The Leaf

Why was I allowed to do this?, that's my great question, W. says. Who let me do it? Whose fault is it? I blame everything on someone else, that's my instinct, W. says. It's never my fault, it's always somebody else's fault. I'm acted upon, rather than acting myself. I'm passive, rather than active. Or rather, my fervid activity is only a sign of a great passivity, as though I was a leaf blowing about in the wind.

It wasn't me!, that's my cry, W. says. It wasn't my fault! This is why, when it comes to it, when it comes to the end, I'll die uncomprehending. – 'You'll never understand. You'll never grasp the extent of your failure'. I'll die with froth on my lips, W. says. I'll die like some rabid animal with wild eyes and dirt under my nails. I'll have tried to dig my way out. I'll have gone mad from confinement, and they'll have shot me like a dog.

‘Him, Him’

What do I think's going to happen to me at the end?, W. asks me. Will I starve to death? Unlikely, he says, with my enormous appetite. With my desperation. He'll probably starve, W. says, and I'll be shot. – 'You'll try and escape. You'll climb a wall'. He stands up and does an impression of me climbing a wall. They'll shoot me, W. says. I'll fall down in the mud and others will step over me.

He, meanwhile, will be long dead. He'll have starved, having given up all hope, all drive. There he'll sit, a skeleton by the window, who'd hoped that things could be otherwise, but learnt things could never be otherwise.

'They'll round you up', says W. I'm the sort who'll get rounded up. They'll know straightaway. Children will point at my door. – 'Him, him', they'll say. And then I'll be shot and fall down in the mud.

Persecution

W. admires my persecution complex. – 'You really think they're out to get you, don't you? You really think you're in trouble'. I may be in trouble, W. says, but it's nothing to do with what I've done. – 'It's not about you', W. says. 'It's never about you'.

When the end comes, it'll be structural, W. says. It'll be about structures of which I am a part. It's nothing personal. It's never anything personal. But the fact that I think it's personal accounts for my desire to protest. I jump up and down like an angry ape, W. says. I hoot and wail.

In the end, all that's left to me is dirty protest. – 'That's your life', says W., 'shit smeared across the walls'. It's my life, that dirty protest, and everything I've written or said.

The Hamster

In his new office, his desk up against the wall and a computer that looks like it's from 80s Russia on his desk, W. has discovered absolute despair. He's been taken away from his window. No longer can he see the rain falling. No longer the Westerlies that batter themselves against his city.

What's to become of him? What's to become of us, because it's no different with me, he says. – 'Of what does your life consist, essentially? Where is it taking you?', W. asks. 'Where do you think it's all going?' A pause. 'Nowhere!', says W. with great vehemence. 'You're going nowhere!'

Of course, I have my constant nightmares of unemployment to spur me on, W. says. I have the job pages I read and my ridiculous fantasies about entering management or beginning a new career. They keep me going, W. says. They give me the illusion of choice, when in fact I have no choice at all.

I'm a hamster on a wheel, W. says. A fat, disgusting hamster with some kind of skin disease and foam around its mouth.

On, On, On

Another day! Another one! Aren't I supposed to be doing something? Shouldn't something be drawing these minutes and hours together? Read that, write that. But read what? Only The Kindly Ones is left on the office desk.

How far am I in? 750 pages. My God, 750! It's too much, too vast. There are too many horrors, and too few reprieves from horror. At least there is the girl he's seeing. At least there is what he calls her grace. But all around him, horror. Bombed Berlin. The concentration camps.

Why go on reading? Why, page after page? Because there's nothing else to bind the minutes and hours together. Because at least there is narrative, the power of narrative. A kind of necessity. The task – which is a sign of there being no other tasks – of finishing the book.

And when I finish it? When I stare up through the office windows? I will want another kind of book. A shorter one. A narrative I could imagine extrapolating upon, carrying on in my own way. A narrative that says, write your own narrative rather than exhaust narratives, burning them up like The Kindly Ones.

It's unbearable, really. That book – that monumental book – open on the desk. It takes up too much space. It's too much itself. And who am I beside it? Unequal to it, less than it, but at it least it's there. It is my constant as one day passes, then another.

One day! And then another! How does it go on? What is it that is going on. That passage in Rosenzweig: not an event that moves in time, but time itself moving. Time itself in movement. But what does that mean? Finish the book, I tell myself. See it through to the end. That's the answer. On, on, on through the unbearable pages.

I Am A Cock

I lapse into stammering, and can't get a word out for several minutes. W. is convinced I've had a series of minor strokes, and that one day I'll lose the ability to speak altogether. He'll be my amanuensis, W. says, like Rosenzweig's wife, who, in the period of her husband's total paralysis, used to spell the alphabet out loud until he was able by a signal – an inarticulate sound, a facial contortion – to indicate the correct letter. I am a cock, that's what W. will make me spell every time. I – am – a – cock.

Broken Immanence

Broken Immanence, that should be the name of our new intellectual movement, W. says, or of an 80s-style band similar to Flock of Seagulls. I think our band should be called The Stars of Redemption, I tell him and that Broken Immanence is a daft name for a movement. The Broken Immanentists – is that any better? To have a movement, of course, you have to have ideas, to stand for something. What do we stand for? 

