Lars Iyer's Blog

Our comparative prosperity is a continual source of bewilderment to W. How did we survive? How did we find employment? It's a sign of something, W. says, but he's not sure what. How were we able to make our way in the world, even if we did not get particularly far? Who left the door open just a chink, merely a chink, so that we could gain admittance?

Of course, it's completely shut now, W. says, there's no doubt about that. The door is closed, and there are no more to come after us. Our end will come soon, W. is sure. Maybe no one will notice us. Maybe we'll slip beneath their attention. That they're too busy to deal with us, says W., is all we can hope for.

What are the signs of the End?, I ask W. – You. You are a sign of the end, says W. Actually, we both are. The fact that we have careers or flourish at all is a sign of the End. Of course, the fact that we won't have them for much longer is a sign that the End is coming closer.

Do you think it's possible to die of stupidity? I ask W. Do you think a creature could have been who was so stupid they died of sheer stupidity? I ask him. Not as a consequence of that stupidity, I note, but from stupidity. And shame, I ask him, do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die? And what about boredom, I ask him, do you think you could die of that? Because I'm burning up with stupidity and shame and boredom, I tell him. I'm burning up and I think I will explode from stupidity and shame and boredom, I tell him.

We've opened our veins to the future, W. and I agree. Our wrists have been slashed and are open to the future; we hold our upturned bleeding arms ahead of us. Death, that's what we want, and that's where we're headed. We're pledged to death, but in great comfort. Our flats and our houses will bear us forward, but in truth, they are only ships of death, just as our country is only a supertanker of death.

Europe still belongs to history, W. and I decide; but we are essentially posthistorical. England has risen like a new island in the middle of the sea. It has removed itself from history; there's nothing here. Oh, there are castles and so on, but they are meaningless. There's the present, and barely even that -but we live from the future, from the brave new future that will see returns on our investments.

Our country is nothing but a trading floor, W. and I decide. Nothing is historical; nothing has any historical weight. Europe, of which we are not a part and can never be a part, is essentially old. The phrase, old Europe is an oxymoron. Old Europe is where things once happened, and continue to happen in their way. The Europeans live in history, as we do not. We are plugged directly into the future, but they are rooted in the past. They speak all the languages of Europe, but we only speak English, the language of the future, the language into which everything will be translated.

Of course this translation will always be incomplete, we decide; there will always be languages and idioms of languages, just as we will always be idiots. But the need to translate is all – the need for the brightest, the best to make themselves understood in English is everything. Translation is imperative – it is the streaming of vapour trails in the sky, infinitely far above the languages and idioms of old Europe.

Europe is fallen, we decide, and we, who are not European, can only pass across its surface like skaters. Old Europe may well be old, but only to itself, we decide, and not to itself. It's historical depth is something of which we are only half-aware, we decide. It troubles us, it makes us feel guilty, but in the end, we can have no relationship to it.

Wars were fought across the body of Europe as they have not been across the body of England. The English fought their wars everywhere except England, and so the body of England has always remained untouched. But of course, there is no body of England, not really, not anymore. It's been seized as investment potential; its value has not yet been realised. How much we would earn if we ever sold our houses! But we will never sell our houses. Our mortgages pledge us to the future, which is to say, to our death.

When the great ice sheets come down as far as Nottingham, it will only be what we deserve. When they scour London into the earth, it will be our just desserts. We'll have nowhere to go, they won't want us in Europe. They'll have their own problems over there, we decide.

Meanwhile, the great work of translation is ongoing. The best and the brightest Europeans speak English much better than we do, we decide. They're better than us, more intelligent than us, but they are still weighed down by history, we decide. They're still historical beings, whereas we are posthistorical beings, with no roots and no memories. Because we don't remember anything, we decide, not anymore.

We've lost the past, although we've no idea we've lost it, nor what it might mean to have lost the past. We don't miss it. It's gone the way of the welfare state: it's a relic, its root have been cut from it. It's senseless, in this, the new world. When the glaciers come rolling down from the North, it will only confirm this great senselessness, we decide.

For our part, W. and I have long been reconciled to the apocalypse. 'It's coming.' – 'What will we do?' – 'My God, look at us! What do you think we can do!' In the meantime, stay at the peripheries, each at our own end of England. In what European cities haven't we been drunk? What European skies have we not seen from the gutter? But we stick to the periphery in our own country. Best not to be noticed. Best not to be seen.

