The Idiot Messiah

There are two axes, notes W., the apocalyptic and the messianic. The apocalypse, W. says, is the time of capitalism: the catastrophe hidden by a sequence of events which is merely the projection of infinite credit and the ideology of progress.

The disaster's the imminent global catastrophe, W. says. The destruction of the climate equilibrium. It could happen at any moment, W. says. Now for instance. Or perhaps not for hundreds of years. A threshold will be crossed and after that …

In the meantime, we think we can avert it. We think we might overcome the catatsrophe in an impossible present of the future perfect. In truth, the true catastrophe is hidden by these so-called events of our capitalism, W. says, and it is that which has to be redeemed.

You have to see the future as it could have been and not as what it became. It could have been otherwise, says W., just as the Messiah could arrive at any instant.

How are we going to redeem the catastrophe?, W. says. How are you going to redeem it, in your flowery shirt? Are you the Messiah? Am I? W.'s confused, he says.

But then we remember the conversation in the Talmud between the Rabbi and the prophet Elijah, who tells him he will find the Messiah sitting at the gates of Rome with the lepers and the cripples. When will you come?, the Rabbi asks the leper-Messiah. When will you come: the Messiah's there, he's no one other than the leper, but he's not there yet: what does it all mean?

Anyone might be the Messiah. The Messiah might be me, says one Talmudic commentary. Are you the Messiah?, W. asks me. Are you?, I ask him. It's all to do with the logic of relations, W. says, his favourite topic. I am the Messiah for you just as you are the Messiah for me not because of what each of us is for himself, but because of what we are for the other.

It's all about speech, says W. About speaking. We're very good at that, 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 and there's nothing left to say. But we carry on regardless, we agree. We twitter like birds. We ascend to the highest, most rarefied plain of inanity.

W. says the Messiah will come through the gap that we open between us in our inanity. We're incapable of saying anything of interest about the Messiah, we're agreed on that. We've nothing to say on the topic, but that's what saves us. We're in the desert. The end is close. Idiocy is redemptive, W. says, but only for idiots. 

Teaching

'These are truly the last days …' W. is making me listen to Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues again. 'Shut up and listen'. He plays this to the students, he says. And he makes them watch Bela Tarr. That's what he calls teaching, he says.

The last days! What are we going to do? 'We'll be the first to go under', says W., as we sit in the living room, shutters over the window. 'We're weak … look at us'.

Misanthropy

One would think that with my simplicity I would have a simple love for humakind, says W., but that's not nearly the case. I'm full of hatred, aren't I? This as we tour the cloister at W.'s place of work, colleagues warmly greeting W., and W. warmly greeting them back.

Of course, I skulk around my place of work, W. says, doing anything to avoid human contact. He remembers how I told him of the circuitous routes I take through my building so as to avoid saying hello to anyone. I don't know why greetings are so difficult for you, says W.

He doesn't believe it's misanthropy, W. says, just as he's never believed that I'm melancholy. It's simply a low level awkwardness, he says, just as my so-called melancholy is no more than  few bad moods.

Or perhaps, then again, it's a kind of shame. You don't think you belong, do you?, W. says. You don't think you deserve to be there, which of course you don't. Nor for that matter does he, W. says. Perhaps he's more reconciled with his idiocy, W. says. Perhaps I haven't quite accepted mine.

Gibt sie auf!

There's something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he's not quite sure what it is. Shame – is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do. They would have known their inability to think and to write and given up.

But there's something missing in us, isn't there?, W. muses. What do you suppose it is? We don't stop, do we? On and on it goes, and we fall a little further every day. We don't stop, do we? Or something doesn't stop in us.

Perhaps it's a kind of reflex, W. muses. Some kind of automatic behaviour of the kind exhibited by those insects who continue to mate even when their heads are cut off.

Why don't we stop? There's a short story by Kafka, a fragment really,  W. says, that reminds him of our predicament. A man in a great hurry gets lots on the way to the station and asks a policeman the way. Gibt sie auf!, says the policeman, give it up! That's what we should do, says W. Give it up!

With, Not Alone

Appelfeld's For Every Sin. A series of encounters, that's all. We know the protagonist's name – Theo – but not the names of those he meets. And we know what he wants: to pare down relations. To simplify. Even to achieve the absolute, the severing of relations, whether of dependency or trust.

And isn't that what I want when I select a book to read from the shelf? I want, in the opening paragraphs, to be reduced – to what? Simplicity – a few simple sentences like a cup of water. And to read of others who would be so reduced. Why did I pick For Every Sin rather than To The Cattails or The Healer? Because it begins not with a family, not with mother said, or father said, but with a single character, a simple protagonist. And a merciful simplicity of prose, just one clean line after another.

But this is also a book in which such mercy is denied me. As if a book could be a retreat, a turning from the world. But unto what does this book turn me? Why, as I read, am I urging Theo the refugee on, urging him to make his way across the hillcrests, avoiding the valleys where there are others?

A series of encounters, one after another. And a series of escapes. Theo's attempt to move, to free himself. And then, in the end, the lesson that such freedom is a lie, and that he belongs with the others. I feel the book is teaching me. I read it quickly enough, but it refused to settle back inside me. Refused – and so I couldn't begin the next book I borrowed from the library.

I had to write, instead. How pitiful! To write – to follow again the course of For Every Sin. To follow it, just that, and then to learn. But what is this lesson? Appelfeld is the simplest of writers. And as I read, as I write of what I read, I feel I become the simplest of readers. Only one, now, who has not turned from the world in order to read, but the opposite: to read is to turn back to the world. To be turned, just as Theo had to redescend into the valleys from the hillcrests.

Now the time has come to separate. This being together weakens us. One mustn't be together. A man in the field is brave. But with others he's swept along like a beast.

Theo, just liberated from a hard labour camp, dreams of 'inner order'. He found himself in a deserted army outpost, where everything has its place. He'd separated himself from the others, from the refugees, and gone North. But somehow a stranger called Mina, another refugee, has found him, and it is to her he is speaking.

We mustn't be together. Everyone for himself. In that way you can also maintain your inner order. This room, for example, shows inner order. They retreated calmly. They left everything in its place.

Inner order. On the wall, a map on which he has plotted his journey back to his hometown. He shows Mina. That is where he will have to go. Alone, of course. But he doesn't leave, not yet. Mina has taken to bed. She drowses. Later, she shows him her wounds. She apologises for doing so. Theo says, 'a person must show others and demand help'. Then he speaks, letting lose 'a confined stream of words'. Reported speech:

He spoke of the need to live a full and proud life. A person who doesn't live a full and proud life is like an insect. The Jews never taught their children how to live, to struggle, to demand their due; in times of need, to unsheathe the sword and stand face to face against evil.