People used to believe things, we agree. It used to be possible to believe in things. Take Rosenzweig, for example (he is always our example). He was going to become a Christian. He was just about to convert – disarmed, he said, by his friend's simple confession of faith.

It came down to the discussion on a single night - July 7th 1913, when everything hung in the balance. Would he, Rosenzweig take his own life? He held a gun to his temple; he contemplated the nothing. Would he accept his new life as a Christian?

A few weeks passed, and there was another date – October 11th – and he reached another decision. He attended the Yom Kippur festival in a synagogue, and it became clear to him he should remain a Jew. Imagine that! He experienced something which led to a real consequence in his life. Have we ever experienced anything? Has anything ever happened to us? 

On August 22nd 1918, due to a sudden inspiration, he begins The Star of Redemption, finishing it in less than six months, despite his active duty at the Macedonian Front, and long periods of illness and convalscence. Into life: that's how he concludes the book on February 16th, 1919: again, a date.

Into life: he plans to leave writing behind, to turn to the 'demands of the day', to everyday life. Everything is about dates and turning points! Then he founded the Lehrhaus … he turned his back on the university; he taught, he developed a new kind of teaching, in small groups with adult learners, rejoining assimilated Jews with the tradition with which they'd lost all relation.

And what of us?, we wonder. How will our lives be judged? What have we ever begun? Of what movement were we a part? When did we convert or lose our faith? … But in truth, we never had faith. We're not capable of it, or of anything. He was a broken immanentist, is that what they'll write on our graves? He was a member of Broken Immanence?

… Inquired Of …

Into life: those were the last words of The Star of Redemption, we muse. What does it mean? Religion is only ever about the everyday, W. says with great firmness. This is what Rosenzweig saw in rejecting mysticism. Revelation was a public affair. It was about ritual, about ceremony lived between people. And above all, it was about speech.

Speaking with others: what else did Rosenzweig mean by life? Rosenzweig was heading into life, existence, where he had, in The Star, argued the most elementary structures of religion were to be found. Henceforward, he could only inquire when he found himself inquired of, that's what he said. And inquired of by men rather than scholars.

Theological problems must be translated into human terms, and human problems brought into the pale of theology, that's what he said. Philosophical problems must be translated into everyday life, and everyday life brought into the pale of philosophy. To what extent do we live?, W. and I wonder. How could we be said, in the Rosenzweigian sense, to be alive?

Speech, thought Rosenzweig, was the bridge between human beings and God. It's all about speech, says W. About speaking. We're very good at that, he notes, speaking. We're chatterers. Are we ever happier than in our chatter? That's always our high point, we agree, when we've worn speech away talking about blowholes or monkey butlers and there's nothing left to say.

We carry on regardless, we agree. We twitter like birds. We ascend to the highest, most rarefied plain of inanity. But what's that got to do with God? Perhaps we are only desecrators and despoilers of speech. Perhaps we only bring it to the edge of meaninglessness, of the tohu-bohu.

For when have we ever been inquired of? When have we ever drawn anyone else into the process of inquiry? We compare ourselves to our third leader, who's clearly superior to us. He gives, we take. He has ideas, we don't. He actually engages with the world, whereas our engagement is mediated by books we half understand.

He tries to change things, whereas we're parasitical on people who try and change things. He makes people feel witty and intelligent; we make them feel depressed and demotivated. Every day, for him, something new might occur. But every day, for us, confirms that nothing new will ever have happened.

Stars of Redemption

Are we religious? I ask W. I'm never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that's already something. There's an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that's certain. But are we religious, I mean, really religious?

Wasn't it pathos which nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig?, we wonder. Wasn't it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one night in particular – June 7th, 1913 – which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.

He confronted the Nothing, he said. He'd come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn't what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed – when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him – Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.

Kneel and try to pray: that's what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naif or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig's crisis. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.

Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he re-converted back to Judaism. If he was to become Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.

But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one's relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you'll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig's account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It's all about pathos.

But there's pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig's despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the nothing might mean?

Hadn't our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn't we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naiveity or romanticism? We plunged into no crisis. We did not contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn't translate into an action.

Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W. We always fall short. But short of what? What idea could we have of faith, of the pathos of faith, as it streams infinitely far above our stupid heads?

My Hinduism

When W. was 13, despite the fact that he had not been brought up religiously, he demanded to be taken to church. It was a great moment, he says. What brought it on? W.'s not sure. – 'You've never been religious, have you?', he says to me. I'm Hindu, I tell him, and he laughs till beer comes out of his nostrils. – 'Oh yes, your Hinduism, your spurious Hinduism'. What idea could I possibly have of Hinduism?

Sal thinks W.'s drifting back to religion. She gives him a year. – 'It's al this Rosenzweig', says W., 'it's very plausible'. And then, 'You need a religion', he says. 'It would be a channel for your pathos'.

