Spurious

White Shirts and Blouses

Route 441, towards Pigeon Forge. Our hosts are driving across the state to the Smokies. We stop in Knoxville for lunch. Our waiter's very literary. Cormac McCarthy wrote a novel about Knoxville, he tells us. Suttee, it's called. That's a Hindu name, I tell him. Shiva's wife, who let herself be immolated rather than accept dishonour.

We ask him if he's read The Road. - 'It's great', W. tells him. 'Really depressing'. He wept when I lent it to him, he says. Our waiter tells us he wants to be a writer. He's studying on a writing programme. What does he want to write about? - 'Oh, you know, everything', he says.

I should show him my American notebooks, W. says. Turning to me, 'They're full of wisdom, aren't they?' - 'So you're a writer as well', says our waiter, refilling my glass with ice water. - 'He's not a writer, he's an idiot', W. says. 'But he did write a good poem about preppies ... How did it go? 'Tall/ sand in the hair/ white teeth/ pullovers/ deck shoes/ white shirts and blouses/ yachts with white sails/ fuckers'.

We visit Yee Haw Industrial Press and buy posters advertising gigs by El Vez, the Atlantic City Rhythm Rascals and Shinola. 'You think he gave a lumpy shit about the so called music business ...' reads my poster of Hank Williams. 'I believe Hank saw the light brother. AMEN. Visit Disgraceland', it reads.

I admire its sentiment, though W. and I found Graceland unexpectedly restrained and moving. We admired Elvis's contemplation garden, where he went to think over things. We thought of several things ourselves in the contemplation garden, looking over the grave of his twin brother who died at birth.

Graceland's surprisingly small, we agreed. The kitchen, for example - it was like any suburban kitchen. The living room, the dining room the same. Elvis was a man of modest tastes.

We particularly admired his Bauhaus style squash court, which he designed himself. Imagine it - Elvis the architect, Elvis the modernist. But it really was his design. He drew up the blueprints, he had them approved, he insisted on building a modernist squash court in the grounds of Graceland.

Inspiration

'Ah, you really inspired me the other night', says W. on the phone. 'It was nothing to do with your thought'. What then? He bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. Then he sat in the dark having apocalyptic thoughts and thinking vague about messianism without knowing anything about messianism. - 'That's how you live, isn't it?'

Hindu Fat Boy

On the Greyhound to Memphis. He can see my lips moving as I read, W. says. It's not a good sign in a scholar. Our hosts lent us a book each, one on country blues, and the other on the history of Mississippi. - 'Have you learnt something, fat boy?', says W.

He's been reading about the freed slaves who cleared the cane breaks and the forests of the Mississippi Delta, raising levees against the flooding river. W.'s been reading about the black labourers who rebuilt destroyed railroads and repaired the levees, and took new jobs in the mines and docks. He's been reading about sharecroppers who tied themselves into a system of permanent debt by renting land, mules and supplies from white owners, and the new kind of slavery which came with the Jim Crow laws that segregated and disenfranchised them.

'This country!', he says. 'This country!' It's as bad as Britain with all its colonies. Am I the colonist or the colonised?, he wonders. Of course, I haven't got a drop of British blood in my veins. That's probably what saves me.

I tell him I've been reading about the dispersal of plantation orchestras after the Emancipation; of wandering balladeers and country string bands. I've been reading about the juke joints where freed slaves could drink and dance, and of the field hollers and work songs of the black labourers who ploughed with mules, picked cotton and pulled corn. I've breen reading of makeshift instruments - of baling wire become diddley bow, of jugs and washtubs that become percussive, of a pocketknife used to play slide guitar.

I've been reading of the deep blues of the Delta, of a music of outcasts and outsiders, which came from the poorest part of the poorest state of America, from plantations, prisons and hamlets too small to appear on the map. I've been reading of its toughness and simplicity, of pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and of verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and broken relationships, of the great flood of '27 and the great drought of '29.

