Lars Iyer's Blog

Laughter in the summer air. My God, this world is mad, mad! Oh God, couldn't we laugh ourselves to death? If we started to laugh, really started, we wouldn't be able to stop, how could we? If we really laughed, really laughed, we could laugh forever, laughing at laughter, laughing at the whole dreadful imposture, at our dreadful imposture. They could cut off our heads, tear us apart, and we'd still be laughing, and laughing at ourselves laughing, as we were strewn along the river ….

One day, says W., shit opened its eyes. One day, to the surprise of everyone, shit got up and walked around. – 'You were born'. It was a miracle, W. says. Shit found a voice; shit spoke; shit wrote – how extraordinary! But it was still shit, says W. – 'You're still shit'. I haven't understood that, have I?

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. 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 garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

But what would I understand of any this?, W. wonders. What conception could I have of the ceremony of reading, of the rituals that must surround it?

He knows how I read, of course, W. says. There are books piled all over my office. Books leaning against other books. But it means nothing! You can have all the books in the world, but if you know nothing about reading, then …, W. says.

He's seen me at it, my reading, W. says. I open one page – another – and then what? I make a beginning, I open a book, and not always at the start, and what happens? I invariably open another, W. says. Another and then another.

Anything so as not to be alone with a book, W. says. Alone and undistracted, he says. Alone with a span of time opening ahead of me. Haven't I always feared empty time, W. muses, the time in which something might happen? And don't I, for that reason, fear – really fear – what might happen to me when I read?

'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. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books – that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library. – 'It's always new for you, isn't it?' And this, W. supposes, is why I never really finish the books I read, but pile them up, one on top of another. I never finish them, says W., but I let them lean, one against the other, on my bookshelves.

They must be undergoing a crisis of some kind, they always are, we decide of those who come to join our table. – 'Never listen to us', W. says. 'We give bad advice, don't we?' Very bad, I agree. But still they listen. We must have the air of people in the know, I say to W. – 'We have the air of idiots', says W.

W. likes to ask questions of the people who join us, who are invariably tongue-tied and confused. – 'What's your favourite colour?', or 'Do you have any recurring dreams?' When all else fails, W. tells us about his. It encourages confidances, he says, and besides, it amuses me.

He's driving a car on an endless highway, W. says, which is funny, because he can't drive. And then what?, our guest will inevitably ask. That's it: the car, driving, and the highway. Well, here I am, driving again, that's what he says to himself, in his recurring dream. He's not sure what it means.

'We'll be in the bar', that's what we always tell them. 'That's where you can find us: the bar'. Constancy is always admired, we agree. People in crisis need to know where we are. We spend all day in the bar, which requires great stamina and pacing. We're calm drinkers, and full of amiability. There are only a few people we absolutely want to avoid.

'The point is not even to try to engage', we tell those who seek us out for advice. Or, 'Give up now: that's our advice'. Or, 'There's no hope for you, you have to know that'. Then we buy them a drink, or get them to buy us one. Our table guests are invariably cheered. – 'See, it doesn't have to be so bad!' Hours pass in the bar. – 'The key is pacing', we tell them.

W. and I never make a point of finding someone to discourage. They must find us, deliberately seeking us out, since we who are the last people to whom anyone would want to speak. But we're friendly, if nothing else, and it amuses us when people throw themselves upon our mercy. – 'You must be really desperate. We're the last people you should talk to. It'll get you nowhere'.

What advice do we give? What do we tell them? You have to know you're a failure, we tell them. That's absolutely essential.

It's always worried him, W. says: is he one in the long line of nutters and weirdoes with whom I've been associated? He doesn't think of himself as a nutter or a weirdo, says W., but still.

If there's anything like a pattern in my life, in my associations it's exactly that, W. says: a great veering towards nutters, towards weirdoes. Which means he can only conclude that he too is a nutter or weirdo.

But how would he know? To what criteria could he appeal? And that's the horror, says W.: that friendship with me means losing all sense of what being a nutter or a weirdo might mean.

My stomach betrays me, that's how I put it, W. says, when in fact, my stomach, with its endless problems, its growling and grumbling, acts only in my interests. – 'It's trying to save you', W. says, 'Don't you understand?'

