The Airless Room

Melancholy, melancholy: W. feels half-drowned by its waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering through the heather?

The mourner, Freud says, learns to detach himself from what he has lost. He leaves grief behind; he leaves loss. But the melancholic cannot leave it behind, and comes to identify with what has gone missing. I am my loss, he says. I am nothing other than my loss. His life, his very existence, is indistinguishable from a kind of tomb.

I am my loss, and nothing other than my loss: isn't this what W. says to himself? Isn't that why he feels so unworthy, so wrong? I cannot live; I cannot exist: so the melancholic. While I live, there is no hope, so the one who cannot leave behind his grief. And in W.'s case? – 'While you live, there is no hope', he says. No hope for him, for any rate. 'While you live, I can't exist'. I've entombed his hopes within me, buried them there. He's suffocating to death in the airless room of my life.

Thinkers

Essex, in the old days. The University of Essex …

W. remembers the guest speakers of the old department. Envoys from Old Europe, taught by the Gods of Old Europe: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and who told them about the Gods of Europe; thinkers who were friends and contemporaries of Deleuze, of Foucault, and who told them of the world of Deleuze and Foucault; thinker-experts who'd spent their whole lives in the archives, or studying in seclusion with the works of a Master. Thinker-militants who'd hung out with Debord and Vaneigim, and who could pass on stories of Debord and Vaneigim.

Literary scholars who read in 27 languages; philosopher-scientists with advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology; thinker-mathematicians fascinated by dissipative structures and complex systems; thinkers of irreversibility and indeterminism, of strange loops and paralogic …

Neurophenomenological thinkers. Neo-Spinozists thinkers and Neo-Leibnizians. Nominalists and anti-nominalists. Mathematical thinkers and poetical thinkers.

Thinkers who had had distinct phases in their thought. ('In my early writings, I was convinced that …'; 'Later on, I concluded that …'; 'For a long time, I thought …') Thinkers who were the subject of conferences and roundtables.

Thinkers who hated other thinkers ('Don't mention Derrida to him!'), thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, become name-calling, hair-pulling.

Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke in great gusts about the misery of their lives. Thinkers who told them why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come, their end and the end of the world.

Wild thinkers; drunk thinkers; high thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth, with a missing eye. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouth. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks. Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Thinker-declaimers, thinker-prophets who all but set fire to themselves in the seminar room.

Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, leftover from vanished intellectual movements; thinkers in mourning for dead thinker-partners. Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and expulsions.

Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts (Jean-Luc Nancy, after a trip to the USA). Thinkers in plus fours (Marion, trying to impress the dons at Cambridge). Thin thinkers in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp checkbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and thick folds of fat at the back of their necks. Worker-thinkers with thick, flat fingers and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines. Serene thinkers, almost godly, looking into the infinite with widely spaced eyes.

Laughing thinkers, who laughed because they could think, because of they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of unimaginable purity. Nomadic thinkers who, like swifts, never touched down, who moved only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages across ice-sheets and through jungles. Ascetic thinkers who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things we couldn't imagine.

Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, and to be alive.

Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talk, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought. Thinkers who said the only thing that mattered was to think.

Ah, didn't they meet them all, all the thinkers of Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates?, W. says.

The Heavenly Fire

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before – and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so only there and then – that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where they spoke – can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive …

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death …

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant …

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked – they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned to speak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German …

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation – the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness – fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

Writing delights me. That's nothing new. That's the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That's how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That's how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don't experience.

Thomas Bernhard

When I write about this kind of thing, about this kind of centrifugal situation that leads to suicide, I am certainly describing a state of mind that I identify with, which I probably experienced while I was writing, precisely because I did not commit suicide, because I escaped from that.

Bernhard, interviewed, cited.

A partial transcription of the Bela Tarr interview included as an extra on the DVD of Werckmeister Harmonies.

[Tarr is asked about Damnation]

There is a difficulty about what we really think to be a film. The question really is what is film for? It's been some time since we came to the conclusion that the film is not about telling or it's function is something very different, something else. So that we can get closer to people somehow; we can understand everyday life and that somehow we can understand human nature: why we are like who we are, how we commit our sins, how we betray one another and what interests lead us.

And that's how we found this rather simple, even primitive crime story which is really a banal story because this is the thing we can get furthest away from[….] It was [a matter of] getting away, of distancing ourselves from the story because we thought that the wall, the rain, the dogs have their own stories, and that these stories are more important than these so called human stories that we write.

