Lars Iyer's Blog

Bela Tarr is to be our leader now, W. says. He's a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about poor, ugly people – they're my people, he always says. The ugly and the poor are always with us, that's what he says, says W. He's like Tarkovsky, only slower, says W., and with less hope. He only makes films with friends, says W. And he hates cinematographers. He had 7 of them for Satantango – 7! They only cause him trouble, says W.

Bela Tarr wanted to be a philosopher, says W., but when he started making films, he stopped wanting to be a philosopher. No abstraction for him, says W. He's completely devoted to the concrete, says W., to what he sees in front of him. He's not like us, says W., who have no idea what's directly in front of them.

He doesn't float nebulously into the most general and most confused of ideas, into our clouds of unknowing, says W. He never talks philosophy, says W. He doesn't believe in abstraction. Film is about the concrete, he says, says W. It can't help but be about the concrete.

Bela Tarr doesn't believe in God, says W. Bela Tarr's seen too much to believe in God. He takes years over each film, says W.. And they're full of drunk people. Full of drunk, aggressive people like you, says W. And mud. His films are full of mud. That's where you belong, says W., in the mud.

He made his first film when he was 16, says W. of Bela Tarr. 16! Imagine it! He had wanted to be a philosopher, but filmmaking cured him of that.

When did you know, says W., when did you know you'd never amount to anything? When did you take refuge in vague and cloudy ideas that have nothing to do with the world?

Perhaps we should have become film directors, W. says, though we probably would have fucked that up, too. What sort of films would we have made? Terrible films! Clouds of unknowing that would have nothing to do with reality!

Ah, said W., who visited recently, that's your writing table, and that's your yard. He looked through the window. It is disgusting, he agreed. And what's wrong with your plants? Why is the concrete green? It shouldn't be that colour. And what is that growing there? Is it a weed? It's too big and serious to be a weed, W. said.

I'll bet it smells terrible out there, said W. It does, doesn't it? You can tell. I'll bet it really hums. You'd never know of course, I tell him, because the windows won't open. They're jammed shut, I tell him, because the flat's changing shape. It's sinking, I tell him. It's collapsing in the middle.

The flat's sinking, W. says, and the yard is rotting. What is that out there? Sewage? And why's it covered in foamy water? The sewage's from the upstairs flat's waste pipe, I tell him, and the foamy water comes from the pipe from their kitchen sink.

W. agrees that Bela Tarr would take a 20 minute tracking shot of the yard. The yard would mean more to him than all our nonsense, W, says. Do you remember when he said that the wall, the rain and the dogs all have their own stories, and that these stories are more important than so called human stories? Do you remember when he said that the scenery, the weather, the locations and time have their own faces? Their own faces! The yard, the horror of the yard, is the only thing around here Bela Tarr would be interested in. 

What do you think your effect is on others?, W. asks. Do you motivate them, inspire them, spur them on? Do you make them think more than they could think on their own? Does the fact of your friendship change the way in which they see the world or vice versa?

Every time he meets someone (except me), W. asks himself how he could have been kinder, better and more gracious. Every time he thinks of his friends (except me), he asks himself what he might to do to help them or look after them better; he asks himself what he might do to further their thoughts or their writing.

What does friendship mean to you, really?, W. asks. Do you think you're capable of it, friendship? Do you think you've ever been a friend to anyone? Can you even conceive of what being a friend might mean?: these questions constantly pass through his head, W. says, as he knows they do not pass through mine.

Friendship makes the highest demands upon him, says W. It's a kind of test. It's the only chance for him, friendship, says W.; that and love. Love and friendship are the only things that might redeem him, W. says. And what about you?, he says. How will you redeem yourself? What are you going to do to redeem your miserable existence?

W. and I are supposed to be thinking about Messianism, but our minds are blank.

What are your thoughts on Messianism?, asks W. I don't have any thoughts on Messianism, I tell him. What about you? W. isn't able to think about Messianism, he says. He's not capable of it, and neither am I.

