore our sense of purpose. As we walk, I remind him of the qualities of our friends and allies. W. is cheered. I sing him a snatch of a favourite song, and he joins in, happy again.

We wander through shady streets, looking for caiprenias. ‘I think we should find someone else to discourage,’ I tell W., when we are refreshed. But W. is suddenly in a pensive mood, and wants to wander town very slowly, with his hands behind his back.

‘This is a terrible town’, I say. He agrees. ‘But what is it that makes it so terrible?’ We muse on this for a time. ‘It was rebuilt to look exactly like it was, that’s the problem’, W. decides, and compares it unfavourably to Plymouth, which made no attempt to do so. ‘Everything here’s so fake.’ But then I remind of Warsaw, and how we liked it there. ‘That’s because it was obviously fake.’

The wines here are particularly bad. The previous night, a friend of ours worked his way through all of them, ordering a glass of each from the menu. In the end the waiter sat down with us and told us the bar was terrible. He was Polish, and keen to try his English: ‘my heart, how do you say it?’ (he makes the gesture, and we say ‘aches’) ‘aches for you. Go somewhere else.’ I ask W. to tell me about his recurring dream as we walk. He does, and it makes me laugh.

‘Inanity saves us,’ says W. I agree. It’s like a spiritual strength we draw from within. ‘Empty chatter’, says W., ‘that’s the key.’ We are masters of chatter and fill our days and nights with it. There are several conversational defaults. ‘Tell me about your stomach,’ W. says. I tell him of its current condition and W. muses on its causes. We engage in speculations about digestion, lifestyle and diet. ‘You go out too much’, says W. ‘if I had your lifestyle, I wouldn’t last a day.’ I ask him if he thinks he’s made of sterner stuff. ‘We’re weak. We’re the runts of the litter.’

Sometimes we meditate on our weaknesses. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ muses W. We both know the answer: literature. If only we knew mathematics. If only we were that way inclined. W. has books about maths, and every year he tries to read them. ‘I can never do differential equations,’ he says. It’s like Greek: every year he tries to learn, but falls at the aorist. ‘The aorist breaks me every time’, says W., dramatically. We list the names of our friends who are good at maths and sigh. ‘They’ll amount to something’, says W., ‘we won’t.’

‘But what we do have’, says W., ‘is joy. We are essentially joyful.’ I agree. ‘We are content with very little’, W. says, ‘it doesn’t take much to keep us happy.’ – ‘Pork scratchings and a fourpack’, I say. ‘Or chicken. Remember when I made you chicken?’ I do remember. W. was amazed. ‘You were ecstatic,’ he says, ‘I’ve never seen you so happy.’ – ‘Chicken does that to me,’ I tell him, ‘and that was particularly good chicken’. W. had spent the whole day preparing it, first cutting out a recipe from a magazine, and then going with me to the supermarket to get the ingredients, and finally letting it cook all afternoon. He remembers my excitement lovingly. He likes to see me eat. ‘You’re so greedy’, says W.

The inane are happy, we agree. Not for us all the talk of desiring desire; we are quite content, as idiots are. ‘I think that’s what you’ve given me,’ says W., ‘idiocy.’ I agree it’s my great gift to the world. ‘It’s very pure, your idiocy’, says W. I agree, and explained how it was honed for years in the cellar of the house I shared with monks. ‘Your monk years,’ says W., who also had his monk years. We tell our monk stories to others, never to each other; we are already agreed on monks, on the subject of monasteries and so on.

I ask W. how his religious turn is progressing. ‘It’s abating a bit’, he tells me. Last year, he felt drawn back to the church. W. wasn’t brought up religiously, he explained, but when he was thirteen he suddenly demanded to be taken to church and became very devout. ‘You were never religious were you?’ -Never for a moment.’ – ‘It’s the purity of your idiocy. It saved you.’

The other day, on the phone, I told W. there had been much speculation about us on the internet. ‘You and your stupid blog,’ said W., ‘but I always said your talent was comic.’ He doesn’t read the blog, W. says, except when he’s really, really bored. ‘It’s so pretentious!’ W. thinks my weakness is wanting to be loved. ‘That’s why you do it, keep a blog.’ He admits to be amused by the line, ‘Idiots always come in pairs‘, and by the speculations about the relationship between us on the net. ‘Haven’t they got anything better to do?’, says W.

For his part, he has been lost in bureaucracy. He speaks again about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been. ‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When he was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, W. says. He’d been delirious. I was ill, too. ‘You’re never really ill’, says W., ‘you just whine. You’re a whiner.’ He’s the same, he admits. ‘Men are all whiners.’

