Lars Iyer's Blog

The boulevards at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich are wide and calm, and we wander them like aristocrats. This is where they'll set up base after the revolution, we agree. This is where we'll be tried and executed by the new revolutionary order … 'It was all his fault', W. will cry as they raise the blade of the guillotine above us. And our heads will shoot out thirty feet over the crowds, mine grinning, mine laughing because I'd led W. all the way to death …

The Royal Observatory. This is where the first international terrorist incident took place, we learn. A young French anarchist attempted to blow up the Observatory, to blow up Greenwich Mean Time …

It reminds W. of the passage Benjamin wrote about the July revolution. 'During the evening of the first day of the struggle, simultaneously but as a result of separate initiatives, in several places people fired on the clocks in the towers of Paris'.

And in the coming revolution, where will they aim their rifles?, W. wonders. Where will they aim them, in separate initiatives and from several places? – 'At you', says W. 'They'll fire them at you'.

Ah, what would we see through the Observatory telescope, pointed to the sky? W. remembers Ferdinand's speech in the scene in Pierrot Le Fou. Since the beginning of time, the man on the moon lived alone. When he saw Leonov, the Soviet astronaut, had landed, he was happy. At long last someone to talk to! But Leonov tried as hard as he could to force the entire works of Lenin into the head of the man in the moon. So as soon as White , the American astronaut, landed there, he sought refuge with him. But he hadn't time to say hello, before White stuffed a bottle of Coca-Cola down his throat.

No wonder the man in the moon's fed up! He's leaving the American and Russians to fight their battles down below. He's getting out …! That's what Ferdinand says, W. says. And then Marianne, beautiful Marianne, asks, 'Where he's going?'. And Ferdinand says, 'Here, he's coming here …'

He's coming here. But there's no sign of the man in the moon in our Greenwich afternoon.

London, London. And there was Marx, who came here after the botched revolution of 1848, living penniless in guest houses and rooms. What poverty he knew! What desperation! Cholera took away one of his children; another died of pneumonia. Still, it barely touched him.

'He lives the life of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely …', said a Prussian police spy. This could be a description of me, W. says, were it not for the word 'intellectual'.

'Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do'. A great deal of work – if only we had that, W. says. If only the sense of something urgent to communicate, something on which would steer us through the days and nights!

'He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world' … If only we could sleep after such great labours, W. says. If only knew what it was to sleep, really sleep, after the righteousness of work!

'When you enter the Marx flat your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around a first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything is covered with finger-thick dust; it is dangerous to sit down. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, and everything in the greatest of disorder'. – 'Marx lived in squalor, like you', W. says.

And Marx was writing great articles explaining why the French revolution of 1848 hadn't failed; why Louis Napoleon's victory in the Presidential elections signified to the proletariat, the overthrow of bourgeois republicanism. Marx set up a Political Economic Review in which he embarked on wild jeremiads against would-be allies.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against out self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', Marx wrote. 'A rowdy, loudmouthed and extremely confused little manikin', that's what the old Marx called Rudolf Schramm. 'Ferret face': that's what he called Arnold Ruge …

Ah, that's what we need, W. and I agree: a Marx to abuse us! But when it came to political work, Marx was an advocate of patience. While the other exiles were busy planning world revolution, he spent his days in the reading room of the British Museum, preparing arms for the fight which would come not today nor tomorrow, but years hence, decades hence …

'England, the country that turns whole nations in proletarians, that takes the whole world within its immense embrace … England seems to be the rock against the revolutionary waves break, the country where the new society is stifled even in the womb': thus Marx on New Year's Day, 1849 … And he was right, wasn't he?, W. says. It's the rock against which we are breaking ourselves …

The metropolitan proletariat, which Marx thought was England's great strength, met its match in the self-confident bourgeoisie. 'History is the judge – its executioner, the proletarian', Marx wrote. But the English proletariat never landed its blow, and the 'bourgeois cosmos' remained intact. 'Drat the British!', W. wrote on his deathbed. Drat them indeed … Drat London!

Middlesex Hospital, London: And wasn't it here Simone Weil died? Wasn't it here she returned in January 1943, having escaped from occupied France to the USA? It was physical danger she craved – to be parachuted behind enemy lines, or to care for the wounded in the thick of battle. Instead – what disappointment! – she was found clerical work for the Free French.

Still, over the next four months, she found the time to write the work for which she is most famous – reflecting on theology, philosophy and religion, translating sections of the Upanishads and Tibetan Buddhist writings, analysing Marxism: some eight hundred pages sprang forth from her pen. At the same time, she reflected on the nature of force – an abiding concern – reading advanced physics and mathematics.

