Spurious

Travel Melancholy

We're at the train station, on our great journey to the festival. Sal booked our tickets, she planned every stage of our itinerary, which has already gone horribly wrong. We were to meet her there, she said. She had to work, and she'd make the journey after work. Meanwhile, we were to make the journey without her.

Didn't she book us an early morning bus? But we couldn't find the bus, or the bus station. Didn't she book us a place on the festival bus, at the bus station at the other end? But we will have no truck with buses. We're men of the train, W. says. You can buy gin on the train, for one thing. Plymouth Gin, which they sell only in this part of the country. We sip our gin on the train, and admire the views.

How he loves this part of the country, W. says. There's nowhere as glorious as Devon. Of course, he'll be forced out of Devon soon, he knows that. His Devon days are numbered, which makes him love the county with even greater ardency. How fragile it is, his Devon existence. It's a bit like my Newcastle existence, W. says, he knows that. It could end at any moment!

That's the trouble with living at the periphery. You're vulnerable, dreadfully vulnerable. What will happen when the storm comes? Will we survive in our obscurity? No, we say, shaking our heads. We won' t survive. We'll be the first to go.

We've reached Somerset. Not far now. We have to meet the festival bus somewhere, but where? We search for cider to still our travel nerves. Where can we find some Somerset cider? We walk up and down the town. Nowhere. There's no cider to be found. So what will do? We're beset by travel melancholy.

Where are we going, and why? Where's Sal to guide us? Didn't she print us our tickets? Didn't she write down our itinerary? Why can't we follow instructions? Why is it always a fiasco, time after time? Why do we never learn from our mistakes?

A Religious Afternoon

'Are you going religious?', says Sal. 'I hate it when you're going religious'. We're having a religious afternoon, we tell her, as we sip our beers. God's here, we tell her. God's everywhere, we tell her, but this only winds her up.

'You don't even believe in God!' We do when we drink, we tell her. We drink to find God, we tell her. Well, the Messiah, we tell her. And when we wake up, hungover, we know we've lost it again: messianism, the messianic epoch.

Everyone's religious nowadays, we tell her. Look at the kids! We look around us at the other festival goers. The men have long beards, the women have long hair. They look peaceful, serene, sipping their beers in the sun. It's like a revivalist meeting, we agree. We're all having a religious afternoon.

The Problem of Africa

'I'm fucking sick of you, of the pair of you', says Sal. Why, what have we done? She's going off on her own, she says. Day two of the festival. The long afternoon. We've set up camp at a table in the upstairs hall. It's dark, the floor's sticky.

Is that Jason Molina over there in a cowboy hat? It is. He's with his people. We recognise the guitarist, who played the entire set with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He didn't care about the smoking ban.

Didn't I see Bill Callahan in person a while ago?, W. says. - 'I'll bet you creamed myself'. I didn't cream myself, I tell him. Bill Callahan was shorter than I thought he'd be. He looked tired, jet lagged. - 'How do you think he coped with meeting his ex?', I wonder. For Chan Marshall, Cat Power is playing too. W. says he's not interested in gossip.

What does he think Joanna Newsom is really like? What keeps Bill and her together? W. says I'm an idiot to think about such things. Bill's a lone wolf, I tell W. It won't last. He'll want to be single again. He'll want to be alone again. - 'Shut up, you idiot', W. says. And then, 'Go and get me a drink'.

The afternoon: you need stamina. Pacing. You might feel sleepy, but you should never yield. W. wants a power nap, he says. No power naps, I tell him. Stay awake! Drink! We're at a festival!

Sipping our pints of Guinness, we consider the enigma of Josh T. Pearson. He's living in Berlin, I tell W., and has no intention of recording anything. He's given up recording! He's poor, I tell W. He can only afford to eat one meal a day. He's an illegal immigrant, which means he can't get benefits, I tell W. He can't afford dental work.

His beard's getting longer. His hair's getting longer. He's vowed never to cut it, I tell W. Josh Pearson's never going to cut his hair until the problem of Africa is solved. He's an impressive man, W. says. Josh Pearson thinks only of the suffering in Africa, I tell him, that's what he said an interview. It's very impressive, W. says.

Josh T. Pearson is a one man band. He doesn't need Lift to Experience anymore, we agree. Not when he can stomp his feet for percussion. Not with his array of effects pedals. He can play and sing, that's sufficient, we agree.

