Spurious (4 page)

‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk.—‘All set?’ We’re all set. Despite his general inactivity, W. is a great advocate of walking: it’s what we’re made for, he says, and speaks of the long walks he used to take on the weekend.

We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle. But why is that?, we muse. Why are we content?’—‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ No, I tell him.—‘Well neither am I’.

We head up into the grounds, the great sweep of lawn running up to the mansion on our right, opening up a great landscape, planned and planted two hundred years ago.—‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, says W. Then, on our left, a beach of pebbles, the sea, and, across the Sound, the distant city, with blue-grey naval ships going to and fro.

‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out over the water. There’s a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: ‘We should go on a trip, one day. We should go to Spain’. And then: ‘We’re not going to go anywhere, are we? We’re men of habit. Simple beings’. And then, ‘Everything’s got to be the same. That’s our strength’.

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

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

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

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

As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W.—‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy’. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

W. is growing his hair, he says.—‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. It’s the age of Aquarius.—‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side.

‘The sea makes me happy’, W. says, ‘does it make you happy?’ It does. We stand before the whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcumbe, the far off seabreak with the lighthouse at one end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the farther lighthouse that can be seen standing blue ten miles out against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, shimmeringly blue under the very blue sky: here we are again!

To think it will all end so soon! To think we’re on the edge of the greatest catastrophe! The oceans will boil, the sky will burn away into space. And won’t we be the first to be swept away? Won’t we be the first to go under?

The apocalypse is close, we know that. The apocalypse is coming, of that we are certain …

As we walk towards the lido, W. tells me about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says, to form a great defensive wall. Their bronze-tipped spears would poke out of the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W.—‘Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this’, he says. ‘You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx’, says W. ‘You’d be the first to break it’.

W.’s great fantasy, and he must admit, he says, that it
is
a fantasy, is of forming a community of writers and thinkers, linked by mutual friendship. Together we’ll be capable of more than we might do on our own. That’s what he’s always hoped, says W. It’s what he’s always dreamt of.

Above all, we have to avoid the traps of careerism, says W. Loyalty and trust, that’s what matters: we have to be prepared to die for one another.—‘Literally that:
to die for one another’
, W. says. ‘It’s all about the phalanx’, W. says. ‘The phalanx you would immediately betray’.

That’s the ultimate paradox, W. observes: that one with such faith in friendship should end up with such a friend. Would I die for him? No. Would I immediately betray him, given any opportunity? Yes. In fact, I’ve already done so several times.

Where did it all go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same answer: me. It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.

‘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’m like the idiot double of an 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 year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. It amuses W., who knows I will never escape and nor will he. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re 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?—‘None at all!’, says W. ‘Not one bit!’

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?

W. has been lost in bureaucracy, he says on the phone. He tells me about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been.—‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When W. was ill, he was farther from writing
The Trial
than he’s ever been, he says.

In W.’s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it’s the key to great thoughts, he says, 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. He always thinks one might. It worked for Kafka, didn’t it? And what about Blanchot? But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

We’re off on another trip.—‘How many shirts are you taking?’, asks W. on the phone. Four, I tell him. Four! He says he’ll only take two. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says.—‘You sweat a lot, don’t you, fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking?’ Four, I tell him.—‘Four pairs of pants’, W. muses. He’ll take four as well, he decides, and four pairs of socks.—‘How many pairs of trousers will you take?’, asks W. One, I tell him.—‘One!’, W. says, ‘after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing?’ W.’s going to take two pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.

On the train to Dundee. ‘What are you doing?’, says W. I’m playing
Doom
on my mobile phone.—‘I haven’t seen you open a book for days’, W. says. Later, I take some gossip magazines out of my bag.—‘Why do you read them?’, says W. ‘Didn’t you bring a book?’ W.’s reading
The Star of Redemption
again.—‘A proper book!’, he says. ‘I don’t understand it, though’. He shows me unmarked pages. Pages without any annotations, he says, except for question marks, meaning he doesn’t understand, and exclamation marks, meaning he’s totally lost.

