Lars Iyer's Blog

‘What possessed you to buy an underground flat?’ W. says. To be close to the earth, he says, was that it? To be close to the toads and the worms, and to the creatures of the earth?

Slug trails along the floorboards. Curled up woodlice in room corners. ‘The flat’s being taken back by nature’, W. says. He’s right. The walls are green. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling.  And then there’s the damp, of course. The ever-present damp. Is it alive? Is it dead? It’s beyond life, and beyond death, that’s what W. thinks.

They should send scientists out to study it, my damp, W. says. They should try and communicate with it, like the scientists in Solaris. It’s more intelligent than us, W. says, he’s sure of it. My damp has something momentous to say, something profound. In fact, isn’t it saying it now, for those who have ears to hear it? Isn’t it rumbling in the darkness? I should know, W. says. I live with it. – ‘You understand the damp’, W. says. Or rather, it understands itself in me.

And there are the rats, too, he shouldn’t forget them. My rats, that’s how he thinks of them. My rats, my familiars, living under my floorboards. He’d hear them chattering if he pressed his ear to the floor, W. knows that. He’d hear them speaking their obscene language, for all that I tell him that the rats are all dead.

What next?, W. wonders. What will be the next plague? There are the slugs, of course, but they’re scarcely a plague. There are the ants – and the mushrooms. But W. believes something more dreadful is gathering itself in my flat to begin, W. says. Something Lovecraftian. Something cosmic …

'The messianic era is about to begin', W. says quietly, almost to himself. Then he shouts it out, for all to hear: 'The messianic era is coming!' And then, 'Let's drink to it!', he cries, but we've run out of alcohol.

1.06 AM. W. catches a taxi back to his house on the other side of the city, to fetch back the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. It might be his finest hour, he says.

1.51 AM. Sitting out in the quad, we drink W.’s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We even drink his rare bottle of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, because they can’t find good quality damsons. And we drink one of his treasures: Plymouth Navy Strength Gin in the old bottle, before the redesign: gin at 90 proof, made that strong so as not to be inadvertently ignited by cannon gunpowder. That was the one time he was refused a drink at the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, W. says, when, already drunk, he asked for a Martini made from Navy Strength Gin.

Then, we drink a bottle of Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Béla Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink a round of Slivovitz, the famous plum brandy from Eastern Europe — drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says — and then Becherovka, a kind of nutmeg liquor from the Czech Republic. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, since it should be served ice-cold with turbot, but how else is W. going to keep us all drunk?

2.41 AM. Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them the impossibility of the spiritual and the impossibility of the political. Drinking always carries you through despair, W. says. Carries you through it, but bears you beyond it, if you are prepared to drink right through the night.

3.22 AM. We have to libate the palm trees!, W. tells us. I didn't know there were palm trees on campus, but W. assures me they exist. And there they are — palm trees in a grove, over which we pour a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.

3.31 AM. The hour of the wolf. We look for the Plymouth Pear in the campus woods. We talk of Beckett and Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentina, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers?, W. wonders. They were exiles, of course, but drinkers?

The exile is a man of a coming future world …: Flusser wrote that.

Nothing in my background could have prepared me for the huge role alcohol played in these people's lives: so Arhika's wife in her memoir. And Gombrowicz, what did Gombrowicz write? We have nothing of relevance in our notebooks.

We tell the postgraduates of an anecdote from the life of Debord: Alcohol kills slowly, read the government information poster near Chez Moineau. We don't give a fuck. We've got the time, Debord scrawled over it …

We've got the time. Life is long, not short, W. and I agree. Life is terribly long … It's too long! … To live without a lifetime, I read from my notebook. To die forsaken by death …

4.30 AM. We need to discover a new discipline of drinking, to drink until our teeth are stained red from wine, W. says. In Vino Veritas, W. says. In Vino, all we’ll ever know of Veritas, he says.

I read from my notebook. A man who drinks is interplanetary, Duras said. He moves through interstellar space. Alcohol doesn't console, it doesn't fill up anyone's psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God, she said. The lack of God! We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God, what in fact we are!

4.50 AM. We need to wait, W. tells the postgraduates, as we watch the first plane land at Plymouth Airport. We need to be watchful, and as watchmen, drunk. Above all, we need to drink, W. tells the postgraduates, filling their cups. We need to perfect a continual drunkenness, we tell them. A vigilant drunkenness. A sober one.

There's no point going to sleep, W. tells the Plymouth postgraduates. What use is sleep to us? We must stay awake, ever-watchful. We must stand watch for the signs of revolution. We must be like the pillar saints, waiting for God. We must be like Saint Anthony in the desert, wrestling with his demons. And above all we must wait, and wait together. Above all!

God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I quote from Jabès. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W.

7.00 AM. All around us, on the grass, the Plymouth postgraduates are sleeping. All of God’s children are asleep.

What are they dreaming of?, we wonder of the postgraduates asleep in the long grass. What are they dreaming of, the other postgraduates we’ve met on our travels?

We see them in our minds’ eyes: across the whole country — our damned, benighted country — postgraduates are turning in their sleep. Middlesex postgraduates, with their filed-down teeth, are dreaming of Armageddon. Staffordshire postgraduates are dreaming of the British Events, of British Autonomia. Manchester Metropolitan postgraduates are dreaming of dérives, of stupor, and the forgotten kingdom of Old Hulme. Greenwich postgraduates are dreaming of new kinds of friendship, the seed of the coming revolution, and of new kinds of political faith. And Dundee postgraduates are dreaming of that point at which despair becomes hope, and becomes despair once more.