Sometimes, there come to our table those who hate everything about them. ‘You’re in the right company’, we tell them, and buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. ‘The point is not even to try to engage.’ – ‘Give up now’: that’s our advice, jointly delivered. ‘There’s no hope for you, you have to know that.’ – ‘We do, and look at us.’ – ‘We’re essentially joyful’,  says W. – ‘It’s because of our inanity. It protects us’, I say. Soon, our table guests are cheered. – ‘See, it doesn’t have to be so bad!’ Hours pass in the bar. – ‘The key is pacing’, we advise.

Once we kidnapped a plenary speaker and brought him to the pub. We drank and I ordered plate after plate of cumberland sausage just for the amusement of it. Our table, and the one we pull over to ours, is covered in plates of Cumberland sausage. ‘Look at all those sausages!’ says W. to the speaker, ‘I hope you’re hungry.’

Later, wandering back to the campus, we get lost in the fog, the speaker and us. Where are we going? ‘We’ll never get out of here’, we tell the speaker. ‘You’ll be trapped forever with us, going round and round.’ I ask W. to tell us about his recurring dream to pass the time. And W. asks the speaker, ‘Do you have any recurring dreams?’, and a little later, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’

Storytelling

I suppose a voyage in writing is not a real one; but there is still a way of cutting free from shore – a voyage of sorts, even if it carries me no further than this room, where the curtains are closed against the darkness. Dark at seven thirty; we are five days from the nadir of the year, and from then the days will get longer than our current seven hours. We come home rather than going out; this time of year, as they know in the old country, is about hygge and staying indoors. They light candles in Denmark even at breakfast in place of a sun which barely hauls itself above the horizon.

Perhaps, before television, stories were told by candlelight: was there really a time in which people spoke in gusts and gales? I scarcely know what it would mean to talk thus, or to listen, though when I lived in the big house in Manchester, David would often talk for hours, on this subject, or on that. How could I explain to him the need I felt for speech to stumble?

I think it is Benjamin who says there is a break between the storyteller and the novelist; the one rests in a tradition, passing down the wisdom of forebears; the other ‘is himself uncounseled and cannot counsel others’. And doesn’t he also say that it is the place of death within shared customs, that once gave ‘that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possess for the living around him’? An authority which is the origin of the story.

And for the novelist, for the writer? No such authority – an authorship, now, that dreams of an impossible ancestry, that searches for forebears who live only in the imagination (thus Filip Kobald’s voyage in Handke’s Repetition). I suppose it was not by chance that David was a religious man – and didn’t he say that the Orthodox could every one of them speak for the whole of the Church? Each adherent carried their own source of authority; they belonged wholly to what they possessed in whole.

Victor Hugo, says Blanchot, says the same of maternity: it belongs wholly to each who would share it – but that in a different context: is he referring to revolution (I forget; I don’t have the essay with me)? If so, it is a different kind of authority of which he is speaking, and a different agency. Who wouldn’t like to live wholly, anonymously, in the moment? Wholly, and alongside others, who are likewise anonymous?

But still, as I read, I remember Leiris’s comments in his Diaries, which laugh at Blanchot among the participants of the Events: who did he think he was fooling? Was May 1968 – and one might say the same of another set of events, ten years earlier – his equivalent of what Palestine was for Kafka, who dreamed of travelling to that land to begin a new life?

Kafka, in the afternoons, used to practice carpentry: a life of the hands, a life outdoors, in contrast to the writer’s life he led at night. Blanchot, rarely seen, also went outside, descending to the streets to take part in the Students and Writers Action Committee (Hollier: ‘I saw him once, pale, but real …’).

Heady, unimaginable days. A return to authorship, to authority? But then he insisted, in the anonymous words circulated at this time, that there must be a break with the past, with tradition, with nationalism, with patriotism, just as, ten years before, he wrote that the living de Gaulle, who had returned to power with the aid of mercenaries, was dead, a hollow shell.

Beyond the storyteller, then, and beyond the novelist, ‘the absence of the book’: a new practice, and which called for a new kind of writing. Is this the way to read ‘Disorderly Words’, and of the fragmentary books that followed? I think to this extent, Blanchot had been preparing most of his life for that disorderly writing, for a writing without order.

What would it mean to blow the candles out and step outside? The streets are empty; but might they one day be filled with a new, anonymous movement? Somewhere Holderlin writes of throwing down his pen and going to do battle of one kind or another. But isn’t this because his pen is the last thing from which he might be freed? Whence the necessity of collective practices of writing – Breton and Soupault, for example, writing together; La Revue Internationale … beyond the storyteller, beyond the time of the novelist, there is another kind of writing.

For Benjamin, the storyteller speaks out of the customs that surround death, out of traditional authority; the novelist, like Rilke’s Malte, might dream of these traditions, but has been cast out from them. Perhaps Mishima is only another example of one who would seek to bestow death a sovereign meaning. What then of the writer of disorderly words – of the récit, as Blanchot comes to understand this word – of the fragment?

