Lars Iyer's Blog

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck in little metal pillars with the names of famous residents written on them.

What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality? Surely someone should keep a record, if only as a cautionary tale. Blind Alleys, that's what it should be called, W. says. Or, A Wild Goose Chase, though that makes it sound too exciting. Stupidity – now that would be a title! Nice and simple! Or, How Not To Think. Very instructive!

Above all, we need to warn off others, to tell them not to make our mistakes. Shouldn't our lives be fenced off in some way, as with a cliff that is crumbling away into the sea? A Path Not To Follow: that could be the title. The Way of Idiocy: that could be another.

How many times have I betrayed him?, W. wonders. I'm on every page of his Book of Betrayals. He's always taken detailed notes. And there are pictures, too. W. wants to remember everything. Everything! One day, he's going to read his notes to me and show me all his pictures, he says. One day, standing at the head of the bed like Saint Peter, he's going to read me the great list of my betrayals and show me the pictures.

It's going to end in a stabbing, W. says. Someone's going to stab me. I bring them on myself, W. says, the nutters and the weirdoes. I'm like a nutter-and-weirdo Messiah, W. says, which means I'm undoubtedly doing to get stabbed. He's always wondered what they see in me, these mad men and women. What draws them to me? Why is it me they pick out from the crowd? But they do pick me out. They follow me, buttonhole me, write incessant emails to me; he knows; I've shown them to him; they're terrifying.

More terrifying still is his role in all this. Is he a nutter? A weirdo? The worst of the nutters, the worst of the weirdoes, I tell him, which terrifies him all the more. Sometimes he thinks the whole world, the whole crazy world is nothing but a fever-dream of mine. The whole world – and him included, him, W., included, his thoughts being nothing other than my thoughts, his life a dream-muddled version of my own. Does he even exist, independently of me? Can he even lay claim to his own existence?

W. can never really understand the everyday, he knows that. There's a limit to his capacities; even a kind of blindspot. What could he, who has always had his intellectual projects, his reading and writing projects, understand of the stagnation of the everyday? What could he know of its infinite wearing away, its infinite banalities?

A man who hasn't been brought to his knees by the everyday can have no understanding of the everyday, says W. aphoristically. But I have been brought to my knees thus, W. says, that much is clear. I spent whole years on my knees, haven't I told him exactly that?

W. wants to hear about my illnesses, he says. He wants to hear about my unemployment, he never tires of it. 'What did you do all day?', he asks me, and when I shrug, he says, 'take me through it. Take me through one of your days'. There's no point, I tell him. He'll never understand. - 'Did you drink a lot?', W. asks. 'is that how you got through it?' Sometimes I drank, I tell him. Sometimes I did nothing at all. I looked out of the window, I tell him. I watched the raindrops bead and run down the window.

But W. can never understand. Imagine if he lost his job, I tell him. Imagine, his job lost, if Sal left him (Sal would never leave him, W. says), and he was stranded in a room, a single room, for year after year. He'd become a kind of cosmonaut, all lines cut, tumbling into space. Tumbling, getting further and further away, utterly lost …

But he'd have his reading, W. says, and his writing. He'd have his intellectual projects. Couldn't he get down, really get down, to learning maths? Couldn't he finally master classical Greek, getting past the aorist which always floors him?

Ah, but he'd soon tire of such tasks, I tell him. They would leave him behind; his project would belong to someone else, living another life. The infinite wearing away: that's what W. would have to fear, I tell him, and for a moment, he says, he feels it, it's terrible. No more reading and writing, he says. Books stranded on a desk, open and with no one to read them (the air reads. The white light reads.) And he'd be watching raindrops bead and run down the windows …

I approach the everyday like a kind of mystic, W. has come to learn that. No one understands it better than me. No one is as fitted as I am to understand it; it's my special gift. The ordinary, the banal, become the extraordinary and the infinitely interesting for me, W. knows that. I'm like a cosmonaut of the everyday, or a deep sea diver. A stroll up the street becomes a kind of spacewalk for me; to put one foot in front of another is already enough. Everything is there, everything reveals itself.

