Spurious

- But there are cosmic themes in your films, and you've been quoted as saying that you're "trying to look at things from a cosmic dimension."

- You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought "Okay, we have some social problems in this political system - maybe we'll just deal with the social question." And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there's the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It's very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It's just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us.

- What do you think this shit is that's coming from the cosmos?

- I just think about the quality of human life and when I say 'shit' I think I'm very close to it.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

In the centre of the tiny, cluttered studio, lit by a skylight, Diego poses, sitting immobile and resigned on a stool: he is used to it. But Alberto, in spite of having examined his brother's face for almost fifty years, is not yet used to it. He is just as astonished as he was on the very first day before this unknown, immeasurable head, which defies and refuses him, which offers only its refusal. If he approaches his brother, the latter's head grows out of all proportion, becomes gigantic and threatening, ready to topple on him like a mountain or the angry face of a god. But if he backs away a few paces Diego recedes into infinity: his tiny, dense head seems a planet suspended in the immense void of the studio. In any case, and whatever the distance, it forbids him to approach. It looms abruptly, a separate, irreducible entity.

[...] We know what a head is', exclaimed André Breton one day, disappointed and irritated that Giacometti preferred reality to the imaginary. We do indeed know what a head is. But the knowledge, precisely, is what Giacometti is struggling against.

Face to face with his sculpture, we are scarcely freer than Giacometti in front of his model. For it carries its distance within it and keeps us at a respectful distance. And our relationship recreates the strictly evaluated space so that its totality, and that alone, may appear. This figure does not allow us to rest our eyes on one or another of its parts; each detail refers us back at once to the whole. It does not develop a rhythm which would gradually conduct us owards an encounter. it does ot reveal itself as a series of plasic events leading to a harmony, a chord. It bursts forth in its immediate presence: it is an advent.

The figures keep us at a distance; they carry their remoteness inside them and reveal their profound being. Naked, unmasked, it is now their unknown doubles who come to light.  Their hieratic attitude reveals an imperious insensitivity. They elude our understanding, reject our impulsive gestures. They do not disain us; they ignore us and dominate us. One would think them fastened on their pedestals for eternity, rooted to their rock. The gravity of their bearing, the asceticism of their demeanor and their gaze which traverses time and traverses us too withou flinching, without suspecting our opacity and our stupefaction, gives them the appearance of divinities. They seem to await a primitive cult.

Jacques Dupin, Giacometti: Three Essays

'Repetitive, too much in its own head and self-satisfied ...'

Publishers Weekly reviews Spurious.

Hineni

'Are you in your office?', W. emails me. Hineni, I write back. - 'So you speak Hebrew now?' Hineni, here I am: that's what Abraham said in response to God's call of course.  Here I am, ready for my task. Here I am, and this is all I am, waiting in response. And it is what Adam refused to say, when he hid from God, and Jonah, who caught a ship to the far ends of the earth to escape the call.

What does it mean to be called?, we've mused a thousand times. What, as Israel responded to God's call in Exodus? To do before you understand. To respond before thinking. It's the opposite of philosophy, of course, W. says. The opposite of the Greeks, for whom it is more important to know oneself than to walk in God's way, to keep the commandments.

'Know yourself', Kierkegaard wrote, 'and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly'. The mirror of the Word. It is only when we stand before the God who, revealed in Jesus the Messiah, came into the world, suffered, and died for the sake of the sinner, that our despair might become hope. Only then that I might will be to be myself, which means assenting to one's existence as the gift of God, and to the task God sets us. To know one's creaturehood and sinfulness, but to know, too, God as our creator, our judge and redeemer.

Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Messiah ... W. has never understood what it means to call yourself the Messiah and the son of God, as Jesus does in the gospels. Jesus becomes real to him at other moments - when he doubts his mission, for example. When, as Matthew recounts it, Jesus's soul becomes 'very sorrowful and very heavy' in the garden of Gethsemane, or when, on the cross, he cries 'My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?'

And Jesus becomes real to him in the parables, too - in fact, whenever Jesus speaks in ordinary words to ordinary people; whenever everyday speech is his medium, and he opens himself in dialogue to all comers, to anyone who wants to speak to him at all. Just as he, W., has to speak with great simplicity to me!, he says. Just as W. has to try and explain things so they can be understood by a simple person like me!

The Scapegoat

Sometimes the melancholic doesn't know what he's lost, Freud says. He has only a vague sense of deprivation, a general sense that something has gone missing. An indeterminate loss, as immense as a storm cloud; a sense of loss without contour: isn't it from this that W. suffers?

He needs to localise his loss, W. says. To find its source! And he needn't look further than the idiot beside him in his cagoule. It must be his fault, the idiot!, he thinks to himself as we walk through the heather. He wants to shake me, to grab me by the lapels and bellow, 'It's all your fault!' Because it is my fault, he's sure of it.

But what if he's wrong? What if I'm only a scapegoat for his problems? The Hebrews sent a goat into the wilderness, which was supposed to carry with it the sins of the people. And wasn't that why W. brought me up to the moor: to send me into the wilderness, carrying all his sins away?

There goes my loss, he'd say, watching me disappear into the distance. There go my sins. And he'd walk more lightly on his way back to the busstop. He'd sing to himself. The clouds would part ... 

But what if grief remained with him, and as heavily as before? What if melancholy never lifted itself from his shoulders? Horror: now he'd be alone with the storm cloud of his grief. Now he wouldn't have an idiot in a cagoule to blame for his melancholy.

The Airless Room

Melancholy, melancholy: W. feels half-drowned by its waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering through the heather?