He sings of celestial battles, of angels battling demons, of the apocalypse and the end of times. He sings of prophets and messiahs, false and true ... He sings of the messianic epoch, says W. He's dreaming of justice. He's dreaming of the redemption of Africa and the redemption of the world.

Josh Pearson! Can we understand what he's become? It's beyond us, we agree. He speaks from inside the burning bush. He speaks from the whirlwind. The battle takes place in his heart. Angels versus devils. Christ versus the Anti-Christ ...

He is the bush that burns and God's voice that speaks from the bush. He's the suffering Job and God as he speaks from the whirlwind. And who are we, on our festival afternoon? Idiots, just idiots, says W.

Apocalyptic Pop

What are the kids listening to?, W. says. We need to find out. We're at the festival, Plymouth Gin in our water bottles. The kids are gentle. They drink, like us, through mornings and afternoons, through the evening and the night. They sit on the grass outside their chalets, smoking.

We play them The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads. We tell them about Josh T. Pearson. W. offers an impromptu sermon on apocalyptic Canadian pop. He plays limited edition CDs in handcrafted cases from recording artists he first hears on Last FM. I play them Jandek. I only listen to Jandek, W. tells them. He admires it in me, that consistency.

Sal passes out from drinking, and to wake her up, we play her something from Khartoum Variations, very loud. It'll reach her reptile brain, we agree. Her reptile brain will react in horror. It does. - 'You twats', she says. 'Why did you wake me up?'

We were worried about her, we said. There she was, slumped by the wall, unconscious, and we were too drunk to get off the bed. We couldn't cross the room! We couldn't stand up! And how else were we to reach her?

Sal hates Jandek. - 'Fucking Jandek. I hate him', she says. - 'Lars loves him', says W. - 'Well, he would', says Sal, rolling a cigarette, 'he's a fucking twat'. - 'Don't anger the Sal', W. says to me. And then, 'we have to sober up'. We have to sober up! Our leader, Josh T. Pearson, is playing at midnight.

We have to compose ourselves, we tell Sal, because our leader is playing. - 'He's not my leader', says Sal. And then, 'He better not be like fucking Jandek'. We tell she has to come, but she's too drunk to stand. We're too drunk to stand!, we tell her. Look at us!

We need food! We need to metabolise the alcohol, we decide. We call out to the kids. Bring us some food! The kids ignore us. They're gentle, W. says of the kids, but lazy. - 'Cook something for us, Sal', W. says. - 'Fuck off', says Sal.

Becoming the Crisis

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, W. is reading from his notebooks. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears. That's Gramsci, he says. It's from the Prison Notebooks.

Morbid symptoms - is that what we are? Is that our significance? Then we need to see it all the way through, W. says. It's the new we have to press towards, and all the way to death. We have to live the crisis, W. says. We have to become the crisis.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, W. is reading from his notebooks. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears. That's Gramsci, he says. It's from the Prison Notebooks.

Morbid symptoms - is that what we are? Is that our significance? Then we need to see it all the way through, W. says. It's the new we have to press towards, and all the way to death. We have to live the crisis, W. says. We have to become the crisis.

The Death of God

Oxford, eternal Oxford. Cunts in punts, says W. as we walk out along the river. I quote from Arnold's 'Scholar Gypsy', the only poem I know. W. quotes freely from Kafka, which I should know by heart, he says. We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head. So God, too wants to die?, I wonder. It's not just us? But perhaps our desires are also God's: perhaps it is only the death of God that we want to see to the end.

Indifference

Our time has passed, W. says as we head through the quadrangle. It's irrevocable. Why don't I understand that? I'm not Jude the Obscure hammering at the door. I'm not the chancer in the college, the idiot who snuck inside when no one was looking. I'm not getting away with anything. My stupidity is in plain view, and matters to no one.

I'm the idiot who was admitted just as it all came to an end. I'm the idiot at the gates of Rome after the Barbarians had sacked it. No one cares that I'm here. I've broken no law.

What began as tragedy is repeated as farce, W. says. What was repeated as farce is repeated in indifference. An idiot drools: that's your life, that drooling. No one cares. An idiot scratches his head: that's your life, that scratching. What does it matter?

