Lars Iyer's Blog

And now you understand: Stalker is part of the Zone, and his whole life belongs to it. Until the life he leads outside the Zone was also lived within it; until the items on his nightstand in his room are there because they were first of all in the Zone. And when he lies down to dream, it is the Zone that wakes up inside him. And when he guides the others through its traps and temptations, it is the Zone that would like to know itself, to find its way back to the event by which it came to birth.

Stalker will speak of his friendship for the ones he guided. Friendship: he steered them, as the Zone steers him. It is the Zone that burns between them. It is the Zone, blind and unconscious, that returns between them. Returns – but without coming to itself. For there is no ‘itself’; the Zone is not the Zone. Or in that ‘not’ it is also everything; it is what gives itself in the world that would lie outside it. Gives itself, and by way of its withdrawal, as what it is not.

The Zone is not the Zone: and who is Stalker? The one who goes by not-knowing, and whose unknowing is the way the Zone comes to itself. Comes – as it does not come. As it stands outside itself: Zone, will you have been anything but the incidental? Will you have ever been otherwise than what is seen from the corner of the eye? Then what is a friendship that passes thus, by way of the incidental? What is a friendship that lives by way of the rebirth of the Zone, its infinition?

The ordinary is not the ordinary, or in that tautology, the ordinary is the ordinary, it lives already as what it is not. As though it were disjoined from itself, and fire burns along the breaks of its articulation. The extraordinary: I will not speak of the depths of the ordinary, but of its infinite surface, its infinition. As though it were the ice sheet across which the aurora borealis flashes, and the bright stars. Everything, it is everything. Or it is what interrupts itself in everything and shows the world as what is torn apart.

The Zone is the world. No: the world is also what the Zone is. The world is its crust, its ashes. How deep is the wound? The wound is the world; it does not heal, and its suffering is the Zone. Is it possible to say: I suffer myself? Is it possible to say: I suffer everything? The Zone suffers itself. No: the world is the suffering of the Zone. The Zone would become itself, but there is still the world.

And isn’t that the way friendship would pass? And love? By way of the incidental; by way of that detour-interruption that breaks the joints of the present world. That unjoins them, or shows they were forever unjoined, and that fire burns along the sutures. You cauterise a wound to close it, but is there another fire that burns around a wound forever unclosed? Is it possible to say: I am dying? Is it possible to say, I am young in my death, and in my dying?

There is a kind of youth that subtracts itself from the world, and draws the world after it. A youth unpossessed, or whose happening is dispossession. To be young again – how old am I, and how is it I have already come to the end of my life? Youth accuses. Youth says: what you have lived is false; the ordinary is not the ordinary. Youth says: turn around, turn, lose yourself in the incidental. How to cross the world at another angle?

Youth suffers itself in you. Or: what you suffer is always your youth, that blazing moment that seems to detach itself from the possible. Until you suffer the impossible, you suffer the place you cannot occupy. Is that way youth passes by way of the other person, and by way of friendship? Isn’t it the other who would be young in your place?

The Zone is nothing for Stalker on his own. He is a guide; he steers the ones who will become his friends. But that friendship is not his – or it is that it is first of all a friendship with the Zone, and a way in which the Zone comes to live a life. Friendship, by way of the others, and for the Zone.

Dream of that friendship in the world that affirms the incidental, that is friendship for the incidental. Give the world to me; let it give itself to be, and by way of the incidental, by way of what gives itself through you. Gives itself, gives and forgets itself; gives and lets its youth, its eternal return, burn in your place as it leaps across to burn in mine.

‘I would like to live, and to live by dying. I would like to die to life and into life.’ The Zone has awoken; Stalker is asleep.

Suddenly, on the white rectangle of the page, the shadow of a bird, moving quickly. What happened? Did it happen? Behind me, large windows, a sunny courtyard. Then I remember Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the interrogation of Berton. Suddenly, through a window in the cold, white room, a bird is seen to alight on a branch. And then, in Stalker, there is the bird that flies across a room filled with sand dunes, and disappears in mid air.