The mourner, Freud says, learns to detach himself from what he has lost. He leaves grief behind; he leaves loss. But the melancholic cannot leave it behind, and comes to identify with what has gone missing. I am my loss, he says. I am nothing other than my loss. His life, his very existence, is indistinguishable from a kind of tomb.

I am my loss, and nothing other than my loss: isn't this what W. says to himself? Isn't that why he feels so unworthy, so wrong? I cannot live; I cannot exist: so the melancholic. While I live, there is no hope, so the one who cannot leave behind his grief. And in W.'s case? - 'While you live, there is no hope', he says. No hope for him, for any rate. 'While you live, I can't exist'. I've entombed his hopes within me, buried them there. He's suffocating to death in the airless room of my life.

Thinkers

Essex, in the old days. The University of Essex ...

W. remembers the guest speakers of the old department. Envoys from Old Europe, taught by the Gods of Old Europe: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and who told them about the Gods of Europe; thinkers who were friends and contemporaries of Deleuze, of Foucault, and who told them of the world of Deleuze and Foucault; thinker-experts who'd spent their whole lives in the archives, or studying in seclusion with the works of a Master. Thinker-militants who'd hung out with Debord and Vaneigim, and who could pass on stories of Debord and Vaneigim.

Literary scholars who read in 27 languages; philosopher-scientists with advanced degrees in astrophysics and molecular biology; thinker-mathematicians fascinated by dissipative structures and complex systems; thinkers of irreversibility and indeterminism, of strange loops and paralogic ...

Neurophenomenological thinkers. Neo-Spinozists thinkers and Neo-Leibnizians. Nominalists and anti-nominalists. Mathematical thinkers and poetical thinkers.

Thinkers who had had distinct phases in their thought. ('In my early writings, I was convinced that ...'; 'Later on, I concluded that ...'; 'For a long time, I thought ...') Thinkers who were the subject of conferences and roundtables.

Thinkers who hated other thinkers ('Don't mention Derrida to him!'), thinkers who'd broken with old friends over intellectual matters. Over political matters. Thinkers at war, for whom philosophical enmity had become personal enmity, become name-calling, hair-pulling.

Thinkers who'd shot away half their faces in despair. Thinkers with deep scars across their wrists. Thinkers who wept as they spoke. Thinkers whose pauses were longer than their talks. Thinkers in breakdown, their lives careening. Thinkers who spoke in great gusts about the misery of their lives. Thinkers who told them why they couldn't think, why thought was impossible, why the end had come, their end and the end of the world.

Wild thinkers; drunk thinkers; high thinkers, nostrils flared, pupils tiny, staying up for whole weeks at a time. Thinkers with missing teeth, with a missing eye. Thinkers with missing fingers, and with great clumps of their hair torn out. Thinkers with terrible rashes around their mouth. Sick thinkers, walking with two sticks. Coughing thinkers, who could hardly get out a word. Thinkers who spoke too quietly to be heard. Thinkers who spoke too loudly, half-deafening the front row. Thinker-declaimers, thinker-prophets who all but set fire to themselves in the seminar room.

Exiled thinkers, forced out of their home countries for crimes of thought. Lost thinkers, leftover from vanished intellectual movements; thinkers in mourning for dead thinker-partners. Betrayed thinkers, who spoke of backstabbing and purgings, of auto-critiques and expulsions.

Thinkers with neck-kerchiefs. Thinkers with cravats. Thinkers with Hawaiian shirts (Jean-Luc Nancy, after a trip to the USA). Thinkers in plus fours (Marion, trying to impress the dons at Cambridge). Thin thinkers in roll-neck sweaters, with sharp checkbones and shaved heads. Tubby thinkers, epicureans full of joy, with great, jolly faces and thick folds of fat at the back of their necks. Worker-thinkers with thick, flat fingers and spadelike hands, who'd laboured alongside others in the fields and the mines. Serene thinkers, almost godly, looking into the infinite with widely spaced eyes.

Laughing thinkers, who laughed because they could think, because of they were free to think. Thinkers who'd escaped from imprisonment and war. Saintly thinkers, of unimaginable integrity, of unimaginable purity. Nomadic thinkers who, like swifts, never touched down, who moved only from conference to conference as invited speakers. Traveller thinkers, who had forsaken the lecture circuit for private voyages across ice-sheets and through jungles. Ascetic thinkers who spoke of great solitudes, great retreats. Thinkers who had seen things, lived things we couldn't imagine.

Thinkers who knew what it meant to live. Thinkers who served life. Thinkers who thought in order to live, and to be alive.

Thinkers who spoke of the ecstasy of thinking after their talk, in the student bar. Thinkers who spoke of the beatitude of thought. Thinkers who said the only thing that mattered was to think.

Ah, didn't they meet them all, all the thinkers of Old Europe, the Essex postgraduates?, W. says.

The Heavenly Fire

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before - and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so only there and then - that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where they spoke - can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive ...

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death ...

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant ...

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked - they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned to speak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German ...

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation - the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness - fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

Writing delights me. That's nothing new. That's the only thing that still supports me, that will also come to an end. That's how it is. One does not live forever. But as long as I live I live writing. That's how I exist. There are months or years when I cannot write. Then it comes back. Such rhythm is both brutal and at the same time a great thing, something others don't experience.

Thomas Bernhard

When I write about this kind of thing, about this kind of centrifugal situation that leads to suicide, I am certainly describing a state of mind that I identify with, which I probably experienced while I was writing, precisely because I did not commit suicide, because I escaped from that.

Bernhard, interviewed, cited.