The Rules of the Game

It's not as if we're a threat. We hold out our hands so we can be arrested, but no one wants to arrest us. We cross our palms and extend our wrists, hoping to be led handcuffed to a holding cell, but no one leads us away. We pack our suitcases and leave them by the door in the hope that the secret police will come, but no one batters down our doors.

He sees it, W. says, like an enormous fact. A great fact, like the wide sky, that says you do not matter. Over the Bodelian, it says: you do not matter. Over the college quadrangles, it says: none of this matters. Over gowned academics, it says: this is all nothing. 

No one's going to shoot us, W. says, more's the pity. No one's going to put us up against the wall. We're not going to executed as traitors. We're not going to be sued for our seditious writings. We're not going to Siberia for twenty years. We're not going to live out our lives in exile.

Whose fault is it? Who can we blame? There are no enemies, not really. Only poor souls, like us. Only cynics and opportunists like us, you can see it in their dead, blank eyes. Cynics, opportunists, who've compromised all the way, for whom the only way was compromise.

Because the rules of the game are everywhere. Because it plays us, because a child plays with the universe, as Heraclitus says, only this is not a child, it's an ape, a gigantic drooling ape, the gigantic drooling ape of Capital, W. says. - 'You, in other words', W. says.

The Pillar Saint

Sometimes W. feels like one of the pillar saints, like Simon Stylites in Syria in the first century AD, waiting for the Messiah to return. When's he coming, the anointed one? When will he be redeemed?

Right now, W.'s a little higher than me. He's perched on his pillar, reading his books in the great languages of Europe. He's reading, he's taken notes in the great languages, ancient and modern, and there I am at the base, masturbating in the dust. 

How's your Latin?, says W. And your Greek? Say omoi again, go on. That's all you can say, isn't it: omoi, omoi, omoi?

Omoi, that's what W. wants to say. Or oy vey! Or yuy! What sound should you make at the end, to acknowledge the end? Yuy! It's all over. Oy vey! We're done for. Omoi, omoi: the lament of Antigone and her siblings as their father was taken away. No, that was popoi. Popoi, popoi, popoi, that's what they say. - 'Are you listening down there?', W. says.

My Hinduism

My Hinduism has no depth, says W. He can't really believe in it. - 'Convince me', he says. 'Convince me you're a Hindu. Of what does your Hinduism consist?'

He still remembers when I told him of my Hinduism. I'm a Hindu, I said, and he laughed until beer came out his nostrils. And it's as improbable today, my Hinduism.

'You know nothing about it!', W. says. If he drew a Venn diagram called Hinduism and a Venn diagram called Lars, where would they intersect?

'You were never religious, were you?', W. says. Im a Hindu!, I tell him. 'But you were never really religious, were you?'

My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It seems to bring me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don't struggle with faith, or with the idea of faith.

W.'s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It's a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn't quite know. Sometimes he feels as far from religion as possible, and the word faith is ashes in his mouth. Faith! he says, what need have I for that?

Of course, he as born a Jew - he's Jewish through his mother's line, but his father's family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase, W. remembers, at the age of thirteen. He demanded to be taken to church! And he was taken. Thirteen!, W. says. That's when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.

My indifference to the idea of God has always disappointed W. He likes to imagine me in another life, he says, as a young priest wandering around in the fields, raising my fist at God's absence.

Sometimes W. thinks we should write a book on God. On God! Imagine! Of course, W. doesn't understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by this word. But at the same time, his own absence of belief seems to him entirely a matter of a blockage of thought, and what he can only describe as a kind of dullness and opacity.

He doesn't have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says; he doesn't know what that means. When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he's come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It's not because he thinks there's some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach - quite the contrary - but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and it is all because of some personal stupidity.

But what would I contribute to our book on God?, W. asks. What would I bring to the project? - 'You could explain your indifference', W. says. 'And then you could draw some cocks'.

The Chairlift to Death

We have to watch Stroszek, to prepare us for our trip to the USA, and read Marx, W. says. You have to read Marx, W. says, if you're going to the heart of capitalism. The heart of capitalism, the heart of darkness, W. says. Look what happened to Stroszek himself!

Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek, in Herzog's film, knew it was going to turn bad. He knew, even as he headed there, that America was, in its entirety, the wrong direction. He knew things were set in motion long before he appeared. What was left to him but suicide, after the collapse of his American dream?

