Spurious

Sons of Perdition

No more Messianism, no more!, I wail to W. I've had enough, I'm finished ... Ah, but it's only then that the Messiah might arrive, W. says, when all hope is lost and you've run out of will and patience and you can't work anymore. 'Which means, in your case, almost at once.

'You've no patience, have you? You've no capacity for the long haul. You think you're going to be caught out at any moment; that it's about to come to an end. But it continues nevertheless, doesn't it? It goes on, and on and on. Did you ever think you'd get this far? That you wouldn't be found out?' W. is a scholar of much greater patience and forebearance, he says, which means the Messiah might come later for him than for me, which seems unfair.

W. reminds me of the old story of the Messiah who remains hidden with the lepers and beggars at the gate of Rome. There he was all along; but is he there? When the Rabbi stands before him to ask when he will come, what does he say? Today, if you will hear my voice. Today! Then the Messiah is here! But he is not here. There are conditions to his coming, and the leper-Messiah, who binds his wounds alongside the beggars at the gates of Rome, is not here yet.

There's a great lesson in this, W. says, but he's not sure what it is. When's the Messiah going to come? Today? Tomorrow? The tomorrow-in-today? He's not sure, W. says, but it's only when you've exhausted everything, when there's no more hope that the Messiah might appear.

Of course, I've always worn him out, W. says. He's exhausted by my apparent exhaustion; he's long since given up all hope for me. I'm hopeless, he says. I'm unredeemable. Why does he talk to me? Why does he continue with our collaboration?

Perhaps he hopes for something nonetheless, W. reflects. And perhaps it's only when he gives it up that the Messiah will arrive. Which would make me some kind of antichrist, W. surmises. A kind of living embodiment of the apocalypse. 

But then, too, might he be an antichrist for me? Doesn't he listen to my wailing like an indulgent mother? Doesn't he put up with me and my parody of good faith and scholarship for year after year? We're sons of perdition, W. decides as we wonder through the shopping mall, each for the other.

Ragged Books

We should be content to write ragged books, W. says. There's no time for polished ones. Time is running out! These are the Last Days! We should write books made of pathos and nothing else, W. says. We should aim for pure declamation, statements without argument. Rosenzweig's example leaps ahead of us.

Of course, I'm halfway there already, W. says. What does argument mean to me? What does logic? There's a kind of purity to my stupidity, W. says. It's instructive. But it can also be misleading. Who, one might think, would be better to speak about the end of the world and the Last Days?, W. says. Who has a more vivid instinct for apocalypse?

But I've never managed it have I? It's never come right, for all that I write, for all that I type away, day and night. I can't spell, for one thing. I have no sense for the rudiments of grammar. Have I ever written a single clean sentence? Just one? That would be the coming of the Messiah for me, W. says, a single clean sentence.

The Son of Perdition

No one had any faith in me but W., he reminds me. No one expected anything; I was never a figure to watch. Quite the contrary, W. says, they tried to ignore me, and I, sensing that, was forever placing myself in the field of their attention. 'There you were', says W., 'bobbing up and down, and everyone doing their best to ignore you'. In the end, what was there left but for me to skulk off to my room?

'You became a skulker', W. says, 'and that's what you are still, though you've long since given up getting anyone's attention'. What would I have been if it hadn't been for him, W. wonders. Has he helped me? Hindered me? Has he prevented something from running its course? It's not as if I am waiting in darkness to make my return, W. notes. But perhaps something's waiting in me.

Why was he drawn to me?, W. wonders. What was it about me, when there were so many others? He has certain instincts, W. says. He's sure of certain things. But in this case? It's not that I'll achieve anything, W. says, he knows that. Everyone does. But there's something about the extent of my inability. He wonders whether I am an entirely new kind of failure. Whether there is something symptomatic about me, from which could be deduced great truths about our age.

How is it I've got anywhere in life?, W. wonders. How was I able to make any progress at all? Somehow, the world parted for me. Somehow there were openings, opportunities. I thrived, in my own way, though no one else could call it thriving. Of course I couldn't be called a success. That least of all. But the way in which I failed ... It's enticing, says W. It drew him to me, he's no doubt of that. I'm like a living car-crash, W. says. A catastrophe entirely unto myself. What process is completing itself in me? What world is coming to an end?