If there's one thing he's learned from me, W. says, it's pathos. – 'Saying nothing, but with great emotion'. He's always impressed at my presentations. – 'You sound so serious. If only they knew'. I tell him I am serious. – 'No', says W., 'it's because you're working class. You think you have to be serious when you give a presentation, but you don't really have to be'.

Demands of the Day

Rosenzweig to Friedrich Meinecke, Aug 30th 1920:

The one thing I wish to make clear is that scholarship no longer holds the centre of my attention, and that my life has fallen under the rule of a 'dark drive' which I'm aware that I merely name by calling it 'my Judaism' […]

[The Star of Redemption] is only – a book. I don't attach undue importance to it. The small – at times exceedingly small – thing called 'demands of the day' which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean … the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence … Note I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars … [T]he questions asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me.

'My Judaism': for Rosenzweig, this meant a way of being together – of speaking to others and listening in turn. Speech, here, concerns not only thought – the exchange of ideas – but existence. Existence understood as a weave of relations, as holding out ahead of itself a kind of community, the dream of saying 'we' beyond institutions and nationalities.

'We': this collective would be like a multiphonal chorus, in which each voice would keep its integrity in the whole, but would still be part of the whole. But above all, the way to the 'we' would be through the 'you', the other person, whose love for you, for Rosenzweig, is the medium of God's love.

'Into life': those were the last words of The Star of Redemption. That's where Rosenzweig was heading: into life, existence, which was the only way, for him, that the validity of The Star could be shown. Hadn't he written about the significance of speaking to others? Hadn't he allowed the very category of speech to become prophetic?

That's what life meant to Rosenzweig, speech. And that's what thought meant to him: to become accountable to other human beings through the act of speaking. Rosenzweig knew he had no place in the university. It was a matter of returning to ancient Jewish texts, in a manner lost to both liberal assimilated Jewish contemporaries and the orthodox who were devoted to the Jewish law. It was a matter of discovering one's own life as a Jew in relation to the ancient sources, and therefore of bringing Judaism to life.

This is what Rosenzweig had in mind when he rejected an academic career to become the director of the newly founded Frankfurt Free Jewish School. Teachers and pupils came together in small groups, the former not as experts propounding a body of knowledge, but as fellow inquirers. Wasn't this what it meant to be 'inquired of' …?

Speech, thought Rosenzweig, was the bridge between human beings and God. It was in terms of speech that he rethought the basic categories of theology and philosophy. 'Theological problems must be translated into human terms, and human problems brought into the pale of theology', he wrote. Philosophical issues were human issues, and religion belonged to the most elementary structures of existence. How else was the world to be redeemed except through speech?

Into life: but Rosenzweig, submitting in the years following the completion of The Star to near total paralysis, lost the capacity to speak. For a while, his mutterings and chokings could be interpreted by his wife and closest friends, but it didn't last. For a time, his head could be lifted in his wife's hands and he could pronounce this word or that. But that time went, and he turned to his specially adapted typewriter to communicate, which was worked by moving a lever over a disc containing all the letters; you needed to press but a single key.

In time, he was able only to point to the letters, his arm held up by a sling; and soon even the chance of this indication ceased, and his wife had to ascertain his intentions with a mixture of instinct and guesswork. Soon it was left to her merely to spell the alphabet out loud, until he was able by a signal – an inarticulate sound, a sudden facial expression - to indicate the correct letter. His head, inclined to loll, was supported in an iron frame. What was left to him now? But he could commit to memory whole essays, which he would compose during sleepless nights. His wife, following his direction, would type them for him, guessing recurring words from the first or second letter.

Rosenzweig, upon his diagnosis, expected a quick death. But it didn't come. Several years passed before he died of pneumonia, the progressive paralysis stopping short of his vital organs. He 'wrote'. He translated the hymns and poems of Judah ha-Levi, the medieval Hebrew poet and wrote introduction to the collected Jewish writings of Hermann Cohen; he expounded The Star in a more popular style and reflected on Jewish learning.

Above all, there was his collaborative translation of the Bible with Buber, who would send him sheets of rough translation, by chapters, which Rosenzweig would then correct. They kept up vigorous correspondence – the correct translation of a single word could become the subject of weeks of debate. And Rosenzweig read, the nurses turning the pages for him when he cleared his throat.

During the years up to his death from pneumonia in 1929, Rosenzweig followed an elaborate daily routine, being washed and dressed – this alone took two and a half hours – breakfasting – another hour – before he was free for an hour and a half of work. Then lunch at one and a nap before a more prolonged period of work, from four until eight. In the evening after dinner, he would read until midnight.

It was not a solitary life. He received visitors, with whom his wife facilitated communication, discerning his responses to questions from his facial expression and generally keeping the conversation going. Buber spent every Wednesday with the family. A nurse was retained for the day and another for the night, the latter turning him so he would not be pained by remaining too long in the same position.

On the last full day of his life, December 10th, 1929, he began to dictate a letter to Buber:

… and now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep: the point of all points for which there …

And that was it. The doctor came, with whom Rosenzweig communicated, telling him he was feeling better. He should spare his strength rather than communicate further, said the doctor. Rosenzweig never finished his letter.