But just before he died, before he rode his chairlift into death, he saw a chicken dancing in an amusement arcade. A chicken on a hot plate, made to dance. A chicken dancing, that could do nothing but dance, once quarters were fed into the slot. And what was Stroszek but a chicken dancing? What could be do but dance, all the way up to his suicide?

We have to be prepared for the worst in America, W. says. For the very worst.

What works of Marx should we take to the USA? Perhaps we shouldn't take any at all, W. says. We might get arrested at customs. We might get sent home for Unamerican activities. Perhaps we're already on a list somewhere, W. says. Perhaps they already have our photos.

We have to remember what happened to Stroszek and his friends, W. says. It's not as if we haven't been warned. We have to remember the chicken, W. says. We have to bear the chicken in mind.

Stroszek: didn't Ian Curtis watch the film just before he killed himself? He saw the chicken, W. says. He really saw it! And what else was left to him? What else could he do? Perhaps our trip to America for our Unamerican activities is only a kind of suicide.

Herzog speaks of finding images adequate to the world, W. says. We have to develop an adequate language for our state of civilisation, Herzog says. We have to create adequate pictures, otherwise we'll die out like dinosaurs ...

The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand, says W. The image of the chicken, the dancing chicken, is the secret of the world. It's a bit like that statue I have in my flat, W. says. Who is it supposed to be again?

Shiva, I tell him, the highest of the gods. Shiva, W. remembers. Shiva as Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. - 'What's your cosmic dance like?', W. says. 'Do the funky chicken', W. says. 'Go on, fat boy. Dance'. W. likes to watch me dance, he says. It's so improbable. So graceless.

Why do you hang out with Lars, everyone asks him. It's so he can watch me dance, W. says. So he can see my chicken dance.

Shiva's dance shook the foundations of the world, I had told W. His locks, whirling, collided with the stars, his steps split mountains asunder and his arms whirled throughout the full breadth of the universe.

Didn't the gods descend from heaven to watch him? Didn't they see the very dance of the universe, the great cosmic cycle of its creation, perdurance and destruction? Shiva, thus dancing, was called Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.

What's sanskrit for Lord of the Chicken?, says W.

W. dreams of a thought that would be the equivalent of the image of the chicken. A thought, a single thought, adequate to the disaster, equal to it ... In some sense, we'll have to exhaust thought, W. says. We'll have to run it ragged, right to its very end, like the car Stroszek set running in circles outside the arcade. It has to run until it burns, until it catches fire. Then and only then might something happen.

The chicken won't stop. That's what's etched into the runoff groove of the last Joy Division album. It's like a mantra to W. It should be pondered at length. - 'You won't stop, will you?', W. says. That's part of the horror: that I should show no signs of stopping. But it's part of my glory, too. Who put the coin in the slot? Who am I amusing? Not even him, W. says. And certainly not anyone else.

In my best moments, I do resemble Bruno S. playing Bruno Stroszek, of Herzog's film. In my best moments, W. emphasises. Otherwise I resemble no one but myself, more's the pity.

But sometimes I achieve a kind of pathetic grandeur, W. says, almost despite myself. There I sit, in the squalor. There I am, a squalid man, amidst the squalor, a bottle and a glass close at hand, some discounted sandwich boxes lying empty around me, and I'll say something truly striking. I'll make some pronouncement. I'll speak as though from the apocalypse, W. says. I'm like a savant. It's like a possession.

Bruno Stroszek speaks of himself in the third person, that's the secret. Haven't I told W. that everyone around me ends up speaking of themselves in the third person? That's the effect I have on people, W. says. Alienation. I turn them from themselves. From their seriousness. Which can be a good or bad thing, depending. Didn't I lighten W. up? Certainly. But there's such a thing as being too light. There's such a thing as being in danger of floating away.

Stroszek. W. supposes he can only resemble Bruno's elderly neighbour - what was his name? Scheitzer. Scheitzerhund. Just Scheitz, I tell him. Scheitz had an interest in animal magnetism, W. remembers. He bothered people with it. He confused them. Just like him with his interests, which are equally improbable, equally irrelevant. Messianism - who wants to know anything about that?