For a time, David appointed me his literary agent, for he was writing a series of vast fantasy novels, set in the same universe as The Lord of the Rings, and taking up the stories of the wizards only mentioned in passing by Tolkien. The first book had already been rejected; the second, which I thought much better, he did not quite complete, though I saw six hundred well written pages come together in first draft in three weeks.

I should say I spoke frankly to him about his writing, unlike others, and for this reason, he said, I was to be his editor as well as his agent, and would receive half the money when and if his books were published. Of course, they never were, as I knew they would not be. I still remember the agent’s letters we drafted together, which spoke of the fabulous vistas opened by the book, of high adventure and great battles …

I am reading the fourth volume now of a fantasy tetralogy; the first such thing I’ve read for many years. There are swords and magic and journeys by sea and air; voyages across mountain ranges and alien beasts, and strange tribes of half-men. And isn’t it clearest of all as I read that it is here that storytelling is alive today: in the world of fantasy, of unreal domains, where it is tradition that holds the world together?

In the filmed The Lord of the Rings, you can see the orcs beginning to use machinery, but you know the Shire will be forever immune from that. Tolkien wrote of and for little England, but the book I read was not. Wolfe is a different fish, of course, as is Crowley, and if storytelling, in their books, is kept alive, there is also a sense of distance, Wolfe foregrounding, at all times, the status of his telling as telling.

The Book of the New Sun, in many ways, belongs alongside Borges and Nabokov; next year, Crowley’s multivolume saga will be complete, and I intend to read Aegypt again, and the books that follow, which came out at such long intervals from one another. How might one compare Wolfe and Tolkien? The Claw to the Ring?

That’s a post for another time, but I remember agreeing with Moorcock’s well known essay on Tolkien – ‘epic Pooh’, I think he called it. A book for children, I’ve always told myself (Wolfe disagrees). Like so many other fantasies, Wolfe tells a story about growing up; and he tells stories within stories, setting within his novel examples of what Benjamin calls storytelling.

Isn’t Severian’s exile from the Matachin Tower precisely an exile from storytelling? Is this why the Tower, and his training as a torturer, Master Malubrius and the dog Triskele return to him in dreams? Perhaps Severian’s tale is no story – not in Benjamin’s sense. Doesn’t he, in the end, become Autarch? Isn’t this just another fairy tale, like the one in the brown book Severian carries? But the Cumean, who is old and wise tells him the brown book contains the wisest stories of all (proof of Benjamin’s point? Counterproof?) …

I will interrupt these reflections here. In the end, The Book of the New Sun, for which I’ve got into bed to read these past few evenings, is like the candles lit in Denmark to make up for short days and weak light. I think it is itself a kind of sun – a new sun, but that burns reassuringly like the tales of old. Doesn’t Wolfe say, in the introduction to Endangered Species, that the sun is the fire around which the storyteller and his audience turn?

It’s winter, the end of a long term and I put aside Bellow for Wolfe, because I wanted company and comfort until the days began to lengthen. A strange winter, so warm that lambing has already started, and I watch the clay pots in my yard for the first sign of daffodils – our world is warming just as Severian’s is cooling.

I think I only have one hundred pages of the fourth volume of my epic to finish; I do intend to leave the flat until I do. And then, after that, a separate fifth volume, then the second series (I did not complete it the first time) and the third (which I have never read). And so the days will grow longer instead of shorter, and then there will be Christmas, and then the New Year.

The Most Ordinary

How should a post begin? What should it contain? I think there should be rules as with haiku for this strange new genre. That you should write of the season, and the time of day, and perhaps of what lies around you. Ordinary items, extraordinary ones … anything that catches the attention, even if it does so as it seems to come forward only when you let your gaze wander over what is usually taken for granted. Perhaps the ordinary and the extraordinary change places thereby.

I think it should be a rule to write of the ordinary, of the most ordinary. I took a bottle of wine – a Rioja – to the kitchen just now to open, anticipating of the sound wine makes as it is poured, and the glass from whose thin lip I would drink it. But I couldn’t find the opener and took it as a sign: hadn’t I decided, a few weeks ago, not to drink alone?

For my cheeks would grow hotter, I knew, from drinking, and the lightheadedness to come would desert me again, on the other side of that ripple that passed through the darkness of my evening. And isn’t it more difficult to sleep, when you have drunk? I find myself awake at three o’clock, or two, my mouth parched and know then there’s no point attempting to sleep.

I think it is different when you sleep with another, or at least that’s what I remember. (And now a post has seemed to spin itself, accruing by those details with which it began those associations that let it gather itself forward, as though it were a body of contained water, spilling over its brink.) There is at least another not to disturb, which I would do if I rose and came in here to work. And I would know the strangeness of rising as early as a monk, and of that solitary life I lived before.

Every day, with such a companion, takes place after what the song calls the day before you came. After – and isn’t that unimaginable, those nights, alone, when I rise very early, or late, for morning is not even close, to try to distract myself from sleeplessness? Afterwards, like another country spreading before me, another life beyond the plateau across I’m stumbling. But as I stumble, I can still give myself the excuse that my life has never quite begun, that there’s still time – but for what?

