Lars Iyer's Blog

We await our Marx, we agree. We await a bearded thinker, a serious thinker to diagnose the crisis of our time, who, even now, is probably locked in the British library or some other library, reading, writing. To diagnose it, and to lead us out of it, a new Moses! To give us a new word in place of communism for the hopes of the left! A new word, for a new left, and for a new world for the left, after the last revolution!

To him, our Marx, we will be the rubbish to be cleared. We won't deserve to be called allies. Foolishness!, Stupidity! That's what our Marx will write in the margins of our work. Total idiocy!

Oh, how joyfully we will read his polemics against us and others like us! We'll be happy when his cannonballs shatter our philosophical windows, and when our names are only known as among the obscurest of the opponents he railed against in one of his jeremiads.

'Our task must be unsparing criticism, directed even more against our self-styled friends than against our declared enemies', wrote the old Marx. Our self-styled friends: the phrase makes us tremble with passion. So the new Marx will find us out. We'll be judged! Found wanting! 

'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. – 'And you, what will our new Marx call you?', W. wonders. 'A toad. A squat man. A man with a micropenis! A nanopenis! A man with a quantum penis!'

W. finds this very funny. Of course, our new Marx won't spare him, either. He'll dismiss W. in a phrase! In a word! A deviationist, he'll write. A dullard. Yes, that's how W. will be known to post-revolutionary history.

He wants to blame someone else! W. wants to blame someone else for his despair. Me, in actual fact. It's all my fault, he wants to say. But what if it is not? What if the fault lay elsewhere, and even within W. himself?

He shudders. The ground beneath him seems to plunge. After everything, his studies, his researchers, he really being sent back to himself? He thought he could blame me, he says. Thought that I was the single source of his problems, oh not me as an individual so much as what I embodied and exemplified: an era of cynicism and opportunism, an epoch with neither breadth nor depth, an age of information in which no one knows anything.

But he thought, too, that he might show me the way, that, clutching me to his breast as he soared into the skies of philosophical speculation, that I, too, might be changed. Hope, that's how he saw it: that I, his charge, his ward, might be redeemed as our time might be redeemed. Promise, that's how he thought of it. Our friendship – always asymmetrical, always dependent on one knowing so much more than the other – was also a hope for our time.

And if he felt despair in company, as he so often has, it was only a modification of hope; it still referred to the open sky in which we would soar. And now? If it is all W.'s fault, and not mine, then what are we to do?

Kierkegaard writes about despair because he wants to cure it, W. says, reading from his notes. He wants to cure us of that sickness unto death which, for him, is really a kind of sickness of oneself, of being oneself.

For the most part, Kierkegaard argues, we refuse to confront the real object of despair; we confuse it with our failure to achieve particular markers of success, to attain this job, say, or to begin this romantic relationship. This ignorance not only masks the real causes of despair, but even that despair itself. For one's failure seems only accidental, and one can still dream of achieving the marker in question, upon which our hope would hang.

In the meantime, the loss of the job in question, or the prospect of that romantic relationship is also a loss of self. You might wish to be another self altogether: one with more talent, perhaps, more physical beauty. If only I were cleverer, more handsome … But you are still yourself, and that appears to be the tragedy. Still yourself: but the goal is to despair over oneself. To despair, without dreaming of being someone else, being better in some particular degree.

Despair, now, becomes conscious. I am aware of that I am both the subject and the object of my despair. Aware that it came from me, and concerns me and that, somehow, my existence in its entirety is a problem for me. To where can I turn? Upon what can I rely when I become conscious of the real source of my despair? This is the question that terrifies W. For hadn't he always blamed me for his despair? Hadn't he always assumed it was all my fault? If only I could be rid of him, that idiot … If only I could ditch him somewhere …

Left wing melancholy. Left wing despair. How is Kierkegaard going to help us with that?, W. wonders. Can he help us with that? He reads out his notes.  