‘So what are you reading, then? Who’s that?’ Jordan, the model, I tell him.—‘Who’s that?’ Peter André.—‘Oh yes, I like them, they’re funny’. He laughs at the pictures of grossly obese women on the next page. ‘That’s you in a few years’, he says. ‘When do you think you’re going to get as fat as that? It’s going to happen, isn’t it, the way you’re going?’

‘You need a man bag’, says W., and shows me his. ‘You see? You can fit everything into it. Everything and anything’. His bag sits on his hip, and hangs from a leather strap round his shoulders. He decides we should spend the day before the conference looking for a man bag for me.—‘You need to smarten up’. Rucksacks won’t do. Man bags are the thing.—‘And you should get rid of that jacket’.

‘So, what have you got in your rucksack?’, W. asks. ‘Go on, show me, I could do with a laugh’. I take out another gossip magazine, and then another. He gasps in horror.—‘My God, there’s no hope for you’.

Then some snacks. Nuts, first of all.—‘What kind of nuts are those? Can I have some?’ Then popcorn.—‘Popcorn? No wonder you’re getting fat’. Then pretzels.—‘Where do you think you’re going? Up Everest?’ Then a book.—‘Load of shit! You read too much secondary stuff’. Then my notebook. W. is very pleased with this.—‘Let’s have a look’.

He flips through the pages. Drawings of cocks, of monkey butlers. He’d taken it from me at a presentation in order to formulate his Hebrew question before he asked it.—‘Ah, my Hebrew question! My finest hour!’ He’d quoted from the book of Genesis from memory, in Hebrew, like a real scholar, we both remember that. Something about the
tohu vavohu
, wasn’t that it?—‘The
tohu vavohu
’, says W., ‘exactly’.

Then he tosses the notebook aside.—‘So, what thoughts have you had? Tell me. I need entertaining’.

We read the papers. Our stomachs hurt. A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he’s ever felt.—‘Drunk and then ill. Drunk and then ill … That’s your life, isn’t it? How do you do it? How can you live like this?’

What has he got in his man bag?, I ask W.—‘I’ll show you’. He places a large notebook on the desk. In the front, he says, he writes the ideas of others in black ink, and in the back, in red ink, he develops his own ideas.

How many ideas has he had? He opens the notebook for me.—‘Mmm. Quite a few’.—‘Can I copy some out?’ W. says I can.
A book must produce more thought than it itself has
, I write.
The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics
, I write. And the best one,
It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster
—I copy that out, too.

Are those ideas?, I ask him. They’re on the way to ideas, W. says. W. asks to see my notes.—‘What’s this drawing of a cock supposed to mean?’

Next, W. takes out
The Star of Redemption.—
‘I don’t understand a word. Not—a—word. I don’t suppose you can help me, either’. Next, he sets down a packet of moisturising wipes. What else?—‘Nothing else. But I’ve got room for everything in my man bag’. I tell W. his man bag is very continental.—‘Oh yes, I’ll bet Rosenzweig had one. And Kafka’.

Before beginning to give our collaborative presentations, W. and I always dab our wrists and then the skin behind our ears with moisturising wipes. It calms you down, W. says. It prepares you for the task ahead. He takes his wipes everywhere with him.—‘I learned it from Sal. You see—this is what women can teach you’.

They were handy when we were travelling across Poland. We sat there with flushed faces until W. got his tissues out.—‘Dab your wrists, where women put on perfume, and then behind your ears’, W. told us, giving out tissues. Suddenly a marvellous coolness descended.—‘You see!’

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

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

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

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

It’s too hot!, I complain. W. reaches in his man bag for a wipe. W.’s prepared for the heat, he says. He watched the weather forecasts. ‘Dundee is either very hot’, he says, ‘or very cold’. He reaches in his man bag for suntan lotion, and applies it to his cheerful face.

W. is an enemy of sunglasses.—‘Take them off’, he says, ‘you look like an idiot’. But it’s sunny, I protest.—‘They block your pineal eye’, he says. ‘It needs sunlight’.