What polemic! But what war is he fighting? What sword is to be unsheathed? He was alone in the army outpost. He admires its order. You could stay there a whole year, he muses; there's plenty of food. But meanwhile, there's Mina. Earlier, Theo had offered Mina coffee and cigarettes. She said:

A cup of coffee and a cigarette. Who imagined such gifts? We've already been in the world of truth, and we've come back from there. It's interesting to come back from there, isn't it?

Truth: the camps. Why that? Why truth? Like Theo, Mina has left the others in the shed with whom she was confined. They were good to her, she remembers, and later, Theo will also remember the goodness of the others. Now Theo's monologue on order. And Mina says, 'I am not so tidy. In all my school report cards it says, "Not Orderly"'. That's how it was for Theo. But now he's to be orderly. You can learn one thing from the retreating army: order. They left everything in its place.

Order: but Mina is wounded. She shows Theo her wounds. And just as stubbornly as he speaks of his desire to move, to walk home, he speaks in praise of those who ask for help. That too is what it means to live a full and proud life. Now we understand: everyone is to be alone, but unafraid to ask for help. Alone, and coming to others only to ask for help, or to offer it. But everyone alone, untogether.

He goes out to find fresh food and a doctor. He returns having found none. Mina is not there. Where is she? He looks out over the hilltops.

Theo raised his head and looked out through the screened window, as though seeking that part of his being which had remained in the hills.

That's where he would be: walking across the hilltops, steadily advancing. But he does not resent his obligation. He is obligated by Mina, by her wounds. he calls her name. The day passes. Earlier, Theo notes to himself he sees his mother's features in Mina's. Now he is afraid: his memory is emptying out. He leaves, going south. He'd headed north, to be away from the refugees, but now he is heading south. Courage again: if he only follows this course, he will be home.

But a voice, asking him for a cigarette, surprises him. There is a man sprawled at his feet. 'Theo fell to his knees and gave the man a light'. Now Theo sees refugees everywhere below. The man with him says he wants to escape them, too. They remind him of the camps. Theo is frightened that Mina is one of the refugee tents, 'surrounded by people feeding her sardines and drilling it into her that she had to be with everyone, that in every generation the Jews were together, and now too they must not abandon the community'.

This thought horrifies him. Should he return to the cabin, the deserted army post? Order, simplicity. But he remembers that he came to the other refugees to search for Mina. Is this true? The narrator had not told us this. Still, he cannot find her, and his face has drifted from his memory: he will not recognise her even if he does find her.

Another encounter. 'Do you have a cigarette?' Yes, Theo does. He recognises the accent: 'You're from Vienna, aren't you?' Yes. The man says he has forgotten everything, and asks Theo where he intends to go. 'Home, straight home'. 'You're right, you're right', says the man, and then Theo sees in the delicate face of his interlocutor a vanished capacity to deliberate and order; in its place 'a kind of hesitant wonderment'. The man is lost in his loss. Theo asserts, 'First a person must get home, isn't that so?'' the man agrees 'with great submission'. Home: is that where order will be found?

The refugees keep informers prisoner, beating their feet. They wail.

Theo wanted to get up and approach them, but they were too sunk into themselves. It was as though they had just grasped that for them the war wasn't over, for them it was continuing. He felt a kind of closeness with them.

A closeness? If he lies down, he will become like them. He will not lie down. He walks, but then he collapses. Another man is lying on the ground near him and addresses him 'with an annoying Jewish voice'; they speak. Evening comes. Voices all around them. Theo is furious: he wants silence. He rises and goes close to a fire. He asks for coffee, and receives a cup of coffee from a woman with trembling hands.

Now he remembers Mina again, and calls out her name. He dreams of Mina. He speaks with her. She expresses concern about the informers. Theo is angry. When he wakes, back to the woman with trembling hands for more coffee. They speak. Is she religious? She is not religious. Her husband was a communist, and opposed to all religion. It seems to Theo she is religious, but she is not religious. What else can she do but serve coffee?, she says. It keeps her sane.

Now Theo tells her he intends to go to a monastery. It is news to us, the readers. To a monastery?  He wants quiet and music. He suffers from the noise. The words go mute in him; he withdraws. He remembers Mina's face. He calls it lovely now. It is clear to him that she has entered a convent. Silence and music.

He sits in the darkness. Another refugee comes to him and tells Theo he must eat. Theo is angry. Who is he to be told? Again he speaks of separation, only this time he acts on his impulse and leaves.

A sharp fragrance of mown clover stood in the air. Apparently the wind came from a distance. Here, there was not a living soul. Green darkness lay beneath the tree trunks, and the silence was heavy and undisturbed. "I'm on my way," he said to himself.

Memories fill him. His mother, his father. The chapter passes, a new one begins. Again he meets the refugees. Again he is given coffee. He speaks to someone who reminds him of an Uncle, and announces his intention to convert. His interlocutor seems angry. 'It isn't anger, it's strangulation'. The other man grabs Theo's coat; Theo pushes him away; the man falls. The man is unconscious. Theo is surrounded and accused of violence.

That evening, he sets out again. Alone again. Memories come again. Theo confusedly supposes he murdered the man. Another encounter: a full figured woman who had hidden among the peasant folk for the war years, the cows letting her suck milk from their udders. They drink coffee together, Theo and her. Then off he goes again, imagining there are pursuers after him to bring him to trial for murder.

He wanders. Memories again. His mother's love of coffee. He calls out for coffee 'in his mother's voice'. Another encounter: a woman and her daughter. They are frightened of him. He gives them cigarettes. They've lost their supplies – a man stole them from them. Theo will help them, he says, but they disappear in the night.

Later, as he drinks coffee, another man approaches him. His interlocutor tells Theo of his own conversion, in the war years. He thought it would save him from the fate of the others; it does not. But in the camps, he has discovered a kind of faith. The man was a violinist, a concertmaster. Now he's no desire to play again. 'Nor to sing again in the synagogue?', asks Theo.

'Jewish prayer is the essence of simplicity. One takes a prayerbook in his hands and prays'. – 'You've given up music?' -'Our camp was full of classical music. The commander of the camp was mad about Mozart'.

This after Theo's memories of his mother's love of Mozart. She would listen to the music coming from the church, Theo had told his interlocutor. 'All during the war the music was within me. Now I'm afraid to lose it'.

Another encounter, then another – a woman whose pleasure is to serve coffee to everyone, from her plentiful supplies. She'll stay there forever, she says, when Theo tells her he is going home. The bodies of her younger sister and her daughters lie in the woods nearby. She will stay there.

Theo moves on, still imagining he is being followed. He dreams. Then he dreams of Mendel Dorf, one of his shedmates in the camp. Mendel rose early to pray; he had faith; he angers the other prisoners; the worst, according to Theo, comes when Mendel is accused of behaving like a Christian, rather than a Jew. The worst: but all Theo can remember is Mendel's face, 'round in its simplicity'.

