Milan Kundera musing on Don Quixote:

Poor Alonzo Quijada meant to elevate himself into the legendary figure of a knight-errant. Instead, for all of literary history, Cervantes succeeded in doing just the opposite: he cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose. 'Prose': the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.

A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote jounreying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.

Once again I want to call up the figure of Alfonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn't want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of traegedy: of its cult of gandeur; of its threatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.

… novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters' lives; those lives feed and justify it.

Marguerite Duras, from Practicalities:

This book helped us pass the time. From the beginning of autumn to the end of winter[….] none of the pieces deals with a topic exhaustively. And one reflects my general views about a particular subject[….] At the most the book represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things[….] The book has no beginning or end, and it hasn't got a middle either. If it's true that every book must have a raison d'etre, this isn't a book at all. Nor is it a journal, or journalism – it doesn't concern itself with ordinary events. Let's just say it's a book intended to be read[….] I had doubts about publishing it in this form, but no previous or current genre could accommodated such a free kind of writing, these return journeys between you and me, and between myself and myself, in the time we went through together.

I'd like to write a book the way I'm writing at this moment, the way I'm talking to you at this moment. I'm scarcely conscious of the words coming out of me. Nothing seems to being said but the almost nothing there is in all words.

When I was writing The Lover I felt I was discovering something: it was there before me, before everything, and would still be there after I'd come to think things were otherwise – that it was mine, that it was there for me. It was more or less as I've described, and the process of writing it down was so smooth it reminded you of the way you speak when you're drunk, when what you say always seems simple and clear.

Marguerite Duras, from an interview in Two By Duras:

Alcohol is irreplaceable. It's perfect. But it's death. I've almost always written on alcohol, and I've always been afraid. I've always been afraid that alcohol would prevent me from being logical, I've been afraid that it would show in my writing. Now, without alcohol, I'm  no longer afraid. But the moment I stopped drinking I was afraid I'd stop writing. The writing in books such as The Lover is, as a line of Baudelaire calls it, 'belle d'abandone', beautiful in its abandonment, in its loss. I've no idea if this abandonment has always been within me, forgotten. But it surfaced when I wrote The Lover. I wrote it without meaning to write, it happened[….] I didn't think about the style, I didn't think about how I'd write it, and when I started writing I felt that the book itself was the style. I had the impression of not writing at all, I don't remember having 'done the writer', as the Italians say.

The heart of The Lover is myself. I am the heart and all the rest of the book, because there's no literature there: only writing. These days no one writes. Or almost no one. There are books, books made out of books, and behind them there is no one.

… the clandestine nature of writing. I can only write for people if I don't know them.

I work a lot, very hard. I've always enjoyed working. Now I work without alcohol. I hope I'll be able to continue to work without alcohol. Because of my liver. I've ended up with a very small liver. That's terrible! Terrible because alcohol is so positive, so perfect, such a major occupation. There is nothing like alcohol. Just look at all the drunks in the taverns. They talk to themselves, they are perfectly happy, they are in harmony with their beings. They are like kings. They are the authentic kings of the world.

from Aharon Appelfeld's A Table For One:

Writing is a huge effort. But, unfortunately, even at my age, I cannot say that I've discovered the secret of writing. In writing, you are tested each time anew. A page where the words are set down on it right and flows – that is almost a miracle. When I finished the novella Badenheim 1939, I wept from sheer tiredness.

I never made a fuss about my writing. Everything I wrote was in cafes, mostly quiet cafes, but also in bustling, crowded cafes. It never bothers me when people talk. Many writers have tortured their families because the noise made it difficult for them to concentrate. True, literary writing isn't regular writing, but then, neither is it a disease requiring the hushed silence of those around it. I have a great deal of respect for an artist who doesn't impose his moods on those around him. Writing is a struggle, and it should be between you and yourself, without involving additional people.

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that God dwells everywhere. 'In the trees as well?' – 'In the trees too', he replied. – 'In the animals too?' – 'In animals too.' – 'In man as well?' – 'Man,' replied Grandfather, 'is the partner of God.' – 'Man is God?' I was shocked. 'No. But he has a little of God in him.' This conversation has been etched in my memory. Grandfather was a believer – he believed with his whole heart and all his soul. That belief of his was expressed in every gresture: the way he gripped any object, opened or closed a book, picked up a child and placed him on his knees. Sometimes I feel I have inherited his religious feelings from him. I never learned much from abstract ideas; the figures from my childhood and the experiences in the Holocaust are what stand before my eyes and have molded my thoughts.

