Lars Iyer's Blog

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

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

'What have you been reading?', W. asks. 'What's caught your fancy lately?' I tell him. W. nods and murmurs. – 'Flusser again, oh yes … Walser, oh very interesting ….'

W.'s read everything, he says. For a long time, reading was more important to him than anything. Those were his golden years, W. says. He was in his heyday! He doesn't read anything like as much now, W. says. It happens in your late 30s; you find you can't read as much as you used to. You can't read for a whole day, stopping for dinner, and then read in the evening as well, not that this would mean anything to me.

'A bit of Flusser – the editor's introduction, for example - and a little Walser – or an online essay about Walser – that's enough for you', W. says. It's enough of me to have a whiff of literature, and it's the same for philosophy. Have I read, really read Rosenzweig, about whom I talk so passionately? And what about Cohen – have I read him?

W. even offered to lend me Religion Out Of The Sources Of Reason, he says. He would have offered to buy it for me, but there was no point. – 'It was enough for you that it existed'. Enough, for me, that there was a man called Cohen and a man called Rosenzweig, and that they wrote books once, a long time ago.

I'd like to start all over again, wouldn't I?, W. asks. I'd like to confess, to tell everyone my story only to wipe it away, to erase and delete until there was nothing left. I'm forever waiting for judgement, W. says. I'm waiting for the party leader to expel me, or the police to arrest me. I want to be sent down, W. says. I want to place my neck on the guillotine – indeed, that's all I want.

Pass sentence on me! Tell me what I've done wrong!: that's my message to the world, W. says. And indeed, I do more and more wrong, W. says. My guilt becomes deeper with every second that passes, and isn't that part of my problem? Doesn't it become more and more acute? Soon I'll no longer speak, only wail, W. says. Soon I'll only type the words, please kill me, over and again.

Paranoia, W. says. Have I always felt paranoid?Do I really think someone's watching me, that my footsteps are being followed? In truth, I'm only following myself, W. says. In truth, I only stalk myself, in horror at myself, and not only of what I have become.

That I am at all: that's what causes my paranoia, W. says. That I even exist: even I know, W. says; even I know somewhere that I am entirely at fault.

Of course, I didn't ask to be born, W. grants that. Which one of us did? But I was born, and that's the problem – my problem, W. says, and everyone's problem.

And isn't that why my life is a series of autocritiques?, W. wonders. Isn't that why it has always resembled a kind of staged confession, a show trial, in which I repent for everything I have done and even in the end, the fact that I did anything at all; and indeed that I was, that even existed in the first place.

It wasn't me! That's what I want to cry to the world. It wasn't my fault! But it was me, W. says; it was my fault, and indeed my only, basic fault: that I ever lived at all.

Glee: that's what W. always sees on my face. That I'm still alive, that I can still continue, from moment to moment: that's enough for me, W. says. He supposes it has to be. If I realised for one moment … If I had any real awareness … But it would be too much, W. says I couldn't know what I was and continue as I am. I couldn't come into any real self-awareness.

'That's what saves you', W. says. 'Your stupidity'. If only he knew … That's what everyone thinks when they see me, W. says. That's what he thinks.

Meanwhile, it's left to him to bear the terrible fact of my existence, W. says. It's his problem, not mine as it should be, W. says. Everyone blames him for me. What's he doing here?, they ask. Why did you bring him? But he had to, W. knows. He has all the excuses. He's sorry in my place. I'm his responsibility.

'You've cheated us!', W. says. 'You've cheated everyone!' My very existence involves a horrible kind of deception, W. says. You only cheat yourself, that's the saying, W. says. But I've managed to cheat everyone but myself, because that's all my existence is: cheating.

'You've broken every rule', W. says. 'You've spoilt the game for everyone'. Why? Because I exist, W. says. Because I shouldn't exist, and do.

'How did you catch us out? How did you catch the world out?' It's a mystery to W. Someone should have been looking, he says. Someone should have been watching out. As it is … Who's going to put me out of my misery now? Who's going to wipe the grin off my face?

'What keeps you going?', W. asks. 'What – minute to minute?' If he has my life, W. he says, he'd kill himself straightaway. It's a disaster, a travesty. – 'How do you go on? How -really?' W.'s never been sure. He has enough trouble with his life, he says. It's already too much. But mine – mine!