We believe that apart from the main protagonists of the film there are other protagonists: scenery, the weather, time and locations have their own faces and play an important role in the story […]

[Asked how he discovered this use of time]

From the very beginning the way we handled time was different to other films first of all because we cut and edited the film differently most films are piece of 'information - edit', 'information – edit' – we didn't edit that way. We are paying no concern to internal, psychological processes and we concentrate on the physical being present of the actors that is why metacommunication is more important - in fact its more important than verbal communication – and from here it is only a short step from putting it in time and space.

[Asked whether he is making a special demand on the viewer]

No, I don't have special demands from the audience I believe that I regard the audience as partners perhaps a bit more grown up than I am myself. I believe that if we make films with more openness, fairness and honesty people watch films with their hearts and minds and they only believe their eyes and then they can understand what we do and it's quite a simple thing.

And it will be special and part of their lives, and after all that's all we want and perhaps that people that come into the movies they leave a bit different, a different person than when they come in, if not as a different person, with something more in their hearts. And if we get that result we are happy and satisfied; if you get closer to the people you see on the film if you get touched by the beauty of the destitute then we've reached something, we've achieved something.

[The interviewer says that Tarr's films aren't always about beauty, but portray ugly landscapes and ugly people. Tarr responds in English, with magnificent simplicity, refusing to extrapolate.]

This is my nation.

[How do you chose the people you work with?]

We always make sure that those people we invite to work with us they are actually our friends. We always try to make sure that they are not actors but personalities and they give their entire personality to the film and that they should be present. And this is a matter of confidence: that they give us something, that they trust us that we won't betray them; that in the end we won't break our promises[….] All the people who work with us are present as personalities, be it as professional actors, workers in a factory or independent actors.

[When you say this is my nation: is it the real Hungary to which he is referring, or the imaginary world he has made in his films? Does it relate to everyday reality?]

I believe that one is making the same film all through one's life. These are the various forms, the various stages of the very same film. It's not that we don't think or look further because all these films are after all different. Every time we try to get closer to a somewhat clearer style, to create something simpler, even more simple, and to try to give an even clearer picture of what is there in Hungary today because after all we are Hungarians and we very much hope that this can be deciphered and understood in every part of the world as well.

[Can his films be taken as a political allegories?]

I would like to make it clear: there are no allegories in any of my films. And there are no symbols, such metaphysical things are far from [the genre of film]. A film as a genre in itself is always something definite. Because that piece of instrument we call the lens can only record real things, there are no allegories. There are very simple and definite scenes in the film.

And we try to think about the quality of life, because everybody has just one single life. It does matter how they live that single life; it is important what the quality of their lives is. I don't regard anything with sancity apart from life itself. And that's why it does matter what we talk about in a film.

As far as politics is concerned, I think it's a dirty business and it's not the object of any normal piece of art. We would never make political films. We would like to do more than that.

[The interviewer says Tarr's films are full of mud and dirt, with people getting drunk and falling over. They're very much about the ugly real world.]

Yes, yes.

[The interviewer presses Tarr on this: Why people falling over drunk? Why the mud and dirt? Tarr responds in English, quickly and directly.]

This is the same question why we make a film about ugly people because this is our nation this is our people that's what I see.

[Tarr's now asked to explore the relationship between literature and film.]

Film by itself is quite a primitive language. It's made simpler by its definiteness by its being so concrete and that's why it's so exciting. It's always a challenge to do something with this kind of limited language. The writer Krasznahorkai always says how can you do anything with such limited options, with such limited tools? He's frustrated that we deal with cheap things. Film is a cheap show in the town market and it's a great thing we can develop that into something valuable something that will withstand time and can be watched in 10 or 20 years or more.

[Tarr explains how he works with Krasznahorkai – how his novels inspire Tarr and his friends to find (or build) suitable a locations (a 'reality'). Film and literature are different languages, Tarr insists again.]

… that reality [i.e., the reality of a location] must be ours and we make a film about our reality with his help and from here on we talk a different language.

[On his wife and editor, Agnes Hranitzky] She's present all through the making of the film. And she is coauthor and no decisions are made without her, partly because she really knows and understands things. We do work together we make the films together. And there is an everyday process of making these film with the preparations the shooting and the editing.