Sometimes W. wonders if I am a living allegory, even a kind of warning. My life is a cautionary tale, or it should be. But who is there left to warn? I've outlived any kind of decency, W. says. We both have. Who could understand my significance except W.? And even he's beginning to lose sight of it. 'Your shamelessness', says W. 'Your laziness. Your inability to see anything through. Your endless appetite for celebrity gossip'. Towards what does it point?

The eschatologist would see me as a sign. 'You're a sign of the End', says W., 'of the very end'. History has run amok. The skies have turned red and the oceans are boiling away. 'And you are writing post after post in your corner'. Is this what it's come to? Are things really this bad?

It was worse when I wanted attention, W. says. When I bobbed up and down. And now? It as though someone had flicked a switch. The disaster is ON. 'It's never going to end, is it? You're never going to finish'. And I'll drag W. down with me. W., who must have wanted to be dragged down, he says. Who must have wanted to hang out with the Son of Perdition.

The Iron Age

Of course, as a Hindu, I have no real concept of the End Times, W. says. Haven't I told him about the great Cycle which sees the degradation of civilisation and its rebirth? Haven't I told him that the Iron Age, full of violence and disease, is succeeded by the Golden Age?

I see nothing but chaos and degradation around me, W. knows that. Nothing but perversity, greed and conflict, but it doesn't touch me, not really. To the Hindu, there are no end times, W. says, that's what I've told him on several occasions. Even our age, the worst age of all, will see the birth of another of God's avatars, W. says, I've got that consolation. And there's no such thing as eternal damnation.

W. was brought up with the idea of eternal damnation, he says, and the thought of it still makes him shiver. Hindus are immune, W. says. I should try living as a Catholic and then I'd see. And as a Jew (W. is Jewish by bloodline). It's the guilt that's worst, says W. The sense you can never measure up.

Detachment, that's what you have to achieve to escape the wheel of rebirth, isn't it?, W. says. The cessation of desire. It makes sense to him, W. says. Look at my flat, for one thing. It's disgusting. Do I desire to clean it up? No. Do I desire to deal with the damp? Not really.

It's a kind of test for you, isn't it, your damp? It's the Iron Age in person, isn't it? It's the apocalypse. All I have to do is to desire not to change it, W. says. That would be moksha, wouldn't it? Ah, if only it were as simple for him, W. says.

Schwarmerei

Pathos is my milieu, W. says. It's where your heart really lies. I am a pathetic thinker, W. observes, if I can be called a thinker at all. Of course, so is he. He learnt it from me. In its way, it's quite impressive - the way everything I say is marked with urgency, as though it was the last thing I will ever say! As though I were going to expire at any moment!

Then there's the way I raise my voice, reaching great shouting crescendoes entirely arbitrarily, W. says. It bears no relation to what I'm actually saying. And then I like to go all quiet, too, don't I?, W. says. All hushed! As if you'd drawn everyone back to the moment of creation! As if something momentous was about to happen! 

All in all, it's always an amazing performance from me, W. says. I always look as though I want to start a cult. Schwarmerei, W. says, that's what marks everything you write. It means swarm and enthusiasm, W. says. I'm one of the enthusiasts that Kant hated. It's all Schwarmerei with me, isn't it?, W. says.

Sometimes he thinks it's because I'm working class. I can't get over the idea someone is listening to me, W. says. that I have an audience. Which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary. I think I'm speaking to people better than me, more refined. Which is, of course, almost always true. I hate them and I love them, W. says; I want only their approval, but at the same time I don't want it; it's the last thing I want.

W. has his pathetic moments, he admits. Sometimes he feels the Schwarmerei rising in his breast. Sometimes his voice begins to climb the decibels. But then he knows that I am to follow him, and who will notice his excesses then? I make audiences flinch, he says. I make them twitch in involuntary horror. All that Schwarmerei! All that pathos!

Messianic Hope

He can picture me, W. says, working at my desk, or attempt to work, or at least what I call working, covered in crumbs from the packed lunch I eat four hours early, surrounded by books by Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and by other books that explain Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and then by still other books with titles like The Idiots Guide to Jewish Messianism and Rosenzweig in Sixty Minutes ...