The incidental, in each case. They do not call attention to themselves, these birds (unlike the bird that alights on the cap of the boy in Mirror), but a part of the whole of a shot. Then I think of the Zone, with its strange laws, its secrets, all of which lie open and apparently ordinary in the light of day, or which, if they are enclosed, are only ordinarily so, in a space as ordinary as any other, even if, mysteriously, its rooms are full of sand, or of water.

The Zone, I tell myself, is only the incidental, but the incidental that presses forward to be noticed. It is the space of the fleeting, but where the fleeting is no longer fleeting, but essential, and the incidental happens imperiously, as though, as soon as it occurred, it always would have occurred thus, as though it had been planned in that way by the gods.

Who is Stalker himself, the guide to the Zone? The one who would abide in what cannot be understood. Who holds himself there. To abide – but does he abide? The items on his nightstand are also beneath the pools in the Zone. A phonecall reaches him there, in an abandoned room: is it that the Zone is only the place of the incidental, of what happened only in the corner of Stalker’s eye?

This is a dream, not a post. Or if it is a post, it is one that remains in the Zone, or a kind of zone, wherein everything incidental that has happened to me comes forward again. The other night, returning from Germany, I bought a book at the airport, which I began to read on the plane. Carried along by the reading, I dreamt of what I would like to write, and in the same strong style. I wanted to be carried forward by strong, calm prose. By that strong prose that would spread like a wave of surf over the sand.

I wanted to seize the incidental and make it essential, to live from what happened without reason. I wanted to write a prose that leapt from incident to incident, disclosing their hidden necessity (is that the word?). By that prose I would have willed everything that had happened. Willed it, demanded it: how could life have been lived otherwise?

Yes, everything seemed possible; I could write of everything, and plot my course through the incidental. I admit, I had felt lost for most part of a whole week. What was incidental and what was not? The word, adrift, had kept returning to me. Write with that word, I had thought to myself. But I was adrift only because I could separate the essential from the incidental: could not find that written path, that critique which would set the two apart.

Then to write – or to write after the example of the book – would be to be able to abide in the incidental, to hold oneself there. And then to be held by what gives a life its shape, and binds it to a style. I read, as the plane flew north above the clouds, and as I saw the whole city from high above the river’s mouth – the whole city in the sun, on both banks of the river. I read, but I fell from my reading-dream; the narrative, which had now encompassed the doings of so many characters, had fanned out too broadly: it seemed anything at all was in the novelist’s grasp – that the incidental had been mastered, rather than being allowed to live and giving life in turn.

There was too much plot, and the novelist insisted on introducing too many characters and too many themes; how I longed, after I finished the first fifty pages of the book, for the prose of Handke, or of Sebald: for a concentrated, single minded prose, for the narrative of a single life.

But the first fifty pages! Everything was there! The narrative demanded nothing; it fell open like a flower, what happened could only have happened; the tale followed what told itself in the world and in the opening of the world. And I, reading, thought I could speak of my life in that way, could speak fluently and without hesitation, and trace a path through all that had happened.

This afternoon, back in my office, I remembered the closing pages of ‘continuity shots’ of Duras’s The North China Lover. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin. In the nakedness of a clear night (relative night)’: short paragraphs which could have been inserted at any point in the narrative. Paragraphs that are printed at the end of Duras’s book, one after another, each of which – as I am sure was the intention – could be inserted anywhere.

I thought, but what I suffer from are shots of discontinuity – that fragmentation that seems to tear life from itself, scattering it in a dozen directions. To be adrift – to live diffusely, and in every direction at once: it is only with a strong book with me that I can steer my life in a single direction, can fool myself that the opening of its prose is also my world as it opens, and in accordance with a single law.

And without such a book? Without a Stalker to guide me through the Zone? What does it mean to live adrift, lost in vagueness? I will take no decision, there where nothing can be decided. I will be lived, there where I do not live. Life will have happened to me – but what will that have meant?