Now he wanders again across the hillcrests, dreaming of home. His feet are light again; in two and a half weeks I will be home again, he tells himself. But now again the refugees, many of them, crowded togther. The smell of coffee: he is in a transit camp. 'Transit to where?', he asks. 'I don't know', says a woman. Now he curses himself. If he had stayed on the hillcrests, he would have been alright. This is what he tells the woman. Here, the valley can be blocked by enemies; it is necessary to scatter, so as not to make a target.

More informers, kept in a pit, but who are given steaming mugs of coffee. Theo feels guilty: isn't it he who should be in the pit instead of them? His interlocutor is educated; they continue to talk. Isn't she frightened?, Theo asks. Every refugee is a precious person, she says. She has learnt to love them; she listens to their stories. Theo tells her of his desire to convert. She would never do that, she says. And not now, above all.

He rises to his feet. He must depart. Then another man, who, like him, was once a student. He is stranded in the transit camp, he tells Theo, who speaks once again of the hillcrests. Now Theo climbs out of the valley. A waking dream of Mendel. He argues in his dream for his conversion.

'I'm going to the place where Bach dwells. The place where Bach dwells is like a temple. I have no other place in the world. Now I'm making a pilgrimage to him'.

He tells himself he left the labour camps, his shedmates, his allies in the war years to leave Yiddish behind. His mother's punctilious German. His father's syntactical precision. But now he realises that language has deserted him. A cup of coffee, he says in his mother's voice. He feels frightened. 'At the inn I'll buy cigarettes', he tells himself. And remembers his mother's last words, as she got into the railroad car with the others. 'I don't like this hurly burly'.

The last encounter. He has been two days without coffee and cigarettes. He comes to a low shed, full of refugees. Come in, he is invited. They have coffee and cigarettes. But Theo says he doesn't want to come in. He's going home, he says.

'You know very well that no one is waiting for us at home. Tkae one of the sick people and bring him to a safe place. That will be your reward'.

Now Theo remembers his own deportation. He and his father, with the others, being marched through his hometown. The burning synagogue. Now his interlocutor says:

'There are some weak people among us whom we mustn't abandon now. We haven't lost the semblance of humanity. We must do what is incumbent upon us. Isn't that so?'

Open and simple words: the brethren are scattered on deserted roads. The weak must be watched over. Then it comes: Theo realises he will never go home, that his mother's language is lost to him. Now and forever it will be the language of the camps. His interlocutor says:

'Thought is forbidden to us. Thought dribes one mad. We must do as much good as possible'.

Words close to those of the educated woman he met in the previous chapter. And to woman with trembling hands who served coffee to all. The novel ends with Theo asleep, as after a long, desperate quarrel, having gulped down mug after mug of coffee.

Yeast

W. was impressed at my recent depression. It's a sign of your seriousness, he says, or that even an idiot like you cannot escape seriousness. These are desperate times, says W., even you must have a sense of that. W.'s always admired my whining, 'like a sad chimp, at the limits of its intelligence', but my depression took me beyond that, didn't it? You were silent for once, W. says. I didn't ring him, or respond to emails … No chatter from me: that's when he knew things were really bad, says W.

Of course, I put my depression down to yeast, W. notes. Yeast! Some psychotherapist you'd make, says W. '"Doctor, I want to kill myself'." – "stop eating yeast" – "Doctor, my wife just hung herself." – "It was the YEAST!"' Of course, it has nothing to do with yeast, and everything to do with the great crises of the world, which even I have woken up to, W. says.

Colds Come From China

Colds come from China, says W. They spread West across the mountains and the steppes. It's a tremendous journey, he says. From China to Plymouth, but a cold's reached him nonetheless, although he calls it a flu, but he's always been prone to exaggeration.

I'm in bed, he tells me on the phone, shivering and coughing up phlegm, and thinking only of the great crises that have gripped the world.

In W.'s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it's the key to great thoughts, W. muses, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that. Still, he's disappointed that not one thought has come to him, not one, especially as it would pertain to the great crises that have gripped the world.

Widow Twankey

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 his windows.

These are the End Times, he sighs. His End Times, and the End Times of the world. What will become of us? Oh I'll be okay – I'm robust in my idiocy, he says, but he probably won't be, coughing up green phlegm and internally haemorrhaging as the financial markets of the world haemorrhage.

Luckily, he has Sal to look after him, who pays no heed to what he says about his End Times, or the End Times of the world, W. says.

Ivan Brunetti Wants to Die

Ivan Brunetti wants to kill himself. That's what he's wanted for some time now – to take his own life. To end it all – what could be better. Imagine the peace! Imagine it, no longer having to write, to work – there'd be no deadlines, no demands from editors. To die – and then to curl up in a quiet place for eternity.

But meanwhile, Ivan Brunetti has to write. The issue's due at the end of the year. He works page by page – no more long stories, not anymore. Not the long stories that began the first three issues of Schizo. A page at a time, that's enough. Who could plan for longer than a page? And besides, he's working all day, he has a day job. He's busy enough! He has enough to do, especially at this time of year, when it's getting dark so early, and its so cold.

A page at a time – so Schizo 4 is made up of pages, of complete strips. One page, then another. One page – in the evening, or across a series of evenings, and at the weekend. Damn it, it's too much. He phones his editor for a deadline. I want a deadline, he explains. I need something to aim towards. He's accomplished little enough so far, he explains. He's done little enough. Just give me a deadline.

Ivan Brunetti wants to die. He's tired of living, because living means work. He hasn't got it in him to work. He takes it so seriously! He takes it more seriously than anything else, working. His whole life is full of work. There's the day job – and the job at night. Drawing, writing, inking in. And there's his anthology work. And the teaching he does for the university. Jesus, it's too much.

So he writes about dying. He endlessly rehearses his own death. He draws pictures of suicides, suiciding. He draws himself with limbs chopped away and his face trampled away, stabbed and shot and kicked and beaten, Ivan Brunetti at the bottom of the world, Ivan Brunetti still alive, God help him.

Ivan Brunetti's got a death-drive, there's no question of that. It's the most obvious thing in the world! But it went wrong somewhere, it took a wrong turning, and now like Kafka's Gracchus, he's lost his death, he cannot keep his appointment. It took a wrong turn for Ivan Brunetti. Death led him elsewhere.

It's the promise at the end of the page. At the end of the page, at the end of the issue: the promise of cessation. But then it begins again, the old engine putters back into life, the propellor's turning, off he has to go, a shaky old plane on the runway. Up to the skies, off he goes again, when he wants only to lie down like a dead man, the sky passing over him. When he wants only peace, peace and death like a cool flannel on his forehead.

