Visiting W. When W. and S. dress up to go out on Saturday night, they look like German terrorists; I call her Elfride Biscuit and him, in his suit, Helmut Omelette. They are part of the Omelette International, because to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.
More discussion of Philosophy Dogma. Badiou has pre-empted us. W. passes me a copy of the new Continuum edition of Infinite Thought. ‘He’d hate us’, says W. – ‘Rightly so.’ The whole weekend we have a self-disparagement competition. ‘We’re not creative, we’re destructive.’ – ‘We suck the life out of everything.’ Neither of us has ever had a single thought. I tell W. that I might be on the verge of one. He looks sceptical. ‘Do you think we too a wrong turn with Blanchot?’ – ‘Our whole lives have been a wrong turn.’ It was literature, we decide. Opening The Castle was fatal.
On Saturday nights, dressed up, W. and S. go to the cocktail lounge which is part of the Plymouth Gin distillery. It is members only; you don’t have to pay for membership, but the bar staff have to like you. These German terrorists like the high life. W. likes cocktails which are as close to pure alcohol as possible. He has a Martini. It is served in a frosted cocktail glass with a curl of lemon rind floating in the clear liquid. It is beautifully pure. I taste some, and I know this must be what Debord drank, or Duras: it is the everyday distilled, the essence of boredom in a glass. Only it is concentrated boredom, strong and deadly.
Slowly, Spurious disappears from blogrolls. This is a good thing. ‘I’ve got nothing to say’, I tell W. ‘That’s never stopped you’, says W, and then he says, ‘So what is this thought you’re on the brink of?’ I tell him it has something to do with suffering and writing, where writing can stand in for any infinitive. W. finds this funny. Later he says: ‘At least Blanchot wrote fiction. You don’t have that excuse.’ And I think to myself: perhaps writing fiction is an excuse. And then: what would it be to concentrate all of writing, all of writing, onto a single page?
I flew down to see him; bad weather meant the plane could only go as far as Cardiff. Air Wales puts us on a coach for the rest of the journey; it takes three hours, and I only have a draft of the new manuscript to read. Horror: three hours in the dark with my own prose. I realised, as I read, that it is a long way from ready. I can’t send it off for the 28th, as I intended, whatever the consequences. As I read, I am reconciled to my first book. If it was bad, as it was, this is not because I do better. That was the limit of my abilities, and the second book doesn’t even approach that.
All weekend, W. and I wonder why we are not better thinkers. ‘There is a threshold you have to pass across’, I tell him, ‘what permits that is not intelligence, though that is important, wide reading, though that is, too; it is not even tenacity’. ‘What is it then?’, W. asks, who has newly adopted Badiou’s intolerance for vagueness. But I have no idea.