It's the music of life, I tell him. Of still being alive. But of being alive and torn apart. Of being the insulted and the injured. But still alive, still alive in the one chord vamp, in a rhythm that precedes melody, that breaks and fragments it, dissolving melody in the waters of its own flood.

W.'s moved, he says. He's never heard me speak so coherently, so sweepingly. What would my blues name be?, he wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.

Fuck Melody!

In a bar at Five Points, Nashville, W. berates the bartender about the poor choice of gin. Bombay Gin is terrible, he tells her. Tanqueray isn't bad, especially with tonic, but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick. She says her customers like it. W. tells her to introduce them to Plymouth Gin. Why hasn't she got any Plymouth Gin? You can get it in America. Our bartender looks annoyed. She'll get what her customers want, she tells us. But how do they know what they want when they haven't tried Plymouth Gin?, W. asks. I don't think she wants to hear about Plymouth Gin, I tell W.

East Nashville is gentrifying rapidly, our hosts tell us. It's preppy hour: joggers and dog walkers fill the streets in the early evening. Fireflies hover over the grasses. It's peaceful. But at night, it's too dangerous to go out. - 'Don't go walking by there', they were told by their landlady as she drove them past a pair of red brick houses. 'Gunshots all the time!' But all they could see was a black woman taking in her laundry from a clothesline.

In the supermarket when they first got here, they saw two twelve year old boys held face down by a security guard, a gun to their heads. Can you believe that? This is a third world country, they tell us. They roll up their shirtsleeves and show us their tattoos: workers of the world unite on one arm, the swallow from Wilde's The Happy Prince on the other.

Later, they play us Barbecue Bob and Memphis Minnie (trading licks with Kansas Joe McCoy) and Big Joe Williams (with his nine string guitar). They make us listen to the funk guitar style of the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it sheeks, they tell us. They point out their sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It's their microphone technique, they tell us.

You find the ultimate blend of melody and rhythm in string bands, our hosts tell us. They've become a real enemies of melody, they say. They hate dead syncopations, they say. They hate drums.

They play us some early John lee Hooker. Hooker plays electric guitar rhythmically, they tell us. Rhythm is everything, they tell us. It's all about the boogie. They put on Bukka White. The guitar produces the rhythm, says our host. It doesn't follow it.

As soon as drums polluted the blues, that was it, our hosts tell us. W. thinks they've gone too far. So does Sal. Fuck melody!, our hosts say. I'm swept up by their argument. Fuck melody!, I shout. Fuck drums!

Messianists

Our hosts tell us of their photographic project to rescue images from another Nashville. How else can they be saved from the monotonous uniformity of the urban sprawl - from identical malls and warehouses and the suburbs of vinyl houses?

They've photographed abandoned roller skating rinks, empty toilet roll holders in public toilets, resting freight carriages, tarpaulin covered cars and closed up loading bays; they've photographed sofas stranded on sidewalks, the signs on Mexican restaurants, and various views of the girders of the pedestrian bridge that leads downtown ...

How moved they were by the faint painted-over letters they saw on a monumental mall fronts, and of the words 'closeing sale' graffitied across a shuttered shopfront! How moved by the rusting stairwells and broken glass in the derelict Yazoo Brewery!

And who wrote the following lines on a piece of paper stapled to a telegraph pole: 'Patience. Don't think of it as deferred gratification, but as immediately suffering'? It was partially covered over by a poster advertising free Ninja lessons, they said.

What are they looking for? Our hosts speak of kernels of time, of dialectical images and rescue operations. They speak of actualising an obsolete past, of reenchantment and reawakening, and of the temporal and hierarchical layering of the city.

Our hosts are people of history like us, W. says. Messianists.

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

from Herzog on Herzog

The Humiliation Artist

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You - wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics ...

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition - that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon - further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write ... And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night ... Then, just after you turned off the light ... A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner ... 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea - the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique ...

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life - the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter ...