(following Glatzer)

Into Life

February 16th 1919: a still young man, 32, recently released from the army concludes his book with the lines 'Into Life'. Into Life: the composition of The Star of Redemption, he will say later that year, was only an 'episode' in his life; it is 'only a book', after all; he did not 'attach any undue importance to it'. 'The book is no goal, not even a provisional one'. If Luther had died on the 30th October 1517, his Epistle to the Romans would have been a scholarly work; but on the 31st, he nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg, witnessing in life what existed only in theory. How could the validity of The Star of Redemption be shown but in the day-to-day life of its author?

Even so, Rosenzweig writes to Oppenheim:

I must be grateful to fate. It isn't given to many to see their boldest childhood dream realised at 32: to have a book, a real timeless work (or what we mortals call timeless), finished, behind me. The rest of my life is now really a kind of magnificent gift …

A gift! But to whom? To Rosenzweig, certainly, but also to those around him to whom he can speak, and to whom he could listen. The tasks of the everyday should be accepted with reverence. The Star of Redemption is finished, and so is Rosenzweig's career as a writer; as he writes in another letter:

You know how important speaking has become to me, since, through the writing of The Star of Redemption I cut myself off from further literary work; speaking was only the productiveness still open to me.

Rosenzweig wants now to confront human beings, to speak, to listen. Married in March 1920, he is appointed head of the Free House of Jewish Studies in August of the same year. By the time Hegel and the State is published in 1920, several years after it was written, Rosenzweig had abandoned scholarship except in the service of adult education, whose focus at the Free House is the small discussion group.

The Star of Redemption is published in 1921. In the same year, Rosenzweig writes Understanding the Sick and the Healthy at a publisher's request, but withholds it from publication. It summarises and simplifies many of the ideas of his magnum opus, being based on the lectures he gave at the Free House. In its pages, you will find what he thinks of as specifically Jewish thinking, which emphasises the concrete, the spoken word and dialogue, and the experience of the time of dialogue, with its give and take, its rhythm …

In truth, of course, this is the topic that invalidates his treatises. What matters is to speak, to act through speech, not to write. Isn't this what Rosenzweig learnt all those years ago in conversation with his friend Rosenstock, a Jewish convert to Christianity?

 On the night of July 7th 1913, he writes, 'I was immediately disarmed by Rosenstock's simple confession of faith'. Asked what he would do when all answers failed – when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him – Rosenstock said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray. Kneel and try to pray: these simple words come from a scholar, a thinker, not a romantic.

For Rosenstock, what mattered was that truth revealed in the relationship with God and one's fellow human beings. The Biblical 'word', the logos, is different from the monologue of philosophy. Dialogue – the give and take of words – is everything.

In a letter to Nahum Glatzer, whose prefaces and essays I borrow from here, the ailing Rosenzweig, a few months from death, wrote that The Star of Redemption 'grew out of an ardent longing' – a longing to stand before God and to live in his faith. Does one stand before God in dialogue? In the exchange of speech?

This is why the 'parerga and paralipomena' Rosenzweig produces are, to him, of no great importance. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy will not be published: the patient attacked by paralysis its author describes has been attacked by philosophy. He's laid out, sick … but Rosenzweig is alive and in living dialogue with his pupils at the Free House. Wasn't Kafka supposed to have been taught by him?

But in 1922, there appear those first symptoms of progressive paralysis which will lead to Rosenzweig's early death at 43, in 1929. By December 1922, he can no longer write; by Spring 1923, he loses his ability to speak. Mercifully, the paralysis stops short of his vital organs; though he cannot move, he lives and is even able to communicate, to 'dictate' using eye movements and a letter board.

The speaker is unable to speak. Yet he writes – a volumous correspondence, translations and essays; he translates a large part of the Bible with Buber. He listens; he receives visitors. His paralysis is the opposite of the paralysis of philosophy. He's been released into life – freed – his book behind him. His book has been burnt up by life.

From September 1925, this from a poem he sent to Buber in celebration of the completion of their translation of Genesis:

I have learned/ That every beginning is an end./ Quit of the task of writing, I wrote, 'Into Life' -/ After scarcely two years/ The hand ready for work grew lame,/ The tongue ready for speech stood still,/ So only writing was left me.

Only writing. But he wrote with Buber; they collaborated – and they did so in translating the first book, the 'Word of the beginning', the poem continues. A writing in dialogue? A writing-speech? Reading, or trying to read The Star of Redemption, I want always to read the shorter texts Glatzer collects in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, or at least to read The Star in their direction.

Because it is only there, read in the context of his letters (substitutes for what he could have said, if he'd but had a voice) that the book becomes important in its unimportance, seeming to negate itself, to catch fire, its pages burning as you read them. Only then that the book's 'Into Life' falls into the heart of the book, life setting it on fire and sacrificing it to itself.

Three Books

… And continuing from the last post, since I have a few minutes free. Exposure … open on all sides. I've wanted to write about my unease with Mark Kozelek's voice. Unease – at The Finally, but above all with April. April – so massive, so one-paced (that is not a criticism).