Time for what? Not to write, and finish a book, but never to begin one. Time never to begin, and to know what it is not to begin: the expanse of time in which no work is possible. Once, when I was young, I think I thought I might fill that expanse: that if I gave myself time enough, then anything was possible. What did I find that others have not found? Neither talent, nor aptitude; but I didn’t shrug my shoulders; I was never resigned enough to let go.

Somehow, the message never arrived, as though it had a dinosaur’s long body to travel so that the brain could move the tail. Or that it had lost itself somewhere, congealing and thickening in a secret recess, and merging with that through which it should have passed. I imagine an octopus’s ink in water, but which changes the substance of the liquid instead of staining it black. A medium, now, that is not so: the glass that will not let light pass, but that traps it instead.

And now I think of a prism that keeps light instead of separating it into seven strands, or of Duchamp’s Large Glass that traps light, rather than merely slowing it. In some theologies, there is a darkness that shines, and I think it is there God lives: his absence is bright; although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us. Or God is there as they become extraordinary, or is it just that darkness that conceals itself in what we think we can see? But then, too, the condition of light hides from itself in our own seeing, and that there’s another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, or with a white pupil like the cataract of an eye.

These are ways, at least, of letting speak this silence within sense. In Japanese, I read, there is an onomatopoeic sound for silence: sin, pronounced as sheeen, and the sound trailing off. ‘Like "whoosh" is the sound of a sword cutting through the air … "sin" is the "sound" afterward, when all is done … and only the silence remains’. Shouldn’t it be a rule that the post lets speak that silence – that it lets it trail behind like a comet’s tail?

(And now the thread of the post is lost, or it has frayed and parted. Not for nothing did Breton call for vigilance in automatic writing …)

Open on my desk, a volume of the literary prose of Basho, in whose introduction I find annotated marks, drawn in faint pencil. I bought it in Oxford, earlier this year, in Blackwells, and then read it by myself when I took the room for an extra night (grace: I was never charged).

‘… Basho was deeply imbued with a sense of the passage of time and the impermanence of all things, he wrote often of the continuity of the past into the present’. This after a brief rumination on Basho’s journeys, in which, in his notebooks, the poet would refer to utamakura, places that had been made famous in literary tradition. And now some lines of Basho that have something of the quality of Debord’s Panegyric:

Of places made famous in the poetry since long ago, many are still handed down to us in verse. But mountains crumble, rivers change course, roadways are altered, stones are buried in the earth, trees grow old and are replaced by saplings: time goes by and the world shifts, and the traces of the past are unstable. Yet now before this monument, which certainly has stood a thousand years, I could see into the hearts of the ancients. Here is one virtue of the pilgrimage, one joy of being alive. I forgot the aches of the journey, and was left only with tears.

I tell myself – and this is another rule – that a post should also have something of that sense of impermanence, and joy, and perhaps tears. Impermanence: for what has to be written must be rewritten, and each day anew, for a blog moves forward in time. Joy: because resignation is not complete; and tears because it should be.

(A broken backed post, that lost its way. I put it up anyway – and isn’t that another rule: to neglect writing into existence?)

The Sparkler

Of course, you can set to publish posts on past days, too, which I often do, making a secret archive only visible when I scroll back from month to month. But then I never do that, seeing them by chance only when, for example, through curiosity I look at the blog through a feed. It is the knowledge they are there, that the architecture of the blog conceals another, and there are fossil-posts intercalated among the others, which sometimes have only a secret meaning, and one that I, too, have forgotten.

To whom are these signs sent? To no one, and not even myself. But also to everyone, potentially, insofar as they are published. Can you alter the past? Perhaps to send posts backwards in time, or at least to withhold them from publication until a month is up, and they’ll no longer appear on the front page, is to open the past wider than it was: to prop a stick vertically in a crocodile’s mouth to hold it open.

Now the past will not shut tight; there will be a few secrets left; somewhere, in the darkness, there might be posts that bear no meaning in particular, meant for no one, not even me. Dropped idly into the past, or left to open there like night flowers that bloom away from everyone’s gaze.

Then, too, I wonder whether it is an architecture they open, or rather the fissures in what accretes here like the coral reef. Post lies down on post – but what of the cracks that pass through them all? What of the fissures that attest to the lines along which it is ruined, rather than the structure itself? A counter-architecture then: a way for what is built to be unbuilt, the unmaking of the made.

But what is this to say? That what is made here unmakes itself in secret? Or that there might be a way of erasing writing as it is written, so that only its edge remains, like the tip of a sparkler in darkness, and the circles made as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly from the night. Then it is the night itself that speaks – the darkness set back from the momentary figures drawn by writing.