Despair comes not from without, but from within, Kierkegaard says. I inflict it on myself. Although despair seems to be about something external to me, it is really over oneself. By the same token, though, I am free not to despair. I am free to hope. But this requires, first of all, that I become aware of my despair. Only then might I understand that the real sickness unto death is the desire to be rid of myself when I cannot be rid of myself.

And to be rid of the world?, W. asks. To be rid of it, the whole of our crisis-ridden world?

Kierkegaard wants us to remain ourselves, only deepening our self-relation. He wants us to choose that inwardness in which I might discover real religious commitment. He wants us to find ourselves, which means not merely to know oneself, as Socrates recommended. 'Know yourself', he wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'.

The mirror of the Word. It is only when when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered and died for the sake of the sinner, that despair becomes hope. Only then that I might will to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and our redeemer.

Ah, this is leading us nowhere, W. says. He's too Jewish for Kierkegaard! To identify the Messiah with a person, with Jesus, isn't that the mistake? Messianism is primarily about time, W. says, that's what Kierkegaard seems to miss.

W. thinks of Job on his ash pile. Job, afflicted with boils, his possessions destroyed, his offspring killed, who sat scraping his skin with broken pottery. Job, who, when his wife told him to curse God, reproached her: 'shall we receive good from God and shall not receive evil?'

Never did he question divine providence. Never, even though he cursed the day he was born.

And of what of him, W.? Many times he's thought to curse my presence in my life. Many times to shake his fist at the sky, to cry, why me God?, why me? But no answer comes. No whirlwind.

Is he still being tested? Am I his trial, his burden? Elihu counsels Job that he should expect no explanation for his travails from God. God is not to be questioned. Then is it only when W. stops shaking his fist at the sky, when he stops cursing, that the whirlwind might speak?

I am his Abraham or his Isaac?, W.'s never been sure. Will I take him to be sacrificed on Mount Moriah, or is that his role? God's told him nothing, W. says. He's listened in vain for the command to lead me to the mountain.

But what has God told me? If I know anything, I'm keeping stum. In fact, I've been especially quiet lately, and W.'s caught me looking off into the distance, as if looking out for a local equivalent of the Biblical mountain.

But perhaps the sacrifice has already occurred. Did God stay my hand when I ruined W.'s reputation by my buffoonery? Did he tell me to sacrifice something else in W.'s place when I publically humiliated him? He's an Isaac whom God did not deign to save, W. says.

Kierkegaard warns that the despairer might not embrace the eternal, W. says. That he will not, despairing over himself in his weakness, as one incapable of such an embrace.

And he warns of another temptation: that such despair leads not to an excessive weakness, but an excessive strength – to that prideful refusal of the embrace, to the rejection of any sense of his own perfection, such that he might turn himself over to the perfection of God.

And a third temptation, which is really an exacerbation of the second: that the despairer wills to be what he is in his imperfection, that demonically, pridefully, he rises up to spite his creator. But what would I know of these, the final temptations? What, when hope was still alive in me?

W. despairs, he says. He despairs of me, for one thing. He despairs of my presence in his life. And he despairs of himself, whose fate is linked to mine. But quite apart from that, he despairs of the earthly, and especially me, who am an embodiment of the earthly, of the limits of the earthly! Of W.'s limits with respect to the earthly!

W. has, he thinks, a sense of the eternal, although Kierkegaard warns you can go wrong there, too – there is a form of despair, he says, in which the imagination runs wild; in which, no longer limited by anything concrete, it resorts to conjuring up dreams and fantasies.  

Is that the eternal, for him, simply a dream and fantasy? Is his notion of God – of unconfinement, of freedom – only the correlate of confinement and imprisonment? But then his notion of God is only the hopeless dream of his salvation from me, who am the real cause of W.'s despair.

The Eternal … what idea do I have of that?, W. says. Of the Power which created me, and before which I am always in the wrong? None at all!, W. says.

It's lucky that W. has some sense of despair, he says. Lucky that he is around to educate me, and show me me that the despair of the earthly is the way to salvation. Salvation will come, W. says, but first of all, I will have to choose despair. 