What do Newcastle postgraduates dream of?, W. wonders. Of being left alone by me, for one thing. Of being untampered with, ungroomed. One day, they’ll put me on trial for the abuse of postgraduates, W. says. One day, he’ll see me on TV, being walked into court with a coat over my head.

And of what are W.’s postgraduates, the Plymouth postgraduates, the children of God, dreaming? Of the wide, high moor, W. hopes. Of cider made from the apples of the moor. Of songs of peace and gentleness sung on the moor. And of Plymouth Sound, which they will see glinting all the way from the moor, like utopia.

Jason Gross recommends Spurious at Flavorwire as one of the Contemporary Short Novels for Your Summer Reading Pleasure …

Ben Loory reviews Spurious at Good Reads. So do Andrea and Heather.

Midnight. Now's the time for our last speech. Our last words, before the police come tomorrow to break up the occupation. They'll lead W. away in handcuffs. This time, he really will be sacked. This time, it really will be the end.

We must take no heed for the morrow, W. says. He feels the presence of God, very strongly, W. says. Don't I? He wants to weep, W. says. He wants us all to weep, all the occupiers. He wants to make a pact of tears.

But the postgraduates won’t weep with him, W. says. Not yet. Only when every postgraduate in the land weeps will the last thinker come, W. thinks sometimes. Only when every postgraduate is overcome by weeping …

'Since the destruction of the Temple, the divine inspiration has been withdrawn from the Prophets, and given to madmen and children', W. says to our audience, quoting from the Talmud. ‘And it's been given to idiots, too’, he tells our audience. And then, under his breath: 'Go, fat boy!'

It will be like Chernobyl, our future, I tell the audience. And they will be like Chernobyl children, our descendants, each with his own deformity, her own cancer.

That's how they'll know one another in future, I tell them: by their cancers. Everyone will have a different kind of cancer. One will have cancer of the spleen, the other cancer of the heart, a third cancer of the ears, and so on. And they'll die before they're teenagers, like Chernobyl children. They'll die with no one to care for them, gasping in the air. They'll die alone and screaming, thousands of them, millions of them, as the atmosphere boils away.

‘Go on’, W. says, sotto voce. ‘Tell them about your vision’.

I see them building great cities at the Poles, I tell our audience. The last cities, after the destruction of the other ones, where no one is allowed but the rich. They’ll build New Mumbai in northern Siberia, when the old one drowns, I tell them. They’ll build New London in northern Scandinavia, when the old one burns, I tell them. They’ll build New Mexico City in the Western Antarctic, when the old one is destroyed in the coming wars, I tell them.

We’ll die in our millions, I tell them. In our billions! Africa will have to be abandoned. India. China will become a dustbowl, America, a salt plain. We’ll die slowly, in great agony, as the skies burn red. We’ll sink down by the walls built to exclude us. We’ll die by the laser swords of robot soldiers. We’ll die of starvation and we’ll die of exhaustion. We’ll die of thirst, terrible thirst. We’ll die of new diseases for which there are no names …

And New Shanghai will tower into Arctic skies, I tell them. New Washington will gleam like Canary Wharf in northern Alaska …

And our bodies will swell and rot in the blazing heat. Do you know what corpses smell like?, I ask our audience. They smell sweet, I tell them. There’s a smell of rotting, yes, but there’s a smell of sweetness, too.

‘Pathos, more pathos!’, W. whispers.

I see the money-makers still profiteering on the cindered husk of the earth, I tell our audience. I see New Beetham Tower in the new Arctic Manchester. I see New New Hulme floating on the ice-free ocean …

I see celebrities on red carpets under hot, black skies. I see helicopters circling in the burning sky. I see military putsches and crazed dictators. I see Fascism 2.0. I see Fundamentalism Reloaded. I see wars without end.

I see investors leaving earth in a swarm of rockets. I see the mega-rich in orbit around a burning earth. I see them looking outward, out towards the stars, for new investment opportunities …

 ‘Are they weeping yet?’, W. says. They’re not weeping, I tell him. Okay, it’s his turn, W. says. He’ll make them weep!

‘In the dark times, will there still be singing?’, he says, quoting Brecht. ‘In the dark times, there will be singing about the dark times’, he says. It’s the same with speech, W. says. To speak of the end delays the end, pushing it away, W. says. Because to speak, and to heed speech, is to belong to another order of time.

‘The last covenant will be the covenant of speech’, W. tells our audience, obscurely. ‘Speech is our promise’, he says, but no one really understands. ‘Freedom of speech is the last freedom’, W. says, but it’s clear that our audience doesn’t understand what he means by that, either.

W. rallies. He speaks of small kindnesses and the goodness of everyday life. He speaks of the failure of goodness as a regime, as an organised system, a social institution. He quotes from his notebook:

Of what does the good consist? The good is not in nature, neither it is in the sermonising of prophets, the great social doctrines or the ethics of philosophers. Yet simply people carry in their hearts the love for all that is alive; they naturally love life, they protect life.