He shakes his head. – 'If you had any decency …' But I don't, do I? I'm still alive! It's a kind of triumph for me, isn't it? It's a little victory, minute to minute: the knowledge that I still exist and I still annoy him, W. It's why I always look so gleeful. It's why I always look as though I've pulled one over on the world, which in fact I have.

Why does he listen to me?, W. says. But he knows why. There'd be sense in keeping people around to inspire him, W. says. But not to destroy him. Unless it's his death-drive, W. says. Unless I'm his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

Ostracism, that's what I've brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.'s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth, and there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want for himself? Ah, there's no way of telling. He'll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We're heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pine trees to where nothing can live.

W.'s workfiles mean little to him now, he says. There are dozens of them now, saved in a folder called Notes, one after another, on every kind of topic. Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, for example. Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason. He saves them to his folder and forgets them immediately, W. says.

What are they all for? What do they mean? Didn't a friend of his set up a website in his honour? Didn't he put up some of W.'s miscellaneous notetakings? It was a disaster, of course, W. says. You should never venture casually into the public domain. It's something over which you should exercise the greatest caution.

He always does the opposite to me, W. says, that's his policy. Take my attitude to the internet, for example. Take my advocacy of the world of blogging. A few years ago, I was a blogging-advocacy-madman, W. remembers. I spoke of nothing else.

I told him of Rilkes of the blogosphere, of blogospherical Nietzsches. I spoke of the new commons, of new modes of writely collectivity. Couldn't we envisage the online fuflilment of Blanchot's La Revue Internationale? Couldn't we bypass the institutions and channels of conventional thought?

Even W. was persuaded, or some part of him was. Even he thought something was happening, that something might come of it … We started a group blog, of course. – 'And then what happened?', W. says. 'Tell me. Start at the beginning'. When I say nothing, he says, as he always does, 'You ruined it! You destroyed it straightaway!'

I published like a maniac, W says. Post after post, one after another. No one else had a chance! No one could get a word in! Occasionally, W. would put up one of his considered, reasonably-written posts, he says. Every now and then, after much thought, W. would put something up – a modest post, soberly written – supposing that, surrounded by my madness, his post might seem all the more reasonable. He thought it might rise up, a calm island in the midst of a sea of madness.

But that's not what happened, is it? It was drowned! Everything he wrote was drowned! It was like Atlantis all over again, W. says. That's when he learnt the internet was only a support network for my fantasies.

He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … Of what am I thinking?, W. says. What'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.

On, on, on, that's what I say to myself, isn't it?, W. says. There are more boxes to fill, more forms … I'm an administrative machine, an administrative maniac, W. says. I find the meaning of my existence in my administrative labours, he knows that; he finds it fascinating.

I've replaced the attempt to think with the attempt to administer. But then, W. says, perhaps my attempt to think was likewise an attempt at administration. Perhaps it was only an attempt to administer and organise myself, to rationalise my reading and linearise my note-taking. Wasn't I only ever a bureaucrat of thinking?

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

W. remembers my work phase, he says. How long did it last? For a while, it was all activity with me. For a while, a flood of writings, it was incredible. I used to send him some of them; he was impressed – not at the content of what I wrote, of course, but the fact that I was writing; that I could write at all.

There was something independent about me he admired, he said at the time. Something untouched by the great disasters overtaking the world. – 'You stuck at it in your corner', he said. 'Working away'.

For a time, he even took dietary advice from me, W. remembers. I told him to eat oily fish – mackerel, sardines – and to restrict his caffeine intake. And he took life coaching advice. I told him never to work at night and to get a good night's sleep, W. remembers.

I told him to write everything up, and never to begin writing without a clear aim in view. I told him to rationalise and organise his workspace; to keep a separate drawer for every work in progress. Because there was to be nothing other than works in progress; no idle notetaking, no leafing through books in languages he half understands.

And he followed my advice, W. says. He did exactly what I told him. He even began to publish. He wrote for publication; he sent things out, inspired by my example. Not by what I wrote, W. says, but the fact that I wrote. Not what I published, which he never read, but that I published, and ceaselessly.

