Spurious

The Imponderable of Imponderables

Why does he hang out with Lars?: the perennial question, W. says. Why Lars, of all people?: that question, which W. has had to field many times. It's worse when it's merely implied: when he sees it in a querulous but fleeting look, in a momentary hesitation, even in a kind of involuntary retching, quickly covered up by a cough. Worse when thinkers - real thinkers, not like us - are distracted by my presence.

Why him?, their facial expressions silently ask W. What's he doing here?, that's the question he sees in suddenly contracted eyes. You, we understand, but him ...? That they, the thinkers, have to be bothered by such a concern even momentarily is torment to W. Why should they have to think about me? It's enough that he has to think about me, that he has to follow me and clear up my messes. But the thinkers, his thinkers, as W. likes to think of them - since he has done so much first of all to discover them, and then to draw them out of the crowd - they should never have to contemplate me, the fact of me, W. says. The fact of Lars. A dreadful fact. A kind of curse, in fact. A kind of catastrophe.

I confuse them, his thinkers. Of course, they know at once I'm not a fellow thinker, a fellow thought-adventurer, W. says. It's clear by my gait, my facial expression. Intelligence, when it is there, glints in the eyes, but in my case, nothing glints. Intelligence flashes in the teeth, but my teeth are dull. Oh it's perfectly clear. I can't hide anything, although of course I've never tried to hide anything. No, it's not my obvious lack of intelligence that confounds them. What then?

They know I'm not one of them - that's obvious - but, too, that I'm linked to W. in some way - to W., who, their attention grants, is at least a potential man of thought, whom they greet as such, to one who might understand the particularities of their, the thinker's achievements - confounds them. Yes, that W. keeps company with me: that's what bothers them. Not the fact of my stupidity, which is plain as the day, but that of our companionship, that W. and I hang out together, that where he is, I will also be; and that where he will be, I, too will be. That somehow I have found myself included in all plans concerning W.

What's it all about? For a moment - and for no more than that, since such thinkers have other things to reflect upon - they wonder whether I am not to W. as W. is to them - a kind of younger brother, a cousin and fellow, one who needs encouragement, bringing on, but also one who understands, since he is kin, something of their struggles - and that therefore I do indeed have some relation to them, albeit at a couple of removes.

That's why they smile at me, despite everything. It's why they make some semblance of including me in their conversations, turning to me as though I could understand what they were saying, as though I were capable of following their accounts of their struggles with thought (a meeting between thinkers is rarely about thoughts, W. says, so much as the struggle to think, since that's what unifies all thinkers, even rivals). Struggles that, indeed, are so exacting, that cost so much in terms of ordinary satisfactions, that it is solely to maintain this sense of shared suffering that drives thinkers from their labours. How they suffer! How much their thoughts have cost them!

And they perceive something of that cost in W., too. They're happy enough talking to him. Happy to bask in his admiration, his sympathy. Hasn't he pulled some of them back from the brink of suicide? Haven't more than one acknowledged the strength of his fellowship, his encouraging emails, the offer he's made of a room in his house for weeks - months - at a time?

Hasn't he taken thinkers into his home, treating them as the most honoured of guests, looking after their needs for weeks - months? Hasn't he held conferences and symposia in their honour, granting them whole afternoons in which to speak before an audience they themselves were allowed to invite and that he, W., found funds to bring over? Whole afternoons, and then whole evenings, nights, the bar open, the quadrangle bathed by the sunset colours, by dusk, by starlight, by shooting stars.

Haven't these thinkers thanked him for bringing them back into the world again, for acting as a kind of conduit or go-between between the world and themselves? Hasn't W.'s real help drawn their tribute? Hasn't he been thanked in a hundred acknowledgements?

Hasn't he always understood their terrible melancholias, their disorders of the spirit, madnesses that thought, the effort to think, only drives deeper, and done what he could to intervene lest that melancholy, that disorder, that madness wreck their ordinary satisfactions, which is to say, the - to them - unnoticed stratum beneath their lonely promotories?

Hasn't he extracted great confidences - life-stories - touched with isolation and withdrawal? Haven't his thinkers confessed their infidelities and alcohol addictions? Haven't they whispered in his ear about their fears of secret mental disorders, of inherited conditions, of early-onset dementia? Haven't they spoken of family horrors and early bereavements, of desertions and abandonings, of cosmic lonelinesses and apocalyptic banishments? Haven't they spoken of finding God and losing God, of the search for God and the quest to free themselves of God? Haven't they spoken of the temptation of science and of the consolations of science, of the move into philosophy and the move away from philosophy?