The night as the past – is that it? Not the beginning, but what never begins in beginning – the same that returns and as the decay of what is written, its fate. I think that’s it: the secret law of writing, the blackness it vanishes against and that it lets speak in its exhaustion.

Fate: then it is the inexorable that writes. The past is that, and inextinguishable; I will not find its end. And, as I search – or as it searches for itself in writing, looks to return to itself in that loop that joins past to future – it is the future that opens, but now pushed beyond itself, beyond anything that might happen.

And I know it in the future, as in the past: the return of what comes by way of writing in order to return there, to itself, and in repetition. To say nothing other than itself, but, in so doing, letting the sparkler’s tip of writing speak, making loops against the darkness.

I believe in this intensely. I think I discovered it here, and by this writing – or at least discovered what I had written elsewhere, and in another key. But there (elsewhere) it was written about and here it is done, and wasn’t that the aim?

‘I have a project’: Jodi reminds me of the journal Kierkegaard has Quidam write, that is set in different strata of the past: one set of entries from one year ago, and another from a month: might one not conceive of a set of posts that might only be published years from now, and when everyone is dead?

In my fantasy, they outlive us all, and lie down like gems in the strata of dirt that will form over our cities. And then, too, in my fantasy, my life is only that tip of fire in the dark, looping even as writing’s hand holds the sparkler.

Somewhere else, I would like to rest like starlight reflected upon ice, flashing back up at the sky. Or like light on water, opening a million eyes into the night. Writing is also a kind of prayer – not for you, the writer, but for itself, its own survival. A Jew cannot destroy a piece of paper on which is written the name of God. And can you erase the prayer that might always be found in the world wide web?

Speak, and wait for those who descend like frogmen to probe the mysteries of the deep. Perhaps they will never come. But what does it matter? Writing is patient. I find that very beautiful. Patient, and waiting with indifference. Hidden too deeply for even wood s lot to find.

Am I guilty? not guilty? Quidam’s question. And of what does Bataille accuse himself when he names his notes Guilty? Amazed that anyone publishes except on the net. Haven’t I found myself defending blogging (not my own practice, but that of others) in the last few weeks?

Enough. Time to keep quiet for those who can’t see it. But how to publish beneath net and web? How to escape the net’s trawl and the web’s stickness, and to let fall, as into the deepest ocean, what is here written? I admit I will not change address and lose those who link to me as by strands of silk. We are together somehow, and falling. ‘Angel, angel, down we go together.’

Ah, but that is my fantasy as I yawn and let my back arch like a bow. Isn’t this writing as easy as the rise and fall of my chest by breathing? Ease: the word gives me an image of shoal of fish quickly passing. Follow them; follow writing – but how to let writing draw me to itself? How to find the current that makes it easy?

Push out your skiff into the river; drift. ‘Go by going’, as Lispector says. And then may a current seize you, even as it only tries to return to itself, and to what never began. But the origin is rising like a kraken, like Erebus at the bottom of the waters. I think it is the past that is rising, or the future, and what does not fail to come like fate.

Drop your posts into the past, then. Cast them from your hand into the water, and watch them glow as they fall, and then disappear. Faith: more is written than appears. Faith: that the most buried writing waits for readers, and the mouth of the blog will open one day like a crocodile’s, and you will see them glowing there.

‘I Have a Project’

One blog feels another appearing in its outstretched filaments – by the record of its stats and referrers, say, which record incoming links, or from trackbacks. A new blog: and it can be opened up, in another window: is it brand new, or only new to you who have found it, such that you cannot really call yourself a discoverer?

Happiness at the thought that alongside your corner of the blogosphere that there are other corners, whole forests of blogs and links. Happiness that you have stumbled into it as by turning the handle of a secret door, or is it that a door has opened into your own corner, and the blogs you keep around you?

Sometimes, you forget them almost as soon as you open them up. Read, scroll down, and then look through the archives: another life, another path of writing, now alongside yours. How often do they update? Is it a living blog, or a dead one? Dead ones can have their charm, and how sad when an old, dead blog disappears.

Where did they go, The Young Hegelian and No Cause For Concern? Many times I went back to wander through their corridors. But Invisible Adjunct is still there, one of the first blogs I read frequently. And will mine, too, disappear one day? No matter, when there are new blogs proliferating.

Perhaps it will crash down like a telegraph pole, carrying incoming links like cables down with it. But that, I think, is too violent an image. Now I see the links snapping like web filaments delicately breaking. Broken links wave like filaments in the air. Who notices they are broken? Who follows them? No one.

No one: and isn’t that beautiful? To disappear, drawing oneself from the corner: isn’t that what you want? In some way, I am the opposite of Sinthome, with what he tells us of his narcissism. I think by this blog I want to prepare a kind of sacrifice, but one no one will notice as it burns. 