Stalker lies down, and a dog passes behind him. Two children, whom we will not see again, greet one another in Solaris. Then there are the horses, that exit the shot to the left and reappear from the right. The children, the horses, the dogs: how to look at the world from the corner of my eye? How to learn to live so that the incidental greets me, and in that necessary vagueness that breaks all laws?

Dream of the telling that affirms the incidental – of that practice of recounting that saves the incidental. Saves it – but by sending the narrative off course, steering it, not by what collects the incident and lays it end to end (the strong narrative), but by attesting to the law that is broken each time. But what kind of telling is this?

Speak by indirection. Write and know that what is written is carried by the incidental, and the detour of the incidental. Nothing you report is essential – or what is told, its details is only an example of the way the incidental can might carry your telling away. An example – which means one incident weighs the same as any other. What is said does not matter; telling must follow a path, a particular path, but it must be affirmed that this path is one of many, and telling now stands apart from what is told.

We live diffusely, and in every direction at once. The strong book gathers the incidental into a narrative, that is its relief. But is there a weak book, a weak writing, that is gathered by the incidental each time, such that it can never bind narrative into linear continuity? The discontinuous, the fragmentary: speak of the diffuse, of the vague. Let speak the telling that is like the heat haze over a summer road.

All stories are here; I will speak of everything. I will tell, and tell everything – and first of all by telling what tells itself each time. Be gathered, do not gather. Wait; telling will reach you. Telling will speak of the incidental and affirm the incidental. This is a dream, not a post. Stand at the beginning place, where telling has barely given itself form. Stand where the aurora borealis flashes above the earth.

What flashes thus? The beginning of the story. No: what returns in the telling of the story, and in the telling of the incidental. ‘A blue sky bursting with light’; ‘Naked sky’; ‘The dark river very close up. Its surface. Its skin.’ Stalker is passing through the Zone. His passage changes it. He lies down; he dreams, and the items on the nightstand are strewn in a pool of water beside him. The Zone says: I will speak of your life. I will speak of everything. The Zone says: lie down, dream, and I will tell you everything.

The incidental never settles into an incident, I know that. Or it is that the incident is only the incidental that has become fixed and determined, a stone in a series of stepping stones. Write with a weak prose; write so that the incident is ready to shimmer into the incidental. The day is ordinary; the day is extraordinary; in its ordinary depth is already the Zone that shimmers in the corner of your eye.

Life will have happened to you. No: you are what life gave to itself; you are what is stretched along the incidental; you lie down, fall, as Otto the postman falls in The Sacrifice. I am at the beginning place, the incidental. Or what begins is what will never settle itself into an incident, or that burns around the incident, its fiery nimbus.

The incidental: is this why, for all its longeurs, I love My Year In No Man’s Bay? Is it why I love Vertigo? Books made of discontinuity. Books that burn around their edges, and in which – across which – telling obsesses itself with the incidental. What happened, what is happening? Why set down this detail, and not another? Why these accounts of a great passage through the world?

Because it is a passage, each time, that does not set its course in relation to the stars of incident, but is lost beneath the flashing of the incidental. Lost – and where this loss is the stake of what is told. Errant speech, speech of indirection: not the single flower that falls open, not the world as gives itself to the flower of narrative, but as hedge flowers are strewn along the path, each of which is a perspective on the whole.

Telling that does not bear, but sets adrift.  I fell asleep; I fell asleep in the telling. Lie down. Stalker is lying down. The Zone shimmers around him.

What happened to you? What will have happened, there where the incidental fails to complete itself? Every path begins here; every path has already begun. Weak prose, fallen prose: decide nothing, determine nothing, there where the incidental greets you.

Thought of exhaustion, exhausted thought. I would like to come to the end of thinking; would like for thinking to leap up in my place. I will give myself to thought. I will let thought come to itself. Come with me. Meet me there where you have no strength to think; let us meet there where we have fallen. Then will thought take place, and take our place. Then will it hold us in its own arms.

Otto the Postman in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice falls. He lies on the wooden floor, laughing. He speaks, from the floor. Glorious to see a man stretched out full on his belly, praying. I’ve seen it – a man, otherwise powerful, lying full stretched on the floor. He would give himself to God. But Otto lies on his back; he has fallen into the arms of chance. No one has caught him; the ground holds him.