Of course, I'm a creature of the suburbs, and can only be understood there. I'm never more at home than in the suburbs, whatever I say about the suburbs, W. says. It's their anonymity, W. says. It's their near-infinite expanse. Hasn't he visited the suburbs with me? Hadn't he thought himself lost there, until I guided him out? – 'You have a kind of instinct', W. says. 'You could never get lost'.

I'm at my most moving when I tell W. stories of my childhood in the suburbs, he says. I grew up in the suburbs, and when I was older, worked there. – 'Tell me about your warehouse years', says W. repeatedly. It's very important to him, my years in the warehouse. 'You had no hope, did you? You had nothing to live for'.

That's where my intellectual awakening occurred, W. knows, there in the warehouse. – 'Tell me about it again!' I can never tell him enough, although he knows all the details. Kafka's The Castle. A stairway that led nowhere. There on infinitely long lunchbreaks, the rain pounding on the metal roof, I put down The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, and picked up The Castle, W. remembers. That's when it began, didn't it?

'What was your job title?', W. always asks me. 'What were your duties?' I sought out UTLs, I tell W. Unable-to-locates. I searched high and low in the warehouse. I inspected log books and van manifests. I scrolled through great lists on the computer. I quizzed my fellow workers, and all in the name of unable-to-locates. Of course, when I found them, I only hid them more deeply, I tell W. It wasn't worth the paperwork, a found UTL. The insurance would pay for everything, after all, I tell W. My boss said as much. Everybody said so. What mattered was that I looked busy, that was the consensus. What mattered is that everyone thought I was on the track of UTLs.

'And what about Kafka?', W. always asks. 'What about The Castle?' I can't remember when it happened exactly, I tell him. I can't remember how I came into possession of the book. Did I get it from the library? Did someone lend it to me? But there it was, nonetheless. It found me, I always tell W., and he finds this very satisfying. It found me, it appeared for me, there in the warehouse, I tell W., where I might have spent the rest of my life reading The Mammoth Book of Fantasy and books like The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, I tell W.

But nevertheless, I put down The Mammoth Book of Fantasy and picked up The Castle, that's when it began, I tell W. That's when the everyday started to reveal itself to me as such, I tell W. This is the part of the story W. always finds most mysterious. He's asked about it repeatedly. He's demanded explanations, but I am unable to explain it. What has The Castle got to do with the everyday?, says W. insistently. What did it reveal to me concerning the everyday?

I can't put it into words, I tell W. It's mystical, I tell W. Somehow, The Castle doubled up the everyday, I tell him. It allowed the everyday to double itself up; to become experiencable as such, I tell him. Everything depends upon this 'as such'. I became a kind of cosmonaut, as W. says. I became a deep sea diver of the suburbs, air lines cut, W. says, slowly drowning, but slowly learning to breathe at the bottom of the sea.

He finds the suburbs unbearable, W. says. They won't allow him to breathe. But I, for my part, am never happier than when I'm there. I'm mystically happy, he says, beatific. It's always a great expedition for me, W. says, the trip to the suburbs. – 'You warehouse years', W. says, 'that's the secret'. And then, 'The Castle', he says, 'that's the secret'.

There's no point bringing any books in his man bag on one of our trips, W. says, because soon he'll be too drunk to read. And there's no point carrying his notebook either, because soon he'll be too drunk to think. Why does my presence make him drink so much?, W. asks. What is it about me? He wants only to drink until he passes out, W. says. He wants oblivion, he says, and this must have something to do with me.

What has he learned?, W. muses. What are his four noble truths? He knows only that I am wrong, and that I have always been in the wrong. He's certain of that.

Could he, given such the indubitability of such a starting point, begin to reconstruct his sense of things, like Descartes? Could he, having reached such a realitatpunkt, begin building everything up again?

No. From the realitatpunkt of my stupidity, there's nothing to build, and nothing that can be built. The realitatpunkt must destroy everything.

W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes. – 'Your rolls of fat', says W.