And there is another important member of the family and that's the composer [Mihaly Vig] with whom we've worked together for the past 15 years and without the composer the films wouldn't be what they are. About our relationship: he would go into the studio a month before the shooting takes place, would compose the music, give it to us and then we already use the music at the stage of shooting. So the music plays an equal role to the actors or the scenes or the story. And we trust him so much that we don't go there into the studio he composes the music and brings it to us.

It's very close and very profound; a very friendly relationship that has been shaped over the past 15 years. We don't have to talk about anything serious; we never talk about art, we never talk about philosophy, we don't discuss aesthetics, we always talk about very concrete practical issues.

[Asked about cinematographers]

It's always difficult thing because one is always in the hands of a cinematographer, and what we ask is a very difficult task, both in physical and professional terms. And it's always very difficult to find the right person; some don't live up to it; some don't have the time; some are talented but make mistakes elsewhere so it's very difficult to find the right person. And we are quite autocratic and we tell the cinematographer what to do […]

[Asked about his relationship to the film industry in Hungary]

We won't knock at the door of the film industry and ask permission to be let in. Because we felt that everything that was happening in the film industry was a lie and it was a very bad and cheap thing. We thought there's no point talking to and negotiating with these people; we thought we had to kick the door in and show them what life really is and we have to show people what real life is like because they hardly see it on the film.

And from then on it was quite simple. We thought that making films should be cheap; we should be able to create films with low budgets and they have to be be 16mm with handheld cameras with nonprofessional actors and with a lot of closeups so going straight into their faces show the faces and to tell what social problems we are facing. 

And as time went by that problems there are are not only social but ontological, and there are cosmic problems as well and then we found out that everything even the weather was bad and from then on there's nothing else to do but make it total [Tarr is laughing] and create a complete desperation and the more desperate we are the more hope there is. It's quite simple.

[Asked whether his films appeal to the young in Hungary]

We were always famous for showing people on the screen who weren't seen elsewhere or before. I think at those times it was important to find a different kind of narrative.We were quite intrigued as to how we could make an epic film. Of course as we know that is quite the contrary of the film genre in general. So it looked like an exciting challenge. And we loved these young people very much because we thought that we had to talk about people who became marginal who lived on the margins because we ourselves are exactly as marginal as they are. So therefore it was nothing special to make a film about them.

Incapacity

A sense of absolute failure, and that it could not have been otherwise. A sense of total incapacity, of complete inability: it's with that W. has always been left. His incapacity: that's what remains to him after lights out. He lies in the dark with it, it dreams beside him: what is more intimate with his own inability than W.?

No one knows it better. And he will know nothing else; he will be pushed to think of nothing else. The capacity to think only leads him to the thought of his incapacity; he begins only to end straightaway. Why do his powers desert him? Why do they seem always to have left him in advance? 

But he drew a face on his incapacity. He called him Lars and brought him to life. And there he is, his idiot, sitting beside him with a stupid grin on his face. There he is slurping his tea, the living embodiment of W.'s failure.

Breaking the Surface

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 …

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 intelligent enough, that's his tragedy. That there is another dimension of thought, another dimension of life he will never attain; that the murk of his stupidity has a gleaming surface …  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.

Damson Gin

The end of W.'s conference. We've run out of drink, and the bar is closed. W. goes back by taxi to his house on the other side of the city, and fetches back, after half an hour, the entire contents of his drinks cabinet. Nothing is too good for his guests!

Sitting in the quad, we finish W.'s bottles of Plymouth Gin and Plymouth Sloe Gin. We drink a couple of rare bottles of Plymouth Damson Gin, which they haven't made for a number of years, since they couldn't find good quality damsons. And we drink his treasure of 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 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.

We drink W.'s Polish bison grass vodka with apple juice, and Zwack Unicum, a Hungarian liqueur that tastes like toothpaste from a bottle shaped like a hand grenade. It's really property of the Plymouth Bela Tarr Society, W. says, one of whose members brought it back from the puszta, the great central plain of Hungary. We drink Slivovitz, plum brandy from Eastern Europe – drink Eastern European, think Eastern European, W. says – and Becherovka from the Czech Republic, some kind of nutmeg liqueur.

We drink some weird version of Baileys from Malta, sweet cream with the addition of cumin or cinnamon, or something. W.'s not sure where he got that. And then we drink several bottles of warm Chablis, a terrible waste, but how else is W. going to keep his guests drunk?