Then he tells the audience a story I once told him about my monk years. Every night, before dinner, we would bless the garden with incense, I’d said. Incense, wafting through the leaves. Incense wafting into the night, and towards the animals of the night, I’d said. Towards city foxes and barn owls. Towards the slugs and the snails and the rats, I’d said. Incense to the people of the night, the prostitutes on the corner, and to the burglars who used our garden as a run-through. To the junkies looking for their fix, I’d said.

To speak is to bless the world, W. says. To offer salvation to all things. It is goodness without forethought. A fragile goodness, that is spoken in spite of us. That is spoken by the stupid and the weak.

Speech: it gives us all we know of God, W. says, which is to say, nothing. It gives us all we know of the Kingdom, which is to say, nothing. It gives us all we know of salvation, which is to say, nothing.

God’s people are prophets, doesn’t Moses say that?, W. says. Amos went further: every person is a prophet, according to him. We are prophets in speech, W. says. We prophesy by speech.

And just as we do not pray for ourselves – just as prayer is wholly offering, wholly about the other, so we do not speak for ourselves, either, W. says. We speak for the others. For the junkies and the burglars. For the prostitutes on the corner. We speak for the outcast, for the widow and the orphan. We speak for them by speaking to them, by addressing them, and by addressing anyone. By addressing the other person as the unknown, W. says.

W. reads out a quotation from his notebook:

I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.

That’s Ingeborg Bachmann, he tells our audience. A day will come – the day is coming. Tomorrow, the police will come and break up the occupation. But there is another tomorrow; another kind of tomorrow. Tomorrow it was May, W. says. And tomorrow it will be May again …

Twickenham. Putney. And Clapham Junction, where the track braids together with a myriad of others, and trains like ours run a parallel course.

My life in Manchester, in old Manchester, before the regeneration. What was I reading in my box room by the curry house extractor fans?, W. wonders. What, as cold air seem to pour from the crack in the wall? Kafka, in my own way, which is to say, spuriously.

W. read Kafka as he travelled through Europe, as he surveyed the European scene from his train window. He read about the Austro-Hungarian empire and its collapse, as the train passed through Freiburg, and about the generation of German Jews in its final hour as he arrived in Strasbourg.

As his train crossed the Alps, W. read about Benjamin and Scholem who, making constant reference to Kafka, discussed the fine line between religion and nihilism in their letters in a cafe in Berne, and about their attempt to develop, each in their own way, a kind of anarcho-messianism, an apocalyptic antipolitics, even as they argued about whether the coming of the Messiah meant the dissolution of the law or its fulfilment.

And me — what was I reading to contextualise my Kafka studies? What, as I wandered through the university library? But I had no idea of Kafka's milieu. To me, he was only a meteor who had arrived from nowhere. I read The Castle in the same astonishment with which I'd greeted it first, back in the warehouse, as I stood on the bridge of my life, with only the swirling emptiness of my future before me. Kafka was a meteor flashing through the sky of my stupidity. A meteor flashing through the squalor of my mind.

Sometimes W. wonders whether for that reason my relation to Kafka is more pure, more intense; whether the star of Kafka burns brighter in my sky. — 'You had nothing else to steer by', whereas W. had a whole cosmos, a milky way. Steer I tried to, paddling my coracle into the unknown. But where was I paddling but in circles? Where but in the spotlight of my single star?

And meanwhile, all around me, the city was regenerating. Meanwhile, they were promising to rebuild Manchester … The suburbs were coming: isn’t that what I sensed? That the suburbs were looking for me, even there? I knew, as my studies came to an end, that I'd have to bury myself more deeply in squalor. I knew I’d have to find a crack in the city and disappear.

Spurious reviewed at Of Books and Bicycles and, briefly, at Times Flow Stemmed.

Various reviews of Spurious at Goodreads.

A nice review at Amazon (USA), and at Amazon (UK).

Various things at Tumblr.

He needs a tranquiliser gun, W. says, with a dart strong enough to bring down an elephant. How else is he going to stop me rampaging through philosophy, tearing up everything with my tusks?

That I write on Western philosophy is really the destruction of Western philosophy, W. says. That I write on religious ideas is really the destruction of all religious ideas. And that I pretend to think is really the destruction of thought, affecting all thinkers, everywhere.

Schelling, Feuerbach … no one's safe when I begin to think. Maimon, Nicholas of Cusa … Is there anyone who might be saved?

A rumbling through the heaven: Lars is writing one of his commentaries! Angels' cries: he's defiling Rosenzweig! And Weil! And Kierkegaard – what’s he going to do with him?

W. shudders. No one reads a line he writes, he says. It's of no significance at all. But when I write — when I publish my reflections, if he can call it publishing, if he can call them reflections — he wants to clasp the entire oeuvres of Bataille, Weil and Kierkegaard to his breast. Wants to build a big wall around the library and all libraries, posting sentries to shoot me on sight.

Don't let him get near!, he's told them. But he knows, like the Red Death of Poe's story, that I'm in there already, that my reading is eating away at those oeuvres like cancer.

Why do I always bring Hello! with me on our train journeys?, W. wonders. Why do I insist on leaving it in his study when I come to stay?

'Who are all these people?', he wants to ask me, when he sees me reading. 'Why do they matter to you?' Because they do matter to me, that much is clear, W. says. The way I read. The way I nod my head over its glossy pages, like a Jew over the Talmud. He sees, as never before, a look of absolute seriousness on my face. He sees it there: an intensity of focus that only the Husserl archives would warrant.