Ivan Brunetti's lost his death and doesn't know where to find it. It's gone off without him, and taken his life with it. Off it's gone with his life, with his sense of the limits of life and the limits of work. Off it's gone, the end, the clear dark line at the end, the eternal horizon he would sail towards.

But it'll never come closer, not now. Ivan Brunetti's off in his deathship. There it is, the eternal mirage: the final line, the place where he can lie down and die, the sky streaming above him. But meanwhile – the eternal meanwhile – there's a page to draw, to write, and then another page, and then another …

Licking the Barrel

I like nothing better than applying for jobs, W. notes. I like the whole process – rewriting my CV, composing a letter – it takes me weeks, W. notes, and involves massive amounts of time and IQ. You like abasing yourself, W. says. How can abase myself today?, that's the first question you ask in the morning, W. says. 

On the other hand, I'm the person to whom W. turns when he has to write an application. I make him feel a sense of urgency, the sense that everything's about to end, and his life, his very life, depends upon his application. I always feel the world's about to end, that's what he likes about me, says W. I always think I'm about to be found out and shot. I always want to lick the gun barrel I think is pointed towards me, W. says, which is why I'm such a good administrator.

But this apocalypticism is the reason I've succeeded to the extent that I have, W. reflects. Whereas I'm all apocalypticism, W. says, he's all messianism: he's always full of joy and serene indifference to the world. What I suffer, he laughs at as the most extreme folly.

It's all mad, he says, the world went mad some time ago. But you take it too seriously, he says. In the end, I want only to be spoken to gently and soothingly, like a wounded animal, a dog run over at the side of the road. But that's how they talk when they're about to shoot you, W. says, and they are going to shoot you, no matter how much you lick the barrel.

Perhaps I want to be shot, W. muses. Perhaps that would be the kindest thing that could be done for me. But he has an application to write, that's why he's phoning me, he says. Give me a sense of urgency, he says. Give me a sense the world's about to end.

Phelgm

W. has 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. You need to get it all out. It means the infection is passing. But W. doesn't trust my medical advice.

W. hasn't had a thought while he was ill, he tells me. He always thinks he will. It worked for Kafka, didn't it? And what about Blanchot? But W.'s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

The Slump

I am a sullen drinker, W. says. Not for the whole evening, he admits – not even for most of it, but the time always comes when I refuse to say anything at all and slump down in my chair. That's when your immense belly becomes visible, says W. During the slump. It's like Moby Dick, says W. Vast and white and rarely seen. But there it is in the slump. It always amazes him, says W. It amazes everyone.

I'm not like him, W. notes, for whom every conversation is on the verge of becoming messianic. W. likes to journey with his interlocutor through the apocalyptic and towards the messianic, he says. He believes in his interlocutor, not like me. He believes in conversation. You're slumped, drunk and silent at one end of the table, W. says, while he is waiting for the messiah at the other.

The Threshold

Clearing my throat to say – what? At the threshold of writing, but what to write? And now dream instead of a writing that remains at the threshold, that reports nothing, or, by way of that reportage only announces the simple fact that it was possible.

At the threshold: a crowded office. The Arbus book arrives, another Xmas present. And with it, a letter from Corwood. There's a new Jandek album being packaged: Skirting the Edge: the 60th? the 61st?

Then cardboard packaging, remnants from lunch, jumpers for the cold weather, anti-bacterial cleaner. Sun Kil Moon playing again: 'Lost Verses': wasn't I going to write about that? Wasn't I going to make it my 'song of the year'? Laughter.

Beside me the manuscript with its crossings out and annotations. I haven't worked on it for a while – for how long? There's no time. Or rather, the time you get is so short, too short for anything except standing at the threshold.

Clearing my throat – but to say – what? What was it you wanted to write? To achieve by writing? No matter. What's left: to mark the moment when you could begin, when you drew the day around you and made a space to begin. To begin – and then to end immediately. That's what the day permitted. That's what it took away.

December 12th. Five years ago (nearly five years …) I began writing here. Five years ago to mark a threshold, the same one I'm marking here. Not to say anything. No communication. Except: it was possible to write. Except: I wanted to write and I wrote.

In the office: six bottles of wine in a cardboard carrier. A post of Neal's Yard moisturiser. An El Vez poster from that shop in Knoxville, peeling from the wall. And this to say: what? That the day and this space could be gathered here. That the day folded itself into a place in which I could write. And then, almost instantaneously, could no longer write.

Empty Pages

Unable to write, or to write anything that would convince me. Which is to say that would have its own kind of life, apart from mine. December 10th – is that the date? Don't I have a deadline for something or another? Two cranes on the skyline. A bright, clear day. I can see all the way to the clouds along the coast.

The office is too big. Too big today, when nothing happens here, when it's all for nothing. Too big – as though it were held up and exposed to something, judged – by the whole sky. I have a manuscript to work on. But it's not really a manuscript, not quite. I want to push it to that stage, when it has its own life, when it is something, apart from me. Only it's not there yet, not close. A few pages with crossings out and annotations. A few dog-eared pages, with scrawlings in pencil and pen.

But there's nothing I can say here that I haven't said better before. Nearly five years since I began – haven't I said it all? Didn't I say it better another time, a year ago, or two years ago? In truth, it's only limping along. In truth, there's nothing new to write, nothing that I haven't done before and better, which is not to say well.

Five years ago … what was happening then? A different office, three floors down. I was more solitary. No one could have lived that way for long. And now, my new life? A lack of belief in writing. An inability to join word to word. I begin and then stop. Nothing new to be said. Or nothing that does not echo in the direction of something already said, already done.

Why waste time? Why bother? And that 'why bother' disjoins word from word and sentence from sentence. It's too late, it's gone, it's finished. That Bergman Archive book open on the table in my mausoleum-office. I have the money now to buy what I would have visited a bookshop a hundred times to look through. But now I can buy it and open it there on my desk to read, to be read.

The open sky is reading. The space of the office reads. It was a Christmas present, very early. Why did I ask for it? Why did I want it? To want again what I wanted once. To let it flame up in me again, some kind of ardency, some desire. That was one with my desire to make something – a book, perhaps. A 'something' to hold out before me like a torch. Only there's no torch now. The darkness of the manuscript instead. Darkness of printed words in 12 point and crossings out and annotations.

Why bother? Why join sentence to sentence? Nothing to be done. Nothing to be said. Sometimes I read books that sweep me before them. That push me ahead of themselves like terminal moraine. And I feel I can write, that it's possible for me. That sentence might link to sentence and lead somewhere. A torch burns.