[Perhaps Appelfeld is religious through the details of his books. Perhaps to record them is itself a kind of belief.]

After a few hours of writing, I would take a stroll, walking up to Agrippas Street, meandering about for an hour or two. Then I would return home. The stroll was a continuation of the writing.

There's no doubt that the Temple and prophecy are the pinnacle of faith, but only metaphysical poetry can attain such heights. Prose needs solid ground; it needs objects and a space whose dimensions you can relate to. The peaks of prophecy and revelation are just not possible in prose. Biblical prose, in contrast to prophecy, is factual; it recognises the weaknesses of man and does not demand divine attributes of flesh and blood. One can listen to the prophets, but it's impossible to draw near to them.

Cafe Peter was my first school for writing. There I learned that simple words are the precise ones, and that daily life is our most true expression.

The Fifth Rabbi

W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts at the end of his great study of Jewish Mysticism.

When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known – his name, and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery – would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

A generation later, the second Rabbi – his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life – confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and said, We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers. What he wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi – whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure – went to the woods and said, We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi – his name is well known, and he lived as we do - faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

There was a fifth rabbi – well, he wasn't really a rabbi – Scholem forgot, says W. His name is Lars and he writes everything about himself at his stupid blog. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was on Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of times.

Stammering and Stuttering

'Compare your life to mine', W. says. 'What does it make you feel?' He has a three storeyed Georgian house, and I have a shitty underground flat. He has Sal, a woman who loves him, and I have no one, and am essentially unloveable. He is liked and respected by his colleagues – they shake his hand in the cloister - whereas I skulk about trying to avoid everyone with whom I work. Where did I go so wrong?

You can't feign friendliness, W. says. You can't feign interest. In the end, the art of conversation is entirely alien to me. The art of greeting people. When he did try and teach me, it led to disaster. I bellowed. Hello!, I cried in my loudest voice. – 'You scared people'.

And I'm a stutterer, too, which makes things even worse. W.'s always amused when the power of speech deserts me, and my interlocutor has to guess what I want. It's at its worst when I have to say something urgently, or have to be succinct.

There's a great stammering and stuttering, W. says. A great foaming at the mouth. – 'You can't get a word out, can you?', W. says, laughing. 'My God! Why don't you gesture? Mime! What is it, ape boy? More food? Something else to drink?'

The Tohu Vavohu

Death is close, says W. Death has set out to find us, all of us. And this will be a death of a kind we cannot anticipate. A meteor-strike, the flaming sky, the stars falling from the heavens … We have no idea of what is to come, he says.

What idea could we have? How could we anticipate our annihilation? Death will be everywhere, W. says. The earth a flaming ball. Why does no one understand? He understands, though, insofar as he can understand. He gets it, and that makes him feel very alone.

It's the opposite of cosmogony, W. says. It's the return of the pell-mell, of chaos, of the tohu vavohu, he says, quoting Genesis. Of course, I should know a great deal about that, with my flat, W. says. I should know everything about it, with the damp spreading across my wall.

It's like fate, I've told him, the damp. The water streams down the wall. It weeps. And then my flat's tilting sideways. It's pitching into the earth. If you look at the skirting, I've told him, you'll see how far they are above the floorboards, which are sinking, along with the joists beneath them. Sinking and leaving a great gap between themselves and the skirting, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

I think it's smiling at me, the flat, I tell W. I think it's beginning to laugh at me.

A Double Suicide

A double suicide – is that the answer? But who would stab whom first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?

Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn't the end already overdue? Shouldn't it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We'll close our eyes at last. There'll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …

Infinite Audit Culture

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says. Broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! I love it, of course. I'm at it all day in my office. How do I even begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense?

I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from dayto day?

W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He's seen too much! He knows where it's heading! He's seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … What am I thinking about? What thought's struck me? But he knows I'm only full of administrative anxieties, and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

Non Serviam

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Bataille's the only Western philosopher to really understand sacrifice, haven't I told W. that? His work a kind of touchstone to me.