Like Andrei Rublev when he walks out into the mud. Like Stalker when he lies down on the low island in the stream. Behind him appears an Anubian Alsation, like a spirit guide. Fall down: no one will catch you but the earth. But to fall thus is to be scattered across the earth like dice. You have fallen; the world knows you as blessed. You are a saint of chance.

The face of God is worn out. You do not pray. Or prayer is thought, the whole of thought, as it is present in you. Come with me. Follow me there, to where we will fall together. There where thought needs our weakness to come to itself. Where thought desires only to hold itself, to touch itself as I would touch you. But thought will not be kept. Thought keeps us. It would keep us, the exhausted ones, who have fallen from everything but thinking.

‘I would like to learn how to fall.’ – ‘But you cannot learn.’ – ‘I would like to fall.’ – ‘But falling must be what you do not want.’

We are exhausted, the sacred ones. Thought crowns us. Thought is joined to itself in our exhaustion, and there it unjoins the world. For that is what thought demands, impossible gift: you will think as no one; nothing will think in your place.

I will think, says thought, by taking your place, and all places. To take place – to take time, too. Both are taken, space and time; both interrupted. Thought is always a block, a break; it is the impossibility of thinking. And you can see it, like a holy idiocy, in those who have thought. It has marked them, deep in their eyes. They laugh with thought; they pass amongst us, but thought laughs with them.

How can they endure us, who are still not thinking? How, who exist all too much, who are adequate with respect to themselves. For thought demands failure, inadequatio. Inadequation: thought fails; thought is exhausted. But that exhaustion is thought; thinking arrives then, when you have collapsed. At last you are unemployed. At last you have been delivered into the errancy of thinking.

‘I cannot bear it.’ – ‘It is the unbearable. Thought cannot be thought, but only borne, and to the point of the unbearable.’ – ‘I cannot bear it.’ – ‘Then you must come with me, we must both fall, and thought will be there between us.’

Break the world from itself. Think as fragment, and the world as fragment. Thought: the inadequate. Inadequacy that meets the inadequation of the world. Become with it, then. With the whole world. That is what is meant by truth. It is the way truth comes, and by way of thought. You must contain what you cannot contain. Fall, and roll the dice across the earth.

‘Fall.’ – The arms of chance cannot hold me.’ – ‘Fall.’ – ‘Nothing will hold me.’

You knew it then, cycling, didn’t you? Knew it as you cycled around the new estates, didn’t you? The sky, the whole day watched you in its blindness. No one saw you. Was that you first fall? Had you fallen before? In truth, you fell as a child, you were always fallen, you who was never himself. But how to affirm what revealed itself then? How to will your own unemployment?

I am unemployed. I would not have it otherwise. I have been dropped by the world. I would not want it otherwise. I have fallen as Otto has fallen. I speak as Otto spoke. I think. Thought is with me. Join me here, where thought is present. Come, to where failure is absolute. You have no chance. You have no hope. Or: there is hope, but not for you. There is a future, but not for you.

Despair without object. Despair that is the whole world in its blindness. The world looks at you. It says: ‘again? One more time?’ And you must say, ‘again.’

‘I am praying.’ – ‘You are thinking.’ – ‘I lie on my back.’ – ‘Thought is thinking.’

There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.

Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?

The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.

Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.

Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a mutliplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.

Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.

Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.

The impersonality of the thinker. The thinker as no one. Thought has claimed her. Thought keeps him; he lives within the secret. She thinks with every part of her life. And thought reaches us, too, by way of her life, his life. Thought thinks – and not only by of the external ‘show’ of a life.

Every detail; each movement: thought thinks. Thought laughs and thought loves. Thinking is absolutely of the body, it is nothing but the body – but that of no one in particular. And so does the body of no one touch my body. So am I touched – called. So am I enfolded.

But it is only that thought has leapt across to me. Only that thought, like the fire that leaps from tree to tree in a forest fire, has reached me. My life is not consumed, but it burns. It is not burnt up, but burns, every part of it by the same thinking.

