Spurious

John Self reviews Spurious at Asylum. 

I will be contributing to the panel, 'Once Upon a Time the End' as part of the HowTheLightGetsIn Philosophy and Music festival at Hay on Wye at 12.00 this Weds in the Globe tent, and discussing Spurious in the Talk Tent on the same date at 3.00.

An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes Christian, among a general confusion of becomings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic - just as he was also an anti-christ, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. 

Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are sustained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. 

It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a resevoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference. 

from Nick Land's Fanged Noumena

The Teach-In

They want us to say something, W. says. He's not sure what.

I have to control myself, W. says. My tendency is to scare them off, students. It's to bellow and fuss and to deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. always tries to speak calmly, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who am going back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe the Plymouth Postgraduates with soft words and sympathy.

New Jerusalem

Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Empty bags of kettle crisps and empty bottles. Spread blankets and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop.

This is what he calls a political protest, W. says.

Life is Shit

Life is shit: that's what it reads on the banner strewn across the humanities building at W.'s college. The students are occupying again, W. says.

What are their demands?, we wonder. What do they want? Ah, what are our demands?, we wonder. What do any of us want?

Dolphins

W. went to a lecture on dolphins recently, he says. Turns out they're not intelligent after all. They made a terrible mistake, trying to communicate with them for all those years. There was no point at all; they're quite stupid.

They're related to sheep, dolphins, W. says They're ungulates, basically. They're sheep who decided to go back into the water.

Of course, he was always sceptical about dolphins, W. says. When was the last time you saw a dolphin cathedral? When did you last meet a dolphin philosopher?

Vot-Vot

Lenin died of the same brain disease as his father, W. says. He must have known it was coming, the series of strokes, and then the long decline, which saw his mental powers dissipate altogether. He must have known he'd end up wrapped in a blanket and wheeled along in a bath-chair, one hemisphere of his brain having turned entirely into cottage-cheese-like mush, and the other one about do the same.

His nurses tried to teach him the word worker again, and revolution. His aides tried to teach him the words peasant and people; they tried to teach him the words cell and congress. God knows, his wife even tried to get him to say kulak, a word he used to spit out in hatred, but from his lips came only the nonsense word vot-vot.

Vot-vot, he said to express agreement and disagreement, satisfaction or annoyance. Vot-vot, he said, with various inflections, as his brain died. Vot-vot to the visiting Trotsky, soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union; vot-vot to Stalin, soon to become its absolute ruler. Vot-vot: and isn't that my word, too, or something like it?

What do I actually understand?, W. wonders. What do I really know? Idiocy is unwitting, he says. It doesn't really suffer itself; that's its lightness. The idiot's an innocent, a child. Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks to himself. What fun! And he laughs too, but what does he understand of what he's laughing at?

Everything's funny! He's an idiot - and that's funny, too. Vot-vot, the idiot says. Vot-vot! But W.'s not laughing anymore. The laughter's stuck to his throat.

Vagrant Sayings

'Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering'. W. is reading from a webpage that collects the sayings of vagrants. That's attributed to the Singer, he says.

'"A handshake can judge you': that's Black Sam', W. says. And then several quotes in a row: 'We're all stange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics'; 'You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have one spark, just one spark'; 'There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?' Who's that?, I ask him. - 'Black Sam again. It's like something from a Malick film', W. says. And then, 'What would your saying be?', he asks. But he knows the answer. 'Vot-vot', he says.

Obsession

W. tells me of his months as an artist's model, being painted by Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt. Lenkiewicz only wanted to talk about philosophy, W. says. He was obsessed with philosophy. He bankrupted himself buying philosophy books, all kinds of books, W. says.

Lenkiewicz bought a derelict church and filled it with books, piles and piles of them, it was quite extraordinary, W. says. W.'d look through the mouldering books with Lenkiewicz, the painter picking up a volume here and there to show him. He had Spinoza's Ethics in a first edition. Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption. He had the pageproofs of Kierkegaard's Discourses on Imagined Occasions, worth thousands of pounds.

Lenkiewicz was painting W. in  series of works called Obsession, W. tells me. He always painted in series, Lenkiewicz - projects, he called them. He had a Vagrancy project and a Street Drinking project. He had a Mentally Handicapped project. But W. was part of the Obsession project, or he was supposed to be. Lenkiewicz died very suddenly, just like that, and it was all over. They had to sell all his paintings to meet his debts. They sold his books too - they had to sell the whole church full of books ...

Do I see him as an obsessive?, W. says.

Children on a Journey

The train to Manchester.

The hours pass. It's a long journey, infinitely long. We're beginning to forget our pre-train lives. We're beginning to forget who we were once were, out there, on the other side of the glass. Have we ever been anything other than voyagers? Have we ever been anything other than children on a journey, amusing themselves with their nonsense?