Poetry is the only sacrifice whose fire we can maintain, renew: W. read that in my notebook. But what does the poet sacrifice? That of which the poet would speak, perhaps – the world, in its living immediacy. The real world is substituted by an ideal one; the world rises anew on the page.

But then poetry depends upon more than signification. Isn't it the weight of language – its rhythms, its sonorities – which are the poet's chance?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its enslavement to the order of signification. Non serviam: that's the poet's motto, Bataille said. 

Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its clearings: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the the page of the poem to every page in every book …

The poem, then, is akin to a sacrificial fire. The heaviness of language is the poet's fuel. Bataille's poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And the poet? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from her death, her continual dying. And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), the reader burns in turn.

What happens when I write about him?, W. says. What, when I fill the blog with my nonsense? Isn't it enough that I've ruined his real life? Why do I want to ruin his ideal one, too?

Thinker-Friends

When did it begin, W.'s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother's caravan park, he says, as a child. He made friends there. – 'Working class friends, like you', he says. 'Except unlike you they had a sense of loyalty'. They wouldn't betray him!

That was the fundamental rule: there was no betrayal. If one fell, when chased by the police, they would stop and carry him. If one was accused, the others would take the blame, each of them, in his place. It was like Spartacus, W. says. The cadre was what was important. The team. And hasn't that been what's he's sought ever since?

If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of four hundred miles away, that would be something. We're islands, he says. We're stranded at the opposite ends of the country.

He dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-swarm, who would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

A Scholar of the Coast

Stonehouse. It's a rough part of Plymouth, W. admits, but he's happy there. – 'You should always live among the poor', he says. We thread through the refugees who gather at the end of the road. They're always standing about outside, the refugees, the sun on their faces, W. says. He likes that. They're men of the street, as he is. But where are their womenfolk? Where do they live? It's a mystery to him, W. says.

We're heading to the sea. That's what Plymouth means to him, essentially, W. says, proximity to the sea. He has to see it!, W. says. He has to be near it! It's as essential as oxygen for him. He is a scholar of the coast, W. says, which means he's bound to end up living inland, far inland, when he loses his job. He's a scholar of fresh air, which means he'll end up somewhere underground and fetid, just like me, W. says.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck little metal pillars into the road, with the names of famous residents written on them. What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality?

We pay to enter the lighthouse, and ascend its winding staircase. It was moved from the breakwater, the lighthouse, W. says when we reach the top. It's only ornamental now, with its red and white stripes. The real lighthouse is much further out to sea. We squint over the waves. The horizon is only ever three miles away, W. tells me. It's not as far as you think.  

W. takes me to his favourite cafe, to see if we can find the young Pole who used to serve us. He wants me to have a romantic interest, W. says. He wants to see me stutter and fumble. He wants to see me pucker my lips for a kiss. But she isn't there, and he has to listen to my caffeine theories instead, as he sips his cappuccino.

'You'll have to document all this', W. says as we walk through the shopping arcades. 'You need to document my Plymouth years'. W. takes me on a pointing tour of his favourite buildings.

I take photos of him pointing to particular architectural features he admires. He points to the brown facade of the new arts and community building. He points to the decrepit Palace Theatre. He tells me again how the old city was razed to the ground by the Luftwaffe, and how it was rebuilt in the 50s, according to the Abercrombie Plan.

I take a picture of him pointing directly up into the sky, from where the Luftwaffe came, and then, standing on a bench, pointing directly at the earth, where they deposited their bombs. I ask a passerby to take a photo of W. pointing at me, and of me pointing at him, and, finally, of W. and I pointing at one another.

The Temple of Scholarship

I take photos to document W.'s house. I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with its internal shutters over the windows and its marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.

I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of W. and Sal's friends. I always ask why there isn't a picture of me there, but they never reply.

Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high old skirting board. The high windows, newly restored. The king sized fireplace …

It's here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I. It's here, late at night, that I make him listen in silence to Khartoum and Khartoum Variations. W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to it with him. Sal never stays for Jandek. – 'I hate fucking Jandek', she says. 'Don't play him while I'm in the house', she says.

I document the great bathroom, too - the greatest of bathrooms, we're all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The generosity of the airing cupboard, with its many towels. The copies of Uncut by the toilet. The stained glass window.