You have to have a sense of defeat, total defeat, W. says. The earthly itself must appear a wall, a blank wall, upon which you can make no purchase. But it must be a wall against which you are willing to run, again and again. A wall against which you must bash your head like a madman. Bashing it so that it – or you – might be destroyed.

In the case of the world versus you, back the world, Kafka said. But there is another option, W. says. You must realise that there's more than the world. That's the point I need to reach, the uttermost reach of despair. Then and only then might you know that the eternal is backing you.

If he knows about despair, W. says, it is because I have taught him it. Oh, not because of what I know, of what I told him. It's clear that I don't know despair, for all that I talk about it, for all I recommend he reads The Sickness Unto Death. No, it's only in relation to me – to the travesty of my existence on earth – that he can conceive of what the despair of the earthly might mean. It's only my presence – the travesty of my presence – that brought him to the uttermost.

Ah, it takes a long time for hope to disappear, W. says. Takes time for it to be entirely worn away. Didn't I have hopes of becoming a world-traveller? They were soon dashed. And didn't I have hopes – anti-hopes – of addicting myself to some substance so as to give my life meaning? I failed at that, too, didn't I? Something in me wanted to live. Something that didn't want to disappear into the squats in Old Hulme.

'You were a survivor, despite yourself'. It was like Eye of the Tiger, W. says. It was like Rocky IV, when he runs up those steps in the sun. – 'You wanted to live!' I wanted to live. So what then? What as I ran up the steps towards the sun? It was Kierkegaard who saved me, W. has no question about that. He finds it moving, even. An ape-man reading Kierkegaard, in the Hong and Hong edition, in his room in his squat on the top floor of an Old Hulme low-rise. A young ape …

But if Kierkegaard saved me, it also prevented me from pursuing my despair to the end. If it gave me hope, it was by destroying that pathos of despair which depends upon the absence of hope. For I wasn't able to despair over the earthly, as Kierkegaard commends, W. says. And wasn't it only by means of such a despair – over despairing over the earthly as a whole, and accepting the fact that there was no happiness to find in the earthly – that Kierkegaard said I might embrace the eternal?

'Tell me, when did you reached your greatest despair?' W. wants to know. When did I discover the sickness unto death, if I have discovered it at all? Ah, it was the outcome of a long process, W. knows that. When did it begin?

I began in joy, as all children begin. I lived in pure immediacy, as Kierkegaard would say, and I had met no obstacle that would challenge my joy. I knew no disappointments, or at least none that would change my understanding of life.

When did it change, that understanding? When did I, as Kierkegaard would say, come against 'something earthly': some disaster over which I despaired? When I disappointed myself, as I had already, no doubt, begun to disappoint others? When did I lose pure immediacy?

There must have been so many things! – 'Your growing obesity. Your tiny penis'. So many things, but W. wants to focus on just one, which he may have made up: the day I discovered the limits of my intelligence, W. says.

He sees it in his mind's eye, the young student working round the clock in his room. He sees it: dawn, then 7.00 AM, and the student had worked the whole night through. 7.00 AM, 9.00 AM, and the student taking Pro-Plus pills to push himself, bleary eyed, through another day.

'You covered your walls in brown paper, didn't you?' I'd told him that. Told him I'd written logical proofs and apposite quotations all over my papered-over walls. I'd gone a little mad. I'd worked a little too hard, but I'd come up against, hadn't I: the limits of my intelligence? It was as though I was too big to think. As though I was imprisoned in a cell in which I could never stand up, or if I did, if I stood up, I would only have broken my neck. Would only have died gasping, back broken, on the floor.

So I stooped. I wrote my notes with my big hand. I read books I couldn't understand. Then I shut the flap of my bureau and stared into space. Was that when I reached it, my first despair? Was it then that it shattered, the pure immediacy I knew as a child?

There are men with whom W.,, a small man, feels safe, and others with whom he feels intimidated. Take our friend the bouncer, who picked W. up and spun him round his head. Never did W. feel unsafe! Never did he feel he'd be dropped, or otherwise come to harm. He was held right up to the ceiling, right beneath the light fitting in his living room, but felt no fear.