Yes, there is thinking – the same thinking, but it differs because it thinks with a different body – mine. Who am I, thinking? No one at all; no one in particular. Or rather, my body is joined to that no one and what I say, what I write is joined to another speech and another writing.

What joy! But then, disappointment, as I cannot give content to what I have thought. I have only been dazed. I was only dazzled. There was thinking; thinking passed across to me, and I, too am on fire. But thought has not resolved itself into determinacy. It blazes, but without determinacy.

Everything is thought – the whole, hen panta. That thought is my blazing, it is my friendship with thought, which reaches me singularly. Friendship – which turns me, for a moment, from my friends. I am alone – but am I alone? There is thought; there is thinking. I am kept; the secret maintains itself. Nothing can be communicated.

But then, by my gestures, by the tone of my voice and my silences, thinking is there, in person. Thinking relates itself to itself, by way of me. Its price: I have become no one. My body, my life has be joined to no one. I am pure figure. Thinking gives itself to itself – but what is left of me, who is sacrificed in this giving?

Thinking communicates. But what does it say? Only itself. Only the saying of itself, the ‘that there is’ of thinking. Only the surprise that thinking has incarnated itself, that it has found a body. This communication is the sign, the trace. But a sign of itself, without signification. A kind of doubling – a division between my body and a body, between my life and a life.

Thought burns; my whole life is burning, but nothing is consumed. Nothing is changed. Friendship, which demands solitude, changes nothing. The world will be restored to you; everything will come back; it is the same world, there is no other. And yet it has changed – yet the same is also what divides itself and does not cease to divide itself between individual lives and a life.

This is thought’s adventure; it is the adventure thought gives itself. But there is no one to give; nothing stands behind thought. It is only that thinking is adventure, and infinite movement. It is only that thinking is the stirring of the infinite in the finite, the fold which can only refold and unfold.

Let it come, then. But it needs assistance. It needs a body, a thinker, one whom it can keep. Hence those thinkers whose memory is precious to me, those who, for a time – a sunny afternoon, a room full of conference attendees, a brief conversation outside, as others smoke – incarnate thought, give to it their life, the whole of their lives.

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

Strange chance both of us were admitted. Strange that we found our way in; we wouldn’t have a chance now, we know that. They do not even hate us – who, after all, are we? Would they hate us? We wouldn’t be acknowledged. Us least of all (and our friends) – we were admitted by accident; it was a mistake; it will not happen again. Still, we have learned a great deal about stupidity, and about our own idiocy. We’ve studied as we’ve wandered this strange, stupid land.

A simple distinction: stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. Outside ourselves – we are inside this stupid land, but we are also outside. W. does a good impression of an insider (I do not), but it is still an impression; they’ll sniff him out. Is he one of them? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, then, which begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet and idiocy speaks, if only by burning up words. Idiocy speaks. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. To address, to be addressed: this is idiocy’s relief; it lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that’s how idiocy discovers itself. That’s how it lets itself be discovered.

Two of us, and the table between. A bottle of gin, and ice from the freezer. Slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. Open jewel cases and dirty CDs. ‘Listen to this!’ – ‘You’ve got to hear this.’ Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that – but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn’t idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

Idiocy laughs. Everything said is a decoy, it is all indirection. Idiocy laughs: it is the laughing path of words crossed between us. Then idiocy laughs too hard and the words fall. But what does it matter what was said? ‘What were we saying?’ – ‘Where were we?’

Gin and the ice, sliced cheese and dusty, thumb-marked CDs: this red-walled room is a wicker man built to be set aflame. Laughter: what stupidity, and all around us. Stupidity of politics, stupidity of work, stupidity of honours, titles, and professional competence (of what Levinas calls ‘ontological tumefaction’).

Idiocy: a block, a break. How can we speak in that land, so strange and stupid? By what right can we speak? No wit; no ‘conversation’. Then idiocy is interruption, just as our lives, inside, are interruptions. We are tolerated – for the moment. But then they haven’t noticed us, not really. Tolerated – so long as we remain out of sight, in peripheral vision. We’ll disappear soon, they know that. And meanwhile? The idiots are in the room with red walls. Idiocy is laughing across the table.