It's indescribably horrifying to W., the thought of leaving his house. But he'll have to leave it, he's knows that. They'll sack him. They'll drive him out of his city.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s office. His bookshelves – not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ('I don't hoard them, like you', he says), but all the essentials. His Hebrew dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His row of Rosenzweigs.

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. folds out the sofabed and dresses it. He draws the curtains and makes it look homely. He has to fumigate the room after I live, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship. How does he do that? He opens a volume of Cohen, W. says, and says my name backwards three times.

Then, finally, W. and Sal's room, calm, generous and large windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. It's where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.

'Compare this house to your flat', W. says. 'What does it make your feel?' I'm a failure, W. says, but then so's he. These are his last days in his house, he knows it. His last days … he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It's building up out there, W. says, it's massing, like the stormclouds over Plymouth Sound.

They'll turn him from his house, and from the temple of his scholarship. He'll have to wander the streets like a rat. – 'They'll turn us all out', W. says, 'even you'. I'll have to stagger out from my pit. They'll prise me out like a grub, W. says. They'll put out my eyes with sticks, just as they'll deafen him with sticks.   

Buried Alive

Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I'm always amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite delirious. I can barely contain my excitement. It's as if I'd never eaten before. She can only imagine what kind of life I lead.

She refuses to visit my flat, of course. It's too squalid. And there's rubble in the shower. How do I wash? Do I wash? And there's no food, of course. Nothing. I can't have food in my house, I've told them, because I eat it all. I binge. I stuff myself. I make myself ill almost immediately. So there's no food.

Then, too, I've no fridge, and nowhere to store food. There's no electricity in the kitchen, and besides, it's dismantled, ready for another round of damp-proofing. The walls are so wet! it's like touching the skin of a frog. It's clammy.

Sal can imagine a terrible plague spreading from the flat. A new kind of illness, which travels by damp spores. And the flat's so dark! It's like being buried underground, staying at the flat, she says. It's like being buried alive. And you haven't told her about the rats yet, W. says.

… Bresson thought of 'performance' as something the entire film was doing, not just the 'actors' in it. The actor is one instrument, along with framing, lighting, editing, and sound, and it is usually these elements that displace the most dramatic 'actorly' scenes. In place of facial expressions of tension and rage, for example, we see falling objects, toppling tables, a skimmer clattering across the floor, impeccably shot and cut, and piercing the sonic compusre of the moment. We 'hear' and 'see' the emotion reverberating through space, often without the agent that sparked it.

One remembers a Bresson film not for a performance but for the accumulated effect of the world created. This is beyond a theory of acting.

The word scene, tied to the narrative film tradition since Griffith, the one Bresson labels 'cinema', is a component of dramatic structure of the rising and falling action type. Scenes crystallise tensions in the story, bring emotions to the surface, and move toward a climax. They excel in expressive and expository dialogue and the clashing of conflicting wills. Acting is the primary vehicle of scenes …

… whereas a scene has a certain settling-in quality in which actors move about and speak freely as if the camera did not exist and the word cut were not an imminent threat, a sequence in almost any Bresson film after 1950 minimises or dispenses with acting and expansive dialogue, neutralises features essential to the dramatic thrust of a scene, and shifts the burden of carrying tensions, conflicts, and emotions to the cinematographic register: to framing, editing, and, even more tellingly, to off screen space and sound.

… The less a film is broken down into scenes, the more momentum it is capable of building and the more inexorable seems its trajectory.

from Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film

Bubbles of Blood

'Have we been good?, W. asks me. 'Have we led good lives?' Ah, but it's too late now. We've been struck, left for dead. Struck, knocked over, and our assailant zoomed away. We wander in the wake, dazed, white-faced. What happened? Who did this to us? But we have no idea. We're out of ideas, and dying of internal injuries, our insides pooling with blood …

Our last words: is it time for them? Last words, but it's only bubbles of blood that speak; only blood tricking from the corners of our mouths.

The Reality of My Situation

Where death is, you are not, says Epicetus. Where I am, I should not be, that's the truth of it, W. says. Do I understand, really understand, the reality of my situation?, W. says. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I'm not really aware of myself, says W., which is my saving grace. Because if I was …

It's enough that W. knows. It's enough that he's aware of the reality of my situation. He tells other people about it, but they scarcely believe him. They have to blot it out. Screen memories replace real ones. When he tells them about me, about the reality of my situation, they recall only owls with spread wings swooping through the night.