It was like Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen me naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.

The signs are coming more quickly now, we agree. The current's quickening, as it does when a river approaches the waterfall. And who are we who can read such tell tale signs? To whom has the secret begun to reveal itself?

The apocalypse will reveal God's plan for us all, that's what it says in the Bible. And if there is no God? No plan, either. We're lost, quite lost, as the signs quicken. My life, for example. W.'s. Our friendship; our collaboration. Signs, all signs, which in turn enable us to read signs, as though our lives, our friendship was only a fold in the apocalypse, a way for it to sense its own magnitude.

How long has he been reading Rosenzweig?, W wonders. It's like rain hitting a tin roof. Nothing goes in. It makes no impression. But at least he does read; at least there is the steady rhythm of his non-understanding that beats against his intelligence. He knows his limits, W. says, because they are constantly tested. He has a sense of what he does not know.

But I have no such sense; I err with no knowledge that I err. My ignorance is happy, almost innocent. Many times, W. has tried to teach me shame, but I'm a poor pupil. -'It's the purity of your idiocy', W. always says. 'It protects you'.

Our friends, what has happened to our friends? W. dreamt we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all; that we would be, standing together, a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamt we'd mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs. But he was wrong, terribly wrong, for news has come that they are turning on one another, our friends, just as we, one day, will turn upon one another, W. says.

It has to happen; he sees that now. It has to fall apart. Wasn't his dream, always, that we could hold back the apocalypse? But we will not hold it back; the apocalypse begins with what is closest to us. And what's my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand? Et tu, idiot?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs. Et tu?, as he sees my face is only that of the apocalypse …

My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.

How could I understand what I've unleashed?, W. wonders. Does the storm understand that it is a storm? Does the earthquake know that it is an earthquake? I will never understand, says W.; that's my always appealing innocence.

It's time for the reckoning, W. says. It's reached that point. But with whom might he reckon? How to tackle an enemy who has no idea he's an enemy?

Can you see me burning?, W. asks me in his dream. He's on fire! What am I to do? Put him out – but with what? But then I, in his dream, understand: I am the fire. I am what makes him burn.

What will happen the next day – the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. asks. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear? That the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can't avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it's all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he's sure not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It's my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

'If you knew, if you really knew' … but I don't know, says W. I have intimations of it, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

I am less and less able to listen to the presentations of others, W. notes. He can see it on my face. I can never hide it. At one point, he says I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.

What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don't I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water?

There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the Mersey, when I full intended to catch a ferry, he says. Then there was our aborted Thames trip, the boating expedition all the way upriver … How disappointed I had been!

Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which there gusts the wind of pure idiocy.

Retrospective redemption, that's what W.'s holding out for. It will have made sense, he says. It will always have made sense from the perspective of redemption, that's what he hopes. But there's little sign of it, he concedes. In fact, it's getting worse.

He hears the dull rumble of thunder, W. says. The storm is coming; lightning could flash down at any time. But why does no one else hear it? Why does no one but him know the signs? Make it stop!, W. wants to cry – but to whom? Make it stop! – but not to me, who is only part of the catastrophe, only a catastrophic scrap torn off to torment him.

What is hell?, W. muses. It's when friend falls upon friend, he says. I would turn upon him, wouldn't I? I'm always about to. I'm already poised …

When friend turns upon friend, that will be the sign, says W. But then hasn't our friendship always involved a turning against him, W.? Hasn't it always meant the destruction of friendship? Yes, that's what W.'s concluded: it is nothing but the destruction of friendship in friendship and as friendship.

My indifference to the idea of God has always disappointed W. He likes to imagine me in another life, he says, as a young priest wandering around in the fields, raising my fist at God's absence.

Sometimes W. thinks we should write a book on God. On God! Imagine! Of course, W. doesn't understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by this word. But at the same time, his own absence of belief seems to him entirely a matter of a blockage of thought, and what he can only describe as a kind of dullness and opacity.

He doesn't have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says; he doesn't know what that means. When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he's come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It's not because he thinks there's some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach – quite the contrary – but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and it is all because of some personal stupidity.