What was that town they ended up in?, W. says. Railway Flats - was that it? Railroad Flats, in the middle of America, right in the middle, equally far from any coastline. And why are we going to America?, W. asks. why did we accept the invitation? Wasn't the film a warning to us? Couldn't we see how it'd end up?

Workers of the World ...

This is yuppie hour, says our host, as joggers and dog walkers fill the streets in the late afternoon. East Nashville is gentrifying rapidly, he says. But at night it's too dangerous to go out. Wasn't he savagely beaten up in his first weeks here? Wasn't he bounced against a chain-link fence and punched in the wind? They took his wallet and left him there, crouched by the fence. It was savage, he says.

In the supermarket that same week, he saw two twelve year old kids held face down by a security guard. He was holding a gun to their heads, he says. He went straight home and locked himself in for a week, says our host. This is a third world country, he says. This country is insane! 

He rolls up his shirtsleeve and shows us his tattoo: workers of the world unite, it says.

A Car City

This is a car city, our hosts tell us of Nashville. You're nothing without a car. When they'd first arrived in America, they tried to do without a car, they tell us. They walked and rode the bus everywhere. The buses are great here, they tell us. You end up having great conversations. Where are you from?, people ask you. Where are you going? But it takes hours to get anywhere.

So they've been forced into driving, they tell us, which is terrible. They're Canadians, they say. They don't drive! They're not used to driving! They walk, they tell us. They cycle through the wilderness, they say. They paddle canoes. They're not made to be drivers.

For a few months, they tried to manage without a car in Nashville. They cycled everywhere, for miles and miles. People cried out to them in the streets. Why are you cycling?, they said. Are you crazy? But they continued to cycle. They cycled from far-flung government building to far-flung government building, in the process of becoming American citizens. They cycled out to their favourite Mexican restaurant and their favourite Vietnamese restaurant, but in the end, it was too much. They have a car now, they tell us, something they thought they would never own - something they thought they'd never have to own.

The sad thing is, Nashville used to have a train station, our hosts tell us. They even drive us past it, the former station, which has become some kind of shopping mall. Imagine it, W. says, shocked, a city without a train station!

Redeeming Nashville

Nashville. We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us.

It's a sign that we belong to Old Europe, for all that we think we don't we agree. Imagine: there are people who have less of a relationship to history than us!

History, history: it's being destroyed! Mocked! But our hosts have been documenting old Nashville in their photography. Old Nashville, what's left's of it ... They've been breaking into old warehouses and factories. They've taken pictures of orphaned walls and broken windows. It's messianic, W. says. They're discovering a past is full of lost opportunities, byways untaken ...

Our hosts are also people of history. They are as baffled as we are by the replica Parthenon. We take pictures of one another posing on the steps. We feel like replica Platos and Aristotles. W. says that I am a replica Diogenes, and that I should strip naked and masturbate in the sun like my cynical forebear.

At Katie K.'s Prairie Style, W. decides to be my dresser. He knows I've always wanted a Nudie Suit, or at the very least a Western-style shirt. I want Rhinestone embroidery! I want fringes!

W. fetches me Western-style shirts, bootlace ties and cowboy boots, while I stand in the dressing room in my underpants. But nothing will do. I still don't look like a Rhinestone Cowboy.

Later, as we sit out on the porch drinking Plymouth Gin, W. explains the features of messianism.

The peculiarity of the Jewish religion (and by this, he means the religion of Cohen and Rosenzweig), W. says, is that it is immediately and directly ethical and political. The idea of God is not first of all metaphysical, from which an ethics or a politics can be deduced. Its only meaning is ethical and political, from which the shortcomings of metaphysics can be deduced.

For the Jew (the Jew of Rosenzweig and Cohen), redemption doesn't lie ahead of time, in some distant future, W. says, but is already within the present, deep inside it. What matters is our relation to it. What matters is relating to the same world in a different way.

The highest expression of Judaism (the Judaism of Rosenzweig and Cohen) lies in the messianic idea, where social justice comes to the world as a whole. The idea of the Messiah in Judaism is always a social and political vision of the world, as opposed to the personal and individual viewpoint of the idea of the Messiah in Christianity, W. says.

The messianic idea (Rosenzweig and Cohen's account of the messianic idea) is the hope that the past and the present might be redeemed in the future, that world history will not be merely the repetition of the same violence and injustice against the weak and oppressed, W. says. It's the hope that the present, and the conditions that hold sway over the present, will not be endlessly repeated.

