Lars Iyer's Blog

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant, or Wittgenstein. – 'Did they have a Diogenes room?', W. asks. 'A Diogenes barrel?'

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I've told him that. The Octavo Notebooks. Bits from the diaries and letters. I'd keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I told him. It was like a fairytale giant burying his heart in a chest in the middle of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, that's what I said. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in a Swiss chalet style?

I knew something was missing. I knew what was missing in me was in secret accord with the sky above the dry ski slope. I knew it was the opposite, in some sense, of what hid itself in the Octavo Notebooks. I had a sense of things, W. will give me that. I was saturated by the everyday.

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machines. I stared off through the windows. I'd plant myself in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

… the same sky … it has to be the same. Nothing has changed. Except the overwhelming overturning of nothing.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

'This wood, for example. That field. And that – what is that?' A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. thinks it's only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. – 'You were looking for something', he says. 'You knew something was missing'.

He sees it in his mind's eye: I'm carrying my bike over the railyway bridge. I'm cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I'm following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I'm looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I'm looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of gods. The everyday: and now he thinks of the famous passage from Blanchot:

an absence that all has since always forevermore been lost therein – so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.

Sacrifice exists for itself in Hinduism, independently of humans, and even independently of the gods, that's what I told him, W., and he often ponders it.

Then it doesn't matter whether priests tend the sacrifice? It doesn't matter whether offerings are made to the fire?, W. says. The fire is in all things already, burning, I tell W. It's already there as the destruction of those things, as their ruin.

What does it mean? Either way, what matters is to become the sacrifice, I've told him. What matters is to awaken the highest Self, Atman.

Is that what I attempt to accomplish in our presentations?, W. wonders. Is it to sacrifice – the burning nature of all things – I aspire in my ongoing ruination of my life? Undoubtedly.

But W., too, is being caught in the sacrifice. What's happened to him since he took up with me? He's going down, everyone has told him that. He's be warned! Reprimanded! Don't hang out with Lars: the advice has been quite categorical.

Do I want to sacrifice him, too? Will he be cast upon the sacrificial fire?

Why do I want to humiliate myself?, W. wonders. Why, over and again? – 'Your presentations. Your books …' It's a mystery to him. Is it masochism? Undoubtedly. But this masochism itself has a source. It's Hindu, W. says. It must be.

Didn't I tell him one fevered night about the centrality of sacrifice in Hinduism? Of the 400 kinds of sacrifice detailed in the Vedas? Of the correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm, of cosmogony and anthropogony?

Of the horse sacrifice – the most splendid of all -when a stallion was sent out to wander through the world for a year, before being ritually suffocated? Of the dismemberment of the horse, and the offering of its parts to different deities? Of the divine power of the horse, harnessed by the queen's symbolic copulation with the dead stallion? And of the king who receives this divine power in turn, and for whom the sacrifice only magnifies his glory?

Didn't I insist that to sacrifice and to be sacrificed were essentially the same? That it is the self that is immolated in the sacrificial fire, even as it is the same self that is purified and becomes one with God? I told him the only authentic sacrifice was suicide. That the victim of the sacrifice – whether human or animal -  is only a substitute and a proxy.

Light the sacrificial fire in the Hindu religion, and it is you yourself you set aflame, I've told W. You sacrifice yourself, but this reveals the continual sacrifice that is your ultimate or highest self, Atman.

The Atman itself is sacrifice: didn't I tell W. that? Then sacrifice is not only a matter of destruction. Didn't Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, create the world by dismembering himself in sacrifice? Wasn't it then that the all – the universal whole and totality -divided itself into the three worlds and four quarters of the manifest universe? Wasn't it thus that the Cosmic One, the principle of unity and uniformity, gave way to the sundered world of gods and men, the sacred and the profane?  