But in my presence, W. is very often afraid. On that pedallo in the Black Forest, for example. I was pedalling, my enormous thighs working furiously, while he was perched up on the back seat, terrified. I even sang to him to calm him down, songs of the thirties and forties, but he wasn't calmed. My voice, my terrible voice singing 'We'll Meet Again', my thighs, and the rocking of the pedallo: he shudders to remember.

I'm a squat man, not a stocky one, W. says, looking at me critically. I like to call myself stocky – that's what I tell people: I'm a stocky man, but the word that comes to W.'s mind is always squat. -' You're a squat man, with a tiny penis'. But if I am squat, a toad of a man, what is he? Chubby perhaps, but not unduly so. In need of exercise, maybe. But in the end, he's not an extreme case, as I am. And he has a normal sized penis.

We're lucky we have Sal, W. and I have always agreed. Sal demands an explanation: how often have we said that to ourselves? Sal demands an explanation: for her, our vagueness and pathos is not enough. She's not satisfied with our equivocations. She expects better from us. – 'Even you! She expects better from you!'

This always amazes W. Doesn't she know my limits? Hasn't she been acquainted, very thoroughly, with my idiocy? But Sal demands an explanation, even of me. She won't let us get away with anything! How well W. remembers that time in Nashville, where I was expounding my theories of community. I spoke of alterity, I spoke of the relation to the Other Even W. was convinced. Even W. was swept away. He's really on to something, W. thought. Perhaps, all along, I've misjudged him.

But Sal demanded an explanation. What did I mean about community? And about alterity? And about the relation to the Other? No more vagueness! No more equivocation! I went white as a sheet, W. said. The blood drained from my face. I'd been found out, I knew that. I sputtered. Well …, I said, and began some spurious explanation. But Sal was having none of it.

Sal demanded an explanation, and I was unable to give her one, wasn't I? But that wasn't the end of it. I was silent for a moment. I bowed my head. And then, in a new voice – a calm, measured voice W. had never heard before – I said something that actually made sense. It was a stunning moment. W. was surprised. Our Nashville hosts were surprised. But Sal wasn't surprised. – 'See', she said, 'you just have to explain yourself better'.

Bored in the office, W. visiting. He picks up a box of green tea and throws it at me. – 'Do something'. W. has a slapstick sense of humour, he says. Well, it's my slapstick that amuses him. My stumblings. My prat-falls. – 'No one could call you a graceful man'.

He, W., is surprisingly lithe. He could have been a gymnast, with the right training. Can I imagine him, soaring above the crowds in his tights?  

We're the opposite of Job's comforters, W. notes, it's true: we do not seek to discourage while offering solace. We're the encouragers of thought! Thought's enthusiasts! What thinker, in our midst, have we failed to cheer on?

We were there on the front row with our notebooks, furiously writing. The thinker spoke, and we wrote. And then after, knowing the audience's reaction could not fail to disappoint, could not fail to leave the thinker feeling yet more isolated, yet more alone, we all but bore him upon our shoulders, cheering. We all but deafened him with our cries.

What did you mean by this point, or that one?, we ask him. We go through our notebooks. What did you mean by this, or that? Stupid as we are, our interest flatters him. We're like a dry run, in our stupidity, for an encounter with a fellow thinker, an ally of thought, in conversation with whom our thinker could rise to his true vocation.

And what would we do, if, with our thinker, another thinker came along? What, if a conversation between thinkers truly began, if idea met with idea like eagles rising into the air? We wouldn't get out our notebooks: W. makes me promise that. I wouldn't take out my camera, my infernal camera: W. makes me promise that, too. And we wouldn't chatter; we wouldn't say a thing: W. doesn't have to tell me that.

Mute, awestruck, we would only listen as to the tongue of angels, to what we couldn't understand.

How will be judged, if we are to be judged?: W. often wonders about that. And the answer: we've sought to assist thought and its thinkers. Sought to lighten the solitude of thinking. We've written consolatory emails (W. more often than I). We've praised and consoled (again, W. more than I). We've even discovered thinkers, picking them out from the crowd (well, W. has).