And now? Today? I'm not reading any such book. The sky reads Bergman. The near-empty office reads him. I can't read a page. 'Lost Verses' by Sun Kil Moon playing. Didn't I want to write about that, about that song, that album? Laughter: but you won't write about anything. You don't believe in writing. You can't lend it your substance.

Once you were a ghost to writing, and now? No desire to write. Only a desire to desire, to begin again. Only the dream of a reading that would carry you forward, that would give you the strength. To what? To write? You: to write? Laughter. Five years … although it's fallen away lately. In truth, it's been falling away for a while. You do not deserve an anniversary.

You fell before the line. You crashed down. You didn't last. Your only chance: to read a book that is stronger than you. A succession of books. To give you the strength. To bind sentence to sentence. Faith, belief – that's what you lack, isn't it? The substance of writing? Its content?

When's 2666 going to arrive? When's it going to appear? Because you need it, don't you? A book to believe for you. A book to believe in writing. But when's it going to come? Tomorrow? The day after? And meanwhile, the sky reads you. Meanwhile you are open, empty pages, for the day to turn through.

A Book of Etiquette

I have no idea how to talk to people, W. says. I lack even a basic sense of the reciprocity of conversation. – 'Come on, let's practice', says W., as we walk out from Dublin towards the sea. 'I'll say something to you, and you say something right back. "Hello, I come from Plymouth"'. – 'I come from Newcastle'. – 'No, no', says W. 'You should ask me something about Plymouth. "Hello I come from Plymouth"'. – 'I've never been to Plymouth'. – 'No!', says W. 'You have to ask me something about my life'. I know too much about his life, I tell him.

W.'s going to write a book of etiquette for me, he says. The art of conversation, that's what I'll have to learn, he says. Give and take. And table manners. – Y'ou never learnt them, have you? And keeping yourself clean. Look at you! You're filthy! When did you last wash your trousers? And that morose expression on your face. Why should anyone want to talk to you?'

Conversation! All real conversation is Messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said – not that at all, but the fact that it is said, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that? You're conversationally lazy. W. says. You can't be bothered, it's obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights.

For his part, W. is never happier pressing a conversation towards Messianism. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life changing. That's what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I'd have no sense of that.

The Third Level of Knowledge

W. looks for the apocalyptic and the messianic in every conversation he has, he says. He attempts to push every conversation towards them: the apocalyptic and the messianic, he says. Nothing matters but urgency and sincerity, W. says. His urgency and sincerity might inspire others to become equally urgent and sincere in their conversation, he notes; conversely, the urgency and sincerity of others, for him, is like messianism itself.

What does he look for in his conversationalists? A sense of the end, he says. A sense we are living in the last days. And a sense of joy, says W. The third level of knowledge. Do you know what that means?, W. asks me. No, you wouldn't, he says, and for the same reason that no one wants to talk to you.

W. reminds me of our third leader. Everything he said, even the most trivial thing, was messianic. He lived a life of complete seriousness, but for all that, he was a joy to be with. He never took himself seriously, W. notes. He took his thought seriously, but never himself, which is a sign of a real thinker.

What he could teach us about conversation! What we could learn, if we saw him more often! But we'd only disappoint him, W. says, though he seemed to like our company. We'd only bother him, and he'd shake us free to ride higher on the thermals of real thinking.

What Matters Most

'Philosophy bears upon what matters most', says W. with great urgency, remembering Plotinus. 'What matters most to you?', asks W. 'Your dinner? Alcohol? Chav mags?'

What matters most, W. muses, are the coming End Times. The ecological disaster and the financial disaster. – 'They're nearly upon us', he says. 'Are you ready for the End Times?' Is he? Least of all him, W. says. Least of all us. 

We'll be the first to go under, W. says. The very first. He'll welcome it, says W., as judgement for our miserable lives and the immensity of our failure.

Delaying the Messiah

W. sends me some quotes from his reading from the Talmud.

Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail.

W. likes lists, he says. It's a Borges thing.

This one especially for you, he says:

Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.

For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?, says W. Years? Millennia?

Actually, W. says, the explanation is that during the second destruction of the temple, the Romans persecuted the Jews, prohibiting against circumcision and so on. The people despaired and thought there was no point bringing children into the world, so they would masturbate or marry young girls who could not have children. But the rabbis said that if the souls that are stored in heaven from the beginning of creation never come into the world through the birth of children, then the Messiah would not come.

Decline

W.'s amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading and writing before going to work. – I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. Then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. But he still managed to learn Hebrew! He still learned classical guitar!

What happened then? asks W. He has no name for it, W. says. A general malaise. A kind of collapse. In part, says W., it was Kafka's fault. How could he, W., write anything as good? He kept notebook after notebook, W. says, before giving them away.

He no longer had an alibi, W. says. He couldn't hold them apart any longer: the writer he wanted to be, and the person he was. It happened with literature for him, W. says, and then it happened in philosophy, which was terrible.

His turn to philosophy was in some way his way of escaping literature, W. says. Didn't philosophy hold out the possibility of a Kant-like flowering of one's powers much later in life? And there was his dawning sense of the apocalypse, too, W. says, of the end of the world.

And the sense that the highest task was of countering the apocalypse, which might indeed be a task of thought, of philosophy, W says. A task for which he discovered himself to be singularly unfitted, which made the distance between the philosopher he wanted to be and the person he was yet more unbearable.

It's was all Rosenzweig's fault!, says W. And Cohen's. All those declarative sentences! All that mathematics! How could he ever approach their brilliance? He fills notebook after notebook, but it's all futile. What is there for him to do in the teeth of the apocalypse? What relationship can he have to the highest that must be thought?

Then he met me, W. says, and things got really bad.

Inadequacy

Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It's the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I'll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse – which is precisely a way to avoid it altogether. You have to run up against your idiocy, to plunge into it, W. says. Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy.

Free Fall

We're in free fall, says W. Or Limbo. We must have committed some terrible crime in a former life. We've been reborn into the wrong bodies at the wrong time, that's what you Hindus think, isn't it?

This is our purgatory, W. says, or perhaps it's just his. Perhaps I am his purgatory, says W., and I am his Limbo. Perhaps his friendship for me is only punishment for some great crime he committed in a former life, he's not sure what.

Army Postcards

Rosenzweig wrote the entirety of The Star of Redemption on postcards to his mother, W. says. All of it, every line, from the Macedonian front, where he was fighting. Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at the Macednoian front – that's not where the big battles were, but nevertheless. An entire book! Written on postcards! One after another! To his mother!, W says.

Rosenzweig! He's the measure of all things to us. The measure of seriousness. The measure of commitment ('he meant every word'!). The measure of acumen. The measure of religiosity. The measure of integrity. He turned his back on the university, says W. He devised a new form of educational institution! He lived what he thought. He acted on what he thought, which is inconcievable to us now.