Alcohol makes people talk, that's its greatness, W. says. It makes them spiritual, political, even as it shows them spiritual impossibility and political impossibility of the political. It always passes through despair, drinking. Passes through it, but bears us beyond it, if we are prepared to drink right through the night.

We think of Krasznhorkai telling Mihaly Vig about the unbearableness of the world in the streets of Pecs. I was born into a predicament and a country where a person accursed with a heightened aesthetic and moral sensitivity like me simply cannot survive.

We think of a hungover Bohumil Hrabal, feeding pigeons in his fifth floor apartment. I love ruination, I love hangovers …

We think of Marguerite Duras alone at Neauphle, except for drink. A man who drinks is interplanetary, she 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! The void you discover in your teens, she said. We know what she means. Our lives! Our voids! Oh God, what we might have been! Oh God what in fact we are!

Guests sitting in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbecues. Bags of kettle crisps. Empty bottles. Spread blankets, and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop. Everyone begins to leave, taxis drawing up in the night, until W. and I are the only ones left, the last drinkers, the most drunk.

We have to libate the palm trees!, W. says. 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, which we libate with a half-bottle of Mara Schino, a liqueur from old Yugoslavia that is too disgusting even for us to drink.

Dawn. The air is moist. We talk of Beckett and Avigdor Arhika, drunk in Paris. We talk of Gombrowicz in Argentia, Flusser in Brazil … were they drinkers? 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.

I tell W. 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, the comrades sent out by 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. To die forsaken by death … What should we do? What's left to us?

God gives the sky the dimensions of His absence, I say, paraphrasing Jabes. God … he doesn't know what God means, says W. But God has something to do with the distance between us. With our nearness, with our distance. Speech. That's what brings that distance to life. Speech between friends.

Dawn, the plateau of the morning. We're high up, for the campus is built on the edge of the moor which looms behind the city, and we can see out to the city and to the shining sea. Dawn, and the sky seems to open itself above us … Is it time to speak? Time, finally, to say something? But we're silent, quite silent, as we swill the last of the whiskey round our glasses.

The Seasons of Thought

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 the great gathering in of his thought-crops? 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.

New Town

Edinburgh. The New Town was going to be built in the form of a Union Jack, W. says, which is ironic. How popular do you think the Act of Union was in Scotland? The Scots wanted nothing to do with it. But the commissioners – aristocrats and rich businessmen, for the most part - wanted access to the markets of the English colonies for trade. 'We were brought and sold for English Gold', Burns wrote. And on the day the treaty was signed, the bells rang out at Giles Cathedral, Why Should I Be So Sad On My Wedding Day …

And it wasn't long before there was money enough in Edinburgh to build the New Town. The richer got richer, and the prestige of the Old Town, where the rich and the poor lived together, higgedly-piggledy, gave way to the prestige of the new town, built in the classical style, with its orderly symmetry, its broad thoroughfares and wide squares.

Whiskey at the Cumberland. The barman makes us recommendations. We'd tell him we're not English, if we could. They hate the English up here, and who blames them? We've got nothing to do with England!, we'd cry. There's not a drop of English blood in our veins! But of course there is: if not real blood, metaphorical blood. We're full of metaphorical English blood …

Of course, we're all too English! We hate our country because we're of our country, made of it. Hating England, we hate ourselves, as we should. And hating ourselves, we hate how England made us. – 'Especially you!', W. says. 'You're the worst!' I'm the worst, and therefore deserves the greatest hatred. It's for my own good! It's for his own good, says W., since he has to hang out with me.

England, our England. England, our misery. We should drown ourselves in whiskey. Yes: that's what we're going to do: drown ourselves. W. wants to see me drown, he says. He wants to see whiskey in my eyes, whiskey pouring from my nose. From my ears! He wants to see whiskey poring out of my ears!

Let's get ourselves beaten up, W. says, as we wander up the hill into town. Let's pick a fight with a tough. The secret is to get in quick, and then get out, I've said to him about fighting. You have to strike before the other fellow has a chance. A jab to the jaw. A punch in the wind. – 'You've never actually been in a fight, have you?', W. says. He'd like to see me fight, W. sees. Actually, he'd just like to see me punched. He'd like to see me coughing up blood on the street. He'd like to see bits of my teeth on the pavement …

Viking Melancholy

The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast. We sit on the right hand side of the carriage for the view and are cheered when we see the expanse of the North Sea. We should toast the ocean!, W. says, but they don't sell Plymouth Gin in the restaurant car. What are we to do?

