Lars Iyer's Blog

I've started a new blog, Wittgenstein Jr, for a new novel. Non-consecutive, unplanned, no real idea where it will go, or if it will be any good.

I'm speaking with Laura McLean-Ferris and Paul Pieroni at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the 11th January. 

'The Trouble With Productivity'. Artists, writers and curators today, more than ever, take part in a time-pressured culture of high performance. One is constantly expected to be productive, professional, and to deliver good work. Is this the way we really want to work? How do people working within the arts manage the imbalance between work and life? Can one be productive by being less productive? Are there creative possibilities in exhaustion, failure and laziness? Writer and critic Laura McLean- Ferris, Paul Pieroni, curator of Space, and writer and philosopher Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, discuss the potentials in being less productive. 

What's ragged should be left ragged.

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture which God makes. As a man sits quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. – Now, do I believe that this happens? I don't. […]

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as ill. / Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

Go on, believe! It does no harm!

No cry of torment can be great than the cry of one man. / Or again, no torment can be greater than what a single human being may suffer. / A man is capable of infinite torment therefore, and so too he can stand in need of infinite help. / The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite torment. / The whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul. / The Christian faith – as I see it – is a man's refuge in this ultimate torment. […]

After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched.

Are all men great? No. – Well then, how can you have any hope of being a great man! Why should something be bestowed on you that's not bestowed on your neighbour? To what purpose?! If it isn't you wish to be rich that makes you think yourself rich, it must be something you observe or experience that reveals it to you! And what do you experience (other than vanity)? Simply that you have a certain talent. And my conceit of being an extraordinary person has been with me much longer than my awareness of my particular talent.

The thought working its way towards the light.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. / Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning of think about things in a new way. The change is a decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is hard to establish.

In former times people went into monasteries. Were they stupid or insensitive people? – Well, if people like that found they needed to take such measures in order to be able to go on living, the problem cannot be an easy one!

[…] a man will never be great if he misjudges himself: if he throws dust in his own eyes.

How small a thought it takes to fill someone's whole life! […]

The purely corporeal can by uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

[…] Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be. –

I cannot kneel to pray because it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. […]

Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a passion) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you. (Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.

The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart.

A typical American film, naive and silly, can – for all its silliness and even by means of it – be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film.

Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above. And if that happens – why should I concern myself that the fruits of my labours should not be stolen? If what I am writing really has some value, how could anyone steal the value from me? And if the light from above is lacking, I can't in any case be more than clever.

Sometimes you see ideas in the way an astronomer sees stars in the far distance. (Or it seems like that anyway).

The book is full of life – not like a man, but like an ant-heap.

One keeps forgotten to go right down to the foundations. One doesn't put the question marks deep enough down.

'Wisdom is grey'. Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.

My thoughts probably move in a far narrower circle than I suspect.

Thoughts rise to the surface slowly, like bubbles. (Sometimes it's as though you could see a thought, an idea, as an indistinct point far away on the horizon; and then it often approaches with astonishing swiftness.)

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes.

Perhaps one day this civilisation will produce a culture. […]

When you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.

[…] the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes or does.

What I am writing here may be feeble stuff; well, then I am just not capable of bringing the big, important thing to light. But hidden in these feeble remarks are great prospects.

(For the Preface). It is not without reluctance that I deliver this book to the public. It will fall into hands which are not for the most part those in which I like to imagine it. May it soon – this is what I wish for it – be completely forgotten by the philosophical journalists, and so be preserved perhaps for a better sort of reader. […]

I ask countless irrelevant questions. If only I can succeed in hacking my way through this forest!

Bach said that all his achievements were simply the fruit of industry. But industry like that requires humility and an enormous capacity for suffering, hence strength. And someone who, with all this, can also express himself perfectly, simply speaks to us in the language of a great man.

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

I am too soft, too weak, and so too lazy to achieve anything significant. The industry of great men is, amongst other things, a sign of their strength, quite apart from their inner wealth.

An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

A writer far more talented than I would still have only a minor talent.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Tradition is not something a man can learn; nor a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. / Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Moore stirred up a philosophical wasps' nest with his paradox; and the only reason the wasps did not duly fly out was that they were too listless.

In the sphere of the mind someone's project cannot usually be continued by anyone else, nor should it be. These thoughts will fertilise the soil for a new sowing.

Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him.

Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tete-a-tete.

Ambition is the death of thought.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

This is how philosophers should salute each other: 'Take your time!'

For a philosopher there is more grass growing down in the valleys of silliness than up on the barren heights of cleverness.

If Christianity is truth then all the philosophy that is written about it is false.

I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?

I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences are what bring this about; but I don't mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us 'the existence of this being', but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, – life can force this concept on us. […]

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

God may say to me: 'I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them'.

Wittgenstein, random remarks from his notebooks, from Culture and Value

Interview with Adam Phillips here.

Will Buckingham's brief review of Spurious.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian on the Not the Booker event hosted by Melville House at The Book Club in Shoreditch last week.

Fleur MacDonald in The Spectator on The White Review and (in passing) the Manifesto of mine that was published there. 

(Apologies for the lack of real content at the blog. This should change soon.)

'Literary Melancholy', a long new interview with me by David Winters is now up at 3:AM. On the Manifesto, the Daniel Davis Wood essay and other things. 

D. Quentin Miller reviews Spurious for the Review of Contemporary Fiction. 

I've written an essay/manifesto available here.

(link corrected)

Last three posts from Dogma, due out Feb 2012.

Pre-order Dogma at Amazon UK or Amazon USA. Or order it directly from Melville House themselves, meaning you can receive it a month early.

The cover of Dogma is above.

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.

He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods.

A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …' When did it go wrong?, W. asks. Where did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse!, W. says. There are no vistas! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.