April like a massif central, a plateau high above everything. The Finally's only in the foothills, but April – April … it's impossible, it's too much to be out in the open like that. Open on all sides, light streaming through you. But April nonetheless. I can't listen to it. I haven't been able to in a while. But go on – listen to it.

'Lost Verses' – it's there right away, isn't it? There: the plateau, the plain below the sky. Mark Kozelek's in no hurry. The song's as long as he wants it to be. It's long – he's taking his time, and mine is stretching out. Mine is stretched out taut to the corners of the earth …

April's too much. Song after sprawling song. These massive one-placed songs … I've turned it off. Stone Breath instead. Folk. Folk for the office now it's all quiet …

The Loop on the bookshelf. The Loop, Roubaud's Loop – should I have begun it by now? How long have I had it? It was a pre-release copy. I had it as early as anyone. Why not begin it, then? Because I opened the page and thought … I'm not up to this; I'm not worthy of it. Read something else first. Read a few other things, build up to it.

Because you'll need a kind of training for Roubaud's Loop, Le Boucle. The Loop, The Buckle … some of it in bold, some of it in normal font. There's a good reason for that, I found it, I searched on the net. I thought: now that's interesting. And thought, I really ought to begin. And thought: I really can't begin.

In truth, I did everything but begin … it was too much! I could have taken it on holiday, but didn't. Could have squeezed in it easily enough, but wouldn't it have been too much. The Loop, on the bedside table. The Loop on the window sill. The Loop on the bed, just as, over Christmas, 2666 had been on the bed.

How did I get through The Part With All The Murders? What horrors! What boredoms! I wailed and moaned, I bored everyone … but what about The Loop? Where is it? Did I bring it with me? No! I left it at home. I left it in the office, on top of the other books. The Loop, stranded … The Loop, a pre-release copy, left beached in the office …!

Three big books this year, I tell myself. Three of them, and you got through the first: 2666. You read that, you came through it, I tell myself, and you read a whole pile of other Bolanos, as should be done. You made yourself a ramp of smaller Bolanos and then revved up for the big one. And over you went, over the five parts like five buses parked lengthwise. And you were the Evel Knievel of reading …

Three big books, the second The Loop and the third The Kindly Ones. Unless it was the other way around for the last two. I think it was. I think I'd meant to read The Kindly Ones first. I think that was top of my list of excuses: I should read The Kindly Ones before The Loop. And at least I'd read 2666! At least I'd got through that and, before it, The Savage Detectives! That was already something! It was already a great deal!

But The Loop, my accuser, says nothing.

Exposure

I haven't read anything in … how long? It's been weeks since a narrative was able to stitch together my days. From this side of the page, nothing else could stitch them together. So I take down a book about Sebald from my shelf, read half an essay, then a book about Handke. I read the prefatory remarks in a book of Bernhard's poetry.

But there's no reading, not really. You need be buried somewhere to read, that's what I tell myself. Need a kind of pit. But the new house is open on all sides, it seems. Light streams through it, and there can be no secrets, and hence no reading.

Before we moved, I'd thought the bay window would be right for that big book of Arbus. Read it there. Look at it there. And then the big Bergman book – read that on the chaise longue. But when it came to it? Too much light through the window. Too much exposure, as though the sun was taking a picture of me over the days and weeks. A five week exposure.

The new house. No damp, for one thing. No rats. We moved in on the 31st March. It's now … the 5th May. Should I take home the three volumes of Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries? Bought them on the honeymoon. Is it the kind of house in which you can read history?

I admit I reread Bernhard's The Loser recently. I reread Yes before that. I thought I needed a rat's tunnel to run through. But that wasn't real reading, there in the second bedroom (more than one bedroom now). Didn't I try a Schklovsky book yesterday? Zoo? But it was too weak for me, or I for it. The pages weren't strung together enough for me. Too much fuss; too much niggling. I wanted something to drive me through the days and nights.

What about The Kindly Ones, then? I shudder. Too big – too big for the time being. Another day. That'd be a real committment, The Kindly Ones. You'd have to carry it with you when you travelled, for one thing. You couldn't leave it behind. And if you're travelling often?

I took Trio by Pinget to Ireland, but that didn't work for me. Too loose. It drove to me to the study bookshelves instead. I read children's history books. I read bits of Patrick Kavanagh's autobiography. I read books about Native Americans. I read a very bad book by a prominent critic and complained about it at length. I read a study guide to the Bible. I read Thomas Merton and was disappointed by Thomas Merton as I always am.

And then I eyed up books in Cork Waterstones to buy. Which one, which one, and with Ireland so expensive? Should I really try Post Office, as W. suggested? Is it time for The Master and the Margharita? Then there's that new critical guide/ biography to Coltrane …

In the end, what I needed, I decided, was a biography. I needed the certainty of a linearly told life, beginning at birth, ending with death and the aftermath. Or at least a chunk of a life: think of Stach's Kafka, for example. Stach's magnificent Kafka. Should I try the V. S. Naipaul biography then? It's been so well received. Look at those blurbs on the cover. And it's a nice cover. There's V.S. Naipaul himself, young and dapper … But then I should at least read Mr Biswas first, shouldn't I? Or finish The Enigma of Arrival?