W. reads to me from his notebook. A rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything.  Two plastic cups of Plymouth Gin would usher in the reign of peace, he's sure of it, W. says.

He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that … Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. – 'Your people, pillaging and marauding …'

The Vikings: haven't I always maintained they've been misunderstood by history - that they a melancholy people, restless only because of their life-disgust, because of their overwhelming sense of the futility of life? Haven't I extolled to W. Viking heavy-souledness, which drove them to the New World, of course, settling in Newfoundland, but also southwards down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico?

And didn't they follow the coast of Africa almost all the way down, being defeated only by the terrible seas of the Cape of Good Hope? There were Vikings in Constantinople, of course, when it was the capital of the Orthdox world. A contingent of melancholic Viking longshipmen were part of the imperial guard …

And didn't the Viking carry their flat-bottomed longships overground to reach the Red Sea and then the Indian ocean? Weren't there Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa? And aren't there pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies?

No gin, so we settle for cans of Stella from the trolley. To the sea!, we toast, banging our cans together. To the sea, as the dusk falls, the drafts of our collaborative paper on our laps …

My Wilderness

It's the kind of day you might come across a corpse, we agree, as we walk out on Dartmoor. It's the kind of day someone might come across our corpses.  

God's watching us, W. says, can you see? But I can see nothing but the overcast sky.

W. tells me of his long walks on the moors with his walking friend – a proper walker, not like me – and of the great conversations they would have, on every topic. They would speak of the decline of Dartmoor tin-mining and quarrying, and of the abandoned long houses of the high moor. They speculated on the origin of the standing stones left by neolithic moor-dwellers, and of the hut circles they left behind.

They wondered about the patterns of climate change, which once saw the moor covered in forest and then peat bogs. They talked of De Valera imprisoned after the Uprising at Dartmoor Prison, from which no one has ever escaped. They considered the relationship of the Dartmoor Pony to the Exmoor Pony, and of the origins of the wild cat, the Beast of Dartmoor, which attacks the ponies, leaving their remains steaming in the morning sun.

He misses his friend, who's busy with a family now, W. says. – 'He was a man of conversational range, not like you'. Why have I never learned to talk?, W. wonders. Why is it left to him, when in company, to speak for both of us?

There are times, it is true, when inspiration seizes me; when I speak for several minutes, as in a revery. W. treasures these times and likes to remind me of what I said, long after. Did you really say —? What did you mean by —? But for long periods, I'm mute, thinking of who knows what, W. says.

Sometimes he likes that about me, too, he says. Sometimes he imagines my silences to be a kind of integrity, a way of guarding something, some secret. He knows something, W. says to himself, looking across at me. Or, better: something knows itself in him. And what knows itself in me today, in our Dartmoor afternoon? Nothing whatsoever!, W. says.

The rain clears. The open sky. – 'It's come to this', W. says. 'The final reckoning'. And then, 'You can't hide on Dartmoor. You can't keep secrets'. It's just us and our God … 'The God of twats', says W.

They'll find us lying prone, with our eyes pecked out. They'll find our bodies half eaten by the Beast of Dartmoor. Yes, that will be our judgement.

We've gone missing, W. says. Well, he has. They should send out search parties. There should be men with loudhailers calling his name. He's lost on the moor, W. says – my moor. He's lost in the wilderness, W. says – my wilderness. And who will come to rescue him?

Black Water

Waterloo Bridge. The mighty Thames.

Bridges are always offensive to the gods, we've read. They're the symbol of hubris, of over-striving. Who would think themselves stronger than the currents and tides?

The gods of the river need to be appeased. The Greeks used to cut the throats of animal suspended above the river. They used to throw live horses into the waters, or sacrifice them on the banks. Later, they used to build shrines and chapels on bridges, and priests would spend their whole lives there, accepting offerings from passers-by.

And weren't there more ancient traditions of sacrificing a child to appease the river? W. shudders. The Thames is full of all kinds of offerings: jewellery and figurines, spear-heads and battle axes, mutilated effigies of the saints, crucifixes with the head of Christ removed perfectly preserved in the mud and silt …

Should we throw ourselves in?, we wonder, looking down at the restless, heaving river. But if we threw ourselves in? Ah, but the river wouldn't want us. We would propriate no god, who were neither innocent, like children, or full of life, like horses. Our blood would not mingle the water. And we're worth nothing, or no more than those countless obscure sufferers drawn to the river to throw themselves in. What would it matter if we died, and to who? We'll write nothing worthwhile. We'll think no worthwhile thoughts. Just the reverse! The very opposite!