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, says W., and Messianism is one of those thoughts. How is it that we nevertheless have bent our efforts on thinking about Messianism? It isn't as though we know anything about Messianism, or have any kind of religious belief that would give us any kind of personal investment in Messianism.

What, really, can Messianism mean to us, except as the limit of what it is possible for us to think or write about? Perhaps that's all Messianism could mean to us: the possibility that one day we might be changed so radically that we would be able to think about Messianism, says W.

You really inspired me the other night, says W., oh, it was nothing to do with your thought. – What, then? – I bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. Then I sat in the dark having apocalyptic thoughts and thinking vaguely about messianism without knowing anything about messianism. That's how you live, isn't it?

W.'s hair is very long now. It's a year since he last had it cut. Some of it falls in ringlets. It's his Jewishness, he tells me. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

If you're not going to be a thinker, you should at least look like a thinker, he says. And if you're not going to be religious, then you should at least look religious, that's what W. believes. Genuine thinking and genuine religious belief might follow looking like a genuine thinker and looking like a genuinely religious person.

You don't actually know anything do you?, says W. You've got no body of knowledge. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course. – You see, I know something. What do you know? I look up into the sky. – I've read a lot. – Secondary literature!, says W. You're always reading secondary literature! It's your main weakness, says W., or one of them. No one reads secondary literature but you. W. is a man of primary literature, he says, and in the original language. Primary literature, and as obscure and half-forgotten as possible.

Literature softened our brains, says W. We should have been doing maths. If we knew maths, we might amount to something. As it is, we'll amount to nothing.

There's nothing wrong with literature per se, says W. who cannot go a day without speaking about Kafka, and takes his books to read to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcombe on his own, but it has a bad effect on us. Besides, I bet Kafka was good at maths. – He was good at law, I tell him. – Oh yes, law, it's a bit like maths. Perhaps we should give up and become lawyers. Perhaps that would be the making of us.

Of course it would be different if we read literature alongside philosophy, keeping it strictly for recreation, says W. But literature, for us, couldn't help infecting our reading. That's where it all went wrong. – But don't you admire the fact that we feel something about literature?, I ask him. Don't you think it's what saves us? But W. is not persuaded. It makes us vague and full of pathos. That's all we have – pathos.

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?, W. muses. We're both Brod, he says, and that's the pity of it. Brods without Kafka, and what's a Brod without a Kafka?

We are both Brod, W. says, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, an apostle will not look back; when Brod looks into Kafka, it's only Brod who looks back. You are my Brod, W. tells me, but he is my Brod, too.

I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it's this we share in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

We're Brod and Brod, we agree, and neither of us is Kafka. Neither of us; but we can dream, can't we, of the imaginary Kafka we would fawn over and whose work we would promote? We can dream of our fervid works of commentary and our public statements – always needlessly simplifying, always full of empty pathos and sham hagiography - on behalf of our friend.

We can dream of nursing him through his final sickness and then of preserving his work for posterity. He'd ask us to throw it all away, all his unfinished drafts and private correspondence, but what would we do? Publish it piece by piece for a grateful humanity, with our stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.

Of course, what I lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, I make up for in pathos, W. says. He's learnt everything he knows about pathos from me, he says. He can make himself weep at the pathos of his writing. I must be constantly weeping, W. says, night and day, since my writing is based only on pathos and has virtually no other content. 

W.'s got a higher IQ than me, he's decided. A few points higher: that makes all the difference, he says. Intellectually, he stands slightly higher than I do; he has a wider view, a greater panorama. But perhaps this is why he despairs more than I do, and has a keener sense of his failure.

He can see more, says W.; and he can also see himself in the context of the whole. He can see the great achievements of the past heaving up behind him like a plateau, and the open space from which great achievements will come in the future. And he can see his own inability to contribute in any way to these achievements, and that, indeed, he is a living obstacle to anything that might happen.