He's mopped brows, W. says. Not literally, but metaphorically. He's wiped away tears. This time, quite literally. He's let his voice rise so the shouting of his thoughtful interlocutor does not seem such an aberration. Quite literally in this case, too. As the editor of a special edition of a journal, he has promised them he'll publish anything, anything they write, even if it is only a lengthy missive on the impossibility of their writing anything at all, on the impossibility of writing. He's bankrupted whole institutions of learning shipping his thinkers over from the other side of the world and bussing in acolytes - acolytes indebted to him, W., for discovering and then disseminating his thinker's thought - so as to show how greatly they were appreciated.

W. is a man of practice, he says. He seeks to effect changes in the world. For the good, the good, only for the good! For thought, W. says. And for his own thought, too. His own Denkweg, his thought-path. He likes to talk with those who make him think!, he says. It's the same with his reading. Why bother reading a line of Hermann Cohen if Hermann Cohen didn't make him think? If Hermann Cohen wasn't a spur in W.'s flanks? In the flanks of thought!

We need to be shocked into thought, W. says. Prompted from without. Thought should reach us from outside, from an unfathomable source. Thoughts should shatter the frozen ice within us, as Kafka said. That's what he has seen in the eyes of his thinkers: a shattering. That a shattering has occurred with tremendous force. That the landscape of thought has been broken and reassembled. That it heaved upwards in a kind of earthquake, and crashed back down again, changed in its details in a way only the thinker would understand.

He's seen ice in the eyes of his thinkers. Starlight on ice. Starlight flashing on the empty expanses. He's seen inhuman distances in their eyes. Seen all the way to heart of thought's continent, all the way to the pole, and the thinkers returning from that pole, their hair streaked with frost, their tears frozen on their cheeks. Seen the broken ice of the Arctic of thought and the crevassed plains of the Antarctic of thought. Seen the deserted expanses of the steppes of thought, and the impassable flora of the jungles of thought. Seen the depths of ocean trenches and the high attenuation of the upper atmosphere where nothing can live.

Ah, They've suffered like gods, his thinkers. Like beasts made of stars and the aurora borealis. They been subject to distant agonies, to interstellar torture. And I, who have never suffered, but have only caused suffering, W.'s suffering and the suffering of others, what place do I have among them, which is to say, alongside him? That's the real question, W. says. That's the imponderable of imponderables.

Clown Act

Why bother? Why begin? Why again, and again and again? We're bored with ourselves, with our eternal slapstick.

I should shoot him, W. says, and he, me. We should aim our guns at one another and fire at the same moment. But our double suicide is part of our clown act, which reaches its pinnacle when we fire and our guns pop and we get up again, as stupid as ever, as desperate as ever.

Two Clowns

Who are we amusing? Who laughs at our slapstick? Tragedy repeated becomes farce. And when farce is repeated - when farce wears itself thin?

Two clowns throwing custard pies at each other, long after the audience has left. Two clowns, make-up running with their tears.

Innocence and Forgetting

In the morning, we work, W. before dawn - in the hours before dawn, when the world is quiet - and I after dawn, as the world wakes up. We work - W. reads, and sometimes he writes, and I look blankly out at the window, sometimes jotting down a few notes or so - in a kind of innocence, a forgetting.

For hadn't our work, the day before, left us as failures? Hadn't we failed our task yet again, and anew? Isn't that all the succession of days means to us: failure again and anew; fresh failure, different varieities of failure, but each time failure nonetheless?

But there is our innocence, our holy forgetting. There is the new morning, and the confidence of the new morning. So we can forget, and thereby get to work. In innocence, we begin to work - or what we call work. We work, Sisyphuses who have forgotten they are Sisyphuses, and our day is always the same day, the same mockery of the day, and the same despoiling of our innocence and forgettting.

An Idiot Friend

Abandonment - is that the word? But abandoned to what? Our lives, the wretchedness of our lives. Our failure. Again and again, our failure.

Why don't we learn? Why do we never learn from our mistakes? But if we did learn? If we took, as our lesson, the failure of our efforts on a previous day and on a succession of days? If we saw our lives as what, in fact, they are: a series of grotesque mistakes, a series of impostures and usurpations? W. shudders.