We've done our best, we'll tell the angel with the fiery sword. We didn't think of ourselves. But he'll strike our heads from our shoulders anyway. For who were we to presume to ally ourselves with God's chosen? Who were we to presume to alleviate the suffering to which God elected them?

We shouldn't try to keep thoughts, W. says. We shouldn't write them down. Shouldn't even try to remember them! The idea should permeate the thinker, W. says. Should radiate from him like an aura.

It should be inseparable from his life, from his slightest gesture. You should be able to hear it in every sentence he speaks. It should be discernible in his bearing, in the way he drinks his tea. You should be able to tell at once he's had an idea, that an idea possesses him, from the way he eats.

There's a kind of distraction to him, the thinker, W. says. A vagueness, as though he wasn't quite in tune with the world, wasn't quite in focus. The thinker's outline is blurred, his replies hesitant. Ask him questions and there'll be long silences, as long as anything. And he'll reply, most often: I don't know. Because he doesn't know. He knows he doesn't know.

His idea – the idea that lives through him, breathes through him – brings with it the non-idea, his thought, non-thought. He is happy with silence. He rests in it. Happy not to know and say he doesn't know. Because he does know something. He actually knows something: his idea. And that certainty, the sun that has risen through him, is such that everything else seems dim and far away.

Ah, the bliss of thinking! The passion of thought! No more opinionating. No more guesswork. He knows; a door has been opened to him. No more chatter. No more idle conversation. He doesn't need others. He's alone in a new way, elected by his idea, ennobled by it.

That's why thinkers like us, W. says. We're non-thought incarnate. We don't have ideas, and we don't pretend to! In the end, we demand nothing, we ask for nothing. The lightness of our chatter is like the murmur of grasshoppers on a summer evening. The to and fro of our banter is like the trickling of a young stream: a backdrop, a kind of night against which the star of the idea can burn ever brighter.

In the end, if we are not thinkers – if we'll never have an idea of our own – we do not hinder thought, either. We're not its enemies.

Leazes Park: yes, this is where I should come when the ping of incoming emails depresses me, W. says. I should come and watch the ducklings. I should rest my eyes on the waterfowl – the black headed geese, the kingly swans. I should even pay to hire a rowing boat to take a turn around the lake.

Although no man of nature, W. has a great deal of time for the city park, where anyone might walk. Where the alcoholic walks, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholic cannot walk – where his way is barred by security guards or policemen – W. will not walk either.

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

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

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

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

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

The lake is fed by an underground spring, I tell W. A river used to run from here to the quayside. Lort Burn – Grey Street follows its long curve. But they culvetted it and made the lake which is higher than the surrounding park as we observe, walking around its edge.

Leazes Park, so near my office, should be my thinking space, W. says. My breathing space. When do I ever take the time to walk round the lake? Never, I tell him. Never: of course, W. says. I'm not an ambler, he says. I've forgotten how to stroll.

W. is a great advocate of strolling. The man of thought is a strolling man, he maintains. I should know that, he says. Haven't we taken many walks alongside one of our thinkers? Haven't we been able to loosen our thinker from the crowd and take him into the countryside?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, but there are no thinkers with us today, as we stroll around the lake at Leazes part. None as W. stops to read the placards about the waterfowl, and we stop to inspect the ducklings. We've been thrown back on ourselves, once again! Thrown back: not upon thought and the development of thoughts, but upon the peace of non-thought in which the thinker can find repose. 

Coming up the path in the evening, we see the birds rise from the field and wheel through the sky as though they were one organism – as though the whole flock was the wing-edge of a single, greater, bird. It must be a sign, W. says. He's on the lookout for signs. But what is it telling us? Turn back!: perhaps that. Go on!: perhaps that, too. Are we at the end, or is this a beginning? 

W. has Sal, I have my potatoes. What's the difference?, W. says. Can I tell him the difference? He lives with a living, breathing woman who loves him, and I with a pile of Marks and Spencer potatoes – very good potatoes, he admits, he's tried them. I boiled up some for breakfast, which we ate with good olive oil, but they're potatoes nonetheless.