To be anyone at all: what kind of fantasy is that? No self-analysis here, however it might appear. A kind of drifting, just that. Don’t wake me up, that’s what I’m telling you. I don’t want to wake up, not here; I am too awake in the world. And isn’t that it: that one who has to speak too much, and with too much reason sets speech loose here instead?

Speech set loose – but now without forethought, without preparation, unless a whole life lived was preparation, unless all the books I’ve read weren’t preparation enough. But for what? To fall asleep and write asleep, just that. To write asleep and as the voiceovers sound in Godard films; in In Praise of Love: ‘I have a project‘.

Scarcely a project, scarcely that. Unless the film follows the way a project wanders, lost from itself. A wandering speech, a speech lost but which, for that matter, does not want to wake up. Or, perhaps – and this is how it will end, though it will never end – I will wake into another life, not mine, just as though I were a god who lived my life as an avatar.

In my foolishness, I search for old posts I wrote that seem important to me. Disappointment follows – but doesn’t that mean I’ve made progress? To wander back through the archives is to see the prose lose its life: does that mean, then, that today’s prose is more alive? But even this prose, the freshest, I find repugnant, and sometimes I make great plans for weeding out most of what has been done.

But I am writing too much. Or rather, awakening is rising up through my writing, like a creature coming up for air. And now writing is drawn towards the surface where it must stop so that I, awakened, can take real breaths. Ah, but won’t I miss it almost as soon? Won’t I carry something of my sleep with me, dragging behind me like a robe?

Like a sleepy child, I love what I’ve lost. Can’t I close my eyes again? If only to know the one who falls in me before he rises. What’s his name? What kind of beast is he, who knows nothing but to fall? Sometimes I imagine that all blogs are falling together, but linked together, like skydivers holding hands.

But isn’t there a way in which we rise, too, each of us? Do not each of us, in their own way, come up for air? But then, too, we are each that child who rubs sleep from its eyes, wanting to go back to bed. And isn’t there something in us still falling, still asleep in waking?

Perhaps this image is too idyllic. Or I should add others, which I discovered only through my own wandering. That it is not from sleep we would awake but from the terror that inhabits sleep – a stirring presence like the Biblical Leviathan that, for a time, calls you from the heart of what you write. That there is an awakening within sleep, a kind of secret vigilance that keeps watch while you do not.

And isn’t it from this beast you flee in wanting to find your way back from the world, and that it is fear you can see in your own eyes, as if your pupils’ blackness was borrowed from his own? And then you’ll see more than you can see, and know your sight reveals itself in a kind of blindness, and that, at that moment, another writes where you cannot, but like an idiot, he can form no letters.

But this image is too grand, too dark, and I think once again of anonymity and neglect. Because there is something triumphally unimportant about writing: it does not matter; it matters to no one, I tell myself, and not even to itself. As if it was born only by neglecting itself and lived through this neglect. As though it wandered without memory and without sense.

How to follow it, then? How to fall, there, to its level? By not caring enough. By not wanting enough. By writing as one might casually brush away an insect. It does not matter: say that. I’ve failed: say that, for isn’t the abandonment of ambition its condition? Or rather, of ambition abandoning you, like Isaac Luria’s God, who created the world as he fled it, and for whom the universe is only the fabric torn open in his escape.

To be abandoned, then, but not to yourself. To a kind of distracted solitude, like a child doodling to pass the time. It doesn’t matter. An abandoned notebook; a graffiti tag no one needs to understand. Why write? To let writing abandon itself. Why? To let writing not matter: and isn’t this what remains of a project at this blog?

A project: but what throws itself forward? After what am I thrown? The attempt to abandon writing by giving it to itself. And then to offer my life, the substance of my life, as the pyre that must burn so it can come into flame. But that, again, is too much. To write of nothing at all, nothing in particular, making no claim. To write as I imagine anyone might write, as though I joined them, anyone, everyone, as they pass along the street like the commuters I used to see in London.

Let nothing distract you but distraction, I tell myself. Write like a god, or a child, I tell myself. There is nothing to begin, and nothing important to say; write like one who has no belief in anything, like the most ordinary person of all, drifting with the others in a crowd. But one so ordinary, I tell myself, he’s a cousin of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, but one who does not leap as he walks, but falls – who walks only by falling forward, stumbling, and who speaks in a stammer, like Moses.

You see, I am not eloquent; or what appears to be eloquence and writely style is only borrowed, and I’m not sure from where. If I read back, which I do rarely, I notice that I do not follow the rules of grammar: there are phrases of which I am unsure, but I set them down anyway.

Beyond Moses, who stammers, isn’t there one whose speech is borrowed, entirely borrowed, and isn’t he more admirable than that? Whose speech clothes nothing, no thought, and is itself a garment sewn together from others. And who is he, the imitator?

‘I have a project’. My speech is not my own; I find that a wonderful admission. What I write is not mine; that, too. To write as I roll over in my sleep. Or as in those rare nights where I forget what happened because I drank too much. Or when, in imagination, I meet one I know on the street who does not know me. ‘But I know you, don’t you remember?’ – ‘I’ve no idea who you are.’