That the future might irrupt at any moment; that the present might be broken from the past of which it appears to be an indefinite continuation: that's what redemption means, says W. - 'You're trying to redeem Nashville', he tells out hosts. It's a thankless task, they tell us.

Our hosts tell us about the Cherokee, Choctau and Chickasaw people, who used to inhabit the Tennessee plains. They tell us of Andrew Jackson, who made his career as an India killer. They tell us of rural poverty and urban poverty, and of the main industry of the state, which is not included in the list of industries in our guidebook. The production of privilege and exclusion, that's what it's all about, they tell us. That's what really matters in Nashville.

Ah, when did it all go wrong? We think of the first migrants to America, not those who crossed via the vanished land bridge from Siberia, but the aborigines who arrived even before then, crossing the ocean. They were hunter-gatherers, of course, says W. It was before the disaster of agriculture, to which he traces the origins of capitalism. The mid-Neolithic, that's where it all went wrong, he says. Once you have agriculture, you have concentrations of wealth, W. says. You have military specialisation. Man becomes a wolf to man.

Perhaps we should become foragers, like our early ancestors, I suggest. Perhaps we should just wander forth, living on berries and roadkill and whatever else we find. He'd give us five days before we died, W. says, and that's generous.

It's My Birthday Today

The word barbeque doesn't mean the same thing over here, says W. over dinner. Nor does the word ribs. He's right. What have we been served? Vast oval plates of red-cooked meat. Chips (they call them French fries) in enormous piles, greater than we've ever seen. It's frightening. I must be in heaven with my enormous greed, W. says. My life must have peaked at this point - has it? I've finally found a country where I won't feel perpetually starved to death.

We watch a band on Beale Street who are playing for tips. There are preppies everywhere, all round us. W. hates them. What are we doing here?, he says. Between songs, the band come round the crowd with a hat. People have to promote themselves in America, we've noticed that. They're not ashamed of it, as they would be back home. There's no welfare state, that's what does it, W. says. But playing for preppies! It's the ultimate indignity, W. says over our pints of Big Ass Beer.

It's my birthday today, reads the sign on the windshield of the taxi driver carrying us home. This is a terrible place, he says of America, when we tell him where we're from. In America, he says, your teeth rot in your mouth, because you can't afford healthcare. There's no minimum wage here, he says, not like in Europe. People are paid five, six dollars an hour, that's all.  

It's the preppies, W. says. He blames the preppies, he says, when we get back to the hotel.

Lost in America

We never like to be too far from the sea, W. especially. Doesn't he always demand, when he visits me, to be taken to the sea? And doesn't he always take me directly to the sea, when I visit him? I'll meet you at the sea, he texts me, when I text him from the airport. I have to go straight there, straight from the airport to the sea to meet him.

And now, in the middle of America, when the sea's so far away? What then? What to do? Let's go to the Mississippi? But how do we get there?

We're lost in America! Here we are, in the deep south, and thoroughly lost! What are we doing here? What led us here? Some terrible mistake, we agree. Some lapse in the logic of the universe. Luckily, one of the blue-capped tourist guides in Memphis shows us the way. Is that really the Mississippi? It really is the Mississippi, wide and brown. Why is it so brown?, I ask W. It's full of mud, he says. Water and mud.

On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.'s Facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, a horse catamaran, with the camera set on automatic. And behind us, the great brown Mississippi, rolling improbably along.

America's so big!, we agree. It's overwhelming, really, when you think about it. How far is it to the coast, east or west? A thousand miles? Two thousand miles? Some great, improbable distance, we're agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive.

There's so much space here. America's so exposed. We think of the terrible signs we saw from the Greyhound bus of a passing hurricane. Houses torn up, trees uprooted and flung about. I took photos. We'd never seen anything like it. America's in danger, we agree. It's too big! It's too vast!

We think of the coming catastrophe, of the winds that will sweep it, the deserts that will claim it, the skies that will darken over it, America's body. Will it be here that the apocalypse rises to its greatest magnitude?