My Very Existence on Earth

'You drink too much', W. says. 'Mind you, I'd drink if I had your life'. Why doesn't someone put me out of my misery? Why don't I book myself into a suicide clinic? Do I have any sense of the disgust my very existence of earth should engender? But then, how could I? It would be like a pig that developed a disgust at its own excrement. I'd live in contradiction. I'd breach the law of the excluded middle. I would exist knowing only that I should cease to exist, and how could that be endured?

The Copula

At the bus stop, W. tells me about his current intellectual projects. They can be summed up under the general heading, capitalism and religion, he says. The 'and' is designed to be provocative, W. says. He wants to provoke the new atheists, he says.

There's nothing more infuriating than the new atheists, W. says as the bus comes. Nothing worse than what they take religion to be. He wants to show that belief in a world beyond this world has nothing to do with religion, he says. Religion has to do with what is sober, real and objective, he says. The true object of religious belief has always been this world, the world as it currently is.

Of course, by religion, it's Judaism he has in mind. And by Judaism, he has in mind the Judaism of Cohen and Rosenzweig. If only the new atheists could read Rosenzweig and Cohen, W. says. If only he could read, really read, Rosenzweig and Cohen! , he says.

Capitalism and religion. What's the significance of the copula? What does it mean to think one alongside the other? Of course, he'd appreciate my input as a Hindu, W. says. What would a Hindu make of all this?, he wonders. But he knows I have no answer. My Hinduism has no depth, W. says. He can't believe in it, not really. – 'Convince me', he says. 'Convince me you're a Hindu. In what does your Hinduism consist?'

He still remembers when I first told him of my Hinduism. I'm a Hindu, I said, and he laughed until beer came out of his nostrils. Where was it? In Freiburg? In Wroclaw? It's as improbable today, my Hinduism.

'You know nothing about it!', W. says. If he drew a Venn diagram called Hinduism and a Venn diagram called Lars, where would they intersect?

But about capitalism, now. I might have something to say about capitalism. For wasn't it in my long periods of warehouse work and unemployment that I came into contact with the essence of capitalism?

Capitalism and religion. Somehow, I'm the key to his project, W. says. I'm the key to the copula, though he's not sure how. In some way or another, I'll be his Virgil, W. says. I'll lead him through the circles of my hell.

A Plymouth Pole

At Whitesands, the bus stops to let on a group of Poles, no doubt some of the migrants who have moved to Plymouth in the last few years. W. has a great admiration for them, he says, the Poles of Plymouth. They've brought grace to his city. Grace and refinement.

As we take the ferry across to Devonport, W. muses upon the troubled history of Poland – how the borders of the country have moved outward and inward over the centuries like a concertina, accompanying the melancholy music of war, genocide and occupation, the great lament of Old Europe. He hears it still, W. says. It sounds through his blood. Didn't his father's family come to England, generations ago, because of old European pogroms? Isn't he, too, a Polish immigrant?

We remember the Polish waitress who served us at W.'s favourite cafe. How gentle she was! How generous! She had everything we lacked, he says. A delicate intelligence. Wit. I was moved, W. says. Even he could see that. I blushed. I fumbled for words.

I should find myself a Plymouth Pole, W. says. That might be my way to redemption.

Hinduism for Idiots

You can only get so far as a Hindu scholar with Hinduism for Idiots as your guide, W. says. Why haven't I learnt that yet?

You don't actually know anything, do you?, W. says. 'You've got no body of knowledge. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course, and he can play classical guitar. And there are whole oeuvres with which he is familiar. He's read his way through Husserl, for example. He's not bewildered by Leibniz. – 'You see, I know something. What do you know?'

Socrates knew he knew nothing: that was his wisdom, and the beginning of all wisdom, W. says. But there's a difference between knowing nothing and knowing nothing, he says. There's a difference between knowing you know nothing and setting forth again in your ignorance, and wallowing in your ignorance like a hippo in a swamp.

'You don't want to know', W. says. And I'm drinking to forget what little I did know. There's nothing left for me, he says. Nothing but the empty sky, and the Zen-like emptiness of my head.

The Mandrill of Romance

You have to court women, W. says. You can't just jump into bed with them. He courted Sal for eight months, he says. He plied her with gin, and she made him mix tapes. It was best of times, W. says. The uncertainty. The intoxication.