That's why I look so bilious and green. It's why we had to seek out an emergency scheisse bar in Freiburg, W. says. The emergency scheisse bar: isn't that what I have to search out in every city, almost as soon as I arrive?

Only my viscera are honest, W. decides. Only there, deep inside my body, buried under layers of fat, is there anything like honesty. In a way, it's comforting, W. says, although it doesn't make me any easier to be around, the fact that there's a kind of internal limit to my idiocy.  

You're not going to get away with it, that's what my stomach says. I'm not going to let you get away with it. That's my curse, W. says, and my judgement.

There's something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he's not quite sure what it is. Shame – is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do. They would have known their inability to think and to write and given up.

Why don't we stop? There's a short story by Kafka, a fragment really,  W. says, that reminds him of our predicament. A man in a great hurry gets lots on the way to the station and asks a policeman the way. Gibt sie auf!, says the policeman, give it up! That's what we should do, says W. Give it up!

He would say I exhibited a philosophical masochism, if he did not know better, he'd say that all my studying – my supposed studying, my let's-pretend studying, was a way of punishing myself, of running myself up against my own limits – of destroying me, or that part of me which has the temerity to believe it can think – not once, but over and over again.

Yes, that's what he'd say – that I set myself, as a course of reading, books I could not possibly understand by authors whose depths I could not possibly fathom – that I set myself, as a course of thinking, the pondering of topics entirely beyond my powers – so far beyond them, indeed, that they mocked and laughed at my alleged powers – that they mocked and laughed at me – that I, studying, ostensibly studying, really mocked and laughed at myself.

But then he knows it's not for my benefit that I study, or pretend to study – or fail, in ostensibly studying to study, that I'm not thinking of myself at all, of punishing myself (as I should be punished), of mocking and laughing at myself (as I should be laughed at and mocked), but of punishing him, W., of mocking and laughing at him.

Philosophical sadism, that's what he calls it, W. Philosophical cruelty, aimed directly at W., directly at him, and solely to spite him.

In the end, W.'s sure, I bought my pink notebook just to irk him – just to get on his nerves, by adverting, by its pinkness, to the fact that I had a notebook, that there were notes to be taken, that I was to be taking notes, that I had the temerity to be taking notes, that I could present myself unashamedly as a note taker, and all this in front of W., for whom notetaking has always been a seriousness business. In front of him, who enters his thoughts on the thoughts of others at the front of his notebook in black ink, and enters his own thoughts at the back of his notebook in red ink, following the advice of our now-deceased friend, and in his memory.

Ah, our friend, who was cleverer than us, better than us, kinder than us, who had a more promising future than we had, who had things to say and write. Our friend, who advised us on the taking notes, advice W. took very seriously, indeed, to the extent that it guided henceforward all his notetaking, and even increased his desire to take notes. Advice, though, which I took up in my own way, smilingly, even humously – or so W. imagines it -taking notes only to spite and irritate W., who knows that my notes could only even be the parody of notes, and hence the desecration of the memory of our friend and his advice.

And it was a pink notebook – ostentatiously pink, flamboyantly pink, waving it in front of W., pink, waving it in front of him and thereby mocking him and compounding my mockery, which consists merely in taking notes – in the fact that I have the temerity to take notes at all. A pink notebook, with a pink ribbon as a bookmark, in which I write in with a violet pen and in violet ink, like a Japanese schoolgirl.

Death, death. It's time for the kill. We're upside down, hanging from butcher's hooks, our throats bared. Death is sharpening its razor. Death is going to slash our throats wide.

Two explosions of blood. Two strangled cries, blood on the walls. It's all Lars's fault, W. tries to say, but no words come out. It was him all along: a bubble of blood and nothing else.

You've heard of suicide by cop, of course, W. says, but what of suicide by philosophy? What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of one's stupidity? Because that's the only way he can account for them, the shortcomings of my book. It's the only way he can account for my persistent attempt to think.

If there were a window in his office he'd doing a running jump through it. If there were a window in his office, and he was five flights up, he'd jump right out of it. But there is no window, only a wall. And he's not five flights up, he's on the ground floor.

W. doesn't believe I actually read books. – 'They're like totems to you', says W. '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 books, like Beckett with his Dante in his room at the old folks home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

His own incapacity: it's with that that W. is always left. His incapacity: that's what remains to him after lights out. He lies in the dark with it, it dreams beside him: who is more intimate with his own incapacity than W.?