Eight hundred pages. She wrote day and night, locking herself into her office. She wrote without changes, without erasures, her handwriting very clear, upright and calm.

'I tenderly love this city with its wounds …': she wrote that in a letter to her parents. 'I love this city more and more, this country and the people who inhabit it…' Hyde Park Corner, where she walked on Sundays, was her Athenian agora: she listened to the speakers, marvelling that, during the war, there were still people gathered to listen. She visited working class pubs. She went to noon concerts at the National Gallery and saw King Lear at the theatre. And she went to Mass every Sunday, longing but unwilling to participate in the sacraments, because the Church stood between her and her God …

And all the while she dreamt of serving France. All the while, she dreamt of being entrusted with a mission, of danger, of death. She must not seek out affliction, she knew that. 'I am outside the truth; nothing human can take me there …'

And she ate less and less. She would eat no more than she imagined her starving compatriots. 'My fatigue is increasing' … But tuberculosis was already spreading from an infected lung.  Hospitalised, refusing the treatment that might help her, and still dreaming of using her remaining strength to meet death in action, she died on August 24th 1943 … 

London's too big for us, we decide. It's too big, too sprawling. And there's too much money here, even though there's a great deal of poverty. Too much money! Too much health! Have you noticed how healthy these people are?, W. says of the people sitting around us. They make us feel stunted, we agree. We're shorter than they are – in W.'s case, much shorter, in mine, quite a bit shorter. They have brighter eyes. Their skin shines. They're elegantly dressed. They iron their shirts. And us? They can tell our kind a mile off, we suppose. They know what kind of people we are. We know what kind of people we are, for all that we'd like to live in truth, generosity and grandeur …

We have London sickness, we decide, remembering the title of one of Blanchot's essays. At first, you're impressed at the buildings – here is St Paul's in person, as it were. Here is Trafalgar Square. But these buildings are so sure of themselves, so pleased with their prestige, and so imposing – exposing themselves with such a desire for spectacle that they turn us into spectators who are very impressed at first, then a little uncomfortable, then sick, sick of seeing too much greatness …

We're men of small cities, we decide on the overground link to Greenwich. We love only those cities we can walk across in a day.

Rimbaud lived in London, of course. He was shacked up with Verlaine, the two lovers learning English and taking great walks out through Greenwich (where we're headed) and out in the other direction to Kew. By day, they would spend their days in the British Museum with their 'reader's tickets', reading books by the Communards forbidden in France. Rimbaud wore a top hat like a dandy, and smoked a long clay pipe like a bohemian. In the perpetual fog of the city, he and Verlaine were followed by police, who suspected them as Communard sympathisers …

True life is lacking. We do not belong to the world: did Rimbaud write those lines in London? Was it the 'enormous city' he evoked 'with its skies spotted with fire and mud'. London was the city of rotting rags, bread soaked in rain', of 'drunkenness' … Of Rimbaud's and Verlaine's drunkenness, of their lover's quarrels, where they stabbed at each other with knives wrapped in towels …

Didn't Verlaine shoot Rimbaud in the wrist? Wasn't he sent off to prison? That's what London drives you to, W. says. And that's why Rimbaud fled, first London, and then Europe. And then the world, Rimbaud fled the world. Rimbaud fled all the way to death …

Blanchot and Bataille. Exemplary friends for W. Theirs was a friendship to which every friend should aspire. They met in 1940, after the fall of France. In 1940, in a France occupied by the enemy. The date I start (September 5, 1939), is no coincidence, Bataille writes as the opening line of what became Guilty.

They met in 1940. In a bar, wasn't it?, W. says. W. needs to believe they met in a bar. He needs to believe Blanchot approached Bataille amidst the cigarette smoke, tapped him on the shoulder, and said: 'You are the greatest author in France …' Is that how it happened? Blanchot, who was moving from the extreme right to the left. Blanchot in freefall. Blanchot looking to be saved by Bataille, who, in turn, needed saving (Klossowski: 'Blanchot saved Bataille with so much strength …')

Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure was soon to appear. His How is Literature Possible? And Bataille was soon to write Madame Edwarda, and 'The Torment', the great central section of Inner Experience.

They met nearly every day, these friends. They met in the two discussion groups organised in the flat of Bataille's lover (who was soon to become Blanchot's lover). Denise Rollin, that was her name. 'She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy, if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods, not at all': Bataille's biographer wrote that. Beautiful and silent, beautiful and nearly silent: don't we catch a glimpse of Rollin in the figure of N. in Blanchot's Death Sentence?, I speculate, but W. doesn't want to gossip.