But what would I know of all that? There's no tenderness in me, W. says. Lust, yes. A kind of animal craving. Foam on the lips. I'm like one of those monkeys in the zoo with an inflamed ass – what are they called? Oh yes, mandrills. I'm the mandrill of romance, W. says.  

Ascetics

Man is the sacrifice, say the holy texts. In sacrifice, the priest identifies with what is offered into the flames. If it is ghee, the priest becomes the dripping ghee. If it is a cake of vegetables, then the priest is each of the vegetables. The priest re-enacts the death of Prajapati, the Lord of the gods and the first sacrificer, whose dismemberment was also the birth of the world. Then the priest dies to let the fire be reborn. He dies as offering; he offers by proxy his lower life, the dross of his body, to the sacrificial flame.

The ascetic likewise is a kind of living fire, I tell W. Upon ordination, he lies on an unlit funeral bier. His marriage is dissolved, his possessions redistributed, and he is released from his duties to his ancestors. He is a dead man – but he's also become deathless, for another part of him has transcended his earthly body. He's sacrificed himself; he's a living sacrifice, a living torch, even as he wanders alone, greeting no one, asking for no alms, and showing indifference in his dealings with all things.

Rubbing himself with ashes, sitting in a thorn bush or on a bed of nails, the ascetic aims only at self-liberation, at escaping rebirth. As he starves, his soul, atman, glows brighter in his eyes. As he thirsts, his inner fire licks up to God. As his limbs atrophy, he is God alive on earth; his soul, atman, is at one with Brahman. That's why it is an honour for the householder to receive the ascetic as a guest. It is why feeding the ascetic is the greatest of boons.

Is that why he feeds me?, W. wonders. Is that why he took me in? I've destroyed everything. I've left it all behind. And am I not compelling him, too, to leave his life behind - his career, his intellectual reputation? We're wandering as ascetics, naked but for loincloths, our ricebowls our only possession. We're wandering in living sacrifice, ascetic-idiots, humiliating ourselves in service to God: that's how I see it, isn't it?

Man is the Sacrifice

Only God can make an offering to God, I tell W. That's why the priest making the sacrifice must undergo a purification. It's why an internal purification of trusting readiness, of the immersion in meditation, must be accompanied by the renewal of the forehead mark and the washing of the mouth.

Only God may worship God; but how does one become God? By sacrifice, say the holy texts. In the public rites of the srauta, milk, curds and ghee are offered to the fire, or sometimes vegetable cakes or stalks of the soma plant instead. Sometimes an animal sacrifice is necessary; there are even human sacrifices – though its victims were set free and a proxy burned in their place.

Fire brings these offerings as smoke to the sun. And when rain comes from the sky, a kind of cycle is completed: plants grow, crops grow and the creatures of the earth are nourished. But if God is to worship God, there must be another kind of sacrifice. If God is to return to God; if that cycle, too, is to be completed, then one must sacrifice oneself.

Man is the sacrifice, say the holy texts. To light the fire as a priest is to set oneself aflame. How else is the dross of one's lower life to be burned away? How else is the altar to truly become the falcon that soars up to the heavens? Man is the sacrifice; only God can make an offering to God: then the goal of all purification must be to die for the world, to take the world into oneself and let it burn.

And it is to absorb heaven, too. For the holy texts tell us also that the gods themselves are sacrifice. The gods, too, are vessels to be smashed; they, too, must be set aflame if there is to be a sacrifice. If you see the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha. For the Hindu, the god is only a portal to God, and fire opens the door. The god is the wick and God the flame; the gods burn even as the soul of the priest springs up in the fire.

I'm offering him to the flames too, aren't I?, W. says, shuddering. His life, his whole career … Haven't I destroyed them both? It's all leading in one direction, he says. It's like The Wicker Man.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

Genet, interviewed

Speaking of my readers, once I was walking through the Flores neighborhood on a very solitary street and I crossed paths with a man who said, “Hi, Aira!” I looked at him thinking, “Where do I know him from?” And he said, “Don’t worry, you don’t know me, I’m a reader, a humble reader.” Humble reader? He might be a humble reader of Isabel Allende. A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I’m so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

Cesar Aira, interviewed