The pineal eye’s in the centre of the head, W. explains, but it’s sensitive to light. Without light, you quickly become depressed.—‘That’s why you’re so morose’, says W. I’m morose, he says, whereas he, who doesn’t wear sunglasses, is joyful.—‘Joy is everything’, W. says. He is essentially joyful.

‘I’ll bet it smells terrible out there’, says W., looking out of the window of my flat. ‘It does, doesn’t it? You can tell. I’ll bet it really stinks’. You’d never know of course from inside the flat, he says, because the windows won’t open. They’re jammed shut, I tell him, by the flat changing shape. It’s sinking, I tell him. It’s collapsing in the middle.

Later, W. helps me empty the cupboards in preparation for the damp proofers. We have to strip the flat down to a bare frame, I tell him.—‘God, what’s that smell?’, asks W. as he sets down the pots and pans I pass him in the other room. ‘These are filthy’, he says. ‘How could you let them get like this?’

W.’s worried about my cough.—‘The damp’s turning you consumptive’, he says. Even
he’s
developing a cough, and he’s only been here a few hours.—‘How can you live like this? How can you get anything done?’

W.’s house is perfectly made for work, he says. His quiet, book-lined study on the second floor; his desk and laptop; the view over Plymouth roofs is perfect inspiration, he says. He has a sense of living above the world rather than living below it in the mud, as I do.

‘All your worldly possessions’, says W., looking round the room. ‘Is this what you’ve amounted to?’ Pots and pans, sticky with filth; rusty tins of mackerel and tomatoes; a duvet soaked in spilt fabric conditioner: ‘Yes, this is what it’s come to’, W. says, ‘it all ends here’.

I must have a death-drive, W. surmises. That’s the only thing that could explain it. I must, on some level, want to destroy myself.—‘Just throw this stuff out’, W. says, ‘all of it. You don’t cook here, do you?’ There’s no power in the kitchen, I tell him. There’s no electricity.—‘My God. How can you live like this?’, says W., his voice high with incredulity. ‘It wouldn’t have got this bad if you lived with someone’.

It’s no wonder I don’t do any work, W. says. He couldn’t work if he lived like me. Out all the time, reading nothing and living in squalor. It really is disgusting, he says. And the damp! He’s never seen anything like it, W. says. It hits you as soon as you come in. No wonder I’m always ill.

‘What would Béla Tarr would think of your damp?’, W. says. ‘What would he make of it?’ W. has become obsessed with Béla Tarr. He’s a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about poor, ugly people. The ugly and poor are
his
people, that’s what he says, says W.

Béla Tarr was going to be a philosopher. But when he started making films … 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, W. says. He doesn’t float nebulously into the most general and most confused of ideas, into our
clouds of unknowing
.

‘Béla Tarr doesn’t believe in God’, says W. ‘He’s seen too much to believe in God’. A little later, ‘He takes years over each film’, says W. ‘Years! Every kind of obstacle is placed in his way. His producers die of despair. His cinematographers leave in disgust. He runs out of money’. And then, ‘His films are full of drunks. 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’.

Béla Tarr made his first film when he was sixteen, W. says. Sixteen! Sixteen! That’s when he started, says W.—‘When did you know’, says W., ‘when did you know you’d never amount to anything?’ When did I take refuge in vague and cloudy ideas that have nothing to do with the world?

There’s something
absolute
about my yard, W. says. You can’t get beyond it. Some great process has completed itself there.—‘What did you do to those plants? Desecrate them?’ and then, ‘What’s hung over your washing line? What was it, before it started rotting?’, and then, ‘Were those once bin bags? My God, what have they become?’

Béla Tarr would discern what is absolute about my yard, W. says. He’d register its every detail in a twenty minute tracking shot. The sewage, the concrete, the bin bags and rotting plants … the yard would mean more to Béla Tarr than all our nonsense.

Béla Tarr said that the walls, the rain and the dogs in his films have their own stories, which are much more important than so-called human stories. He said that the scenery, the weather, the locations and time itself
have their own faces
. Their own faces! Yes, we’re agreed, the yard, the horror of the yard, is the only thing around here in which Béla Tarr would be interested.