My Cork dilemma, as usual. My Cork Dilemma: call it that, Bernhardianly. And my stand-by in the bookshop in Rory Gallagher Square had gone too – a book by Butor about Manchester, how unlikely! I never thought it would sell! Who bought it? Who bought my stand-by?

No real reading, then, and in how long? Five weeks or so. Light from all sides streaming into the house (not really; it's one of a terrace). And now there's the allotment, and the small front garden. Outdoor work. Labour in the fresh air, digging and planting, all that. In the sun, the sun streaming everywhere. I'm quite brown, you can't hide from it.

And what picture's being exposed? What picture's forming? From this side of the page, there's no one pictured; for who am I without something to read? But from the other side, reading and writing belong to phantoms …

Brod and Brod

We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we're not geniuses. It's a gift, he says, but it's also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don't have it ourselves. 

Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka?

But then again, didn't Kafka depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka, lean on his friend in times of despair and solitude?

We too, W. and decided long ago, must give our lives in the service of others. We too must write interpretative essays on the work of others more intelligent and gifted than we will ever be. We too must do our best to offer support and solace to others despite the fact that we will always misunderstand their genius, and only bother them with our enthusiasm.

Inside Us, Outside Us

Ballard dead, after a long illness. Ballard, dead … he said he was dying, didn't he, in his last book? I didn't read it – I haven't read any new Ballard since The Kindness of Women, which seemed a betrayal to me. Of what? All those early stories and books, 'The Terminal Beach', The Atrocity Exhibition which I read and reread.

The only British novelist of ideas, I want to write that - but was he really British? His horror on returning to this grey isle, I remember reading of that. A dreadful, parochial country with dreadful, parochial novelists … but then there was Ballard, outside all that, outside it but within it with Delvaux on his wall.

How many times did I read the original Re:search publication by him and about him? It seemed an antidote of sorts. To what? This country. Parochialism. Over and over again, that and The Drowned World, of which I had an illustrated edition. I was quite young reading those. The battle (a false battle) was for the legitimacy of Ballard – the incorporation of his name among the canon other well known writers.

Literary writers, parochially literary writers … A false battle as I say. As a bull, you should never charge the bullfighter's cape. Everyone knows the influence of Ballard spread by other means. Music above all – popular music and its satellite publications. Later, I never liked Ballard's name to be listed among a band's influences. Like that Myths of the Near Future album. No need for that.

Ballard and Ballardism long since saturated music and other arts. Keep quiet about your influences. Ballard became a name that was too obvious. Let it fall back into obscurity. The dream of someone young as I was discovering a novel of his. The Drowned World, say. Or a story. 'The Terminal Beach', say. 'The Voices of Time'.

Forget the short story compendia and anything published after … what date? Forget the profile of a career novelist, which Ballard never wanted to be in the obituaries. A sensibility, a mood instead. A vision, a way of looking. That 'we' – whoever we are – bear inside our own vision, looking with his eyes in us. Inside us, outside us.

Turnchapel

The water taxi to Mountbatten. We're in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck. – 'Poseidon must be angry', says W. Homerically. W.'s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he's begun? the sixth? It's the aorist that defeats him, he notes. Every time.

It's choppy! – 'We should libate the sea', says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It's because the mountains are salty and the sea is full of broken up mountains, he says.

The round, stubby tower at Mountbatten Point. W. seemed rueful when we were here last year, reading the plaque then as he does this time. Why was he so unhappy? He must have been hungry, W. says. Hunger makes him very depressed. First his nose aches, then his teeth ache, then a great wave of depression breaks …

W. cherishes my special love for the town of Turnchapel, near Mountbatten. I become gentler when I'm there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I could have lived here, imagine … We muse wistfully on what I might have been like. – 'A better person', W. thinks, 'taller, with some nobility of character'.

How Is It Possible …?

W. reads to me from The Star of Redemption. – 'Listen to this!'

In the innermost sanctum of the divine truth, where man might expect all the world and himself to dwindle into likeness of that which he is to catch sight of there, he thus catches sight of none other than his own. The Star of Redemption is become countenance which glances at me and out of which I glance. Not God become my mirror, but God's truth.

What does it mean?, W. wonders. It doesn't matter. It's amazing, I tell him. It's the best thing I've ever heard. W.'s impressed at my vehemence. I have certain instincts, W. allows. Occasionally I'm right, he tells me. – 'It's like a chimpanzee who knows a storm's coming, jumping up and down and screaming'.

Sometimes we go up to W.'s study and spread Rosenzweig's books on the table. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. always says, with quiet reverence. – 'Even you feel it, don't you? Even you have a sense of what is greater than you'.

Dressed For Thought

'Why don't you get rid of that jacket?', says W. 'You've been wearing it for years. It makes you look fat. It's completely shapeless'.