Potatoes! My potato friends!, W. says and laughs. Most people wouldn't eat their friends, but I would, and that's why they're my friends, aren't they? Maris piper: they're my favourite kind, W. says. They're the kind I sit and eat in the darkness, until I finish the whole bag, boiling its contents on the stove.

For his part, potatoes always send him to sleep, W. says. He can't stay awake after potatoes. But they seem to energise me, he says. They seem to drive me on. After potatoes, wine, and after wine – the internet. It's internet time, every night, when I write drunken rubbish on my blog, my belly full of of potatoes and wine.

I always take my trousers off when I visit – why is that? On one level, the answer is quite obvious: I am growing too fat for them, their waistband cutting uncomfortably into the vastness of my belly. But then I never take them off elsewhere, my trousers, W. has noticed. Only with him, with him and Sal. Only in his front room, whether the shutters are open or closed.

Once, when a friend of theirs called round unexpectedly, I leapt up, frantically looking for my trousers, before she entered the room. Too late! He always takes his trousers off when he visits, W. told her. I feel some sense of shame, at least, W. says. He didn't think I did, but there it was: shame over my trouserlessness. My public trouserlessness.

Ought he to take it as a complement, my taking off my trousers in his front room, every time I visit? Is it a tribute to intimacy, to my trust of him, of Sal? Is it a kind of gift?, he wonders. 

Nestled in these questions is a much broader one, of course, W. says: that of his significance for me as a whole. Who is he, for me? What does he permit? He likes to think of me as free and wild, W. says. As a roaming idiot on the wind. Sal thinks the same. That Lars …, she says, and lets her sentence trail off. Sometimes I allow him, too to become a roaming idiot. Sometimes we roam insouciantly together.

But then he leaves me, then we return to our homes on the opposite edges of the country, I to the northeast, he to the southwest. Then he leaves me, he imagines, to roam on my own on the gusts of idiocy. He has to retire from idiocy! It's too much for him! He holes up with Sal. They close the shutters and eat dinner. And where am I?

Circumambulating my town, looking for my 75p dinners. Circumambulating it, drinking pint after pint on the way. Circumambulating my town and then taking my trousers off my in my flat, then all my clothes. He can imagine me, naked and bloated in my flat. Naked, bloated, half-drunk, bleary eyed amidst the plaster dust and squalor, and then rising next morning to do it all again.

Is that how I live? I can't live that way, can I? No one could, not even me. I must hole up, too, closing my curtains. I must sit alone the dark to restore my energy, whispering to the potatoes that are the only foodstuff in my flat. I, too, must be exhausted from my idiocy, taking solace in my potatoes, W. says, my potato friends.

'You talk to them, don't you?' He sees me talking to them in his mind's eye, W. says. He sees me sharing my adventures. Yes, that's who I go home to, when I'm done with our adventures, and head to the airport. I'm thinking only of my potatoes, my potato friends, with whom I will recover in darkness.

He looks like Kim Il-Jong, I tell W. when I come down in the morning. It's his grey trousers and grey top: he looks like the Great Leader. W. pulls some tai-chi moves. Now he looks like Kim-Il Jong doing tai-chi.

I look like that guy in those John Walters movies, W. says, what was his name? The really fat transvestite guy who ate dog shit … Divine, that's it. – 'Do your Divine tai-chi', W. says. 'Bust out your Divine moves'.

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. It's a weather front, W. says. Which way is it travelling? Where is it heading? And where are we heading, we who walk beneath it, the shore of clouds?

Is the future open to us, or closed? – W. can never decide. Are we making progress, or falling behind? – W. can never decide about that, either.

It's my fault, of course, W. says of our lack of self-control. For a time, it's liberating – it liberated W., freeing him from the high table. He felt a great rush of freedom; he sent laughter into the air.

But then what? His former colleagues on the high table turned their backs on him. He was free, but alone. Well, alone except for me, and I hardly count, after a while. I hardly count, I who wear out friendship and all the usual forms of sociability.