The Big Picture

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says, broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! How do I ever begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense? I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from day to day? W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He's seen too much. He knows where it's heading. He's seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

Cycles and Circles

It's not going well, is it?, says W. It's going badly, I agree. Worse than ever. But why does it surprise us? What did we expect? Some Kant-like resurgence, late in life? Some awakening from our dogmatic slumbers? 

Worse than ever, never worse ... We walk around in circles. We think in circles, which doesn't bother me as I'm a Hindu, W. says. - 'It's all circles for you, isn't it? Circles and cycles'. But it bothers him, W. says. As a Jew by lineage (his mother's family), as a Catholic by conversion (his father's), time, for him, is linear. It only goes one way! We've only got one chance, and barely that!

A few days later, he stood in my room and said I am Walser. A tall rather lanky fellow with ruddy, bony features, under a thick blond thatch that fought off the comb, dreamy blue-grey eyes and beautifully formed large hands protruding from the sleeves of a jacket too small for him; they seemed not to know what to do with themselves, and wished they could have crept into the trouser-pockets so as not to be there. This was Walser, half journeyman apprentice, half page-boy, all poet. He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be crossed out and replaced in what was nonetheless a first draft . . . This young person gave every impression of having heard there was such a thing as poetry from hearsay or report, that he had invented the music and the instrument on which it was played at the same time, so wholly unformed by reading or literary taste were these poems.

essayist Franz Blei’s recollection of his first meeting with Walser, from Michael Hoffman's 'Perfect and Serene Oddity', London Review of Books

Fatalism/Hinduism

How are my studies of fate coming along?, W. wonders. Fate, he says. It's das Geschick in German. It comes from schicke, to send. Geschick means the events themselves, not the power that determines them, W. says, I should take a note of that. Schicksal, on the other hand - now that means events and the power determining them, but it only refers to human beings, not things.

There's Das Fatum, of course. It comes from the Latin, W. says. Leibniz writes about fate, doesn't he? He writes about Mohammedan Fatum, which is inscrutable, Stoic Fatum, which is knowable and can become the object of inner tranquillity, and Christian Fatum, whch we should be happy about, since it comes from God.

Fate's moira in Greek, of course, meaning that which is allotted to you. There are the Fates, the Moirai. But then there's anake, too - necessity. That's the word Heraclitus uses. And the Stoics spoke of himarmene.

For the Jew, of course, Messianism trumps fate, W. says. Fate, fate, what does it matter to the Jew?

Of course, Hinduism is all about fatalism, W. says. Isn't our fate written on our foreheads before we are sent into the world? But then, of course, fate is really a product of the karma of one's previous life, the burden of the past. And there's the possibility implicit to the karmic work in this life too, isn't there? Developing detachment. Cultivating mental stability. Performing good actions. Surrending to God. - 'All the things of which you're incapable'.

Too Late

We never lived. W. is haunted by that thought. We never lived! We were never alive, not for one moment! That's W.'s horror. What do we know of life, of living?, he asks himself. What clue do we have, or did we ever have? It was always too late. It's always been too late.

My Role

What's my role in all this?, W. wonders. - 'What do you do to people? Have you any idea?' It's as though I were a gap within W. himself. An uncrossable distance, there at his centre. What do I want from him? What do I ask?

Sometimes, W. thinks he invented me, or something inside him invented me. That I'm his nightmare come to life. But then, too, he wonders whether it's the other way round. I invented him; he, W., was born from me as a detour from the nightmare, from the horror of my life.

Am I a question he asks himself, W. says. Or is he my question, my way of asking what it might have been, for a moment, to raised myself above failure and the knowledge of failure? Is there's something good in me, despite everything?, W. says. Something not quite dead, not quite finished?

The Salmon-Leap

One day, he says, and this is his hope, his hope against hope, I'm going to surprise everyone with my salmon-leap, W. says. One day, catching everyone unawares, there will be my great leap upstream -my leap, flashing the light back from my scales, my sunshine-touched leap against the current of my own idiocy: that's what he believes, somehow or other. He still believes it; still sees it: up and above the foaming water. Up and forming a great flashing arc ...

And where will I be going? In the opposite direction to my dissoluteness and squalor. In the opposite direction to my compromise and half-measures. And where will he be -he, W.? Leaping with me, he says. Leaping, his arching interlinked with my own.