Food is a sacrament, W. has always believed, which is another reason why he thinks I am so disgusting. You have no sense of food, he says, you could be eating anything. For a long time, he remembers, I lived only on discounted sandwiches from Boots.

He remembers me telling him of my circumambulations of town in search of discounted sandwiches. Your long circumambulations, W. says, that would take in every possible shop that sold stale, discounted sandwiches.

For a long time, W. remembers, I ate only gingerbread men, five a day. I would buy a packet of five stale gingerbread men from the discount bakery and a fourpack of own-branded supermarket lager from Kwik Save, the very worst.

No wonder you were always ill, W. says. No wonder you were always complaining about your stomach. Of course, I was poor then, W. remembers, but that was no excuse.

Gluttony has always appalled W., who has a small and delicate appetite. He always undertakes special measures when I come to visit him, to make sure there's enough food in the house. It was part of the reason why he brought his new fridge, W, says.

When I text him from the airport to tell him I've arrived, he opens a bottle of Chablis or Cava and puts the glasses on the table, and then unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats, along with olive oil and relishes. He'll have bread, which he will have made himself, and slices of smoked salmon.

Only the best!, says W. Only the best for my friends! Food's a gift, W. says, the greatest of gifts, which I descecrate every time I visit him.

W. and I both had our monk years. It surprises everyone who knows us. It surprises us, too. What do you remember of them, your monk years?, I ask W.

He'd taken a vow of silence, W. says, and lived a life of great simplicity. Of course, his fellow monks were all having affairs. Not with each other, W. says, but with hangers on. There are always hangers on around monasteries, W. says. You'd know all about that, wouldn't you? Was I a hanger on?, W. wonders. I was the guestmaster, wasn't I?, he remembers.

It was a lay religious community, wasn't it? W. recalls how I told him of welcoming monks and hermits from all over the world. Copts, Dominicans, Ukranian Catholics, the lot. I even taught them, didn't I? I was an English teacher and guestmaster, and lived for free in the highest, coldest room in the house. Of course we differ, W. notes, in that he, for a time, had genuine religious belief, whereas I never had any. It was entirely lacking in you, W. says.

But W.'s monk years had to come to an end, he says. There were barely any monks in the monastery, for one thing. They rattled around a huge building designed by the architect who had planned the Houses of Parliament. It was on a island in the middle of nowhere. W. used to take walks in the afternoons, he remembers, where he would surprise monks who were having affairs, walking hand in hand with men and women on the rocky shore.  

At the busstop by the hospital, W. shows me the dedication of book he's recently added to his collection. 'To my Rabbi …' It's dedicated to his Rabbi, says W.,wonderingly. W. has always wished he had a Rabbi to whom to dedicate his books. Or rather, he now knows that is what he should have wished for all along.

A Rabbi! He would have been part of something. He would have had a sense of belonging. Despite his interest in Jewish topics, W. is not really a Jew. His family were Catholic converts for one thing, W. say. And for another, he is not capable of believing in anything, not anymore. There's no-one more boring than an atheist, W. sighs.

Of course he looks very Jewish, W. says, especially since he's grown his hair long.  But however Talmudic he appears (and he has looked increasingly Talmudic in recent years, with his beard and long ringlets), there is the reality of his non-belief.

W. confides that he thinks he's on the brink of an idea. He's never had an idea before, so he doesn't quite know what it's like. But he thinks this is it: he's on the brink of an idea; a new horizon is opening before him. Have I ever had an idea?, he asks. Of course not, he says, why is he asking. Have you ever thought you were on the brink of an idea, and that people would haul you up on their shoulders and carry you around, cheering? 

Of you course I never thought I'd have an idea for a moment, did I?, W. says. I actually repel ideas and intelligent thought, W. says. Never for a moment would I be capable of thinking, W. says. Not for one moment!

When he was young, W. was sure that one day, if he worked hard enough, he'd have an idea. He lived in only one room of a house, in which there was only a bed and a work table. A bed and desk, W. emphasises. He rarely left it, his room, W. says. He worked night and day. Reading and writing were all that mattered.