So W. set off on his lonely path. We set off, and left everything he knew behind him.

You should never learn from your mistakes, W. and I agree. It's our operating principle. If we lived them over again, would our lives be any different? Not one bit! The same, they'd be exactly the same, and that's our strength, W. says. We are reliable in our idiocy.

Is that why thinkers – real thinkers – are attracted to us? They want to be amused, no doubt, and we are amusing, for a while at least. We have a kind of charm. We make them laugh, our thinkers, who are often lost in melancholy. We lighten their souls.

But we always go too far in our inanity. We alienate them, our thinker-friends, sending them into a new kind of melancholy. They walk away, shaking their heads. What happened when we rushed into the rooms of one of our thinkers, pulling up his bedclothes in order to sleep like a thinker? What when we pulled on his tee-shirts over ours in order to dress like a thinker? He was appalled, of course. He shook his head. We'd invaded his thought-cell, and for what? We'd breached the outer doors of his thought-sanctum, and then what did we do? We can't control ourselves, W. says. It's grotesque.

If anything, I am too punctual, W. says. I'm always there before everyone, anxiously pacing about. What do I think I'm going to miss?

I have a dim sense that something is going to happen – but what? What can I possibly understand of what is going to happen?

I strain my intelligence, W. says. He sees it on my face. But you can't replace intelligence with punctuality.

We rank our friends in order of their intelligence. Then we rank them in order of their melancholia, and wonder if there's a correlation. Then we rank them according to their punctuality, cross-referring our results to our previous findings.

Our brighter friends are always late, we decide, always disorganised. Our brighter friends are melancholy, which is probably why they can never keep their appointments. How many times have they left us standing, looking at our watches? W. always smiles on such occasions. There are more important things than meeting us, he says. Much more important things!

Why does he hang out with Lars?: the perennial question, W. says. Why Lars, of all people?: that question, which W. has had to field many times. It's worse when it's merely implied: when he sees it in a querulous but fleeting look, in a momentary hesitation, even in a kind of involuntary retching, quickly covered up by a cough. Worse when thinkers – real thinkers, not like us – are distracted by my presence.

Why him?, their facial expressions silently ask W. What's he doing here?, that's the question he sees in suddenly contracted eyes. You, we understand, but him …? That they, the thinkers, have to be bothered by such a concern even momentarily is torment to W. Why should they have to think about me? It's enough that he has to think about me, that he has to follow me and clear up my messes. But the thinkers, his thinkers, as W. likes to think of them – since he has done so much first of all to discover them, and then to draw them out of the crowd – they should never have to contemplate me, the fact of me, W. says. The fact of Lars. A dreadful fact. A kind of curse, in fact. A kind of catastrophe.

I confuse them, his thinkers. Of course, they know at once I'm not a fellow thinker, a fellow thought-adventurer, W. says. It's clear by my gait, my facial expression. Intelligence, when it is there, glints in the eyes, but in my case, nothing glints. Intelligence flashes in the teeth, but my teeth are dull. Oh it's perfectly clear. I can't hide anything, although of course I've never tried to hide anything. No, it's not my obvious lack of intelligence that confounds them. What then?

They know I'm not one of them – that's obvious – but, too, that I'm linked to W. in some way – to W., who, their attention grants, is at least a potential man of thought, whom they greet as such, to one who might understand the particularities of their, the thinker's achievements – confounds them. Yes, that W. keeps company with me: that's what bothers them. Not the fact of my stupidity, which is plain as the day, but that of our companionship, that W. and I hang out together, that where he is, I will also be; and that where he will be, I, too will be. That somehow I have found myself included in all plans concerning W.

What's it all about? For a moment – and for no more than that, since such thinkers have other things to reflect upon – they wonder whether I am not to W. as W. is to them – a kind of younger brother, a cousin and fellow, one who needs encouragement, bringing on, but also one who understands, since he is kin, something of their struggles - and that therefore I do indeed have some relation to them, albeit at a couple of removes.