The Most Negligible

Too often I write to say nothing at all, or only: I am here; or rather – I was here – and isn’t that the strangeness of reading diaries that have been transcribed as blogs, updating every day, though they were written a century ago: for does Barbellion really write alongside me? and Kafka? But they are here nonetheless, and very close, and each word in their diaries lets them say, each in their own way: I was here; once, like you, I wrote to mark the days in their unfolding – one day, another, and when I could not see the great wars you know are coming like storm clouds from the horizon.

‘Then came long years of restless wandering, culminating in the misery of the second world war …’ From Janouch’s introduction to his conversations with Kafka, where he says, even as ‘Kafka’s twilight kingdom of shadows became a perfectly ordinary day-to-day experience’, he gets out the notes he wrote back then, as a 22 year old, and decides to select and arrange them anew.

Appelfeld says we cannot understand what the death of millions might mean, when the death of one close to us is already overwhelming. I have found little about Janouch, but I feel I know him in some way through the conversations he records. From his presence that lets Kafka, even a fictional Kafka – Janouch’s invention – speak in the way he did.

This morning, just as any other, even as I imagine myself smoothing a page on which to begin to write. Smoothing it, this imaginary white surface, in order to make a mark as for the first time, just as I once saved to buy with my pocket money the pads such as you used to be able to find in W.H. Smiths. What happiness to begin writing on the first loose leaf page, to begin, to make a beginning, and with a fine-tipped pen!

I learned to write with a minute hand, and when I came to keep diaries, from the same stationery, but hard-bound now, and a day to an A4 page, it was with such a minute hand that I filled them. Perhaps it took time to know it mattered little what was said, and that what was written was never important enough but to be set down in anything but a sovereign neglect.

Neglect: is this why I think no one should speak about blogging? – or that one might do so only after writing a million words or so, coming up for a gulp of air having descended very deeply? But still the joy of reading blogs by those of whom we know the least, who turn themselves away from us except for what they chose to show, and how glorious that showing, fireworks against the darkness, when it is from the darkness of anonymity from which they write – and to let, as I read, the most negligible carry me into its arms.

I think I would like to read of nothing at all, just as I would like to write of it: to mark the passing of days, and the fact that each of us is alive, though our bodies are so delicate, and don’t I always worry, upon saying goodbye, that I will never see the one to whom I wave again?

… As The Blogger Said

I think I like most a writing whose source is obscure, a buried writing. Do not link to a blog where the photograph of its author looks at you face on: it is unbearable. The author should look away, or her image be replaced by one of someone else: might it then be possible to use an analogue of that old phrase, ‘… as the poet said’ when you quote another? ‘… As the blogger said’: but now to refer to any blogger, all bloggers, and we are all the same, falling through our lives together.

Perhaps you should always set your post to appear in the future, as is possible on Typepad. To let your words survive you, and survive everything (but a writing is not truly neglected when you have to pay a subscription for your account …)

Mandelstam: ‘I wake from the dead/ to say the sun is shining.’ But when did he write those lines? Was he was already a prisoner? The miracle: those words reached us. But also that the sun is shining, as I can write of this bright morning.

Runs

Sometimes there come runs of posts that seem to be important. Waking, I already hear sentences that seem borne from yesterday’s posting, as though it were the secret work of dreams to push forward what was thought the day before: that it is dreams which work, or perhaps that they have been made to do so, being transformed from a mess of impressions to an indication of what is to be written in the morning.

And a sense of the fragility of such runs – that the visitor from Porlock (was it Porlock?) might interrupt them; that some illness might come, rising as out of the water like a whale’s back; that I must make a trip to another part of the country and come back exhausted. And then the more general urgency – why do I feel this? – that there is not much time, and everything must be written now.

Foolish superstition: those who write much will die young. But mightn’t death be brought about by writing much – too much? Foolish thoughts, foolish superstition. And when there is no run? When the morning beaches you without thoughts, without phrases that call our promiscuously for the company of other phrases? No thought – nothing to be said, to be written, but only the desire to say, to mark my passage.

Because my sleep is never unbroken, and I awaken, usually, much too early, sometimes looking at the clock to find it was only two hours since I went to sleep, I regard it as an achievement to sleep late – to reach eight o’clock, say, or – but this never happens – nine. I always think that when I have no thoughts, when no run of posts bears me from morning to morning, I deserve to awaken later, beached guiltless and thoughtless on the shore. But this never happens, and without such a run, the hours before daylight are more hollow – for with what am I to fill them?

To live on one’s own is to know well the strangeness of the illnesses and fatigues of the body – but also those moments of strength, of possibility. How was it, for a time, that my evenings woke up because of writing? For a few weeks, tired, I’d gone to bed at eight and watched episodes of The Simpsons streamed on the laptop. And then – some posts that let the evening broaden and spread outwards: now the early darkness did not bother me, and behind the curtains, this room was a cave in which, sitting upwards at my desk, typing, I was moving and the room through time, through my past, which came alive again, and so to the future.