The river is calling us, W. says, he can hear it. The waters are calling us home, obscurity to obscurity. Will I jump first? Will he? Will we hold hands and jump together?

Ah, where would the river bear us, if we threw ourselves in? To the Dead Man's Stairs at Wapping, where suicides wash up? To Dead Man's Dock near the Isle of Dogs where tide and current wash up the dead? Or perhaps we'd be borne out past Lower Hope Reach, our bodies decomposing in the English channel.

But the river wouldn't want us, W.'s sure of that. We'd be pulled up from the waters, our stomachs pumped of the polluted water. They'd slap us round the face. Wake up! Wake up! And his eyes would open and see me. And he'd retch up the black river water from the bottom of his lungs.

It is rarely assumed that not wanting to live might be part of wanting to live; or that finding one's life – or as it is usually generalised in such states of mind, finding life itself – unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.

[…] [A] capacity to be depressed means being able to recognise something that is true – that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need – and have been prepared to bear the grief and guilt. In this sense depression makes us real. It deepens us.

[…] Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.

Adam Phillips

Recollection: Paul [Celan] coming back from London. – 'I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room'. And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, 'Sometimes God, sometimes nothing'.

Cosmic dust covers us. The wind lifts the air. – 'I'm writing like never before', he says.

The poem he writes in the street and then telephones to her from a public phonebooth.

Why? I don't want to look anymore. I don't get the tone. The word no longer has tone. How would you say? How would you understand? – 'The secret is in these leaves. The secret is perhaps within us', he says to me. 'But we cannot understand at all. The world is empty. The sky is empty'.

'I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid … I have paid', he says.

stray paragraphs from Jean Daive's Under the Dome

Teaching

'These are truly the last days …' W. is making me listen to Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues again. 'Shut up and listen'. He plays this to the students, he says. And he makes them watch Bela Tarr. That's what he calls teaching, he says.

Grand Apocalypticism

We should hang ourselves immediately, I tell W., it's the only honorable course of action. We are compromised, utterly compromised. W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. We should stab ourselves in the throat, I tell him. I over-react to everything, says W., it's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric. He, by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse, says W. I do have my great apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and longness of view required by apocalypticism.

Men of the Surface

How are you? Depressed as usual? Of course we're never really depressed, W. says. We know nothing about real depression. We're men of the surface, not of the depths. What do we know of those blocks and breaks in the lives of real thinkers? What can we, who are incapable of thought, understand of what the inability to think means for a thinker? And what of real writer's block – what understanding can we have of that terrible incapacity to write a line for those who have thoughts to set down?

We're melancholic, that W. grants. Who wouldn't be? Melancholic, vaguely rueful, knowing we should not be where we are, that we've been allowed to much, overindulged … And for what? With what result? We're completely irrelevant in the broader scheme of things. We can make no contribution to the issues of the day. Where are we heading but down?

All we have is our pathos, our melancholia and a sense that things are not right. But we are not right either. We're part of the problem; our own obstacle. But if you yourself are the obstacle, then what? What is to be done? Lie down and let it all pass over you. But we won't allow ourselves that. We want to do something, think something, and that's our trouble.

True thoughts pass infinitely far above us, as in the sky. They're too far to reach, but they're out there somewhere. Some place where we are not. Some great, wide place where thoughts are born like clouds over mountains.

To be able to think! To write in good conscience! But what idea could we have of that? We're men of the valleys, not men of the peaks. We know nothing of real highs and real lows, of mountain peaks or abysses.

What's it all for?: that's our vague question. Why have we been fitted with the desire to think but not the means to do so?: that's our vague resentment. We'll accomplish nothing: it was obvious, and from the first. We read and write in vain. And all the while, a vague melancholy and a vague sense that things should be otherwise.

The Cliffs

Isn't it all our fault, all of it? Isn't the whole thing our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything? Yes, we're responsible. We're resigned to it; we're not just part of the problem, we are the problem.

The road is blocked – our road, everyone's road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the cliffs, we agree. We should get the water taxi out to Mount Batten, and then head up to the cliffs, and …

But what good would it do, our bodies prone and bloody on the rocks, seagulls pecking out our eyes? How could we apologise then? Because that's what we ought to do – we should spend our whole lives saying nothing but sorry: sorry, sorry, sorry, and to everyone we meet. Sorry for what we're doing, and what we're about to do, sorry for what we've done: who would be there to say that for us if we jumped from the cliffs?

‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’

‘Reification,’ he answered.

‘It’s an important job,’ I added.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’

‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’

Michelle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses,

A Shit Stain

You should never hang onto a conversation, says W. Once it's finished, pfft, it's finished. He snaps his fingers in the air. – 'I forget everything you say as quickly as that', W. says. 'You, on the contrary, remember everything, and not only that'. I make things up, W. says. I wholly invent conversations we are supposed to have had, but in fact we never did have. I'm a fantastist, W. says, a dreamer, but for all that, I'm not without guilt. I'm no holy fool, W. says, no innocent. A fool, yes, but holy – not a bit of it.

I am neither an Eckermann or a Boswell, W. says. I'm his ape, says W. and, remembering Benjamin's comment on Max Brod, a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.

Of course, W. never mistakes himself for Kafka, as I do. He's never thought himself anything other than a Max Brod. But the point is – this is W.'s first principle – the other person is always Kafka, which is why you should never write about them or hold on to their conversations, let alone make them up. The other person is always Kafka, W. says, even me. He knows that, says W., why don't I?

A Vortex of Impotence

W. sends me a quote to mull over in my stupidity, he says.

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence. 

W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.

I want to escape, that's my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something's wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he's not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. I'm not escaping, says W. I'm going to drown with everyone else, he'll make sure of it. I'm going down, says W.

Dressed For Thought

'Why don't you get rid of that jacket?', says W. 'You've been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. It's completely shapeless'.

W. and I are wearing our flowery shirts. 'Look at us', W. sighs, 'fat and blousy, and in flowery shirts, and everyone else slim and wearing black'.

What's wrong with us? Why are we never dressed for thought? Take my trousers, for example. They should be pulled up round my waist like those of Benjamin in the famous photograph. But they sag. They droop disappointingly. – You're a man without hips!', says W. 'A man without ideas!'

W. remembers the pictures of Deleuze from the 70s, with his flares and long hair. Then there were the trousers of Levinas, generous, expansive …

I'm getting fat, of course. Eventually, I'll have to wear elasticated trousers like the American professors, W. says. Perhaps it will suit me, that obesity. Perhaps it give me gravitas.

Turnchapel

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck. – 'Poseidon must be angry', says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time.

It's choppy! – 'We should libate the sea', says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It's because the mountains are salty and the sea is full of broken up mountains, he says.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful when we were here last year, reading the plaque then as he does this time. Why was he so unhappy? He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache, then a great wave of depression breaks …

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I could have lived here, imagine … We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. – 'A better person', W. thinks, 'taller, with some nobility of character'.

Brod and Brod

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we're not geniuses. It's a gift, he says, but it's also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don't have it ourselves. 

Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka?

But then again, didn't Kafka depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka, lean on his friend in times of despair and solitude?

We too, W. and decided long ago, must give our lives in the service of others. We too must write interpretative essays on the work of others more intelligent and gifted than we will ever be. We too must do our best to offer support and solace to others despite the fact that we will always misunderstand their genius, and only bother them with our enthusiasm.

Great Bells

Death, death, death: W. hears them tolling in the sky, the great bells. We're at the end, the very end! There can't be much more, can there? This is it, isn't it? The credits are rolling…. The game is up….

They're calling him home, W. says. He sees them as light-filled figures in light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light? He's falling upwards, W. says. Is this the Rapture?

And meanwhile, where am I falling? Down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the great betrayer? Is that the humanzee, bred in Soviet research labs?

Signs

The signs are coming more quickly now, we agree. The current's quickening, as it does when a river approaches the waterfall. And who are we who can read such tell tale signs? To whom has the secret begun to reveal itself?

The apocalypse will reveal God's plan for us all, that's what it says in the Bible. And if there is no God? No plan, either. We're lost, quite lost, as the signs quicken. My life, for example. W.'s. Our friendship; our collaboration. Signs, all signs, which in turn enable us to read signs, as though our lives, our friendship was only a fold in the apocalypse, a way for it to sense its own magnitude.

The Drunk

One day, I'll surprise you all. One day, I'll really surprise you … That's what you say to yourself in brown pub interiors, isn't it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They're full of a sense of great earthly mission. Just listen for a moment, that's what the drunk says. Listen – just listen!

And when he does? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.