But when W. finally read what I wrote, when he read it, line by line … The shock was immense, W. remembers. Suddenly it was clear to him: he knew who I was. His own private Mephistopheles, W. says. His last temptation.

I was the mirage that there was a kind of shortcut to thinking. That to think meant to publish and nothing other. That thinking was only a working for publication, and the mania of writing for publication.

He immediately gave up eating oily fish, W. said. And he immediately began drinking more coffee. He let his office to fall back into a mess, and emptied the drawers of his filing cabinet. Why did he listen to me? Why did he ever listen?

And now he waits, every morning, looking out over Stonehouse roofs, naked but for his dressing gown. Now he waits, the lone watchman, knowing that I've long since stopped getting up as early as him, or going to bed early, for the thought that he dreams is crossing the sky to find him.

W. has always been immensely susceptible to changes in weather, he says. He can feel them coming days in advance, for example, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there's another low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of England with rain and grey clouds and humidity, and another low front behind that. How's he going to get any work done – any serious work?

It's alright for me, he says, staring out of my window at the incoming banks of clouds. I'm on the East of the country, for a start, which means the weather doesn't linger in the same way. Oh it's much colder, he knows that – he always brings a warm jacket when he stays – but it's fresher, too; it's good for the mind, good for thought.

But W. can't think, he says. He knows the Westerlies are coming. He knows low pressure's going to dominate the weather for weeks, if not months. Sometimes whole seasons are dominated by Westerlies, which costs him an immense amount in terms of lost time and missed work.

He's still up early every morning, of course. He's still at his desk at dawn. Four A.M. Five A.M. – he's ready for work; he opens his books; he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He's there at the inception, at the beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs along his window ledge.

He's up before anyone else, he knows that, but there's still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months. Not one. He's stalled, W. says. There's been an interregnum. But when wasn't he stalled? When wasn't it impossible for him to think? No matter how early he gets up, he misses it, his appointment with thought. No matter how he tries to surprise it, thought, by being there before everyone.

W. and I both had our monk years, which surprises everyone who knows us. It surprises us, too. How did we end up, in our different ways, with the monks?

It was poverty in my case, W. remembers. Sheer desperation. What could they do, seeing me snivelling and cold, but take me in?

With him, of course, W. says, it was genuine religious feeling. He took a vow of silence. He spent days in solitary prayer. Why didn't he stay there? Why couldn't he have spent a contemplative life with his brother monks?

It must have been my fault, W. surmises, although I didn't know him at that time. I must have already been sent out to find him. It was fate: someone, somewhere, had decided that his life should be ruined.

Sometimes important people fall into our orbit, we're never quite sure why. They come with us to the pub to escape it all, and we order them plate after plate of Cumberland sausages. 'Look at them all', says W., 'I hope you're hungry'.

We invariably try to convince our guest that everyone hates the three of us. – 'They hate us!' – 'I hope they don't hate me', said one guest. - 'They hate us and they hate you', we tell our guest. 'Especially you. Everyone round here. All of us. Even we hate you, and we don't hate anyone'.

That night, wandering back, we got lost in the fog, the three of us. – 'Where are we going?' – 'We'll never get out of here', we told the speaker. 'You'll be trapped forever with us, going round and round'. I asked W. to narrate his recurring dream to help us pass the time. After, W. asked our guest whether he had any recurring dreams. And then, 'What's your favourite colour?'

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

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

'We'll be in the bar'. W. likes to ask questions of the people who join us, who are often tongue-tied and confused. – 'What's your favourite colour?', or 'Do you have any recurring dreams?' Sometimes he will ask, 'What's your favourite drink?', and tell them about Plymouth Gin. – 'You have to find the old bottle', he says. 'The new one's been redesigned'.

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

The kernel is in Poland, W. often says. The secret is in Poland. But what does he mean? we run through our memories. Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? It all came together there. In a real sense, it all began.

There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, who had a civic reception. Wasn't it the mayor of Wroclaw who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wroclaw looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer? – 'And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes over dinner', W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted the primal scene for them on the dancefloor. It's a British dance move, we told them. It's what we do on British dancefloors, but they looked away from us appalled.