‘What are you looking for?’, W. says, as I turn the pages. What, in Oscar dresses and airbrushed actresses? What in the photospreads of Queen Rania of Jordan?

'That look on your face … That raptness …', W. says. He's seen it before, when, in the early hours, we pore in wonder over the pages of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard. — 'How is it possible that a human being could have such thoughts?', one of us will exclaim. ‘How is it possible …?’

In the end, I admire Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard only as I admire the celebrities in the gossip magazines I buy. Their brilliance is only the equivalent of a celebrity's beauty; their integrity the fervour of that of an ingénue’s rise to fame. But this means I admire them only because of what I lack. My stupidity places them at an infinite and glamorous remove.

It's different with W., he says. He's that little bit cleverer than me, that little bit farther ahead, and it's enough that his non-intelligence, unlike mine, is commensurable with real intelligence, his non-integrity with real integrity. At least he has the glimmerings of the faith of Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard, W. says. At least he has an idea of belief.

He, when he writes of them, leaves his thinkers intact in their greatness, their distance. They remain remote and brilliant in the sky of thought. But when I write of them? I make others doubt, W. says. I make others despair. Are Rosenzweig, Weil and Kierkegaard really so worthwhile if Lars is writing on them?, they ask themselves, looking at me. Were we wrong all along if Lars thinks they're right?

New interview at The Cherwell.

‘Staines — what a name for a town!’, W. says. And, a little later, ‘Egham — it's unbearable!’ ‘These names, these names!’ True life is elsewhere, isn't it?, W. says. True life is elsewhere. But we are in the suburbs, and on the slowest train in the world.

This is suicide country, W. says. He’d top himself if he lived here. He’d either top himself, or think some great thought, W. says. To think against the suburbs. To think in the suburbs, hating the suburbs. What pressure of thinking you could build up! What a head of steam! – ‘But it didn’t work for you, did it?’

Oh, but he sees why. It gave me the fear – the fear of falling back here. The fear of crash-landing here where I grew up. That’s why I’ve flung myself into administration. That’s why I’ve tried to lodge myself in the administrative work of the university like a tick in an armpit. – ‘They’ll find you in the end’, W. says. ‘They’ll smoke you out. There you’ll be, coughing in the sun …’

We speculate about the lost geniuses of the suburbs. Bracknell's secret Rilke (Coetzee lived in Bracknell, W. says) … Martin's Heron's hidden Leibniz (W.: ‘Martin's Heron: what kind of a name is that?’). And Sunningdale's own Solomon Maimon, drunk in Tesco's carpark …

You'd have to go on the sick, if you lived in the suburbs, W. and I agree. You'd have to stay unemployed, wandering the streets with the early-retired and mothers pushing buggies. And you'd go mad from isolation. You'd go off your head. And then you'd top yourself.

It's different in the north, of course. It was different in my Manchester, back then before the regeneration, I tell W. It was different before Marketing Manchester and Heritage Manchester and Superclub Manchester. It was a shithole, I tell him. It was a shithole, W. agrees. But we should only live in shitholes. Where else could we live? (W.’s house, for all its grandeur, is in the worst part of Plymouth).

Maimon would have felt right at home there, in old Manchester, we agree. I felt right at home there, as muggers held knives to my throat and junkies trailed after me asking me for money. I felt right at home in my bedsit next to the curry house extractor fans.

There's a crack in the wall, I told the landlord, when he showed me the room. — 'A crack in the wall, yes', he said and smiled. I could hardly breathe for cold and curry, but I took the room nonetheless, because it cost nothing and I had nothing. — 'You were born for squalor', W. says, and that’s my gift. I live the life of the abased, of the abject, he says. I can’t help it. I’ve found my level, which is very low, and I’m bringing him down to my level, W. says.

The suburbs, the suburbs … There are still bits of countryside, we notice from the train. Forlorn horses in tiny fields. Rabbits hopping across a golf-course. Rats crawling along a wall by the sewage treatment works.

W. pictures me as a teenager, cycling out to every green patch I could find on the map. He pictures me making my way through fir plantations to the patch of scrappy woodland fenced off by the MoD where solders came to train for future wars. I listened out for artillery fire, but heard nothing but the wind in the trees and birds singing.

What was I looking for? What did I discover? There were the suburbs and the suburbs were everywhere. That my non-town was growing on the verge of every town; what does it matter where you were? And even the firing range was sold off, the last of the old woodland, to build a new housing estate. Didn't I see myself as Stalker's cousin, ready to lead others through the last patches of wilderness?

What was I looking for in the wide patches of grass between the plots on the hi-tech industrial estate where I used to work? What, in the rain that was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud?

The gypsies came with their caravans and churned up the grass. We were warned about them on the tannoy. — 'Make sure you lock your cars'. They left quickly enough, and the companies organised diggers to cut trenches along the perimeter of each plot. But beyond the trenches, beyond the new chain-link fences …

A pristine snow bank like a blank page. And whirling snowflakes above. And silence, deep silence. I underlined a passage in my book. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upwards at the seeming emptiness. And I gazed across the snow into the white emptiness …

K. on the bridge, that’s where it all began for me, I’ve told W. that. K. on the bridge, gazing upwards into the swirling emptiness, just as I was on a metaphorical bridge staring upwards into a metaphorical emptiness.