Ah but to think from idiocy – to think stupidity out of our idiocy, our gift of idiocy: will that be our revenge?

‘Pull out another chair’, I say to W., ‘not for Elijah, but for idiocy’. But idiocy does not come to sit down; he’s already here. Between us. Idiocy is between us.

Plymouth Gin is the path; it opens the way. Plymouth Gin, the table, W.’s front room: now it opens: the route to idiocy. Now will we run up against what everyone is capable but us. Claustrophobia of idiocy, the sense of being pressed up against it. There is no escape. We are idiots, we are becoming idiots.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Gin over ice, no tonic, no mixer. Gin: absolute alcohol. Alcohol that has burned everything away but itself. What burns? Alcohol burns; it has become a star. Alcohol, igniting itself, is sheer ardency. Drink, and speak of what you have not done. Speak of your failure; share it. Share your failure, and your sense of being outside. You are both apes, imitators. You are idiots, and your idiocy is growing pure, as pure as alcohol.

Burnt engine oil: that’s what opened the way to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But now it is Plymouth Gin, and it opens nothing but our own idiocy. Let it complete itself, that idiocy. Let us experience its completeness, its fatality. From the first, our idiocy. From the beginning, and before the beginning.

How could it be otherwise? Idiocy set itself back in us. It was our fate, our fatedness. It set itself back, it fell into our past, and into the past before the past: the a priori. Idiocy was our a priori, our condition, our uncondition. It is what sets us apart, and apart from ourselves.

How could it be otherwise? But it was also our gift. A gift from idiocy to itself, and by way of our idiocy. Two idiots, drinking. Two idiots, invited by idiocy to drink in a room with red walls, a table between us, and ice, and two glasses, and a bottle of gin, of Plymouth Gin.

Blanchot recalls that passage in Bataille where he speaks of reading and drinking with X. We know who is, says Blanchot, but that does not matter: X. stands for friendship as much as the friend. And to drink with X.? To read? A kind of community happens, says Blanchot. Drinking, reading, are its condition.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Drunkenness is the path, and this is what distinguishes us from Socrates, who knew he knew nothing. For we do not even know that (and isn’t it the same for Bataille’s’ Socratic College’?). We speak of our failure. ‘When did you know that you’d failed?’

We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y.? and Z.? Ah, that conversation I had with Z.! And with Y., that summer’s day? And X., when we had him to ourselves for a whole evening? And more distantly, we speak of the thinkers we read. ‘How is it possible for a human being to write like that …’

Later, we will go up to W.’s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. ‘How is it possible …?’ Above all, it’s not possible for us; that first of all.

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

So does idiocy presses us up against itself. Idiocy calls, and by way of the Plymouth Gin, the red walls of W’s room, and the open copies of Rosenzweig and Spinoza. We are idiots. Do we know we are idiots? Not even that. We are not even Socrates, who knows he knows nothing. It takes gin to get us to that point – gin, and the open books in W.’s study. And by that time it’s already too late. Know? What do either of us know?

Between us: what does it mean to share idiocy, to wander out in the mountains and the flashing stars, where books loom and thinkers are gods? To share it: now I wonder whether it can only be shared. For who can attain idiocy, pure idiocy on their own?

First sign of a thinker: the insistence there is a gap between them and their thought. Who are they after all? ‘I’m not very interesting’, said X. to W. and I two years ago, ‘but the book’s interesting’. He insisted on that. But W. and I scared him when we asked him to become our leader.

Another sign: the thinker experiences blocks and breaks when it comes to writing. Sometimes they write, and it is like the flash of lightning: everything is written, and all at once. But that ‘sometimes’ follows the darkness of many years. For a long time, there was no writing; and then – there it is, all at once. To write as by a single stroke – what does that mean? To write after thinking – but thinking is not the word, unless thinking happens in those blocks, those breaks. Unless thinking begins by facing its impossibility and then enduring it, riding it, that same impossibility, folding it into something that might be lived.