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist - you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

In the Way

'No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way'. W. is reading out loud from Scholem's didactic poem. - 'How do you think it applies to you?', W. says. 'Do you get in your own way?' I get in his way, that's for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in him also gets in his way. It's my fault, he's sure of that. If it wasn't for me, would he reach the star of redemption? He'll never know, W. says. He suspects not.

Ragged Books

We ought to be content to write ragged books, W. says. Ragged books for a ragged world. Oh, he forgot, W. says. I already do. 

W.'s learning ancient Greek for his new book, he says. It's going to be on religion. He was going to do a book on time, but he's decided against that. Religion, he says, that's his topic, and for that he needs Greek. And maths! If he's going to write about Cohen and God, as he intends to, he'll have to understand the infinitesimal calculus.

He sends me his notes.

In Leibniz what is key is the concept of the differential as the infinitely small. The ground of the finite is the infinitely small. It is the infinite that founds the finite, and not the finite the infinite - this is why the infinite is not a negative concept.

Impressive! I write back. He's reading The Logic of Pure Knowledge, he says. In German!, he says. Logik der Reinen Erkenntnis. It's taken him a year so far, and he's only on page 50.

The essential point for Leibniz is that dx is the origin of x. As with fluxion, the infinitesimal is the fundamental meaning of the judgement of origin.

What does fluxion mean?, I ask W. What does any of it mean? He's not sure, he says. He bought a book called Numbers, but only got through the first chapter, 'What is a Number?'

Anyway, here's the good stuff, he says, and sends me some more of his notes.

Third judgement: the Judgement of Contradiction. 1) The Not and the Nothing. Judgement has its origin if the judgement of origin, but this requires the mediation of the nothing. This would seem to require the judgement of negation, Vereinung. That is to say, contradiction. But the nothing is not to be confused with the 'not' of negation which is only a verbal form.

They look like notes of a real scholar, I tell W. They amaze me. He knows they amaze me, W. says. I have certain instincts. It's like a chimpanzee jumping up and down and screeching. He does an impression on the phone.

Die Identitat ist das Gut, ist der Wert, W. says. Der Widerspruch ist der Schutz, ist der Recht. Du bist ein Schiessehund. What do I think of his German accent?

Greek! Mathematics! W.'s not like me, who will just dash off a book regardless. Actually, he was genuinely moved by my new book. He almost wept when he read chapter three. Why don't I write another book, and make it a trilogy? God, that would be hilarious, W. says, a trilogy from me.

Leonard Nimoy

W.'s decline is getting worse. He doesn't work at night any more, but watches trash TV instead. And now, like me, he's bought Civilization 4. What appals him, he says, is that he plays Civilization 4 with more seriousness than he works.

Of course, W. knew that the last thing he should ever do is to buy Civilization 4. Which meant therefore that he went straight out and bought Civilization 4, W. says. Then he destroyed Civilization 4; he snapped the CD in two. Then the next morning, he went out and bought it again, he says, but he threw the whole package in the bin before he even got home.

Then, in a weak moment, despairing of his many years of intellectual work and convinced he'd taken a fundamentally wrong turn, he downloaded Civilization 4 from a torrent site, W. says, and has been playing it ever since.

Having Leonard Nimoy as a narrator is an attraction, of course. Whenever you discover a new technology, it's Nimoy who says some apposite quotation. It's edifying, W. says. He hears Leonard Nimoy's voice now whenever he reads philosophy, he says. It is necessary to know whether we are being duped by morality, W. says, in Leonard Nimoy's voice. It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity, in Leonard Nimoy's voice.

The philosophers we've heard have always had unfeasibly high voices, we remember. Think of Heidegger, on that CD I bought, going on about Hoelderlin. He sounded like a castrati, W. says, and does an impression.

Then there was Levinas. Didn't W. phone him once, from a Paris phonebooth? He was going to ask about attending the Talmudic readings. But he had to put the phone down when Levinas answered, W. says. His voice was so high! The receiver fell from his hands, and Levinas was saying, 'hello? hello?' in his very high voice. W. was really nonplussed.