But they treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun – that's what they called it, a grill party. There were sausages and beer. We're a loutish people, we told them. Don't expect anything from us. We told them we'd disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but after a while, they seemed to find us charming.

I think we won them over, in some sense, W. says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were like a race apart, like elves or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could expect very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.

Yes, that's where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts' expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.

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

What advice do we give? What do we tell them? – 'You should leave at once. It's terrible. You shouldn't spend another day here. You'll go mad'. People like them don't belong here, we tell them. – 'They'll hate you. They probably already do'. And then, our best advice, 'You have to know you're a failure. That's absolutely essential'. We know we're failures, don't we? We're the worst of all. We're from the wrong class, we tell them. – 'The difference is that I can pretend to be middle class, and he can't', W. says. I agree. – 'He's either overpolite, or surly', W. says. I can't help it, I say, spreading my hands.

On the other hand, we point out, I saved W. from the high table. Everyone agrees: since he's met me, his work's really gone downhill. We laugh. – 'He's destroying my career', says W. 'No, really, he is. He'll destroy yours, too'. And then we start again: 'You have to leave straightaway. Go somewhere else. Head to the periphery'. And then, in chorus, 'always stay at the periphery'.

We speak of our failure. – 'When did you know that you'd failed?' We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y? and Z.? Ah, that conversation we had with Z.! And with Y., that summer's day by the river! And do you remember when we had Z. to ourselves for a whole evening?

Then, with an even keener sense of awe, we speak of the thinkers we love to read. – 'How was it possible for a human being to write like that …?' We go up to the study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig and Cohen. – 'How was it possible for a human being to write such books?' Above all, it's not possible for us, and that first of all.

It's enough that Rosenzweig and Cohen existed. Enough that they were once alive and wrote these boo. The books are like great looming mountains, like flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it would be for us, and especially us, to write such books!

Of course, you can't be ambitious once you know you've failed, says W. And if there's one thing we know, it's that we've failed. W. realised long ago that he wasn't a genius, he says. – 'Do you think you're a genius?', W. asks me. And then, 'I think you still have nostalgia for the time when you thought you might be a genius'.

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out loud from my book. – 'Most thought provoking is that you think you're thinking', says W. 'Because you do, don't you?'

Our friend makes a trip to Heidegger's hut in Todnauberg. – 'Did you shit in the well?' You can't get near the hut, apparently. Hermann, the son lives up there. Later, our friend meets him. Hermann said his father turned down the Rectorship twice, and only accepted it as a favour to a friend. A likely story.

W.'s ill and I'm ill, and it's his fault, since I caught it from him. My thighs ache, I tell W. on the phone. I'm staggering around like Widow Twankey. So do his, W. says, but he's unable to rise at all. He's bedridden, he says, and all he can see is the rain streaming down the windows.

W.'s been coughing up green phlegm, he tells me. It's like something out of The Omen. He's been in bed for days, really ill. Green phlegm is a good sign, I tell him. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

Kafka wondered if he cast a shadow on the sun, and W. wonders if I'm his shadow, or in some way his eclipse. A shadow is a region of darkness where light is blocked, W. reads. Am I his region of darkness? Am I that part of him that remains untouched by light? W. is tempted by this thesis. It would account for so much.

A shadow cast by the earth on the moon is a lunar eclipse, W. reads. Conversely, a shadow cast on the earth by the moon is solar eclipse. Each time, it is a matter of an interruption of light – of that opaque body that blocks the light from the space behind it. Mostly, W. assumes I'm his own shadow. But what if I am that body that blocks light from him?

'Your obesity', says W. 'The immensity of your thighs and arms'. Yes, it's quite clear: I eclipse him just as, in another sense, I am his eclipsed shadow. I stand in front of his light, but I am also that shadow that trails behind him. Which comes first, then: light or the shadow? It was the darkness of my stupidity that came first, W. supposes. Just as it will be the darkness of my stupidity unto which everything, in the end, will return.

Before God, we are always in the wrong, so Kierkegaard's Jutland pastor. Am I in the wrong before W.? Undoubtedly. But is he in the wrong before me? W. is responsible for me in some sense, he knows that. Terribly responsible. I am in some sense his own creation; I am the result of something that went wrong with him.