Why has it been left to him, rather than me, to face our disaster? I am a little more idiotic than him, and therefore a little more forgetful. I can wake with a little more confidence in my labours; I can throw myself more obliviously into my studies (my so-called studies). And in that way, I throw myself ahead of him, too - ahead, and calling him after me by my power of forgetting, which is to say my idiocy.

Why don't I learn?, W. asks himself. But he thanks God that I do not, and that I encourage him by my example. Everyone needs an idiot friend, he says. He thanks God for his idiot friend.

Holy Idiocy

Our grief ... We are grieving men, we decide. Men full of grief, saturated with it, men who have had too many disappointments, too many failures. Men of grief, but men of hope, too, men who, for a time each day - just before dawn for W. when he goes into his study to work, just after dawn for me, when I gaze vacantly out at the yard - are given the gift of forgetting their grief. Who, forgetting it, are ready, without knowing it, to disappoint themselves again, to fail anew.

Our idiocy is our salvation, W. says. The way we are unable to learn from our mistakes. For our lives, in their entirety, have been a mistake! We were mistaken from the first, and all along!

Sometimes it strikes him with great force, W. says, the extent of our mistakenness. How could we have got it so wrong? How could we be so deluded? But in truth, we delude ourselves. We forget - we want to forget - the lessons of yesterday in order to begin again today - before dawn, for W., after dawn, for me.

We wish a holy idiocy upon ourselves. We want to be born again as we sit at our desk (W.), or gaze vacantly out of the window (me). Born again in idiocy and forgetting! Plunged into the Lethe freshly each morning! Ah, what would be left to us otherwise but our suicide? What, without our idiocy, except that sickness unto death incapable even of suicide?

A Lonely Station

Sometimes W. thinks his melancholy is deeper than his philosophy; that he has attempted to think, that he has been drawn to thinkers, only to escape the despair that, in the end, always lies in wait for him.

It always seeps back, he says, in the still hours of night. It's always there when he turns off his television and trudges up to bed. It's there in the blackness above him as he sleeps, in the blank slate of the sky. And it's there at the heart of his sleep, too, forming itself into nameless monsters, into stirrings that lead him to break out in night sweats.

Hope returns, of course. Hope always returns before dawn, and the pigeons flapping and cooing outside his window. Hope returns as he pulls on his dressing gown and goes next door to his study to open his books and take notes. But such hope, W. sometimes suspects, is but a modality of despair, made of it.

Why is he reading Kierkegaard alongside Cohen and Rosenzweig? Why is he teaching himself the infinitesimal calculus? Why is he attempting to think messianism mathematically? Where will it lead him? To his desk in the other room. To his lonely station against the void which itself is only part of the void, just as his hope is only part of his despair.

The Corona

Melancholy, melancholy. 'What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim', Pascal says, 'but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?'

True happiness: what can this possibly mean for W.? What sense of it can he have? I've been in his life too long, he says. I've been there too long, blocking the sun of what might have been his happiness with the moon of my stupidity.

Ah, the lunar eclipse of his life! Ah the obliteration of his hopes and dreams! He knows his happiness, what he might have been, only from the faint glow of its corona.

Self-Hatred

'The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves'. Pascal wrote that, W. says. To hate ourselves: what a task! He'll begin with me, W. says. With hating me. Then he'll move on to hating what I've made him become. What I've been responsible for. Then - the last step - he will have to hate himself without reference to me at all.

This stage, for him, is the most difficult. He can hardly remember what he was like without me. He has no idea what he might have been, what he might have achieved? I arrived too early in his life. The blow was fatal.

It's a relief, of course, W. says. He can blame me for everything. It's all my fault, his failure, his inability to think! In fact, that's probably why he hangs out with me, W. says: to have a living excuse for his failure.

But what about me? Do I hate myself? W.'s sure I must hate myself in some way. - 'Look at you! Look at your shoes!'

This World

W. sees no difference between Christianity and socialism, he says. No difference between Christianity and communism. Religion is only ever about this world - W.'s always been insistent on that.

The trouble lies in finding this world, because it's been hidden from us. We've lost it, and lost ourselves: isn't that what Kierkegaard teaches us? We have to understand the real object of our despair, Kierkegaard says. We have to understand what we lack. This world, W. says, this world is paradise.