Bataille was said to speak in a manner always absolutely serious: that's always impressed W. Blanchot himself says it, in one of his memorial essays. Absolutely serious, as if the most important issues were at stake. That's how W. dreams of speaking. That's how he does speak, with his more gifted friends.

'Georges Bataille had the power to speak no less than the power to write. I allude not to the gift of eloquence, nor to the notion that he was prepared to play a Socratic role …', so Blanchot. 'When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance', so Bataille's biographer.

The most serious of men. But not grave, not heavy. Light – Bataille was lightness itself, Blanchot remembers. Bataille was life itself … Oh to be capable of such friendship!, W. says. Not to let others down. Not to disappoint them. To look upwards, with one's friend. To look upwards into the sky of thought …

Somerset House, London. They put up an ice rink here at Christmas, W. says. We should come here to skate. It would be like Kafka and Brod on the frozen lakes of Prague. He can see them in his mind's eye, W. says: skating together, two friends, talking literature, talking writing. Skating and with arms linked with Oskar Baum, their blind friend, out with them on the frozen lake to feel the wind on his face …

And now W. imagines Blanchot and Levinas, out skating in some Strasbourg lake, talking philosophy, talking Heidegger, arms linked … And, better still, Blanchot and Bataille, out skating in the winter of 1940, just after they they met. Blanchot and Bataille skating, scarves round their throats, talking politics, talking community in an occupied France … 

But Blanchot would never skate of course. He was too ill! He'd be out of breath. And Bataille, too, with his tuberculosis: he'd be out of breath, puffing on the ice. How unwell they were, the thinkers we admire!

The Fathers went to the desert in the spirit of repentance and surrender to the Lord. The Kingdom of God was their ultimate aim, purity of heart their proximate one. All the way to heaven is heaven, said Catherine of Siena, much later. All the way – and so they read scripture constantly. They sang the praises of God in liturgy. And they celebrated the new covenant with bread and wine.

And what of W., who was expelled into my desert, the desert of my stupidity? Did he ask to repent? Did he want to surrender? He reads – if not scripture, then books nearly as worthy, the great works of theology, of the philosophy of religion. He writes in his own way to celebrate the idea of the Messiah. But all the way to hell is hell, and a desert without a promised land is just that: hell.

Solitude: he knows that. Fasting: in his own way, he has fasted (since I ate all the manna). Self-denial: what has he done except deny himself? The renunciation of  ambition: it was taken from him, his ambition. I killed his ambition … Ah, W. has all the virtues the Fathers admired …

40 years, W. says. It's that how long it'll be? 40 years of my idiocy … 40 years of stupidity … When will he be finally delivered from bondage? 

But he knows Moses died before he reached the promised land. Moses saw it, it is true, from the plateau of Mount Pisgah. The patriarch saw the fertile plains of Canaan, to which he was leading his people.

And W., who's leading no one? He sees only more desert, only the endlessness of my stupidity.

The desert of my stupidity. Will God become a pilgrim with W., just as He became a pilgrim with the children of Israel? Will God walk with W. to comfort him in the dark years of tribulation?

It was in the desert that God spoke to humankind. It was there where the comfort of man is absent, that God addressed the faithful.

But W. hears only the winds of idiocy and the wolf-howls of desolation. 

Where are we? Is this the desert? Is it the great and terrible wilderness that the Bible calls Sinai? Is it the sparkling sand of the Egyptian desert, with no grass for pasture?

This is the place where you come to be nothing but yourself. This is the place to know yourself as a creature solitary and poor, a creature utterly dependent upon God. This is the place of madness, the devil's refuge, where thirst and hunger will drive you mad …

My stupidity: that's our desert, W. says. That's where we're stranded, W. says: in the desert of my stupidity.

The mythical pelican fed its young with its own blood. And with what has W. fed me but his own blood, his hopes and dreams? With what has he sustained me but his sense of what has been thought and what has to be thought?

Now the chick is big and must leave the nest. – 'Fly, fat boy, fly' …

Of the two of them, they decided it was Marx who had the superior analytic mind, W. says. And so Engels worked to support Marx, who laboured in the British Library.

'There's a lesson in that', W. says. When we lose our jobs, I'll go out and dance for a living, and W. will stay at home, writing. There must be some money in my naked Shiva dancing.

I tell W. about my troubles with management. Perhaps I should make a stand. – 'Where did that get you last time?', W. says. 'Squatting in the corner with your trousers round your ankles'.