'So you went north', W. says. I went north. — 'Of course you did, where else were you to go?' For his part, as a semi-northerner, a man of the Midlands, W. went south, lured by the promise of a course on which he could study Kafka in translation (back then, he could only read Kafka in translation). But they'd lied in the prospectus, of course. He never studied Kafka, but he studied other things instead. He learnt things — great things. He studied overseas. He visited the great archives. He criss-crossed Europe on the great railways of Europe.

'And you, what did you do?', W. says. I became Stalker's cousin all over again, looking for space, looking for time under viaducts and on the tow-paths of canals, climbing over rusting pipes and broken girders. I arrived in Manchester while it was still a rust-zone. I arrived just before its regeneration, and the city was still falling apart like a Russian space station.

'We're in the suburbs of a suburb', W. says. 'In the suburbs of a suburb of a suburb …' Through the suburbs on the slow train, travelling back to London. — 'Did you really grow up here?' I really did. — 'You're lucky to have escaped'. I know that. He's amazed I got out. What would have happened otherwise?

I point out my old school from train window, in the suburbs near Reading. It was the worst of schooling, I tell W. No one knew anything. We didn't know anything. Our teachers didn't know anything, I tell W. The blind led the blind. The blind stabbed out the eyes of the sighted. They stabbed out our eyes, I tell him.

‘When did the other children turn on you?’, W. wonders. ‘When did they find you out? When did you go home in tears?’ Because that’s how he sees me, W. says, going home in tears, snot running from my nostrils, an idiot child alone with his idiocy.

I point out the warehouse where I worked as a contractor when I left school. It was the worst of jobs, I tell W. We stood about doing nothing. Sometimes management would come downstairs and tell us to get on with our jobs. From time to time, there'd be a cull; they'd sack a few of us. But we'd reappear in the warehouse sooner or later, employed by another agency, and go back to standing about and doing nothing.

‘When did your fellow workers turn on you?, W. wonders. When did they find you out? When did you go home in despair?’ Because that’s how he sees it, W. says, my heading back to the station, quietly sobbing to myself, an idiot alone again.

And I tell him about my escape to university, my escape to Manchester, although I knew nothing whatsoever about Manchester, indeed nothing whatsoever about the north. — 'You had an instinct', W. says. 'It's admirable'.

Fog descends as we head back to the campus. It's as thick as the cloud on Mount Sinai, when Moses went up to meet God. He descended with the Tablets of Law, but what will we bring back with us?

We're lost, hopelessly lost. Our kidnapped speaker's worried. What about the conference meal? He's supposed to be sitting at the high table. — 'Never mind the high table!', W. says. Our speaker's too full of sausage and mash to be able to eat anything else, for one thing. — 'You had a real appetite!', W. says to him, impressed.

Where are we going? It's a very verdant campus, we agree. Very lush. The Thames Valley's known for its humidity, I tell them. It's very bad for asthmatics. I developed asthma when my family moved out here. And eczema. – ‘And scrofula’, W. says. 

In the thick darkness: that's where God was waiting for Moses, W. says. That's how God appears to the mystic, Gregory of Nyssa said. The mystic receives a dark vision of God. But what do we see? Not God, at any rate. Barely even each other! It's a real pea-souper, we agree, speaking like the commoners in Brief Encounter. Cor blimey, guv’nor.

Our speaker says he feels unwell. He feels unwell! What have we done to him?, we wonder. How can we make reparation?

It's our duty to talk, we know that. We need to settle his nerves, our kidnapped plenary speaker. We need to settle his stomach! So we tell him of our Kierkegaard project, of our collaborative endeavour, for which we are constructing an elaborate dossier. We tell him about the intimate link we expect to discover between Kierkegaard and contemporary capitalism, about the Danish philosopher's despair and our despair.

Despair is everywhere, W. says. – ‘Even monkey boy feels it’, W. says, nodding at me. ‘He’s full of despair, monkey boy, though he doesn’t really understand why’. Still, perhaps our researches will help me grasp my despair for what it is, W. says to our speaker. Perhaps I’ll learn its real cause – which is to say, not simply its proximate cause.

Oh, I feel a great deal, he’ll give me that, W. says to our plenary speaker. – ‘Look at him, monkey boy, full of pathos!’ My eyes are always ready to brim with tears, W. says. But when it comes to thought … When it comes to thinking from my despair, out of it …

Silence. We’ll need to say something else! Religion! What does our speaker think about religion?, W. wants to know. Does he, like W., have a sense of the urgency of the question of religion? Our speaker says he has no particular thoughts about religion. What about despair, then? What does he think about despair?

Silence again. Do we drink?, our speaker asks us. He drinks, our speaker says. He drinks every night. Do we drink?: we muse, separately considering the speaker’s question. Of course we drink! Whatever can he mean, Do we drink? What kind of question is that? What are we being asked?

We probably have no idea of what drinking means, we think to ourselves. Do we drink?, we wonder. Have we ever drunk? Ah, but what do we know of drinking, and what could we know?, W. and I think to ourselves. And about despair, about religion: what could we know about those topics, either?