That's why they smile at me, despite everything. It's why they make some semblance of including me in their conversations, turning to me as though I could understand what they were saying, as though I were capable of following their accounts of their struggles with thought (a meeting between thinkers is rarely about thoughts, W. says, so much as the struggle to think, since that's what unifies all thinkers, even rivals). Struggles that, indeed, are so exacting, that cost so much in terms of ordinary satisfactions, that it is solely to maintain this sense of shared suffering that drives thinkers from their labours. How they suffer! How much their thoughts have cost them!

And they perceive something of that cost in W., too. They're happy enough talking to him. Happy to bask in his admiration, his sympathy. Hasn't he pulled some of them back from the brink of suicide? Haven't more than one acknowledged the strength of his fellowship, his encouraging emails, the offer he's made of a room in his house for weeks – months – at a time?

Hasn't he taken thinkers into his home, treating them as the most honoured of guests, looking after their needs for weeks – months? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to speak before an audience they themselves were allowed to invite and that he, W., found funds to bring over? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the quadrangle bathed by the sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.

Haven't these thinkers thanked him for bringing them back into the world again, for acting as a kind of conduit or go-between between the world and themselves? Hasn't W.'s real help drawn their tribute? Hasn't he been thanked in a hundred acknowledgements?

Hasn't he always understood their terrible melancholias, their disorders of the spirit, madnesses that thought, the effort to think, only drives deeper, and done what he could to intervene lest that melancholy, that disorder, that madness wreck their ordinary satisfactions, which is to say, the – to them – unnoticed stratum beneath their lonely promotories?

Hasn't he extracted great confidences – life-stories – touched with isolation and withdrawal? Haven't his thinkers confessed their infidelities and alcohol addictions? Haven't they whispered in his ear about their fears of secret mental disorders, of inherited conditions, of early-onset dementia? Haven't they spoken of family horrors and early bereavements, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments? Haven't they spoken of finding God and losing God, of the search for God and the quest to free themselves of God? Haven't they spoken of the temptation of science and of the consolations of science, of the move into philosophy and the move away from philosophy?

He's mopped brows, W. says. Not literally, but metaphorically. He's wiped away tears. This time, quite literally. He's let his voice rise so the shouting of his thoughtful interlocutor does not seem such an aberration. Quite literally in this case, too. As the editor of a special edition of a journal, he has promised them he'll publish anything, anything they write, even if it is only a lengthy missive on the impossibility of their writing anything at all, on the impossibility of writing. He's bankrupted whole institutions of learning shipping his thinkers over from the other side of the world and bussing in acolytes – acolytes indebted to him, W., for discovering and then disseminating his thinker's thought – so as to show how greatly they were appreciated.

W. is a man of practice, he says. He seeks to effect changes in the world. For the good, the good, only for the good! For thought, W. says. And for his own thought, too. His own Denkweg, his thought-path. He likes to talk with those who make him think!, he says. It's the same with his reading. Why bother reading a line of Hermann Cohen if Hermann Cohen didn't make him think? If Hermann Cohen wasn't a spur in W.'s flanks? In the flanks of thought!

We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Prompted from without. Thought should reach us from outside, from an unfathomable source. Thoughts should shatter the frozen ice within us, as Kafka said. That's what he has seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its details in a way only the thinker would understand.

He's seen ice in the eyes of his thinkers. Starlight on ice. Starlight flashing on the empty expanses. He's seen inhuman distances in their eyes. Seen all the way to heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole, and the thinkers returning from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. Seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Antarctic of thought. Seen the deserted expanses of the steppes of thought, and the impassable flora of the jungles of thought. Seen the depths of ocean trenches and the high attenuation of the upper atmosphere where nothing can live.

Ah, They've suffered like gods, his thinkers. Like beasts made of stars and the aurora borealis. They been subject to distant agonies, to interstellar torture. And I, who have never suffered, but have only caused suffering, W.'s suffering and the suffering of others, what place do I have among them, which is to say, alongside him? That's the real question, W. says. That's the imponderable of imponderables.