For a few evenings, it continued in this way, and I was eager to come home, rather than staying out to drink. Home – and to write, because for a few days at least, writing was possible and it gave me the possible; the evening was thrown like a spear into the future. And then, of course, it fell away as it must do, and I was left only with a sense of energy unbound. Not work, then, and the steadiness of work, but a scattering, and in all directions. What was there to do but to retreat to the other room, behind the bevelled glass and lie there as the hours passed unmarked, all the way up to sleep?

I decided instead to drive my evenings on by reading, and so ordered many books – some difficult, some easy because they were books I had before, and that I’d read before, and to read was to glide, as I was doing last night, when I finished two thirds of the first book of Gene Wolfe’s tetralogy. I made it all the way to midnight: fabulous achievement, burrowing through the night.

Possibility was mine; hadn’t I already braced myself for this new reading – my first in 15 years, I think – by reading speculative critical studies by Robert Borski and others? I don’t think I can resist a mystery, and the detective work that comes from working things out; braced by Borski I would read attentive for the clues that would guide me in understanding the mystery of the book (or would only lead me deeper into the mystery, as I know it is not bound up, say with the question of Severian’s ancestry, so much as what gives and withholds itself by way of Wolfe’s prose).

Always there is the writing – Wolfe’s supple, strong-limbed prose – and those asides which make the fiction come alive: those lovely pauses in the story that I think I like more than the story itself. But I made it all the way to midnight, and to the brink of this day, today – and wasn’t that what I wanted: to be carried by reading through evening to night?

Of course there is also my review to think about; I should be writing that – but sometimes it is sufficient just to get through days and nights as I imagine does an ordinary person: one who lives according to normal rhythms, who has strength and then rests in the evening when his strength is exhausted. Are there any such people? And besides, what do I know of exhaustion? Didn’t the weights have to be lifted from me when the other day I loaded too much by chance upon the barbell?

In the gym, I allow myself to read Saul Bellow as I train, but I’ve lost the plot of Humboldt’s Gift so infrequently have I gone lately. I think it will be necessary to turn a new page in my life, to begin again, in some new way. And that requires travelling back to the head of the day, to the place where resolutions might be made, or renewed.

But what resolutions have I? It is enough, today, just to write. Enough that in the hours before dawn (but dawn comes very late; it is winter) that I can make my mark, or rather make it again, having forgotten what was written yesterday, or remembering only that a mark was made and must be made anew. Isn’t that enough? To open up an evening, or a morning, to live, or only to mark that moment where a sense of living opens up? But why is it necessary? Why writing, and why here?

It is morning now, and bright. Perhaps the coming of light in winter cannot be called dawn – or at least that dawn should be something unshared, with the sense that only a few of us are awake at this time, very few. Morning, then, just that, and the busyness of the day. Am I braced for it now, and ready for the office? But I would rather the day was forgotten and I knew only the latest in a run of posts, not for what it said, but for the urgency of its saying, that seemed to let fate direct me as soon as I awoke, and gave a single orientation to my dreams, which otherwise tend to linger where I would rather they did not.

The Mark

To mark a date, a time – to have been capable of marking it with a little writing, if only to scratch a mark on the walls of time – why is that enough, at least for me? why is it necessary, so that to fail to scratch means, like a prisoner kept unaware of the date, that I forget in some sense what day it is? What day?

Not that I cannot tell it’s Wednesday, or early December, but that the day without writing fails to open for me. As though, by writing early in the morning – and didn’t I, this morning, wake at half past one? – I’ve a headstart on what occurs such that it might happen not to others, but to me.

I will have a stake in this day, that’s what writing announces. It will be partially mine; the hours will part for me like the Red Sea to the Israelites – they will let me have passage, and so join the passing of this day to the passing of others, and so on, through my life, letting it be mine, and letting me live. And better still, for me, the knowledge that I will have forgotten this, what I have written, by the time the day is over: that I am like one who loses his memory overnight, so that each day he must find himself again.

A liberation, because it breaks me from the dominion of the past by a neglectful forgetting, and lets the future open to me as it is not measured by the past. Is it this eternal youthfulness I want, a wheel propelling itself, like Zarathustra’s child?

I think this is how I want day joined to day, each morning: this that will be the hinge of my days, or the point around which they turn: that happy forgetting that means writing must come again to mark the day, to say: here I am, even when, by the next morning, I have forgotten yesterday’s mark, and must mark it again, and that that is the condition of memory, and passage.

Here I am: then it is not the succession of days I would mark, but the rebirth of the day. The mark must be marked again. Here I am: but where am I, when I’ve forgotten by evening that there was a mark at all?