W. and I are wearing our flowery shirts. 'Look at us', W. sighs, 'fat and blousy, and in flowery shirts, and everyone else slim and wearing black'.

What's wrong with us? Why are we never dressed for thought? Take my trousers, for example. They should be pulled up round my waist like those of Benjamin in the famous photograph. But they sag. They droop disappointingly. – You're a man without hips!', says W. 'A man without ideas!'

W. remembers the pictures of Deleuze from the 70s, with his flares and long hair. Then there were the trousers of Levinas, generous, expansive …

I'm getting fat, of course. Eventually, I'll have to wear elasticated trousers like the American professors, W. says. Perhaps it will suit me, that obesity. Perhaps it give me gravitas.

The Third Leader

We've always needed a leader, W. and I agree. We were in Poland several years ago, in Wroclaw town hall square and it became very clear to us: we needed a leader, someone to inspire us and force us to work harder. Someone to make us capable of more than we could accomplish on our own.

For his part, W. has always dreamt of being part of a pack. Friendship is very important to him. – 'You have to work together, to strive together, to force each other on'. Friendship involves a lot of nagging, W. explains, which is why he's so merciless with me. It's a sign of love, he says, his loving. But a leader, that's what we really need, he says.

In truth, we have found several leaders. The first, far cleverer than us, far more serious, wrote a book we admired. We spoke alongside him and were the dull panels of a triptych. We were there only to make him shine all the more, we agreed. It was enough to be close to our leader, enough to give him a background of stupidity on which to set himself against.

But then the disaster happened, W. remembers. We told him, didn't we? We told him he was our leader. We told him what we hoped he'd make us become. We told him of our hopes and fears … That's where it all went wrong, we agree. We scared him off. After that, we resolved never to tell our leaders they were our leaders, but we could never help it.

Didn't the same thing happen with our second leader? – 'Which one of us blurted it out', W. asks, 'you or me?' Regardless, the spell was broken. We had spoke to him of what we lacked and what he had. We spoke of the nectar of knowledge and the bees of the invisible, of the Open and the Closed. We frightened him, we agree.

Then there was the third leader. – 'Ah, our third leader', W. exclaims, 'the greatest one of all'. We brought him halfway round the world! We thought this was it, that we'd finally justified our lives; this was our high point! And what happened?, W. asks, knowing what happened.

We told him all we wanted was a leader and to be led by a leader. We told him about first leader and our second leader, and our desertion by our first leader and our second leader. We told him of  the great harvest of ideas, and of the coming end times. We told him of the apocalypse and of waiting for the Messiah … 

He was better than us, W. and I agree. He gave, we took. He had had ideas, we had stolen them. He engaged directly with thought, whereas our engagement was meditated by books we half understand. He tried to change the world around him, whereas we've always been parasitical upon people who try and change things. Every day, for him, something new might have occured. Whereas every day, for us, confirmed that nothing new will ever have happened …

Our third would-be leader was not so easily scared. But we think he wanted peers, not disciples. Where is he now? – 'On the other side of the world, far away from us, sensible man', says W.

Summer Flies

The last Duke of Edgcumbe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and put the whole estate up for sale. The city bought it. It's a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up through the woods.

It was here the Dukes and their guests would drive about in their carriages in the twilight, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There's even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, looking very convincing in the autumn sun.

A landslide has taken the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing aslant, though most have fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It's slow going – very overgrown – and where the cliff has completely collapsed, you have to scramble across scree.

What would happen if we fell? It's a long way down. But W. and I never think about our death or anything like that. It's pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we've always been convinced by that. We're syndromes or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more signifcant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.

Doublepatte et Patachon

Strasbourg soothes us. Strolling through the wide boulevards, we grow calm and quiet. So many beautiful buildings, one after another! It's too much, we're dwarfed, humbled … and for a time, we're quiet, really quiet, lost in wonder at old Europe.

Isn't this where Levinas and Blanchot met for the first time? Imagine them, two students, the one tall and thin – very pale, the other cheerful and plump; one dishevelled in a double breasted suit and the other dressed like a dandy with a silver-knobbed cane …

I show W. the picture of them both from Malka's biography. Doublepatte et Patachon, that's what someone wrote on the back of the photo, no one knows who, I tell him. Doublepatte et Patachon, that was their French name. Long and Short, that's what they called themselves in English (they were originally from Denmark). Can you imagine Levinas and Blanchot as a comedy duo?

We sit down in a bistro and drink Alsatian wine from tumblers. W. speaks soft French, his voice lowered, and we dream, for a moment, that we are real European intellectuals.

Men in Space

Freiburg's destroying us. Last night, we worked our way through all the wines on the menu, glass by glass. In the end, the waiter sat down with us and told us the bar was terrible. He was Polish and keen to try his English: 'my heart, how do you say it? (he makes the gesture, and we say 'aches') aches for you. Go somewhere else'.

Where should we go? In moments of crisis, W. always asks himself what Kafka would do. What would Kafka do in our place? What would he make of it all? But that's the point: Kafka would never find himself in our place; he would never have made the mistakes we've made.