What happened? He discovered drinking, says W., and smoking. He came late to both, but when he discovered drinking and smoking that was it. But he also wonders whether he began drinking and smoking from a sense of disappointment, from the knowledge he'd never have an idea and that there was no point in going on, he says. Yes, that's what happened, W. says: disappointment, and then drinking.

Since then, he's lived in the ruins of his impression of himself as someone capable of having ideas. He's felt ill for years, says W., which on top of his drinking and general disappointment may have prevented him from having an idea (until now), or be the result of him having an idea (until now). But W. thinks he may be at the beginnings of an idea. At its rudiments, he says.

W. points out a strip of trees from the window, which looks towards Plymouth and the sea. It's ancient woodland, he tells me. That's all that's left of it, that strip, he says, which runs right up to Dartmoor. There's a species of tree unique to the area that grows there: the Plym pear, he says. You can't eat the pears, though, they're like crabapples.

Why has he brought me up here? Why this vista from the staffroom window all the way towards the glistening sea? Infinite judgement, he says, mysteriously. That's my idea. Infinite – judgement. It's from Cohen, he says. Well, it's from Cohen's reading of Kant.

W. has been sending me his notes on Cohen for months. He barely understands a word of Cohen, W. has always admitted. In fact, he is singularly unqualified to read Cohen, lacking any understanding of mathematics, which is essential, or any real religious feeling.

Infinite judgement. Whatever does it mean? W.'s not sure, but nevertheless, he feels he's on to something. He's not sure, he says, whether he has made a genuine breakthrough, or whether it is all nonsense. Is he at the summit of his creativity or the peak of his idiocy?

Even now, despite everything, W. dreams of Canada. Everything would be okay if he got there, W. says. He could start again in Canada, turn over a new leaf. Imagine it! W. in Canada, close to the wilderness, as everyone in Canada is close to the wilderness, W. peaceable and calm, as everyone in Canada is peaceable and calm. He would be a different kind of man, says W., a better one.

Every year, I write long and elaborate letters to places of employment in Canada on behalf of W. I write of him as the finest thinker of his generation, or as the thinker surest to mark the age with his name. I take dictation from W., who speaks of his commanding presence and his extreme intelligence. He is a man-God, says W., no don't write that down. He is the best of the best of the best, says W., don't write that down either.

But we hear nothing from the Canadians. They remain silent and distant, as remote as Mars. To console ourselves, we imagine the endless plains of the Yukon. The Canadians are busy in the wilderness, we decide. They're boating on their many lakes or hiking through their many woods. They're an outdoor people, we decide, and not given to replying to letters of absurd overpraise.

It's our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There's nothing better than visiting a city on the periphery, W. says, just as there's nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).

And likewise our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essential peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have been fundamentally left alone. No one watches out for us, but on the other hand, no one has really noticed us, so we can get up to what we like. We are blips on no one's radar. Our fates matter to no one, and perhaps not even to ourselves. That's one thing that marks us very strongly, we agree: indifference to our own fate.

For haven't we noticed that the world is shit? Isn't it the most obvious thing that it's all going to shit? You can't struggle against it. You can't do anything at all. Those at the centre don't realise it. They haven't grasped their essential powerlessness. Only we have grasped it, we who live at the periphery of our own interests, no longer advancing our own cause.

For what would that be: our own cause? What would we want in a world of shit? First of all, distrust yourself, burrow down. Destroy all vestiges of hope, of the desire for salvation. Because it will not come good. It's leading nowhere. Nothing means anything. The centre does not matter. There's suffering everywhere – agreed. There's suffering and horror everywhere – on that we're agreed. But the first step must be to peripherise ourselves, and to peripherise ourselves with respect to ourselves.

All jobs are becoming the same, W. says. We're all administrators now, all of us. What do any of us do but administer? We administer and prevaricate about administration. Work time is either administration time or prevaricating about administering, which occupies a large part of W.'s day, he says.

He doesn't know how I just get on with it, he says. He's always marvelled at it: my ability to launch myself into administration, to get to work early, to sit at my desk and begin. It's incredible, W. says, though it also indicates there's something very wrong with me. There's something wrong with my soul, he observes.

For his part, W's given to endless prevarication. He can never make a start, no matter how early he gets in. He stares out of the office window, W. says. He makes himself some tea, he says and sips at it amongst the great parcels of books that get sent to him for review.