Rosenzweig is a guiding star to us, burning brightly above everything. He's our inspiration. To write like him! Wholly in declarative sentences! To let your thought flash out! To write in sentences like bolts of lightning! Imagine him, Rosenzweig, at the Macedonian front, says W. Imagine, shells falling around him. Imagine, in the trenches (were there any trenches in Macedonia?) propped up against a dirt wall, writing another postcard to his mother.

Dear mother, he would write, and then off he'd go, W. says. Dear mother, and then he'd write his thoughts about God or death or Judaism horizontally, in the space left for you to write, and then vertically, as they used to do in the nineteenth century, using every part of the page. Sentences like lightning bolts. Thoughts swift and certain and sure, the shells falling around him (was the Macedonian front bombarded?)

He might die at any moment! A shell might fall and explode then and there! But he's writing horizontally, then vertically and then slantwise across his postcard. What do you think it showed on the front?, I ask W. What view did it show? – Nothing, you idiot, says W. It was an army postcard. Probably some artillery. Or a tank or something. Did they have tanks in the first world war?

By the time The Star of Redemption was published, he'd already left the university, W. says. He'd left it behind! He'd founded a new kind of establishment! He was educating young Jews, says W. Including Kafka. Did you know he taught Kafka?, W. says. Well he did. Rosenzweig taught Kafka. Which is quite extraordinary, when you think about it. Kafka and Rosenzweig, in the same room as one another. The younger man, the older man. Teacher and pupil.

The Occasion of Thought

Thought! cries W. What does it mean to think? Why can't we think? Why are we so singularly incapable of thinking? We've cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, W. says, but weren't not thinkers! We've failed at the level of thought!

He knows they're out there, W. says, real thinkers. He knows how natural it is for them, how they glide through the milieu of thinking like a whale through deep water. it's effortless! it's as natural as breathing! they're used to thought, they're fully confident of their ability to think, which might as well be God-given.

They can't help it! They couldn't do otherwise! Thought is their element, their milieu, W. says, just as idiocy is our element and our milieu. They are virtuosos of thinking just as we are virtuosos of idiocy. Do you think they envy us as we envy them? Do you think they even know of the existence of idiocy? They don't know of it and they don't believe in it. They don't need to. Thought is not the absence of idiocy, although idiocy is the absence of thought.

W. and I remember our leaders. Do you think they had a sense of our idiocy? Was it real for them? Did it confuse or confound them? Did it prevent them from thinking? Not at all. Not for a moment. We bothered them, there was no question of that.

Do you remember how he spoke?, of the first leader. His seriousness? He wasn't swayed by us. Our idiocy was annulled. Just for a moment, we were quiet. Just for a moment, idiocy was interrupted and we were calmed. It was marvellous, W. said.

And our second leader. Do you remember what he told us? How he'd dropped out of college. How he'd worked as a pastry chef. How he'd taken up boxing – and all in the name of thought. All because he felt himself unworthy of thought, and tried to turn away from it, but there it was nonetheless: thought. There it was, waiting for him, the most natural thing in the world: the capacity to think.

There was no presumptiousness about him, we both agree. Thought was natural to him, it didn't surprise him and nor did it give him any sense of distinction. He was just like us, we agree, except that he could think. Which means he wasn't at all like us, really.

And our third Leader, perhaps the greatest of them all! Do you  remember how quiet she was? Do you remember how silent the room became, and how we leaned in to listen more closely?

We thought were party to something, we remember. We thought we were in on a Secret, that now, at last, thinking would be here, in person. We though we would be par with it, the emergence of a thought. It was terribly flattering. We were, for once, to be the occasion of thought, rather than its obstacle. Thought had been very close to us that afternoon, hadn't it? Maybe we even believed we could think, which is the greatest illusion.

T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E

W. has always liked the story of my intellectual awakening. Tell me again, he says, tell me the whole story. It was Kafka, wasn't it? You started reading Kafka in your warehouse, didn't you?

W. admires my working class credentials. You're more working class than I am, he always says. You're closer to the people. W. grew up surrounded by books, he observes, whereas I have never seemed to know what to do with them. You find them wondrous, don't you? You can't believe they exist!

You were happy in your warehouse, says W. I'll bet you wished you never left it. What was it like, reading your first book? what did it mean to you? Was it like the obelisk in 2001? Were you jumping up and down and hooting?

W. finds the idea of my reading particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming hte lettes as I spoke, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. It's still an effort for you, reading, isn't it?, W. says.

Besides, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. They're like totems to you, says W. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them. It's The Castle all over again, isn't it? It's all a mystery to you, isn't it?

Tell me what it meant to you, The Castle, W. says. What did you make you see? Your limits, that was it, wasn't it? You ran up against your limits like a wall and fell down, didn't you? And then you got up and kept on running, didn't you?

W. finds it all tremendously funny. He can picture me in my warehose, mouthing the words of the title. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E.

Of course, Kafka was also involved in W.'s intellectual awakening. Unlike me, W. was the recipent of a well-rounded grammar school education. Unlike me, W. grew up surrounded by books and book readers, and already had a sense of the full sweep of Western literature.

But he remembers very clearly his first encounter with a yellow, Schoken edition of Kafka in his school library (we had a school library, unlike you, W. says). The Castle. He didn't have to mouth those words to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and pronounce the words out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. It all went wrong with the fatal lure of literature. Didn't he want, immediately, to become a writer? 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.

Go on, say a sentence out loud, he says, just one, without stammering and stuttering. Anyway, he wanted to become a writer, that was what was fatal about his intellectual awakening, although he came to learn (it took a number of years) that he would never, ever be able to be a writer. Unlike me, W. says, who has never learnt this simple lesson, no matter how many times it's been confirmed for me.

The Masque of Red Death

Richard's post on literary experiences remined me at once of Montano, which I've kept here on my desk. He's suffering from literary sickness, Vila-Matas's protagonist-narrator; he sees literature everywhere, and cannot separate himself from it.

In a moment of crisis, precisely as it pertains to his literary malady he boards a train from one city to the next. What a very literary thing to do, he says. You can't escape a crisis of the literary via a literary device! It's entirely too literary, as all of Montano's experience is literary infested with literary tropes and traits, which he cannot help but see everywhere.

He's read too many books! His life is a book! He, a literary critic, cannot step outside of literature, and even makes literature (the book Montano) as he tries to do so.Vila-Matas's narrator, here, is very different from Sebald's – say of Vertigo, who is forever boarding trains and rushing about and encountering ghosts of literary writers (Kafka, Nabokov).

He lives in literature, he's entirely literary, but has no sense of it; it's not yet become a sickness, which is why, ultimately, Sebald belongs as a writer to a different age. He is the last writer of an age that is not self-conscious about writing literature, doing literature, being literary, a kind of self-consciousness that, I will say very pompously, cannot be foreign to 'us'.