Dismembered, scattered, Prajapati begged Agni, the god of the sacrificial fire, to put him back together. He begged him to reunify heaven, middle space and the earth; he begged for his fragments to be rejoined to the whole. And it was thus that the five parts of his body – hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow – became the five layers of the sacrificial altar. It was thus that Agni lent his own body – the eternal flame – to the sacrificial fire. Henceforward, it was through oblation, through the offering to the fire that the universal whole and totality would revealed itself anew. It was through the ritual of burning that the moral and the immortal were rejoined anew.

Now he understands, W. says, or he thinks he understands: my life, the disaster of my life, is an attempt to belong to the sacrifice.

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.

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, but that was a disaster. He stopped me continually touching my skin through my shirt, and tried to correct my tics.

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.

I could speak – I even spoke well – but with the urgency of a preacher, or an apocalypticist. – 'You thought it was all about to end, didn't you? That this was the day of judgement'. People were impressed at first then frightened. But W. admired my pathos.

Scholarship by any means necessary, that's what I embodied. Scholarship without any ability whatsoever at scholarship, except the need to show scholarship. I can't go on, but I'll go on anyway, that was it, wasn't it? I can't go on, and I never even began …

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. He became my secret advocate.

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?

What was I like back then, when we first met?, W. wonders It was a long time ago. I was a little raw, a little rough, he says. I knew little of the finer things in life. He introduced me to coffee beans and coffee grinding. He encouraged me in my study of ancient and modern languages. He taught me to pronounce the words hyperbole and synecdoche.

It was a bit like Oscar Wilde and Bosie, W. says. Wouldn't he have defended himself like Wilde at his trial by evoking the model of the Greeks: of a man in a tutelary relationship with a beardless youth? Of course, I wasn't beardless, and nor was I young. I was already vast. Already Divine to his John Waters, and like Borges's Baldanders, I wouldn't stop growing.

I show W. a book of photos of Deleuze and Guattari from the 70s, with their flares and long hair. Look at them! They were having a good time. – 'They had ideas', W. says. 'They were changing the world'.

Anti-Oedipus has just been published as a Penguin Classic. – 'It's being fossilised', W. says. 'Antiquated!' How many times have I read that book? It's one of the few books I have read, and I read it again and again, each summer. W.'s always amazed.

'It's like Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies to you, isn't it?' It's like the cut wide bird of an augur. – 'You think you can divine the future from its guts. You can see anything there. Anything at all'. In the end, it's no better than reading tea leaves. - 'It doesn't mean anything to you, does it? Have you ever really read a page?'

But is W. any better? Does he understand, really understand anything he reads? But he feels the need to read it, as I do. He feels the need to protect it, to fill his notebooks with quotations and to become a walking, talking library of philosophy, like one of the book lovers of Farenheit 451.

We sit behind Poles on the bus, some of the new Poles of Plymouth. W. has a great admiration for them. They've brough grace to his city. Grace and refinement. We remember the waitress who served us at W.'s favourite cafe. How gentle she was! How generous! She had a delicate intelligence, W. says. Wit. Smiling, playful eyes.

I should find myself a Plymouth Pole, W. says. That might be my chance, W. says. I might be redeemed.

As we take the ferry across to Devonport, W. considers the history of Poland – how the borders of the country have moved outward and inward over the centuries like a concertina, and of the melancholy music of its wars, genocides and occupations. It's the sound of old Europe, W. says. A great lament. He hears it still!

Of course, it's in his blood. Didn't his family come to Britain, generations ago, because of old European pogroms? He too, in some sense, is a Polish immigrant.

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?

'We tried to tell them, didn't we?', says W. Yes, we tried to tell them. – 'We tried to warn them?' Yes, we tried to warn them. Our lives were living warnings. We all but set ourselves on fire. We all but soiled ourselves in public. – 'Actually, you did soil yourself in public, didn't you?', W. says.

'The elephant in the room was your stupidity', W. says after our presentation. 'Actually, you were the elephant in the room. My God, you're fatter than ever'.

Sometimes he feels like Fay Wray clutched in the hand of King Kong. He wants to scream and scream. – 'You're monstrous!' Sometimes, though he's amused by my size: he feels like John Waters to my Divine, and wants to make me eat dog shit like in Pink Flamingoes.