Our speaker falls back into silence. All three of us are silent, as the fog grows thicker. – ‘Marx and Kierkegaard’, W. says finally, to fill the silence. ‘We intend to think the conjunction of Marx and Kierkegaard’, W. says. ‘They were both born in the same year, you know’, W. says to our speaker.

He’s feeling really ill now, our speaker, that much is clear, we think to ourselves. What will we do? The fog's thickening. We need to stay close! To keep a head count! And it's darkening, too. Are we really going to meet our God? Do you think we'll receive the Tablets of Law? — 'Go on, say something profound', W. says to our kidnapped speaker.

In the pub, we wait for our plates of sausage and mash with our kidnapped plenary speaker. — 'You know they hate you', W. says to kidnapped speaker. 'They hate us, God knows, and they hate you, too'. — 'Who hates me?, the speaker says. — 'Everyone. Everyone here', W. says. — 'I don't think they hate me', the speaker says. — 'They do! They hate us, and they really hate you'.

‘They hate thought!, W. insists. ‘Don’t you see? They hate thought, and want to drive all thought away!’ – ‘Why did they invite me, then?’, our kidnapped plenary speaker wonders. It's a mystery, we agree. Perhaps there's still some instinct among the Reading philosophers concerning what they lack, W. speculates. Perhaps they feel some residual shame about their inability to think.

We feel shame, W. tells our speaker, setting down his cutlery. Well, he does (W.) at any rate. He’s been trying to teach me the meaning of shame, W. says. How can you teach a grown man shame?, W. says. If only he’d known me as a child, he says to our speaker; what I might have been! Give me a child till the age of seven, and he’s mine for life, say the Jesuits. Give me a full grown adult idiot, and he’ll never be yours, W. says. – ‘In fact, you’ll be his. You’ll be his for the rest of your life!’

Our sausages and mash arrive on big oval plates. It looks disgusting, we agree, but what can you expect for £3.95? Eat, man, eat!, we urge our speaker. He needs to keep up his strength! After all, very soon he'll have to go back to the conference! We'll protect him, we tell our kidnapped speaker. We'll flank him like the president's secret service bodyguards. We'll keep our sunglasses on and speak into earpieces. — 'The package is in the building', we'll say. 'The package is about to give his speech'.

This has to be our last lecture tour, W. says. This has to be the last time, the last dog and pony show. We came here against our better judgement, it's true. We were invited, personally invited, and how could we refuse? Our trouble is, we're too polite, W. says. We want to please people, despite everything.

How will we survive? We need a rallying point, for one thing. — 'Look for a pub!' We need a place of safety, W. says. We need a panic room. A war room! And we need a general strategy. — 'Keep your head down! Talk to no one!'

Then we spot him in the foyer: the plenary speaker who W. recognises as an ally. How did they get him here?, I wonder. — 'Just as they got us. Through flattery', W. says. Suddenly we feel a great surge of tenderness. We have to protect him, we decide. He doesn't belong here. For one thing, he actually has ideas. He needs to be rescued!

We resolve to smuggle him off campus to a pub. We need to save him, the plenary speaker. To save thought!

And in the meantime? Be careful. There are enemies everywhere.

Reading University campus. W. is full of dread. He has the feeling that it's about to go terribly wrong. What, our presentation? No, no — more than that, W. says. Something catastrophic is about to happen.

I knew Reading would appal him, I tell him. How could it be otherwise? On the bus out to the campus, he was already squirming. Driveways packed with Range Rovers and 4X4s … Mock Tudor houses … Mock Georgian ones, with pebbledash rendering and plastic windows, in great estates at the edge of everywhere … All the styles of history and mocking history, laughing at it. All the styles, and all at once. This is the end of the world, W. says. The eternal end.

Did it ever have a history, Reading? Did anything ever happen here?, W. wonders. But he knows it did. He's read about the Abbey, and he knows Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here. He might as well be imprisoned here, W. said on the bus. He might as well write his own Ballad of Reading Jail.

Of course, it’s very hard to explain Reading, the horror of Reading, W. says. What happened here? What failed to happen? He could think against Birmingham, W. says – it was easy enough: the city looks disgusting. It’s easy to think against the Bull Ring, all the more so since it’s been rebranded as BullRing. But here, where I was brought up? You can’t hold Reading apart from you in the same way as Birmingham, W. says. It isn’t as obviously repugnant. There’s nothing in particular on which to focus your disgust.

Nothing in particular … but there’s something wrong, W. says, you can sense that. Something colossal, but at the same time, hidden. – ‘The horror of Reading is yet to come’, W. says, mystically. What rough beast is slouching towards Reading to be born?

Even I have a sense of it, W. knows that. Even I am saturated with disgust when I come back here to my hometown. Even I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. Wasn’t that what drove me towards philosophy, the attempt to diagnose the horror of Reading? Isn’t that why, despite everything, I have a taste for philosophy – for European philosophy – and for the more philosophical of the European novelists, W. says.

Reading and the southeast made me think the whole, he has no doubt of that, W. says. Reading led me to philosophy and abandoned me at its doors as a foundling. And who was it who opened the door to admit me? Who who swaddled me and took me in?

The train south. We're heading into the belly of the beast, we agree. We heading into Dante’s Inferno. We'll need to take special measures to survive.