He can picture me, he says, hungover as usual, bleary-eyed as usual but full of a vague, stupid hope, with the sense that this time, despite its resemblance to all other times, will be different. This time it'll be okay. This time it'll come good. That's my Messianism, W. says, and it's all I'll ever know or understand about Messianism, that vague sense that things will be different this time, even as everyone else knows it will be exactly the same.

Even you feel it, don't you, that Messianic hope? Even you, like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but excited. But do you actually think you're going to be redeemed?

W. himself can't shake it free, that hope, that springtime of the spirit. One day, he feels, he will be able to think. One day, his thoughts will rise as high as Messianism, the sun in the sky of the future. Oh he knows it's impossible, he says, he knows he'll never have an idea, but that's what the coming of the Messiah must mean: the impossible, which is to say, an idea, an idea that would belong to W.

Is that why he writes?, W. wonders. Is that why he accepts invitations to speak? Is that why the hope is reborn eternally in him that it will be different this time? In the end, that's what we share, W. decides. A sense that the apocalypse isn't quite complete, and that there are still grounds for hope.

The Stupid Messiah

W. is sure he heard somewhere or another - at a lecture, symposium or suchlike - about the stupid Messiah, and this has oriented his research ever since. The stupid Messiah, whatever can that mean? When did this figure appear? In what circumstances?

Of course, there is a long tradition of the occultation of the Messiah, W. says. The idea, that is, that the Messiah has already arrived, if only we could find him (if only we could set out to find him.) And then of course, the idea that certain conditions would have to be satisfied such that the Messiah could appear. The moral improvement of humankind, for example.

But what could it mean to think of a Messiah so stupid that he is occulted from himself? Of a Messiah who does not have the intelligence to know he is the Messiah? There's a tradition, of course, that the Messiah would be the one who broke the law rather than simply fulfilling it. Whence the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, whose followers likewise committed apostasy, it being a sign for them of a kind of test the Messiah would ask them to undergo.

Would the stupid Messiah have stupid followers?, W. wonders. Followers so stupid they wouldn't know who they were following, or what it meant to follow? Mystery upon mystery, says W. But at least it goes some way to understand my significance vis-a-vis Messianism. Because I'm attracted to it, aren't I, in my own stupid way? Even I have a sense of the importance of the Messianic idea and circle around it in my stupidity.

W. is a little less unwitting than I, he says, a little less stupid. And perhaps that means I'm a truer follower of the stupid Messiah, he says, he's not sure.

Scholarship

Reading Scholem makes me melancholy, I tell W. on the phone. He knows everything! He's an expert on all matters! That's because studied for 40 years and then wrote, says W. How many years did you study? Are you studying now? But you're writing, aren't you? You're writing constantly.

My problem, says W., is that I don't know anything at all. I have no base of knowledge upon which to draw. I'm an abyss of ignorance, W. says, which I think I can overcome through frenzied reading and frenzied writing, working as close to the deadline as possible. But in fact, it's obvious to anyone that everything I have written is a product of frenzy and not patient, calm scholarship, which has no aim but the cultivation of knowledge.

W. remembers his scholarly years with quiet reverence. He had no aim other than reading, thinking, and broadening his intellectual horizons. Great vistas opened themselves to him at his desk. He was close to the great names and the great books, which he always read in the original language, however long that took him. He sought out the oldest and most obscure of volumes. He wandered through the archives of great European cities.

But what would I understand of all that?, W. muses. What would I know of the life of a scholar? In truth, I am only a product of my time, a depthless age, an age of surfaces and first impressions. What book have I read that I did not first encounter in some online summary? What idea that I did not meet through a hyperlink? Wikipedia: that's my research tool. Google Scholar: that's the closest I've been to the great archives.

That was all long ago, says W. of his scholarly days, it's all gone now. He hadn't met me then, for one thing. Didn't I teach him about the value of writing? Wasn't I the one who drew him up from the musty depths to the bright light of publication? My shamelessness taught him a lesson, says W., he admits that. My shamelessness and my depthlessness: didn't he learn something from that?

He would like to say, says W. that he longs for nothing other than to plunge back into the murky waters of scholarship, but it's no longer true. My example fascinates me, he admits that. I am a man of the new world, as he is not, says W. He is a man of the old world, and I of the new one, shameless and free of profundity.