No one knows it better. And he will know nothing else; he will be pushed to think 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?

W. remembers how it all began. I came into his care, like Robin to Batman: a ward, a protege. How was he to know what would happen?

He taught me table manners, well, basic table manners. He tried to teach me politeness – to shake hands, to make chit-chat. He stopped me continually touching my skin through my shirt, and tried to quieten my bellowing.

Friendship involves a lot of nagging, W. says. I had to be nagged! I was like a prisoner released blinking into the light. What had I known of life before I met him? How had I survived?

I was a scholarly Kasper Hauser, W. says. What did I know of reading, or note-taking? I could read, that much is true. But only just, only approximately, and with a great deal of pathos, with wild underlinings and illegitimate identifications. – 'You thought every book you read was all about you, didn't you?' That's me!, I would say, pointing to a passage in Leibniz. It's all about me!, I said, pointing to the Science of Logic.

And all along, W. was waiting to see if I was the harbourer of some secret wisdom. All along, if my years of unemployment had taught me some great and unguessable insight. He took me out into the scholarly world. People were impressed at first then frightened. Why is he covered in his own spittle?, they asked. Why is he covering us with his spittle?

I made audiences flinch. Professors would turn white, or leave to vomit. – 'They couldn't understand what had just happened'. But W. understood. His heart leapt up. 

Hadn't he always sought an outsider scholar? Didn't he dream of intellectual movements that took place outside the university? Of professors of desperation; of the university of alcoholism?

I came from outside, and I brought the outside with me, W. says. I came from the everyday and had to stamp the everyday from my boots. – 'How long had you been unemployed?' Years, I tell him. Years! W. can't imagine it. – 'And for how long before that did you work in your warehouse?' Years again. – 'Years!', W. exclaims, impressed. Of course, there was also my time with the monks. That's my wild card, W. says, my monk years. Who would have known from looking at me?

But there you were, and who had seen anything like it? – 'You were like a one man horde, a Tartar'. There was spittle on my lips and drool in my beard. Had I ever heard of a footnote? Did I know what an appendix was, or what op. cit. might mean? Scholarly standards were an irrelevance to me; scholarly apparatus an imposition I could completely ignore, it was quite impressive.

'Your book!' W.'s still amazed. A book without scholarship, without ideas. Without the usual concern to explain or to clarify. A book almost entirely lacking in merit. And yet! He saw something there, although no one else did. He saw it, and not in spite of its many typos and printing errors … It was there because of them. It was inextricable from them. A kind of massive, looming incompetence. A cloud of stupidity that covered the sun. But more than that: didn't it belong like a shadow of the sun, and of its burning? Didn't it belong to the clarity of the day as its cloud and blind opacity?

It was demonic, W. says. It was as forceful as a demi-urge. That's when he became aware of it as a vast Gnosticism, as a division of light within light, of life within life. Who could have written anything so bad? Who, who ruined the temple of scholarship and revealed it to have been always ruined? He saw it, W. says, even if no one else did. And it was his role to look after me.

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, W. wonders. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy?

Who allowed it? Who raised our aspirations to the sky? We want to blame someone. It must be someone else's fault. Our horizons were opened too widely. We saw too much … But who let us see? Who left the doorway open?

Has our time come?, I ask W. – 'Ages ago', he says. Then what's keeping them? 'The judgement came too late', says W. 'There are no hangmen, no firing squad. The army have all deserted their posts. The very institutions of the law are deserted, their doors swinging open, files blowing about in the wind'.

Then who will pass sentence? – 'There's no one to pass sentence'. Who will lead us to our cells? – 'There's no one to lead us to our cells'. Then are we to strangle ourselves? – 'I'll strangle you, and you strangle me, and we'll see where that gets us', says W.

'They'll shoot you like a dog', W. says. 'Actually, that's too good for you. They'll crush you like an insect. No, even that's too good. They'll simply let you live, a living humiliation, humiliating yourself and us all to a degree you'll never understand'.

If I survive the current cull, as he will not, I shouldn't be proud, W. says. – 'Why do you think they're keeping you around? To laugh at you, to pole you with sticks. Now and again, they'll look through the food slot of my cell to see if I'm eating my own shit. Look at him!, they'll say. He's eating his own shit!'