Spurious

Seven Months

Tired of Freiburg, we catch the train to Titisee and hire a pedallo to paddle out into the lake. Feet on the dashboard, the blue bowl of the sky above us, we discuss the limits of phenomenology and the limits of the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, whose hut in Todtnauenberg we refuse to see.

We discuss the inadequacy of political thought in failing to tackle the question of political economy and the failure of philosophical thought to pose, really pose, the question of the environment collapse ...

Above all, we bewail the fact that the great disasters about to befall us barely leave a trace in the intellectual reflections of our time. It's as if we were going to live forever, but the real thinker, we agree, knows without histrionics thought is fragile and already touched by death.

Isn't that what the young Rosenzweig knew as he reassembled The Star of Redemption in his barracks in Freiburg as he convalesced? It took him seven months, that's all. Seven months, and he was also writing a letter a day to his beloved ...

Our Leaders

Our first leader was always an example to W. and I. I'm not very interesting, he always insisted, but my thoughts are interesting. My thoughts! As if he had nothing to do with them!, W. exclaims. As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptable for something infinitely more important.

He was completely serious, W. remembers, not like us. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatittude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?

W. and I reminisce about our second leader. He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of his everyday life, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. said. We agree: how frankly and absolutely he spoke of himself, and to anyone who asked. Frankly and absolutely, as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking was possible. A level of which we have no idea, W. says.

He was completely serious as well, says W. of our second leader, not like us. We're the apes of thought, W. says, but he was completely serious. Everything was serious for our second leader. Nothing mattered but thought, the life of thought!

W. and I reminisce about our third leader. Everyone knows to keep quiet when she speaks, W. says. She speaks very quietly herself, and is immensely modest, but everyone knows it: here is a thinker, here is thought in person. She lives in a different way to everyone else, that much is clear. She lives a different life, and her quietness is a sign of her elevation.

It's what everyone in the room knows when she speaks: she's better than the rest of us, cleverer, she occupies the stratosphere of pure thought. Thought is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it would be impossible for us to think. To have a thought that would burn our lives away like dross! To have the whole of our lives become clear and still like pools of water in Northern forests!

We lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than we can be to listen. For a moment, we forget we are apes, and listen with the whole of our being.

Behold the Ape

I hole my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it was written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says. Once I was happy on my savannah, he says. I was happy romping about the whole horizon before me. What made me think I could read, let alone write? How did I end up mistaking myself for a writer?

Behold the idiot, that's what my book says, says W. Wouldn't you like go back to my savannah now? Wouldn't you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?

A Vortex of Impotence

W. sends me a quote to mull over in my stupidity, he says.

Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence. 

W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.

I want to escape, that's my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something's wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he's not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. I'm not escaping, says W. I'm going to drown with everyone else, he'll make sure of it. I'm going down, says W.

The Fifth Rabbi

W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts at the end of his great study of Jewish Mysticism.

When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known - his name, and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery - would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

A generation later, the second Rabbi - his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life - confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and said, We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers. What he wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi - whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure - went to the woods and said, We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs - and that must be sufficient. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi - his name is well known, and he lived as we do - faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

There was a fifth rabbi - well, he wasn't really a rabbi - Scholem forgot, says W. His name is Lars and he writes everything about himself at his stupid blog. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was on Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of times.

A Beam of Light

We'll stop writing about the Messiah only when the Messiah comes, W. decides. And until then ... By what strange chance did it fall to us, who are least qualified to do so, to write about the Messiah? And how, in particular, did I come to write on the Messianic idea, I who am even less qualified to do so than W.? He at least reads Biblical Hebrew; he at least attended lessons on the Talmud; he has some sense of the divine and has always found himself at the brink of belief.

'You're a Hindu,' says W. 'What's a Hindu doing thinking about Messianism?' Of course, I'm not even much of a Hindu, W. says. What relationship do I have with Hinduism? Wasn't I going to learn Sanskrit? Wasn't I going to set out my Hindu stall? I even made noises about becoming a scholar of the Hindu religion, W. says, although it came to nothing. In the end, things have come to a grim pass when a not-quite-Hindu or a non-Hindu with no feeling for religion starts thinking about Messianism, W. says.

What is it that attracts me to the Messianic idea? What beam of light continues to reach me? For it must be quite a beam, W. says, if it's able to pierce the fog of my stupidity. Or perhaps there's something in my stupidity - due, no doubt, to its sheer overwhelming extent, the fact that it seems to cover and occlude the world - that makes a place for the Messiah, he's not sure.