His life is absurd, says W. It's a living absurdity, and mine is no better, although I have the strange capacity to just get on with it. Where does it come from?, W. wonders. Who am I trying to please?

W., as usual, is reading about God. God and mathematics, that's all he's interested in. Somehow everything has to do with God, in whom W.'s not capable of believing, and mathematics, which W. is not capable of doing. And he's reading about God and mathematics in German, W. says, which means he doesn't really understand what he doesn't really understand. He'll send me his notes, W. says, they're hilarious.

God, muses W. He's going to write about God, he says. And about Messianism. How are my studies of Messianism coming along?, W. asks me. And then: should we really be writing about Messianism? In fact, that's how he's going to begin his essay on Messianism: saying he is in no way qualified to write on Messianism. 

But what about God? He's not really qualified to write about God either, W. says. God least of all. Of course it's all a joke to you, W. says. You'll write about anything – anything. You've no shame. Nothing internal prevents you from parading your ignorance.

W. wants to believe in something, he says, but I believe in nothing, nothing. It's a game to you, he says. Messianism, God: what meaning can they possibly have for you?

It's beyond masochism in my case, W. says. It's not that I want to punish myself by parading my ignorance, or not merely that, he says. It's something cosmic, he says. There's something cosmic streaming through you. There's a cosmic storm howling through your ignorance and your shamelessness, says W.

Our favourite pub, The Dolphin, on the quayside. A man in the corner spits onto the floor. That's you in five years, says W. The man continues to spit, spitting and spitting onto the concrete floor. He's drunk, as drunk as anything. I've always felt akin to alcoholics, W. notes. They're kings of the world to me. They know the apocalypse is coming, he says, which is why they drink, he says.

Why aren't I an alcoholic?, W. wonders. It's a kind of bad faith, he says. I should at least be alcoholic. I should be falling off barstools like the druknards in the opening shot of Werckmeister Harmonies. In some important sense, I haven't followed through, W. says. I'm not consistent. I'm hopeful despite myself, W. says. What's my secret?, W. wonders. What sustains my existence from moment to moment, given that the certainty that life is shit should give me no such sustenance whatsoever?

What does it mean to you, all your reading?, W. asks. I haven't read much, W. says, and I read less and less, but what did it mean to me, the little I have read? What could it mean?

Thinking depends upon seeing the world differently, says W., but I can only see the same. Thinking means questioning your assumptions, but all I am is one big assumption, which is really a presumption.

The world is shit, that's my presumption, W. says. In its way, it's impressive. The world is shit and life is shit: that's my single thought, W. says, and everything else is nonsense to me, isn't it? Ideas mean nothing to me, books nothing. The whole history of thought matters not a jot to me, W. says, since it's just a game. That's what I think it is: a game, says W.

In a sense, he admires it, W. says. I know one thing: life is shit and nothing else touches me. That's my starting point. It's where the world begins for me, isn't it?, says W.

All my faults can be traced to this fundamental assumption. My laziness, for example. The fact that I read nothing, and when I do read it's not real reading, which is to say disciplined reading, says W. And my conversational monomania, says W. Really I say the same thing over and over again, especially when I'm drunk, which I nearly always am. Over and over again.

And my obesity. I'm growing fatter for the apocalypse, aren't I? I eat incessantly – incessantly, says W., who has always marvelled at my appetite. I eat because you're depressed, and you're always depressed, not least at the amount I eat. Eating and drinking, says W., that's all I do. I'm going to eat and drink my way through the apocalypse, though that won't help me.

What have our lives become?, W. asks. Of course, I never expected anything, W. is clear on that. I'm from another generation to him, we agree, the generation of shit. Nothing to hope for, nothing to expect, so your whole aim in life is to find a warm pocket and survive there like some kind of parasite. Like a tick, W. says, or a leech.

What could I know of friendship, or community?, W. asks. What could I know of politics? Every year he sinks a little further, W. says. Every year he becomes a little more like me. What's it like to expect nothing and hope for nothing?, W. asks.

At the same time, he admires my admantine apocalypticism. It's very cold and pure, he says, like the sky on a winter morning. Your sense of the apocalypse is absolute, he says, you're sure of it. He's not sure of it, he says. He still believes something could save us, though he also knows nothing will save us. He knows nothing will save us, but he feels something will save us, that's the thing.