Not like us, I said to W., everything is possible for us. But for them, thinking is a risk, it is exposure. A kind of aloneness, that separates them from others, even if it allows them to return – even if it is all about return. I tell W. for the hundredth time about my two great conversations with Y., when he spoke of the category of repetition in Kierkegaard. The first time, with great urgency, on an afternoon when the sun blazed down. It changed everything for me, I told W. And then the second time, the following year, when he spoke to me of his relationship with his son. Pure repetition, he said, with incalculable joy. Did I understand him? I’m not sure. But he set fire to the word repetition; henceforward it would blaze, and Kierkegaard’s book became the urbook, the first book, from which others had cooled and fallen.

And the third time we could have spoken? W. and I remember it well. W. was speaking to Y, and I was not. Someone else – who was it? – insisted on talking to me. I was aghast; I moved my chair closer to W. and Y., I tried to overhear, to participate, but I had no chance. It was a great conversation, said W., unhelpfully. A great conversation! But I was being monopolised; someone thought I had something to offer. Couldn’t she see I had nothing to offer? Me, of all people! When all I wanted was to be drawn again into the circle of conversation. To listen as new words were set on fire; as books of philosophy became those scorched paths through which the thinker – thought in person – had blazed.

And a third sign, which is always marvellous to W. and I: the thinker has an absolute pellucidity with respect to  their ordinary life. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, I said to W. after speaking to X. And it was true: how frankly and absolutely X. spoke of himself, and to everyone who asked. Frankly, absolutely: as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, at that of blocks, of breaks – a level of which we had no idea.

Complete seriousness, said W., not like us. He was right: we are the apes of thought. Complete seriousness! But isn’t there a sense for them, the thinkers, that there is a lightness in seriousness; that thinking is a kind of beatitude. What will W. and I know of the infinite pleasure of thought, thought’s laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker? They know more about joy than us, I said to W. There’s no doubt about that. The play of thought, the game of thought: Blanchot’s phrase of which W. and I always remind ourselves.

Remember what he wrote about Bataille, says W. for the hundredth time. We remember: absolute seriousness, absolute play, both at once. And I remember Blanchot’s letters to Bataille (those that Bataille did not burn): almost contentless, expressing solicitude, expressing friendship, as friendship became a name for the play of thought between them.

Blocks and breaks: but now thought was a kind of turning, that orientation where speech, too heavy with itself, was turned to the other. A kind of shuttling (though Bataille’s letters do not survive) where speech lightens itself as it slips from the one to the other. Speech? Is that the word? Rather, the ‘there is’ of speech as it returns from the impossibility endured by thought. As it returns after the longest absence, having traversed the greatest distance, but still young, younger than either thinker, announcing only itself, and the possibility of the impossible.

And now we remember Z., around whom the room becomes quiet. She speaks, and everyone is quiet. Here is a thinker; here is thought, in person. She lives differently to us, we know that. She lives a different life, and silence is a sign of that difference. What does it mean, that she does not speak? What does it mean, when her speech is light, quiet? Everyone in the room knows: what is spoken so lightly burns with the greatest urgency. The room is blazing, but these flames are like those of the aurora borealis. Thought is here; thinking is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it is impossible to think.

Touched: and it seems for a moment that we have faces with which to face the impossible; that we can be brought there, to the edge of cold and fire. The dross is burnt away; the whole of our lives become clear and still, like pools of water in Northern forests. The play of light across us, across the whole of our lives: we live; we are alive. Everyone in the room knows it. The room – but this is scarcely a room. An expanse – we lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than her speech. To be that quiet! To listen, with the whole of our being!

Thought is here, we know that. Thought that needs nothing to think, that thinks itself, like a star that has burned its substance away. Philosophy is burning. All thought is burning. And don’t we each burn from that same burning? Hasn’t it set something of ourselves alight? Wow, I said to W. when we came out. We sat in the courtyard, completely quiet. No more chattering. No apishness. Wow: I said nothing, I said everything. To share what had happened was only to repeat that non-word.