If W's on his dung heap perched up and looking around like a meercat, he says, I'm still playing in the dung. What could I understand of achievement or failure or any of these issues?, W. says. What can I understand of the magnitude of our failure?

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 (and Janacek), yet so given to a vague and general pathos – to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of Kafka (and Janacek) – has always served as both our warning and example. What could he understand of Kafka (or Janacek)? Weren't his interpretative books – which did so much to popularise the work of his friend – at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka (or, for that matter, Janacek)?

But then again, didn't Kafka (and to a much lesser extent, Janacek) depend upon his friendship and his support? Didn't Kafka (and perhaps Janacek, though we're not sure), 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 enthusaism.

My idiocy is theological, W. says. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says. I am that I am, says W., that's all it says.

On the other hand, he says, sometimes my idiocy is only a simple absence, a pellucid sky. Not a thought crosses your mind for weeks does it?, says W. Nothing at all. You're untroubled by thought and untroubled by thinking.

His idiocy, says W. is more a kind of stubbornness or indolence. It's never thunderous as mine can be, and nor is his head ever really empty. It's only a niggling reminder of his own incapacity, against which he runs up freshly each day.

When did you know you were a failure?, W. repeatedly asks me. When was it you knew you'd never have a single thought of your own – not one? He asks me these questions, W. says, because he's constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He's not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.

What amazes him still further, says W., is that I am almost entirely lacking in the same amazement. I am like the idiot double of a idiot, W. says, being of the same intelligence (or nearly the same intelligence; I am a few IQ points behind him), of the same degree of laziness (or nearly the same laziness; I am more indolent than he is), but entirely lacking an awareness of what I so signally lack.

Every summer, he begins work with great ambition, W. says. By the end of the summer, it's all gone wrong. Why does he never learn?, W. muses. Why does nothing change?

It's a great mystery to him, W. says, his eternal capacity for hope and the eternal destruction of his capacity for hope. He lives and dies a whole lifetime over summer, W. says, and is reborn every autumn, a little more stupid.

Kafka and Tarr are our spiritual leaders, W. and I agree. They've gone the furthest, we agree.

But we need more immediate leaders, too. W.: We're stupid, we need to be led. We long ago decided that we could redeem ourselves only by creating opportunities for those more capable than ourselves.

It's our gift, says W., we know we're stupid, but we also know what stupidity is not. We ought to throw ourselves at their feet and ask them to forgive us.

We always stop short of this, of course. We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It will only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we decide. Only we should know. And we should only follow them in secret.

It never gets any better does it? – No. It's getting worse. It's going to get a lot worse. – We're doomed, aren't we? – Oh yes, completely finished.

It's only a matter of time, we know, before we are found out. They haven't really noticed us yet, that's what saves us. But when they do …!

The clock is ticking, we know. This is not our time, W. says as we walk through the newly coverted Victualling Yard. Who lives in these flats, we wonder as we pass through the wide boulevards. Who can afford them?

They're in the new world, the coming world, we know that. They're the kind who are going to wipe us out, not becaue they know we exist or bear a grudge against, but simply because they are of a different order. They can't help but hate us, I tell W., though they have no idea we exist.

W. likes to test me on Spinoza: What is a mode? What's a substance? What's an attribute? I tell him the Ethics is too hard. Get the Routledge Guidebook to Spinoza's Ethics, W. tells me. But that'll be too hard for you, won't it? Get the Idiot's Guide to Spinoza, then. But that'll be too hard too. Start with these words on a piece of paper: S-P-I-N-O-Z-A. Ponder that in your stupidity.

W.'s street. The houses at the bottom are no longer derelict, he says. You used to be able to see the faces of children behind the cracked windows like ghosts, but now developers have moved in.

You must always live among the poor, W. says. This part of the city was once very wealthy, he observes. His own house was owned by a ship's captain, he says – imagine it! We stand back and admire its storeys.