That's his Messianism, W. says. But there's no Messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I'm far beyond that. In me, some process has completed itself, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end. Friendship and community, says W. Politics, all that. What idea do you have of them? You're just a tick, says W., or a leech.

We've always known our limitations, W. and I agree, which is very different from accepting them. In fact, our entire lives have been concerned with not accepting our limitations, and battering ourselves against them like flies against a window.

Our limitations fascinate us, we agree. From the first, we aimed ourselves against them, in defiance not of the world that expected something of us, but our own expectations.

Of what did we think we were capable? From where came that ferocity of hope? It's a kind of idiocy, very pure, we agree. We're idiots, we agree, idiots who do not quite understand the depths of their idiocy, which is theological. We're mystics of the idiotic, we agree, mystical idiots, lost in our cloud of unknowing, which is vast.

Idiocy, that's what we have in common. Our friendship is founded upon our limitations, we agree, and doesn't travel far from them.

If there's one thing he's learned from me, W. says, it's not to work in the evenings. Two hours of work – real work – is enough, W. says, and that's what I taught him. Of course, I never even manage that, W. observes. Two hours – when I have ever worked for two hours? When have I ever worked at all? But he admires my resolution never to work in the evenings and never to work at weekends.

W. would like to be a layabout, he says. He'd liked to do nothing at all, not even work. But he thinks of little else but work, he says, and when he's not working, he feels a terrible urge to work and a guilt about not working. It's Protestant guilt, W. says. We all feel it, W. thinks, even him, who is a Catholic from a Jewish background. It's everywhere, says W.

He knows my views on the topic. He knows I think it should all stop and right now, he says. But haven't I fallen into the administrative trap? Aren't I in the office dawn until dusk, administrating? W. had thought I'd be the one to break from work. He thought I'd give it all up and go somewhere else.

This country, says W., is terrible. He tells everyone he meets to leave. Leave immediately, he says. Of course, when he left, he only came back, W. says. His time in Strasbourg, that great, peaceful city, taught him only that he was British, and couldn't live anywhere else. There's something wrong with him, he says. And with me, he sees it too. We're British – and worse, he says, English, and though we despite England and everything it stands for, we're stuck here.

Despite everything, though, W. still dreams of Canada: that's his escape route, he says, his line of flight. It's Canada that would teach him to work less. Canada with its great lakes and great forests. The sheer expanse of Canada soothes him, W. says. The fact of Canada. It's not like England with everyone swarming around, W. says. The Yukon: if only he could there, W. says. He'd be a gentler person, W. says, a kinder one. His soul would expand like the open expanses of Canada,, W. says.

There's something sick about us, W. says, something depraved. Only it's not just about us, says W., but about the whole world. We're seismographic, W. says. We register the great horrors of the world in our guts. That's why you're always about to soil yourself, says W. It's why you have a continual nosebleed and always feel sick.

Many illnesses have passed through W.'s body. We're weak, he says, the runts of the litter. Something has come to an end with us. We're the end of the line in some important way. It all finishes here, W. says, pointing at his body and then pointing at mine. Especially here, says W., pointing to my stomach.

My obesity always impresses him, W. says. My greed. The way I eat, the amount I eat. He'd call me a carnal man, W. says, but that sounds too grand. You're just full of greed. What would I be like if I didn't go to the gym?, W. wonders. It's all channelled into my enormous thighs, W. says. They're grotesque, he says. You're out of proportion. And my great fat arms.

For his part, W. takes no exercise. He hasn't felt well for many years – eleven or twelve. There was a time when he'd go for great walks on the moor, he remembers. He had a walking friend, of course. You can't go walking on your own, that would just lead to enormous melancholy. That's what I always say, isn't it: that going out walking on my own would lead to enormous melancholy?

W. also feels it. He's essential agrophobic, W. says. He's only really happy holed up in his room, working. He'd prefer never to leave his house, says W. Or indeed his office. He'd like to hole himself up like Howard Hughes, he says, with bottles of toenails and urine. It's only the love of a good woman which saves him from that.

Now and again, he thinks he should walk to work, or cycle. But it's too far, and all uphill. It would only depress him, W. says. In the end, he's not cut out for exercise. He'll lead a short life, says W., as will I. a short, unfulfilled life, which will come to nothing. What it all been for?, W. asks. Nothing, he says. We're runts of the litter, W. says.