Lars Iyer's Blog

He blames me, W. says. Somehow this is all my fault. You're dragging me down, W. says, everybody says so.

Some part of him simultaneously wants to be dragged down, W. has to concede that. But I am dragging him down even more quickly than he would want to be dragged down, he says. It's cataclysmic. How could he have guessed at the humiliations that lay before him? How could he have known?

But then, too, he must have wanted to humilitate himself in some sense, even as he was drawn to me as the means of that humiliation. What crime has he committed? Why did he want to place himself on trial? His immense sensation of guilt is mysterious, W. says, but it led him straight to me, his judge, his guillotine.

When he's in his cups, W. talks passionately about friendship. It's all about friendship!, says W. But what has it become, friendship, with us? It's soured. Curdled. Nothing has been made, nothing produced by way of our friendship. The opposite, in fact.

Why is it that we only take from the world, but give nothing to it?, W. says. Why are we so incapable of any real intellectual act? Friends should push each other to become greater than they are, but we've only made each other less than we might be.

In the depths of the night, lying awake when the world is asleep, W. poses himself great questions. What do you consider your greatest weakness? – Never to have come to terms with my lack of ability. What do you think is your greatest delusion? – I have the fantasy of joining a community of thinkers, and this prevents individual action and individual thought. What motivates you? – Fear and anxiety.

What's your greatest disappointment? – To know what greatness is, and that I will never, never achieve it, even if everything in my life was right. What's your worst trait? – Fear and anxiety cloud all my judgements and relations. What's your greatest intellectual gift? – I don't think I have any. I see my intellectual life as a crushing failure. I only continue out of debilitating fear.

Why do you think you've a failed as a lover?, asks W. What do you think you're lacking? What's missing in you? What crucial stage of development have you missed? Your parents brought you up properly, didn't they? Then you've got no excuse. Yes, it's your fascination with beauty that's your problem. You're not deep enough, romantically I mean. You need a woman who abuses you

Sal has complete contempt for me, says W., that's how it should be. Your partner should always have contempt for you. Abuse is the key. W. takes me back through his romance with Sal. It began with a mixtape, he says. Before he met Sal, says W., he only listened to Gary Glitter and Mahler. Sal introduced him to Will Oldham. You know what she put on my mixtape? I Send My Love To You.

Sal improves me, says W., she makes me better than I am. That's what you need. And then, after thinking a little, W. says, you have to feel proud of your partner. Of her achievements. W. feels proud of Sal, he says. Have you ever felt proud of someone?, he asks me. Are you proud of yourself?

The living room is filled with examples of Sal's ceramics. We could never do that sort of thing, says W. Look at us. But Sal, he says, has a natural gift. She's gifted. Not like us. He feels proud, he says. All my friends prefer Sal to me. That's a good sign. At the ceramics show, he went to buy a piece of glassware without knowing who it was by. It was Sal, of course, who had made it. You see?, says W.

Love, says W., reclining on his bed in the hotel room, your favourite topic. Why are you so afraid of love? Why?

How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn? Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal – this is always moving – but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another.

What do you think love is?; What is love, for you?; Have you ever loved anyone?; What do you consider love to be?; Do you think you'll ever be capable of love?; What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?

For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love. You only love yourself, he says.

Your weakness is that you're too susceptible to beauty. It's your fatal flaw. It's not about looks, says W. Companionship. That's what you need. If anyone needs a woman, it's you.

Companionship, says W., is very important. It's the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. Sal and I get on, he says. If you're working class, like us, says W., you show your affection by verbal abuse. That's why I abuse you – verbally, I mean. It's a sign of love.

Listen – can you hear it?, says W. You can hear them, can't you?, says W. You can hear what they're saying, can't you? It's echoing everywhere. It's whispering in the wind. Idiot. You're an idiot.

Everything is telling you this. The stars are telling you this. The full moon is telling you this. You're an idiot: it's cosmic. The universe knows it. Everything knows it and it was known from the first: you're an idiot.

We were never witty, W. and I agree. We are not raconteurs; we do not have conversation, as we imagine others have conversation. Of course W. can do an impression of a wit, of a conversationalist, he can sit with others at the high table, but he is at home, much more at home with my crudeness and simplicity.