What sense have I of the true measure of European civilisation? What of the mountain range of thinkers behind us, and the desert that is growing all around us? And by what curse was he led to me, the ape of knowledge, the ape of seriousness? But he was led to me, W. admits, and now there is something apish about him.

Scholem notes that there is a tradition of doubling the figure of the Messiah, W. tells me. The first Messiah belongs to the old world, and to the catastrophe that destroys the old world (Messianism always entails catastrophe, W. says). Every horror of the old world is concentrated in him. He can redeem nothing, and what can he desire but his own catastrophe?

But then there is the Messiah ben David, in whom all that is new announces itself, and who finally defeats the antichrist. He is the redeemer, W., says. He brings with him the Messianic age.

Which one are you, do you think?, says W. Which one am I?

Forcing the Messiah

I've no time and no money, I tell W. on the phone. Why would I need time?, says W. What would I do with it? What great work would I realise? Now, no money, that's more serious. He's poor himself, W. says. He's living on toast, he says, nothing but toast. 

But with my appetite, he sees the problem. He knows how upset I get when I don't eat. In fact, he knows that my appetite is greatest when I am upset. 'You're at your worst'. For his part, W. enjoys his penury. His life is being stripped down to its barest dimensions, he says. Soon it will just be W., a room and his books on Messianism.

How are my studies in Messianism?, W. wonders. What have I learned? What am I reading? It's the most unlikely of subjects for me, W. says. It requires the deepest learning and the greatest loftiness of thought. And what do I bring to the study of Messianism? The greatest absence of learning and the greatest triviality of thought. What do I know of revelation? What of the great tradition of Messianism across all three of the religions of the Book?

I'm obsessed with celebrity gossip for one thing, W. says. And I'm lazy, lazy beyond all belief. And I'm shameless. There's no sense of guilt in me, despite everything. No desire to repent, despite everything I've done.

The Messiah comes when he is least expected, says W. He comes when hope is almost entirely lost, which it is when someone likes you is drawn to write about Messianism. And perhaps that is why my studies are pecularly appropriate in these times of apocalypse, W. muses. Perhaps that's when the Messianic idea will shine most brightly.

The Talmudic teachers were continually asked was whether it was right to force the coming of the Messiah, W. reflects. Should one exacerbate the horrors of the present time? Should one break the law even to the extent of committing apostasy, like Sabbatai Zevi? W. wonders whether it's the apocalypse that's pressing forward in me. Maybe my ignorance and love of celebrity gossip are its attempt to force the coming of the Messiah, but then again, maybe not.

The Waterwheel

Afternoon, the office. Another afternoon, the office ... What day is it? What was I supposed to be doing? Administration, endless administration - but isn't it a relief to have an excuse? To say: what chance did I have to do anything else? To say: I was too busy, I didn't have the time.

A kind of eternity breaks in nonetheless. Breaks apart from moment from moment, separates them and breaks the forward movement of time. The moment droops, falls. The moment contracts into itself and draws the past and future with it. A present without present.

No one here. The afternoon, another afternoon. Who's left here to do anything? Who's left to finish this task, and that one? So I try to gather myself together. Read, I tell myself. Pick up a book. Follow a line of prose. Follow a sentence as it binds itself to another. Follow a little arrow of sense that opens up again the past (what you have read) and a future (what you are going to read).

But that fails, too. I had that little Michael Chion book to read. On The Thin Red Line. I thought, it looks simple enough, I'll read that. Text and photographs. A line of argument (quite free associative, it's true, quite informal, but refreshing for that).

On the desk, far more forbidding: a book on Messianism. A book on Rosenzweig, on Cohen. I pick it up, read a few lines and put it down. What did I read? What did I understand? Nothing, nothing at all. I couldn't be bothered. I wasn't up to it. The book streams above me. The succesion of time streams above me ...

Anyway, I've written this kind of thing before. Over and over again, a thousand times. Until it seems I've written nothing else. And worn writing away. And worn everything away. A thousand blank pages. A million sentences written in the wrong direction.

When's The Kindly Ones going to arrive? When's that going to bind the past and the future for me? When's the moment going to turn, roll, into another moment? When, like a waterwheel, time filling the hollow and rolling it on?