'No one wants to talk to us, have you noticed that?', W. says. We're like lepers in the middle ages. Someone might as well be walking in front of us, ringing a bell.

We love reading about friendship because we know nothing whatsoever about friendship. We love reading about love because we know nothing whatsoever about love. We love reading about comradeship we know nothing whatsoever about comradeship. We love reading about politics because we know nothing whatsoever about politics.

We love reading about thought because we know nothing whatsoever about thought. We love reading about philosophy because we know nothing whatsoever about philosophy. We love reading about faith because we know nothing whatsoever about faith. We love reading about God because we know nothing whatsoever about God.

We love reading about literature because we know nothing whatsoever about literature. We love reading about despair because we know nothing whatsoever about despair. We love reading about hope because we know nothing whatsoever about hope. We love reading about life because we know nothing whatsoever about life.

I am his sin, W. says. My sins are his sins. If he's ever to come to terms with his sin, he must first come to terms with mine. If he's ever to be able to confess, he must first hear my confession. And if he's ever going to think, mustn't he hear my thoughts first – my non-thoughts?

What will people look like, at the end of time? They'll look like us, W. says. But with browner teeth. What will people talk about, at the end of time? They'll talk like us, but with more cock jokes. What will people wear, at the end of time? They'll dress like us, but in blousier shirts.

Is he, in the end a tortured man?, W. wonders. Is he a man of anxiety? No, not really. He's amused, despite everything, by my antics. He amuses himself by his antics when he's with me.

Then am I the obstacle to his seriousness, to his true anguish? But W. wonders whether I am  not the source of his desire to be seriousness, of his desire to be anguished. Perhaps, in the end, he can reach a conception of his seriousness, his anguish, only through a negation of my unseriousnessness, and my lack of anxiety, and, by the same token, by the negation of his unseriousnessness, and his lack of anxiety when he's with me?

In that way, I am both his obstacle and his doorway.

All the problems of the world begin, says Pascal, with you not being able to sit alone in a room. All our problems began because we had a sense of life beyond our rooms.

Our rooms, our cages, W. says. My office (at work), W.'s study (at home): cages, although W.'s larger than mine; he has more room to pace up and down than I do (that's what thinkers do, he says, pace up and down); he has more room to step back from his shelves to pick out a book (that's what thinkers do, he says, carefully pick out what they're going to read); he has more room for his desk, which is larger than mine, and to pull up his chair to his desk, to begin to write (that's what thinkers do, he says, pull up to their desk and begin to write).

Our cages, our bars, against which in desperate hours, we want to brain ourselves (W. is more desperate than I am). If only we could forget what lay outside. If only our dreams of old Europe, and the thinkers of old Europe, would fall away from us (W. dreams more ardently, more intensely, than I do); if only we could forget our political dreams, our dreams of a great politics, of a politics of the Party (W. wishes for it with more longing than I do); and our religious dreams, our dreams of God, our dreams of the infinite – if only they, too, would leave us (W. dreams more vehemently than I do).

And in the meantime, our cages. In the meantime, my office (at work), W.'s study (at home). In the meantime, our cages: our lives, which we know to be the involution of something wider, something greater. We are made of stars, scientists say. We are made of thought, too – great thoughts. We are made of great politics. Of great religion.

'Your oeuvre, your suicide note', W. says. Not that I'll kill myself. It's my version of suicide by cop, suicide by proxy.

Surely someone's already set out to murder me. Surely someone has me in their crosshairs.

'Expecting the worst, getting the worst, that's your life', W. says.

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.

Dartmoor. 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.

'Your readings of Weil! Your account of Rosenzweig!'

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?

We should have enemies, of course, W. says. We deserve them. There should be satellites in low orbit, tracking our movements. There should be snipers in the bushes, looking to finish us off. There should be mercenaries ready to kidnap us and execute us in the woods.

That we haven't been finished off yet is a puzzling sign. Why have we been permitted to live? But perhaps that is our punishment: continuing to live.

My enemy hasn't written lately, I tell W. W.'s surprised. He thought I'd have made even more enemies, now I'm splashing my name about on the net.

He sometimes wonders whether his enemy, who sits in the House of Lords, has forgotten him. Hasn't she got other things to think about? But no doubt, she's planning his demise even now. Can't she see he's gone as low as you can go? Can't she see he's been punished enough?

'This is what it must be like being you', W. says, getting beneath my bed covers and moaning. 'Oh my troubles, oh my life! They're out to get me! I'm going to be next!'