Idiocy, we decide, is very different from stupidity. Stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. W. does a good impression of an insider (as I cannot), but it is still an impression; they'll sniff him out. Is he really one of them? Does he really belong at the high table? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, we reflect, begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet outside the high table and outside themselves. Idiocy speaks,we decide. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. Idiocy is a kind of lightening, we decide. It lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that's how idiocy discovers itself. That's how it lets itself be discovered.

There's a bottle of gin between us, and slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. There's an empty ice-tray and a motley pile of open jewel cases and dirty CDs. 'Listen to this!' – 'You've got to hear this.' Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that – but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn't idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, we wonder. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, we reflect, we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.

You're never witty, says W., that's a sign of intelligence: wit. W. says he is sometimes witty, but, more generally, he's never witty. I never bring it out in him, W. says. I don't make him more intelligent.

W. is more intelligent than me, he decides. But what about those illuminated moments when the clouds part, and I have ideas? It's true, I do have moments of illumination, W. grants, but they are sporadic and lead nowhere.

Write it down!, write it down! W. often cries in the midst of my moments of illumination, but when I read back my notes, I find only incomprehensible scrawls and random words without sense.

Kafka was always our model. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. says, again and again. It's always at the end of the night that he says this. We have drunk a great deal, the sky opens above us, and it is possible to speak of what is most important.

At the same time, we have Kafka to blame for everything. Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature in person. We were finished. What could we do, simple apes, but exhaust ourselves in imitation? We had been struck by something we could not understand. It was above us, beyond us, and we were not of its order.

We're looking out at the sea. A great shadow seems to move under the water. I can see it, says W., look: the kraken of your stupidity. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

We go up to W.'s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. 'How is it possible for a human being to write such books?' Above all, it's not possible for us; that first of all.

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

Our greatest flaw, says W., is that we are so mesmerised by our own stupidity that we can do nothing about it. We've sat and read our own prose in open mouthed horror, but no decision issues from his horror as it would from a sensible person.

We are paralysed by our inability, our signal lack of intellectual gifts. It amazes us. There's nothing of which we are capable, he says. There's no idea we cannot sully, no quotation whose brilliance we cannot paraphrase into mush.

W.'s greatest flaw, he tells me as we walk along the quayside, is that he believes that with a group of friends, a community, thought might be possible. It is what our friendship, after all, has singularly failed to accomplish: thought is, in fact, utterly impossible for W. and for me, he says, but especially for me.

It's in no way funny, or surprising that I've never had an idea, W. notes. It's quite obvious. It's part of the course of things; it's plain to everyone. W. blames himself for raising my hopes, or giving me the impression my talents were being nutured.

By what idiocy was he drawn to me? Was it that I was the only one who listened to his dreams of intellectual friendship and intellectual community? But then, on the other hand, I am the one who so singularly destroyed any hopes he had for intellectual friendship and intellectual community, W. says. In the end, our friendship is founded upon the utter impossibility of our achieving anything at all.

W. is perpetually, grindingly disappointed with himself, he says. He suspects that I am not as disappointed with myself as he is. In fact, I seem rather pleased with myself, he says. But W. is not pleased with himself, he says.

At Mount Batten, up by the tower, which is locked, W. speaks of his overwhelming sense of shame. We do nothing, he says. We're parasites. What are we doing with our lives?

Later, W. speaks of his dream of a community, of a society of friends who would push each other to greatness. We speak of our absent friends over a pint of Bass. If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable! They would make us great! Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.

For his part, W. has always considered himself a small man. Once, our friend X., a nightclub bouncer, picked W. up and twirled him round over his head like a cheerleader's baton. W. didn't mind. He always feels safe with X., he says. X. makes him feel secure and safe.

Do I make him feel safe?, I ask W. No, he says, just thin. W. says I'm getting fatter. You're not going to last long, he says. You haven't got many years left. Look at you. When I die, W. says, he's going to be my literary executor. Delete, delete, delete, that's what he's going to do.

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.

There are many kinds of Messiah, W. has learnt. The idiot Messiah, the stupid Messiah, the inadvertent Messiah, the irritating Messiah (that's you), the weeping Messiah (that's me), W. says. Of course everyone knows than the Messianic is really about time, W. says. What does Messianic time mean to him?, W. ponders. W. says that he's not quite sure, but it seems incredibly important.