The railway to London used to run through here, he tells me a little later. Passengers would disembark straight from their cruise liners onto the train, and went straight up to London. The houses are still grand, W. says, although most of them have been turned into flats now. They're full of alcoholics and drug addicts, he says. No one wants to live here.

The children like to bang on the window as we sit inside and drink Tequila. Ignore them, says W., don't give them any attention. He's not fightened of them, he says later as he closes the shutters. They're strangely lost, he says, you can see it in their eyes.

Their grandparents would have moved down from Scotland, like everyone around here, W. says. Thousands of them came down to the dockyards a couple of generations ago, but now there's no work for them now, nothing. So what do they do but drink all day?

He'd drink all day, says W., if he had nothing to do. Sometimes they punch him or throw ashtrays at Sal but that's alright. He'd be exactly the same, says W.

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

We've been singled out for something, W. has decided. We've been marked. Look at us in our flowery shirts, says W. We're fat and blousy, and everyone else is slim and wearing black.

We're men of the end, W. says. Do we take nothing seriously? Not even ourselves. Least of all that, says W. Something has given up inside us. A whole world has come to the end. And it laughs at itself in our pot bellies and our flowery shirts.

Every year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? It amazes W., who knows he will never escape and nor will I. 

I'm not getting out, he says, I'm stuck like everybody else. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism. And what was it last year? It was music, wasn't it? I was going to become a great scholar of music.

But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music? Nothing at all, says W., about either subject. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music? Nothing at all, says W. Not one thing.

There's no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I'm stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?

I'm filling in my esteem indicators, I tell W. Oh yes, what are they? He could do with a laugh, says W. How about humiliation indicators? Or soiling yourself indicators?, says W. Write about the history of your humiliations, says W. Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that's what you've done.

Every chance I've been given, I've not only shown myself a failure, W. says, but redefined the parameters of what failure means. I've destroyed those parameters, W. says, like some great marauding wildebeest. I've exhausted his good will, W. says, and the good will of everyone.

Take his attempt to create a new kind of intellectual forum, W. says. What happened there? It went along fine for a number of years, everyone was impressed and pleased to be involved, and then what happened? I invited you to speak, didn't I?

How could he dream of what happen next?, W. says. I antagonised everyone, he says, him first of all as the organiser of the event, and my co-presenters next, by destroying any intellectual credibility the event might have had. It was a travesty, W. says.

It was as though I'd become a kind of mirror in which everyone could contemplate their own horror. They understood what they were becoming, W. says. They understood where the world was heading, and it was all too much. In your direction, that's where the world was heading!, W. says. Everyone knew it! Everyone sensed it!

And take our participation in a collective blogging enterprise, W. says, you ruined that as well, didn't you? Go on, remind me what happened. Tell me in your own words. He had to sort it out as usual, W. remembers. He had to sort out the mess I'd created.

You single-handedly brought the whole thing down, W. says, with your incessant, obsessive and ridiculous writing. You drove everyone crazy with your writing mania, W. says.

No one knew what to do, so they left it to him, as usual, to handle me. He had to get the message through, W. says, that I'd spoilt it for everyone, and especially him. He had to stop me somehow, which was well nigh impossible.

Sometimes, W. feels like Dr Frankenstein, unleashing a monster on the world. Sometimes, though, he wonders if he's the monster, and that I might be the diabolical inventor and destroyer of all things, including the world.

W. speaks of his obsession with the great Hungarian plain. Bela Tarr spent six months visiting every house and every pub on the plain, W. notes. He said he discovered mud, rain, and the infinite, W. says, in that order. Mud, rain and the infinite: nothing to W. is more moving than those words.

W. wonders whether we too have discovered the infinite in our own way. Our incessant chatter. Our incessant feeling of utter failure. Perhaps we live on our own version of the plain, W. muses. Am I am the plain on which he is lost, or vice versa? But perhaps the plain is the friendship between us in which we are both lost, he says.