The first thing that struck me about Benjamin - indeed it was characteristic of him all of his life - was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment. If the two of us were alone, he would look me full in the face as he spoke. At other times, when he fixed his eyes on the most remote corner of the ceiling (which he often did, particularly when addressing a larger audience), he assumed a virtually magical appearance. This rigid stare contrasted sharply with his usual lively gestures.

When I reflect on what it was he had in common after these first encounters, I can cite a few things that are not to be overlooked easily. I can describe them only in general terms as a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment - which was basically German-Jewish assimilated middle class - and a positive attitude toward metaphyiscs. We were proponents of radical demands. Actually, at the universities the two of us did not have any teachers in the real sense of the word, so we educated ourselves, each in a very different way.

Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He was always surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognised intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin's not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable.

from Scholem's The Story of a Friendship

The Drunk

One day, I'll surprise you all. One day, I'll really surprise you ... That's what you say to yourself in brown pub interiors, isn't it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They're full of a sense of great earthly mission. Just listen for a moment, that's what the drunk says. Listen - just listen!

And when he does? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.

An Idiot Strategy

Am I an idiot dreaming he's a genius?, W. wonders, or - this is unlikely - a genius dreaming he's an idiot? He looks for signs of genius in my idiocy, but sees nothing but idiocy. - 'Your idiocy runs all the way down', W. says.

But sometimes he thinks he finds cunning there, at the heart of my idiocy. A kind of idiot strategy. Am I preparing myself for the end? Is something preparing itself in me? Am I the rat, or the cockroach who will thrive after the catastrophe?

I know my time hasn't come, that's what W. believes. I'm waiting, he says, or something in me is waiting.

The Creation Hymn

I send W. the creation hymn from the Vedas, one of my favourites:

There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? Was there death or immortality? Was there a sign of night and day? Who really knows?

Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. Only the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know.

Ah yes, it's my sort of thing, W. says. Vague and spurious, W. says. Vague, spurious and full of pathos.

Personally, he was a most amiable presence, tall, with the bearing and the ruddy complexion of an alpine mountaineer, a handsome, boyish face with a sailor's long, greenish, narrowed eyes trained on the far distance. He lived in Ohlfield, a village near Gmunden-on-the-Traunsee in alpine Austria, in a stately farmhouse with a huge square inner courtyard which had taken six years out of his writing life, he said, to restore singlehanded from the decayed ruin filled with mountains of refuse parked there by the neighbours who, resenting the loss of their garbage dump, had sabotaged his efforts with persistent ingenuity. Inside, he had painted the floors a black lacquer, the walls all white, had installed green-tiled stoves and wall-length bookshelves, a bare table, a few wooden chairs, a bed in the centre of the upstairs bedroom that held virtually no other furniture. The tall windows let in much green-tinged light from the surrounding trees. The effect was serene, monastic ...

Sophie Wilkins on Thomas Bernhard, from the Introduction of her translation of On The Mountain

Kafka was the most important and fundamental experience of my youth, a bitter-sweet upheaval which brought into play all the potentialities of my self, a trauma of adolescence which, at the time when I made Kafka's acquaintance, I tried to master by making careful entries in my diary.

[...] My 'Treasury of Ideas' was, I now see, an amorphous collection of hastily recorded scraps of reading and conversation, the origin of which I only really knew at the moment when I wrote them down.

[...] I made a selection of entries in my diary, and from my 'Treasury of Ideas' for Florian to publish in Czech. But this never happened ...

[...] Then there began for me a period of restless wandering between different people, towns, ideas and ocupations. In the course of it, the intellectual and emotional experience of my youth was drowned by a flood of new adventures. The image of Kafka faded away. I turned away from what had been fundamental to my youth[....] the grey book of my 'Treasury of Ideas' lay abandoned under a pile of old notebooks, sketches, drawings and newspaper cuttings[....] My mind was purified only by the pressure of war and violence. I suddenly stood face to face with the insect world of The Metamorphosis and the cold and merciless machinery of In the Penal Settlement ...

From Janouch's Conversations With Kafka

[Who trusts Janouch's introduction to the second edition of his conversations with Kafka? Trustworthy or not, it's moving. In fact, I like the lies, which are so obviously lies ...]

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation[....]

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue[....]

We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile[....]

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled into some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

From 'Lessons of Darkness', Herzog on Herzog