We check our survival kit. Do we have our bottle of gin? Check. Of Plymouth Gin? Of course! It’s safe in my rucksack. What else? What books have I brought?, W. asks me. The Sickness Unto Death. The Concept of Anxiety: ‘Ah’, says W., ‘nothing better’. And Simone Weil: Gravity and Grace. – ‘Hmm, there’s a wild card’, W. says. ‘What drew you to Weil? What was she doing on your bookshelf?’ Perhaps there's something serious about me after all, he says. He's brought some Rosenzweig – a collection of miscellaneous writings, he says. We'll need some Rosenzweig in the south. We’ll need protection.

Plymouth's in the south, of course, we acknowledge, but not in the south south. Plymouth's in the southwest, which is entirely different. In fact, W. thinks of Plymouth as being part of the north. In his mind, it's as far north in England as Newcastle, he says, albeit with a warmer climate.

W. has always appreciated the rawness of Newcastle. It’s barely touched by the Westerlies which ravage the southwest, but it’s cold, terribly cold in my city. Even the summers are cool, the blue of the sky as remote and hard as that of Scandinavia.

W. wonders whether he might become a keener, sharper thinker if he lived in the northeast, whether his ideas might become less diffuse and more jewel-like, coalescing like new stars, and whether I might become a warmer thinker, a tenderer one, full of love and generosity, if I lived in the southwest.

But now we’re heading into the southeast, which is entirely different prospect, W. says. The southeast: hasn’t it always meant, to us, the destruction of thought, its complete compromise? Hasn’t it always meant the destruction of philosophy?

In the end, philosophy can only survive at the periphery, we agree. It only thrives among the poor, the working class, when the working classes are given a chance to think. There were universities like that once in the southeast, W. says. That’s where the University of Essex, W.’s alma mater was, in the southeast. And there’s Middlesex, of course, and Greenwich: departments of the margins, we decide. Peripheral departments, where the working classes are given a chance to think.

Of course, one mustn't start reading too soon, W. is adamant about that. One mustn't simply devour an oeuvre, tempting as it may seem, the many-coloured spines of Kierkegaard's works in the Hong and Hong edition, lined up on my windowsill, as inviting as boiled sweets.

One cannot just begin at page one, and then read one's way to the end. There must be a kind of pause before reading, a dwelling in the clearing opened by the fact of Kierkegaard, by the fact of his writing, by the fact that he lived.

That Kierkegaard wrote: we should pause before that fact, mulling it over. That Kierkegaard was at all: we should mull that over, too. And that we exist, too: ah, that's what's unbearable, W. says. The fact that, despite our best intentions, we'll never be able to understand a word of Kierkegaard.

W.'s always admired them — their sober spines, the varying colours against which the title appears, varying from volume to volume (Point of View in charcoal, The Book on Adler, bronze, Fear and Trembling in a handsome burgundy). And then there's the sheer bulk of them, spanning my office windowsill; it's quite moving. The collected works of Kierkegaard, with my improvised bookmarks sticking out! – ‘You mean you’ve actually read something!’, W.’s amazed.

And I have read them. The books look worn, tired. – ‘Is that blood?’, W. wonders of the blotches in the margins of Practice in Christianity. ‘Are those tears?’ There are even annotations, W. notices. What did you write?, W. says, turning the book sideways. He can hardly make out a line. Iration – what does that mean? Livity?

What is the attraction of Kierkegaard for lunatics?, W. says. He’s seen it before, with some of his more desperate students. In the half-wild ones, who’ve come off the streets after years on the streets. In the half-mad ones, who want only to lose themselves in some great task of scholarship, but who are made for everything but a great task of scholarship …

Still, I'm to be his guide into the mountains of Kierkegaard, W. says. His sherpa. I'm to carry his things. What should he bring? His learning. His years of study of the philosophy of religion.

He'll instruct me as we climb, he says. He'll point things out, and when he gets tired, I can give him a piggy-back. Kierkegaard: in truth, I know more about him than W. There's my Danish connection, of course. My half-Danishness should be a help.

Of course, I'm only half Danish. Half Danish and half Indian, a peculiar combination, W. says. He, of course, is Irish on one side of his family and from Ostjude stock — probably Ostjude stock — on the other. He's a mixture, too. He'll be able to bring his Jewish-Catholic approach to bear on our reading of Kierkegaard, he says, and I my Hindu-Protestant approach.

Kierkegaard's Danishness has always bothered W. He lacks a context for him. He can't grasp his place. Of course, this is doubly difficult for W. as a Catholic (and as a Jew). No doubt there is something Protestant in me (through my Danishness), alongside my Hinduism. No doubt I have some instinct for Kierkegaard that W. lacks.

But then, of course, my knowledge of Kierkegaard is confined to trivialities. Gossip about his life, for example. About his broken engagement, or his melancholic father. Gossip about his thought. The leap of faith this. Fear and trembling that.

I don't understand his place in the philosophical tradition or, for that matter, the theological tradition. I don't know his place in the great chain of thinkers.

That's what W. will bring to our collaboration: his sense of the broader landscape. His grasp of the whole sweep of European thought.

'Did you bring some Schnapps?', W. says. I brought some Schnapps. — 'Is it chilled?' It's straight from the freezer, I tell him, as Danes serve it.