But what would I contribute to our book on God?, W. asks. What would I bring to the project? – 'You could explain your indifference', W. says. 'And then you could draw some cocks'.

Up early, we step into the sun, out to find a cafe. Another day full of possibilities! – 'Which we will crush', says W.

'Have you had any thoughts yet?', W. asks me. None, I tell him.  'It's like Zen', says W. 'Pure absence'.

I should work more, W. tells me. An hour a day, that's all he asks. If I can't work at home, then in the office. And if I can't work in the office, then I should find a cafe.

My assignment this summer, W. says, is to investigate the work of Rosenstock-Heussy. He will continue to read Cohen, he says – he's just bought a book on logic by Cohen from ABE books for 180 Euro – and my task is to investigate the not especially well known work of Rosenstock-Heussy. That way, W. says, we can approach our principal philosophical topic in a pincer movement.

Weil: The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

W.'s proper method of philosophy, he says, consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problem of my stupidity in all its insolubility and then in simply contemplating it, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting, knowing it will never, ever change.

Literature was our great curse, W. says. To be fascinated by something of which we would always be incapable. And it's not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our heads against them, over and over again, like idiots.

I close my eyes. – 'What are you contemplating?', W. asks. 'Your next magnum opus?'

'You have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can't do, in your case, everything', W. says. 'Where do you think your strengths lie?', and then, 'do you have any strengths?'

What sort of literature would W. write, if he could? – 'I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you'.

'You drink too much, that's your problem', W. tells me. 'Mind you, I'd drink if I had your life'. He'd slope off to the bars every evening as I do, W. says. He'd drink himself stupid in the corner of a pub.

How do I bear it, my day to day reality?, W. asks. But it's quite clear: I don't bear it. My life is in a state of collapse, anyone can see it. I'm in the final act, W. always tells himself. It can't go on, can it? But it does go on, W. says. Empires have collapsed more slowly.

A series of jerks and tics, like those of a hanged man in his final death throes; a series of involuntary and grotesque spasms: that will have been my life, W. says. It's not even desperation; it's more basic than that.

There's a rebellion at the level of my bare existence, W. says. - 'You shouldn't exist. You should never have been born': that's what my body knows. It's what I know at some abysmal level. And meanwhile, there I am twitching over the void, a man half-hung, neck broken …

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad – very bad – and at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Of course, my tendency is to scare them off, W. says. It's to bellow and fuss and deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. tries to keep quiet, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who can go back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe them with soft words and sympathy.

It won't be that bad, he tells them. Don't listen to him. Or: don't worry, everything's going to be fine. Ignore him, he's an idiot. – 'But in their hearts they know', W. says. 'They know what's going to happen'.

It all ends here, with us, The Star of Redemption open on our desks, doesn't it? It's completely at an end, a whole civilisation. Who allowed it? Who got us into this mess? Who raised our aspirations to the sky, by setting the great books amongst us? Who granted us the chance of commerce with the great ideas?

Because they were too great for us. They were more than our heads could contain. They broke us, and we wandered around dazed. What had happened to us? Something had happened, but what? We'll never understand, that's the tragedy. It will always have been beyond us.

These are the last days, says W. It's finished. Everything's shit, but we're happy – why is that?' Because we're puerile, he says. Because we're inane.

We're chatterers, we're agreed on that, like monkeys. We're never happier until until we've worn speech down to nothing, until we've reached the highest, most rarefied of inanities.

It was different once upon a time, W. says. He spoke little. He was nearly silent, everyone said so. And then he became a lay member of the Trappists, a silent order, W. remembers. That must have been difficult! No, he says. He liked the peace. He wasn't as inane back then. His head wasn't full of chatter. – 'It was before I met you'.

Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out aloud from Heidegger. – 'Most thought thought-provoking is that you think you are thinking', W. says. 'Because you do, don't you?'