For what is literature in an age of mass culture? One among others of our entertainments, and not a particularly important one at that. To read, really read, demands a great choice, a great determination. For who reads now, really? Who grew up in a house of books? Who was taught by great readers, and taught to read by great readers? And for whom, really, can literaure be of any great importance?

The wheel has turned; a whole age has fallen into the past. And with it, Sebald. No coincidence that in his last, very bad book, the bloated Austerlitz, its literariness has become pure device, pure mannerism. The narrator's endless walks, his endless communion with ghosts … all this becomes unbelievable and intolerable.

Better Vila-Matas any day. Better Bolano, whose poets and poetry-lovers are as real as we are, and inhabit this age, our age, dope-dealing and sleeping around and wandering from place to place without a clue. 

For there are no models now, and not literary ones. Or only the hologram-flickering of the heroes of capitalism, phantasms projected into the apocalyptic night into which we are falling. Hero-financiers, heroine-entrepreneurs unreal and depthless. And meanwhile, the apocalypse, the great ecological catastrophe, the devastation of the earth, the putting out of the sky. We're going to die a new kind of death. We're going to boil, we going to burn, the sky will go red and the land will burn red and the sea will slop red, and the atmosphere will burn away into space …  

What's literature to this? What's the literary experience to this? Something comical. Laughable. Something without consequence, even if we are caught up in it, even if it caught us when we were young, when it meant something, when it could mean something, when our vision was narrow and simple and raw. Comical, but there's also a sadness as literature fails us and the night of the real world opens across our windshields. A sadness, and even a tragedy, as our youths, our hopes burn up in the night without glory.

This is why Vila-Matas's novels (the two translated into English) and Bolano's, are a post Literature Literature. A laughing and sad and too-wise Literature in which Literature becomes a sickness and a delusion (Montano). And a daft, laughable hope (The Savage Detectives) that is our eternally doomed youth.

The Battleground

Wednesday morning, I stop work, look about, am I still an idiot? Yes, still an idiot, listening over and over to Lift to Experience's apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. Still an idiot, googling to see what happened to Josh T. Pearson, the singer, guitarist and main songwriter of said band, I find out he's living in Berlin and has grown a great beard, and is not recording anything, and has no intention of recording anything, despite the record company Bella Union, for which Lift to Experience recorded Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, being very interested in issuing a new album by him, and the fact that he's performed on many occasions, and even released a live album, of his most recent songs, many of which can be viewed on Youtube.

There seems to be less distance now between the Josh T. Pearson of this interview with Lift to Experience, just after Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads came out, and his apocalyptic musings, and between the bearded, Berlin-dwelling Josh T. Pearson of this one, who barely gets by through his day job, who can only afford to eat one meal a day and is still an illegal immigrant in a city foreign to him, and his apocalyptic musings. Which is to say, the bearded Josh T. Pearson has disappeared into his music, just as the Chinese painter was said to have stepped into one of his own paintings.

This unrecorded Josh T. Pearson is one with what he sings about; there's no persona anymore, no bandmates to hold him back; he's a one man band, Josh T. Pearson, with his guitar and his effect pedals; he doesn't need a percussion, he can stomp his feet; he doesn't need to record songs about the apocalypse because he is the apocalypse, he's nothing other than the apocalypse, he lives inside the whirlwind, he's God's voice from inside the burning bush which must be achingly, agonisingly perilous. He's a prophet of the disaster and the disaster; he's our judge and our saviour, he's all the angels and all the devils, he's a battleground, a disputed territory, great hordes pass across him …

How difficult it must be to disappear into what you made, to no longer have the distance, nothing to hold you back. He's on his own, Josh T. Pearson, illegal immigrant, with hardly enough money to eat or fix his teeth, yet he can't record either, he feels he's not ready to record, he wants to make an album as great as the apocalyptic Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, yet he's unable to make an album that great.

What's he going to do? Wander, lost, in the world he opened. Wander in that world he was able to push away from him before, saying, that's what I've made and it's separate from me. Only now it's consumed him. Only now there's no distance between Josh T. Pearson and what he's made. Terrible fate! To be too weak to withstand what you put into the world! To be weaker than the actions that seemed to have accomplished themselves without you! Terrible, enviable fate to burn up in the fire you set to burning …

Snake Loops

A stupid phrase has been floating around my stupid head for some time now. A stupid phrase: Post-Literature Literature. Capitalised. Literature that comes after Literature, after the whole thing, the whole edifice, has come crashing down. A post-apocalyptic Literature, a Literature that knows the game is up, that it's all finished, that the real world is a greater work of fiction than any particular fiction, and that what's left is to press Literature, what remains of Literature, towards that Reality, to hope it catches fire.

The madness of the 'Credit Crunch' (stupid, prosaic name), the madness of the whole of Capital whose body turns like a Chinese dragon … A post-Literature Literature that you find in Bolano and in Vila-Matas (they were friends, I discovered after reading them both: no surprise). Literature in whose books you can laugh at a man in jail who draws dwarves with giant cocks. In which humour has become puerility … in which wit has decayed into innuendo, and there's only bad taste.

What happens when a page of Blanchot reappears in Vila-Matas's Montano? What happens when it reappears in this mad context? Something has ended, a whole seriousness has disappeared. Something has ended: literary substance has lightened, the airship's unmoored. There it goes, drifting into the sky. It's lost, gone, and what remains? Our Real world, our Fiction-Reality, our mad world through which affects pass at great speed, in which words and money and moods flow fast as lightning.

They don't speak like people in books, these characters. They're like us – like me – on this side of literature, of the great mountain range, that far plateau. They're like us, with us, where the range's shadow doesn't reach. How many people read Lautreamont before us? And Breton? And all the old avant-garde stuff. It's old, old, it's for young people, they're naive enough, unread enough and meanwhile we know there's a thousand books on Lautreamont and books on books about Lautreamont and books on books on books on Lautreamont.

Lautreamont's eternally young, so is Rimbaud, yes, yes, but that eternity, that infinitely pure flame, the flame that burns everything up except itself burns too far away for us, remote star, on this side of Literature capital 'L'. Meanwhile, there's all the time in the world to read, not to read, to write, not to write, none of it matters, and the great snake loops of Capital writhe all about us.

Montano, Montano: the book's too long, two thirds too long. It's absurdly verbose, madly verbose, doubling and then tripling itself, satirising itself and then exhausting satire and then exhausting everyone, all its readers. Who hasn't put the novel down in exasperation? Only to pick it up again, to finish it … out of a sense of duty to what began so dizzingly in those opening pages? To those flashing pages … with their laughter, in a laughter that takes everything, even itself as its object. That refuses to limit itself, laughter falling into laughter, lost in it, Literature on fire, Literature boiling …

Hooting and Pointing

It's come to an end, all of culture and civilization, it's all finished, Rosenzweig and Cohen with it, that's what you think, isn't it?, says W. You see no point in anything, which is why you do nothing. For his part, W. says, he's not sure whether I say these to give myself an excuse for not working, or whether I'm right, and there is no point to anything at all.