Kafka was at least a man of Europe, of old Europe. A Europe in crisis, but Europe nonetheless. And us? We are men without contexts, without roots, men in space who float endlessly in a fog of the intellect.

The Plan for Plymouth

Freiburg's a terrible place, we agree. But what is it that makes it so terrible? We muse on this for a time. – 'It was rebuilt to look exactly like it was after the war, that's the problem', W. decides, and compares it unfavourably to Plymouth, which was rebuilt in an entirely different style.

W. reminds me of Abercrombie's Plan for Plymouth, published during the war, which saw the city organised in long boulevards, transected by the avenue that runs from the train station to the Hoe. Modernism at its finest, we agree.

But Freiburg's fake. I remind W. of Warsaw, the central part of which was built in an exact replica of what was therefore before the bombing – weren't we at our happiest eating out with our guide in the old square? - 'That's because it was obviously fake', W. says. And then there was the warmth and conviviality of the Poles. – 'The Freiburgers are cold!

Nothing here is historical; nothing has any historical weight. They've lost the past, though they've no idea they've lost it, nor what it might mean to have lost the past. They don't miss it. It's gone the way of its intellectual life: it's a relic, its roots have been entirely cut away.

But what of us, who are likewise without roots? What of us who drift in a haze through European cities. We recognise ourselves here, that's the trouble. Freiburg confirms us in what we are.

Seven Months

Tired of Freiburg, we catch the train to Titisee and hire a pedallo to paddle out into the lake. Feet on the dashboard, the blue bowl of the sky above us, we discuss the limits of phenomenology and the limits of the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, whose hut in Todtnauenberg we refuse to see.

We discuss the inadequacy of political thought in failing to tackle the question of political economy and the failure of philosophical thought to pose, really pose, the question of the environment collapse …

Above all, we bewail the fact that the great disasters about to befall us barely leave a trace in the intellectual reflections of our time. It's as if we were going to live forever, but the real thinker, we agree, knows without histrionics thought is fragile and already touched by death.

Isn't that what the young Rosenzweig knew as he reassembled The Star of Redemption in his barracks in Freiburg as he convalesced? It took him seven months, that's all. Seven months, and he was also writing a letter a day to his beloved …

Our Leaders

Our first leader was always an example to W. and I. I'm not very interesting, he always insisted, but my thoughts are interesting. My thoughts! As if he had nothing to do with them!, W. exclaims. As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptable for something infinitely more important.

He was completely serious, W. remembers, not like us. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatittude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?

W. and I reminisce about our second leader. He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of his everyday life, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. said. We agree: how frankly and absolutely he spoke of himself, and to anyone who asked. Frankly and absolutely, as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking was possible. A level of which we have no idea, W. says.

He was completely serious as well, says W. of our second leader, not like us. We're the apes of thought, W. says, but he was completely serious. Everything was serious for our second leader. Nothing mattered but thought, the life of thought!

W. and I reminisce about our third leader. Everyone knows to keep quiet when she speaks, W. says. She speaks very quietly herself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. She lives in a different way to everyone else, that much is clear. She lives a different life, and her quietness is a sign of her elevation.

It's what everyone in the room knows when she speaks: she's better than the rest of us, cleverer, she occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it would be impossible for us to think. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in Northern forests!

We lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to listen. For a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.

Behold the Ape

I hole my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it was written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says. Once I was happy on my savannah, he says. I was happy romping about the whole horizon before me. What made me think I could read, let alone write? How did I end up mistaking myself for a writer?

Behold the idiot, that's what my book says, says W. Wouldn't you like go back to my savannah now? Wouldn't you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?

A Vortex of Impotence

W. sends me a quote to mull over in my stupidity, he says.

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence. 

W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.

I want to escape, that's my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something's wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he's not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. I'm not escaping, says W. I'm going to drown with everyone else, he'll make sure of it. I'm going down, says W.

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.

A Beam of Light

We'll stop writing about the Messiah only when the Messiah comes, W. decides. And until then … By what strange chance did it fall to us, who are least qualified to do so, to write about the Messiah? And how, in particular, did I come to write on the Messianic idea, I who am even less qualified to do so than W.? He at least reads Biblical Hebrew; he at least attended lessons on the Talmud; he has some sense of the divine and has always found himself at the brink of belief.

'You're a Hindu,' says W. 'What's a Hindu doing thinking about Messianism?' Of course, I'm not even much of a Hindu, W. says. What relationship do I have with Hinduism? Wasn't I going to learn Sanskrit? Wasn't I going to set out my Hindu stall? I even made noises about becoming a scholar of the Hindu religion, W. says, although it came to nothing. In the end, things have come to a grim pass when a not-quite-Hindu or a non-Hindu with no feeling for religion starts thinking about Messianism, W. says.

What is it that attracts me to the Messianic idea? What beam of light continues to reach me? For it must be quite a beam, W. says, if it's able to pierce the fog of my stupidity. Or perhaps there's something in my stupidity – due, no doubt, to its sheer overwhelming extent, the fact that it seems to cover and occlude the world - that makes a place for the Messiah, he's not sure.