Mountain Streams

Yes, we have been fortunate to meet real thinkers, W. and I agree. It was our great good fortune - but wasn't it also our curse; didn't we have confirmed for us that of which we would not be able - that of which we above all would not be able? It's important to know one's limitations - on that we're agreed - but to have them reconfirmed so often; to have the sense of them closing around you like a cage?

We're being suffocated, we agree. How can we breathe? But an encounter with a real thinker is precisely that breath. How is possible, the sense that, with a thinker, a thought is shared between us? How is possible that we believe ourselves to participate in thinking? Thought seems to occur between us. It seems to flow there, are though we were gathered around a mountain stream, around thought in its freshness, eternally streaming.

Ah to be near the source, at the beginning point! To have reached the highest, widest plateaus with only the flashing stars above us! That that's where these thinkers bring us; that's the vista their thought provides. Yes, we have seen the heights; thoughts, pure and fresh, have passed beside us.

Were we the condition of thought? We were only its occasion, alas. Someone spoke to us. We looked interested; someone spoke, we listened - that was it. And thinking welled up around like a great flood, and there were fishes in that flood, fish-thoughts streaming by us.

That was it, and nothing more. And with what were we left when the flood subsided? Where we were beached but on the valley-bottom of our stupidity, on the parched sands that no thought might cross?

Kafka For Himself

You have to know you're not Kafka, says W., that's the first thing. But you have to know that the person you're speaking to might be Kafka, that's the second. This is why conversation, for W., is always a matter for hope. The very ability to speak, to listen and respond is already something, he says.

Of course, to speak to the other, to respond is already to betray. Whatever you say is a betrayal, even if at the same time it is suffused with hope. That the other person is Kafka is a perpetually present possibility. And that you are also the Brod who betrays Kafka is the destruction of this possibility, its disavowal.

In what sense is he Brod?, W. wonders. He never listens enough. He never gives himself over to what is being said. He comes up short, says W., very short, which is why he always feels troubled when he speaks, yet at the same time always wants to push conversation towards the Messianic.

In my case, W. says, I am untroubled by guilt, and therefore by the sense of a perpetually present possibility. History is not about to be blown off its hinges for me. There's no escape, no plurality. What can Kafka mean to me? But Kafka means everything to W., and especially the sense that the other person, the speaker, might be Kafka.

'Even you', says W., 'even you might be Kafka, which would be a great miracle'. Of course, on the other hand, I'll never be Kafka for myself, but only for him, my conversationalist. The other person is never other for himself, says W. Or only rarely.

For haven't we along the way met thinkers - real thinkers - who speak without a concern for themselves, without any sense of self-preservation? It's as though what they say is indifferent to them, we agree. As though they are borne by thought, thought by it, rather than the other way round.

A Shit Stain

You should never hang onto a conversation, says W. Once it's finished, pfft, it's finished. He snaps his fingers in the air. - 'I forget everything you say as quickly as that', W. says. 'You, on the contrary, remember everything, and not only that'. I make things up, W. says. I wholly invent conversations we are supposed to have had, but in fact we never did have. I'm a fantastist, W. says, a dreamer, but for all that, I'm not without guilt. I'm no holy fool, W. says, no innocent. A fool, yes, but holy - not a bit of it.

I am neither an Eckermann or a Boswell, W. says. I'm his ape, says W. and, remembering Benjamin's comment on Max Brod, a question mark in the margin of his life. Well, more like an exclamation mark, says W., or a shit stain.

Of course, W. never mistakes himself for Kafka, as I do. He's never thought himself anything other than a Max Brod. But the point is - this is W.'s first principle - the other person is always Kafka, which is why you should never write about them or hold on to their conversations, let alone make them up. The other person is always Kafka, W. says, even me. He knows that, says W., why don't I?

The Founding Principle

Everything begins when you understand that you, and you above all, are Max Brod: this, for W., is the founding principle. That you (whoever you are) are Max Brod, and everyone else (whoever they might be) is Franz Kafka. Which is to say, you will never understand anyone else and are endlessly guilty before them, and that even with the greatest effort of loyalty, you will betray them at every turn.

Do I have a real sense of that?, W. wonders. Do I really know I am Max Brod rather than Franz Kafka? He doubts it, he says, which is why I never know the extent of my usurpation. For I'm a usurper, says W.; I've stolen his place and the place of everyone. Who haven't I betrayed? What crime haven't I committed?

Still, says W., his burden is to take on my wrongdoings as though they were his own. It's all his fault, says W., even though it's all my fault. This is because he is certain he is Max Brod, while I still think I'm Franz Kafka.