Anyway, whether W. is in the wrong or not, working, for him, is like some conditioned reflex. He hasn't got a choice! What's he working on, and why is he bothering?, W. asks himself. What does it matter? Why does he read these books that are too hard for him? Why does he batter himself against the wall of mathematics? What difference does it make? What's it all for? Who could he possibly influence or persuade?

Who will listen to him but me, who has no idea what he is talking about, who can only regard the work of Rosenzweig and Cohen with the awe of an ape before the thundering power of a waterfall? What can it possibly mean to you?, says W. That's what makes it worse for him: the only person paying attention to him, says W. is the one least capable of understanding anything he says.

But then too, W. says, he doesn't really understand Rosenzweig and Cohen either, and he too can only hoot and point like an ape at their mighty oeuvres.

The Sonora Desert

What am I doing? What was I doing? I was supposed to be writing something, wasn't I?I was writing something that was supposed to carry me from day to day and string those days together, making meaning of them. Supposed to aim all these days in a single direction – but what was it?

Weakness: I fall below the ability to write. I'm tired, tired … So I finish the two books I was reading instead of writing. The Savage Detectives, the longest of books, was finished off yesterday lunchtime in the office. I've finished it at last, I thought. I can't believe I got through it, I thought. I decided I deserved an award. But then, almost immediately, that I deserved no award, that I'd been self-indulgent enough of late. So I set myself the task of reading reviews of the book I just read, to make sense of it, to make sense of myself, to replace that stringing of days and hours together like beads on the long thread of my writing.

Bolano! Too many people have read him. He's too celebrated! There's too much on the net! Curious, then, that you can still invent a private Bolano. Still set up a small shrine, your own. I have my own Bolano, made up of scraps of what I read in the long biography-reviews (all the reviews seem to turn into biographies), at the heart of which is his friendship with Mario Santiago (who becomes Ulyses Lima in The Savage Detectives).

That friendship, and with it, other friendships too -infrarealist (visceral realist) friendship. Friendship whose third term is Life, a great and ferocious vivacity – Life like a firework bursting in the sky. Life: that's what binds them together, life as broad and distant as the sky. Life upon which you can make no impression. Life against which your own life bats itself meaninglessly.

Is there a tragic vision to Bolano? A tragedy behind the many stories through which Belano (Bolano's own double) and Lima pass in the second long section of the novel? Tragedy … but the great broad vivifying tragedy of life in general, the life of everything, the life of stones and stars … 

What am I on about? What is this all for? For no reason. Just blast up like a rocket and explode. The Savage Detectives. Overlong? Vastly so, and yet … Boring? Without question, and yet … Life, tragic life celebrates itself through the hundred stories of the second part (the middle panel of the triptych). Life beyond any particular voice (though it seems particularly close to some: step forward, Quim, mad Quim in the asylum …)

As I read, often bored, often distracted, I still kept the impression that there was a great sky, a great Day beyond these particular voices. A Day beyond days, as in D.H. Lawrence's The Flying Fish (and isn't there something like the exuberance of Lawrence, his riotousness in Bolano's book?). A kind of apocalypse, everything revealed, the great judgement day of Life upon we can make no impression. Life = the Sonora Desert.

Life, for Bolano = that expanse in which the narrative runs out in the third part. I've heard 2666 (a title already prefigured in The Savage Detective) heads into the Desert again. No surprise. It's Bolano's topic, his great topic. But let me come back to friendship, to Bolano's friendship with … what was his name? Santiago.

Bolano said he wrote the book so that Santiago and he could laugh at it together. A book to make his friend laugh. His friend, who'd published … barely anything. A single book of poems, I think, but wasn't that beside the point? Isn't Bolano's great theme Life, and not poetry? Life and not Literature (capital 'L'). Life that laughs at silly Juan Garcia Madero, narrator of the first and second sides of the triptych. Life that poetry, Literature (capital 'L', the usual modernist Literature; Lautreamont, Breton, all that …) burn up towards but never reach.

Bolano published a couple of things before he left Mexico for Europe. He appeared in some anthology or another. He cowrote a novel. So what? What does it matter? As with Santiago's production (his non-production), literature was a name for Life and Life was elsewhere. Did both men leave their South America? Was it only Bolano (Belano) who headed off for France and Spain and Israel and Liberia (Liberia!)? I'm not sure. The reviews and profiles would tell me.

But what I wanted to say (what started me off here), was that the book was written to make his friend laugh, but that the same year it was published, The Savage Detectives, in 1998, his friend died in a 'mysterious' car accident. Mysterious in inverted commas, Bolano's, I'm not sure why. And that that moved me: that's what I wanted to say. Moved me, the thought that this literary furore, the comet of Bolano's oeuvre that is passing through our skies, was all about friendship, and what was shared between two friends and a group of friends (the infra-realists, the Visceral realists).

It was about laughter. It was about a crazy, nonsensical world. It was about the absurd glory of Life, about writing, about fucking, about the roads that disappear in the Sonora desert, which is to say all roads, including this one, the one I'm on …

A tragic vision. A tragic, laughing vision. A vision in which no hero, no heroine rises up to face their great destiny and the greatness of its limits. A vision, instead of the futility of life, of all things, a laughing futility, a drunken futility, but futility nonetheless … The desert is opening. The desert is here, right between us, those of us for whom the flag of Literature is buffetted by the winds of Life.

The desert: here it is, because none of this matters, none of it, not Literature, not writing (or not writing), publishing (or not publishing) … it's all futile, laughable, we're heading into the same desert. We're all riding in the same Impala into the desert and laughter and madness and bleached, exposed bones in the sand. Bolano was dying and we're dying and everything is dying, and in the meantime … what else is there to amuse our friends and ourselves? What left but to close the door on the world and write to make our friends laugh and roll on the floor laughing and coughing up blood and spitting blood all the way to death …?

Not Thinking

When did you know?, W. says with great insistence. When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything? Did I know?, he asks, because sometimes he suspects I never did. Well he knows at any rate for both of us. Neither of us are going to amount to anything!, he says with finality. Neither of us! Anything!, he says imperiously.

We might carry on as if we're going to amount to anything, W. says, but that does not alter the fact that we're not going to amount to anything. We haven't had a single thought of our own, for one thing, W. says. Not one!

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I say to W., remembering Heidegger. Most thought provoking is that you think you are thinking, says W. Because you do, don't you?