Lars Iyer's Blog

Leazes Park, Newcastle: this is where I should come when the ping of incoming emails depresses me, W. says. I should let my gaze rest on the waterfowl: the black headed geese, the kingly swans. I should hire a rowing boat to take a turn around the lake. Above all, I should walk …

A man must walk if he is to think, W. says. We have to be receptive to thoughts, open to them. An idea might reach us at any time, and it's only when we relax — when we let the mind stretch out — that they might discover us. How many times has W. walked out alone, hoping that an idea would come looking for him?

W. goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe when he wants to think. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar — a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or, for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip is Kafka!, W. says. The flower is the thought! But what would I understand of that?

We must not so much look for ideas, W. says, as let ideas find us. It is not a question of mental effort, but of mental slackening, he says. Ideas need time to emerge — unmeasured time. Ideas despise clocks. They even despise notebooks.

Lately, W. has been deliberately neglecting his notebooks. He's put them aside, he says, the better for ideas to reach him. He's been neglecting himself! Is it any accident that Solomon Maimon was taken for a vagrant?

But W.'s vagrancy is confined to the early morning, before he comes downstairs to make tea. It's confined to his dressing-gown hours, his hours before dawn, when he reads and writes in his room. Oh, he shouldn't read or write, he knows that. The thinker-vagrant lets go of all books, all writing. But W.'s is only a contained vagrancy, he says. He has his limits.

Ah, the figure of the thinker-vagrant, the thinker wanderer: was that why he was drawn to me? I resembled the thinker-vagabond, I was scruffy enough, unkempt enough … But he mistook the signs of vagabondage for a sign of thought. The vagrant is not necessarily a thinker: it was a painful lesson.

New short interview with me from The Philosopher.

New long interview with me at Biblioklept.

What do I think is going to happen to me at the end?, W. asks me. I’ll die with froth on my lips, he’s sure of it. I’ll die like some rabid animal with wild eyes and dirt under my nails. I’ll have tried to dig my way out. I’ll have gone mad from confinement, and they’ll shoot me out of disgust like a dog.

And what about him (W.)? He’ll have starved to death, W. says, having given up all hope, all desire. There he'll sit, a skeleton by the window, who'd hoped that things could be otherwise, but learnt that things could never be otherwise.

Ah, but what does it matter, any of this?, W. says. There’s no time left. It's coming, the end, as great and fearsome as a hurricane. Climatic collapse, financial collapse: it's coming, the great wind that will blow out our candles …

Death is striding towards us. Death is laughing in the morning air. It's so obvious, so clear. Why can't everyone see it: death, laughing, striding towards us?

How they're going to hate us, all of us, the future generations!, W. says. He can feel their hatred even now. They're not yet born, they've yet to appear on their scorched and burning earth, but they already hate us. They already hate us, especially him (W.) …

Some of them, of course, will never appear. Some of them have been denied even their chance to be born. They hate us even more for that, he says. They hate him even more.

And he feels the hatred of the generations of the past, W. says. He feels their hatred, those who felt something good might come from their struggles on the slaughter-bench of history. He feels their disappointment, those who expected something better to come.

Ah, none of this troubles me, he knows that, W. says. Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. — 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'. I’m not loyal to thought, W. says. What do I know of it, the demand of thought?

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. There’s something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, W. says. The thought of our own stupidity, for example; the thought of what we might have been if we weren't stupid. The thought of what he might have been, W., if he hadn't been dragged down by the concrete block of my stupidity … The thought of what I might have been, if my stupidity had simply been allowed to run its course … W. shudders.

Oh, he has some sense of what we lack, W. says. More than I have, but then he's more intelligent than I am. He has some sense that there's another kind of thinking, another order of idea into which one might break as a flying fish breaks the surface of the water. He knows it's there, the sun-touched surface, far above him. He knows there are thinkers whose wings flash with light in the open air, who leap from wave-crest to wave-crest, and that he will never fly with them.

He's not brilliant enough, that's his tragedy. There is a dimension of thought, another dimension of life he will never attain. The murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface … Ah, he half-understands, half-knows; but he doesn't understand, he doesn't know.

But isn't that his mercy, too; isn't that what saves him? For if he had understood, really understood, how immeasurably he had failed, wouldn't he have had to kill himself in shame? If he knew, really knew, the extent of his shortcomings, wouldn't his blood have had to mingle with the water?

But then if he really understood, then he wouldn't be stupid, W. says. To know, really to know, would mean he had already broken the surface.

Sometimes W. wants to send up a great cry of dereliction. Not his dereliction, he says, but dereliction in general. Abandonment.

Who has abandoned us? Who has left us behind? Who left us to ourselves, and left him to me? Who thrust me into his arms like a foundling?

Two yammering British intellectuals travel to the American south to form a new religion—with Canadians

The sequel to the 2010 hit Spurious—which was acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Washington Post, which called it “fearsomely funny”—Dogma finds Lars and W. still, continually and without cease, arguing, although this time in a different country.

This time out, the duo embarks on a trip to the American Deep South, where, in company with a band of Canadians who may or may not be related to W., they attempt to form a new religion based on their philosophical studies. Their mission is soon derailed by their inability to take meaningful action, their endless bickering, the peculiar behavior of the natives, and by a true catastrophe: they can’t seem to find a liquor store that carries their brand of gin.

Part Nietzsche, part Monty Python, part Huckleberry Finn, Dogma is a novel as ridiculous and profound as religion itself.

– Publisher's blurb for Dogma, the sequel to Spurious, out early next year.

I understand nothing of the rhythms of scholarship, W. says. I know nothing of its seasons: of the time of sowing, of tending and caring, and of the harvest, the gathering in of the crops of thought.

Isn't that of which what he dreams, at the beginning of the summer: of the coming autumn, which will see his thought-crops ripe and ready, bowing in the breeze? Isn't it of carrying back the harvest of his ideas, so carefully tended, in his sun-browned arms?

There must be a process of thought-threshing, too, W. says. Of thought-winnowing! The wheat must be separated from the chaff. And there will be chaff, he said. Even the greatest of thinkers cannot avoid chaff. But there is still wheat. Still the evidence of a year's long labour …

But what would he know of this? His crops have failed, W. says, as they have always failed, and he stands in the empty field, weeping.

I understand little of the patience of scholarship, W. says. Scholarly work is slow and meticulous, W. says.  You need to accept that you’re in it for the long haul, and the results of thought will not come quickly, if at all. What has W. ever done but wait for thought?

Above all, we mustn’t expect quick results, W. continues. How many years did Marx labour on Capital in the British Library? How long did Engels give financial support to his friend by working at his detested family cotton mill in Manchester? But now imagine a Marx who did not finish Capital – an Engels who never left his job in the family firm. Imagine those poor idiots whose thought-paths led nowhere, petering out in the scrub.

W. doesn't believe I actually read books. — 'They're like totems to you', he says. 'They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

My office is actually filled with books, that's the paradox, W. says. I get a childlike excitement from them, from the fact of them, with their heady titles and colourful spines.

Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He would prefer to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

We must read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they – the authors of the books on our bookshelves – have not.