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the former – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say?

Of course I can speak, W. says, and I speak all too much; but perhaps, at another level, I cannot be said to speak, or my speech is infested with a shapelessness and formlessness that hollows out its significance. It's as though I've worn out speech in advance, W. says. As though I've said and written everything there was to say, and carry on regardless.

But why is it his fault?, W. wonders. What have I got to do with him? But perhaps, like the Rabbi who raised a golem from the mud, he conjured me up from his own sense of failure. Perhaps I am only the way W. is in the wrong, its incessant, unliving embodiment.

There is, of course, something quite disgusting in my endless desire to parade my buffoonery before the world, W. says. It's born not from humility – an entirely warranted sense that I will achieve nothing with my life, improve nothing, in fact the very opposite – but from a dreadful exhibitionism that is part of my buffoonery, indeed is inseparable from it. For what else is buffoonery but the desire to endlessly parade one's shortcomings? To perform them, insist upon them, to thrust them into the face of everyone?

I would have been happiest in the period of show trials and autoconfessions, W. says. I would have liked nothing better than to have confessed for imaginary crimes, the greater, the better, signing every confession the police brought to me and admitting my role in the greatest of conspiracies. And I would have liked my entire oeuvre to be swallowed up by the great confessional autocritique that would sprawl from volume to volume.

I did it, I would say. I was the worst of all. It was me, it was all my fault: what have I ever wanted to say but that? W., by contrast, dreams of a mystical kind of buffoonery that is no longer dependent on masochism and exhibitionism. Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard, in the guise of a Jutland Pastor wrote an edifying sermon on that theme. But before what is W. always in the wrong? Before what internal tribunal?

Of course, you should never try to repeat anything, not exactly. You can't go back: it didn't take Constantin Constantius to show us that, even if we did so for entirely for the right reasons. Even if it was in the name of friendship that we went back to do exactly the same thing. On Monday, having arrived at the conference days early, as we always arrive days early, we caught the train to Titisee and walked out along the lake to a guesthouse I had read about in my guide.

There it was, framed by great trees: the guesthouse that immediately welcomed us in, which sat us in the best seats overlooking the lake. W. ordered us a bottle of Sekt, which I'd never had and we were waited on for lunch by a graceful and gentle waitress. Did she bring us a sample delicacy from the kitchen before out main course? Didn't she advise us in her charming English of the pick of the menu?

We congratulated ourselves as we walked back to the station, and resolved to share our experiences, this time with our friends. You should share everything with your friends, W. has always said.

And so, a few days later, we walked out with them to the guesthouse, which we found closed, inhospitable; we waited, dawdling by the now busy road in the rain, cars roaring by us, until they opened, and this time there was no graceful and gentle waitress, and no sample delicacy. They seemed not to want to serve us; they took us to a damp corner of the garden and left us there for a full hour before they took our order. The Sekt was stale and flat, and when it came, the lunch devastated us. Even the walk back to the station was a disaster, car fumes filling our heads and the ceaseless rain pattering on our heads …

How many times did we apologise to our friends? How many times did we tell them that it wasn't like this last time? In our hearts, we feared they wouldn't believe us, despite our utmost desire to do our best for them. In our hearts, we feared they thought it was some vague kind of revenge for one of their misdeeds; we feared they would feel as apologetic as we did, given that all we wanted to do is to grab them by their lapels and say sorry, sorry, sorry.

Bishop Berkeley gave up philosophy to lecture on the healing properties of tar water, W. says. He gave it all up – he'd written his masterpieces by the age of 23, but he still had a long life to live, which he then spent advocating, in lectures and pamphlets, the entirely false thesis that tar water was the cure for all ills.

Of course in my case, W. says, the tar water came first, and there would be nothing but tar water. I began with an entirely false thesis, says W., from which I never departed or advanced. But then, W. says, it wasn't a particular argument that in my case was wrong. It wasn't a particular position that I reached through some process of induction or deduction. The very position from which I began – my very position was wrong from the first, and could only ever be wrong. What, henceforward, could I say that was not the equivalent of an endless, spurious advocacy of tar water?

Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard said that, in the guise of a Jutland pastor. Does this mean that I, unlike W. – or to a greater, much greater extent – am close to God? Is the man of tar water closer to the holy fool?

Unending bilge, that's what W. hears when I open my mouth. Bilge, a great streaming forth of bilge water or tar water: that's my entire written oeuvre, such as it is – how can I bear it? I must not know, W. surmises. I must not have guessed, which is why he was put on this earth to remind me, to goad me. His entire life will have been the attempt to remind me and goad me.

Isn't it in this way that he, too, might be close to God? Isn't it in the indefiniteness of his task that he will always remain in the wrong?

'You're never happier than when you make plans', says W. 'Why is that?' I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of fort-da like that of Freud's grandchild. But then, too, there's something wild about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which entail the very opposite of control.

There are never well thought-out tactics, never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who's been locked up for 20 years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won't the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?

But there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There's a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan is a kind of kite, that's how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky. 

My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books and series of books written together! For flurries of articles!

What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it's all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I do know it. Only something in me knows otherwise. Something that remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.

You would think that with my simplicity I would also have a simple love for humankind, W. says, but that's not the case, is it? I speak of my enemies constantly. I speak of my dislike and horror at this person or that person, and I can't help but show it. – 'You look quite ill in some company', W. says. I look sick with hatred and dismay.

Isn't that why I've arranged my life to avoid everyone? Isn't it why I take the most ridiculous measures to avoid bumping into anyone I know? But of course what I really want to avoid is something else entirely. What I really want to avoid is the person I become in the face of my so-called enemies, W. says.

Don't I in the face of the enemy invariably become the most obsequious person who ever lived? Don't I entirely give myself over to a kind of desperate toadying? I'm a fawner, W. says. He'll never forget how I greeted that fucker in a cowboy hat, as I called him, who I'd been avoiding for many days, when he finally caught up with me.

I might as well have curled up on his lap, W. says. In fact, I showed classic pack animal behaviour, W. says, by figuratively rolling over and showing my belly. The so-called fucker in a cowboy hat was the alpha male, and who was I? The omega male, W. says. The runt of the litter, my vast white belly on show for everyone to see.

W. has no enemies, he says, though people have taken him as their enemy. One of them even sits in the House of Lords, imagine – in the House of Lords, and all the while plotting W.'s downfall. It's not as if he, W., has far to fall, W. says. It's not as if he has a career to ruin.

Why would anyone plot against him? It must be his joyful indifference, he decides. People are resentful of joy, and they fear indifference: the fact that you're independent of their judgement. W. would have thought this would be my strength, perhaps my greatest strength: independence from judgement. How else could my life be accounted for? How else that series of disasters that I call my career?

But, in the case of my enemies, W. finds something else entirely. He's seen me give a thumbs up, a grin on my face, in response to the fucker in a cowboy hat. It was a great surprise, W. says. And it taught him that I wasn't so much independent from the judgement of others, but doltishly unaware of it, oblivious, except in the case of those I called my enemies. Which meant that on the one hand, I was more stupid than he thought, and on the other more constrained.

Yes, my relationship to the fucker in a cowboy hat is undoubtedly my weak point, W. says. He's not sure why that is.

The fucker in a cowboy hat has always been renowned for his memory, W. says. He's said never to forget a face, it's legendary. Didn't I spill a pint of Guinness over his stetson a few years back? Didn't I spill stout over his special, prized velvet stetson? That's what I feared, said W., that he would remember and enact his vengeance.

He was looking for me the other night, that much is clear, W. says. And he found me, didn't he? In the dingiest corner of the hotel bar. In the dankest corner, and there I was, and there he, W., was too W. says.

And W. was witness to a scene he can scarcely believe. He saw it all: I gave the fucker in a cowboy hat my customary thumbs up, I complimented him and agreed with him about the weather. And then, apropos of nothing, I apologised for the whole business over the spilt Guinness, and offered to dry clean his stetson.

Of course the fucker'd entirely forgotten the whole incident, which W. found so funny he nearly pissed himself. There I was, W. said, the omega male before the alpha one. There I was, belly upturned, exposed like a beaten dog, my own enemy …