Aalborg Akavit, for our picnic. Did Kierkegaard drink Aalborg Akavit?, W. wonders. Undoubtedly! Kierkegaard would certainly have drunk it in his early years, his pagan years, W. says. He probably drank himself blind on Aalborg Akavit before his return to his faith, just as we must drink ourselves blind on Aalborg Akavit, we who are lacking in faith, in Kierkegaard's faith.

And did I bring the herrings? Yes, I brought the herrings, a disc shaped packet of crispbread and some cod roe sandwich paste from the grocery in Ikea. And we have some ryebread, too. – ‘Good’, W. says, ‘we're well prepared’. To think like a Dane, you need to eat and drink like a Dane, we agree. And here we are in the north of England, pretty much at the same latitude as Copenhagen, ready to eat and drink like Danes. We're well prepared.

We're method thinkers, we’ve decided. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!

It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only to the mind! To the cultural world of the thinker, in this case, the cultural world of Denmark of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the work, its engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.

W. stops to read the plaque about waterfowl. There’s usually a melancholy to the urban park, he says, but this one is different. It’s more vibrant, somehow. We look around us. The empty bandstand, the high grey wall of St James’s Park, goths and emo kids drinking cider in the sun … It harbours some great clue about life, W.’s strangely certain about that, or maybe it’s the effect of the coffee I made for him this morning.

We should bring our thinkers here, W. says. This is the perfect place to help them walk away from their troubles. It’s perfect to help them walk their way to thought.

Haven't we taken many walks alongside one of our thinkers? Haven't we been able to loosen our thinker from the crowd and take him outside?

Thinkers have thanked us for nothing less: for giving them freedom from the crowd. Crowds are unbearable to the real thinker, W. says. The thinker always wants to escape. And so we've taken many such journeys — journeys out, away from the others, in company with our thinker. Away from the tumult.

We try to calm our thinkers on such walks, that's our main task, W. notes. We try to put them at ease, drawing attention to the pleasant vistas around us, to the blueness of the sky, to the peace of the forest. We make no demands. It's not about us: we've always grasped that. It's about our thinker: that, too is obvious; we have a kind of instinct.

Occasionally, it is true, I've begun to expound my caffeine theories, and W. has to put a stop to that. He prods me when our thinker isn't looking. He raises his finger to his lips. And occasionally, W. ventures to introduce some intellectual topic or another before pulling himself back, apologising.

Let the thinker introduce the topic!, we've always told ourselves. And sometimes they do. Sometimes they begin to speak, and we respond only to enable them to speak some more, only to let ourselves drift into the central current of their reflections.

What a privilege it is to hear a thinker think! What to hear the untrammelled ideas of the thinker extemporised to us as to no one in particular! What to be the beach upon which the thinker-sea spreads his waves! What, prone, to be the shore over which the thought-ocean breaks!

Of course, we can understand little of what we hear. But we expect nothing more. In the end, it's not meant for us! We're overhearers, not interlocutors. We're listeners-in, not conversation-partners. To our credit, we've always understood that, which is why we're popular with thinkers.

We don't have ideas, and we don't pretend to! In the end, we demand nothing, we ask for nothing. The lightness of our chatter (for we speak when our thinker is silent) is like the murmur of grasshoppers on a summer evening. The to and fro of our banter is like the trickling of a young stream: a backdrop, a kind of night against which the star of the idea can burn ever brighter.

In the final judgement, if we are not thinkers — if we'll never have an idea of our own — we do not hinder thought, either. We're not its enemies. They were not enemies of thought: isn’t that what they might write on our tombstones?

Ah, but there are no thinkers with us today, as we stroll around the lake at Leazes park. We've been thrown back on ourselves, once again! Thrown back: not upon thought and the development of thoughts, but upon the peace of non-thought in which a real thinker might find repose.

Solomon Maimon was unkempt. Maimon was dirty. That's what I always protest to W. when he reprimands me for my personal habits. But Maimon was a genius!, W cries. A genius driven out of his home city for daring to philosophise. A beggar-genius, living on alms as he wandered for years, before being offered a position as a live-in tutor.

Was it in those years that Maimon formulated the most decisive criticisms of Kantian thought ever made? Was it then, his begging bowl before him, Kant's three Critiques in his knapsack, that the ideas came to him which, in his final years, he would publish in a series of essays?

Only Maimon understands me, Kant said, after reading his unkempt admirer’s Transcendental Philosophy in manuscript. And when Kant died, it was suspected that among the causes of his death was Maimon's devastating criticism of his work. How could he, Kant, survive an attach by the ragged philosopher?

But Maimon never succeeded in penetrating academic circles, or even the salons of enlightened Berlin Jews. To them he was of the Ostjude, his manners too rough, his jerks and tics too disconcerting, his speech stammering and garbled. And he was a difficult man, lacking in manners, brusque and intolerant when he should have been diplomatic.

And he smelt awful, everyone said that. Maimon stinks! Get him out of here!: that's what you'd hear in Berlin salons. And out he went, back onto the frozen streets, back outside with the three Critiques in his knapsack. He was an alcoholic, of course. He drank like a madman, W. says. He drank himself to death even when he found employment, even as great essay after essay poured forth from his pen.

Is that what's going to happen to me? Am I going to produce a great stream of books in my final years, which can't be far off?, W. says. He's offered me support, and now he's waiting. He brought me in from the cold, and now he's sitting by expectantly. But he thinks he's going to be disappointed.