W. admires loyalty wherever he finds it. Take the animal kingdom, for example. Swans!, says W. They mate for life! – 'You're the opposite of a swan', W. says. 'Friendship means nothing to you'. And then, 'You're always about to betray me', he says. 'You're thinking about it now, aren't you?' And then, 'You're a betrayer. You'd break the phalanx'. What phalanx? – 'The phalanx of our friendship!' 

It's empty time that I fear, W. remembers my telling him, it's always struck him. Empty time, he says – he's rarely heard me speak so movingly on any topic. Of course, it's all to do with my fear of unemployment, he knows that. That's always been my real fear, W. says, which goes back, no doubt, to my warehouse years.

W. has often talked of using my account of my warehouse years as an example in one of his philosophical essays. He's often urged me to write it up, to present it to him as a text he might use in some way. Whenever he thinks about the great questions of philosophy, W. says, he always has my warehouse years in the back of his mind. He knows they are relevant in some way, but how? He hasn't worked that out yet, W. says.

W. has always admired my working class credentials, he says, which are far better than his. When he thinks of me leaving school and working in the warehouse, he is invariably moved and feels the great urge to protect and encourage me. How long were you there?, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps. That long! And what did you do there?, he asks, and when I tell him he's amazed.

Best of all, he says, are my accounts of reading in the warehouse: of the flight of stairs that led up to the roof and no one ever used, and where I went as I began to read my way through the library, W. says. What was the book I started with?, he asks. Oh yes: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, he could never forget that. I began with The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, W. says, and read my way up to Kafka: how was that possible?

W. began with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library ('we had a school library', he says, 'unlike you'). They had yellow dustcovers, W. says. Why was he attracted by that colour, he'll never know. But there it was: The Castle. The gates of literature opened to enclose him.

The Castle, W. says. He didn't have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes, W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. The fatal lure of literature: wasn't that where it began to go wrong?

Of course, he immediately wanted to become a writer, which was a disaster. But then he could form letters, W. says, unlike me. He could actually write a coherent sentence, a task of which I am still incapable, W. says. It was worse, much worse in my case, W. says. It led to all my hopes and dreams, and the perpetual dashing of my hopes and dreams.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of my sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof, The Mammoth Book of Fantasy already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E to himself.

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar – a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

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

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

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

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

There are some books, of course, over which W. has wept like a baby, he says. Imagine it! Him! Completely disarmed! Completely overcome! He's wept many times, W. says. There are books that have brought him to tears, he says, great floods of tears. He's always been a pathetic reader, W. says. He's always been tremendously alive to pathos.

Of course, it's different in my case, W. says. My eyes are always dry. When do I weep? Never, W. says. I am only a hooter, a pointer. I can hoot and point at a book, but that's about it, he says. Whereas W. will sometimes read in great sweeps, on a long train journey, for example, my reading is always sporadic and spasmodic; it begins, and is almost immediately interrupted.

In a sense, W. says, I cannot be said to read at all, though I claim to be a reader; I claim to have read books by this thinker and that thinker; I claim to be an admirer of literature. But what can it mean to me, all this philosophy, all this literature? What can it mean to one who has never wept like a baby over the pages of Cohen? What can it mean who has never felt so compelled, utterly compelled by The Star of Redemption, that tears ran streaming down his cheeks?

Someone, at a certain time in my life, must have praised me too highly, W. says; I show all the signs of that. Someone must have told me I excelled, which of course I have, given my education.

Wasn't I happy in my warehouse? Wasn't I content long before I decided to venture into the university? Shouldn't I have stayed there, reading The Castle in my lunch hour? Should I have remained a lunchtime reader of Kafka and the others, rather than venturing into the university?

Of course, as W. knows, I never really read The Castle. He finds the idea of my reading anything particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming the letters as I spoke them out loud, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. – 'It's still an effort for you, isn't it?', W. says.

But in the end, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. - 'They're like totems to you. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

The real reader has no need for surrounding himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? 

But it's different for me, W. says, for whom all books – and particularly the first one for me, Kafka's Castle - are like the obelisk in 2001, making me jump up and down and hoot excitedly.