Wittgenstein Jr

Wittgenstein Jr was published in 2014.

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Over to the blog for the next novel.

God will continually withdraw before him, he says. God’s withdrawal will lead him on and on, until he has wandered every part of the godless world. 

Does he think we are concentrating? Does he think we are able to listen?  Does he think we are taking notes?

Does he think that what he teaches has any relevance to us? Does he think what he says can enter our souls? Does he think that he will shape us by what he says? Does he think we will be formed in some way? Does he think we are capable of learning a lesson? Of taking something in?

True, we must admit that there is something interesting about him; that he is a figure of curiosity for us; that his quirks are unusual; that he is a ‘case’. We must admit that we want to see where it is all going, that there is a sense of gathering urgency to his lectures, that the momentum is increasing, that something is coming to climax, that, soon enough, it will reach its head.

He is about to make the final descent in his bathysphere, he says. He’s about to plunge into the depths of thought’s trench, of thought’s abyss.

How deep he has come! How far down he has plummeted! He mustn’t think of the million-ton column of water above him. He mustn’t think of the straining and groaning of his bathysphere, or of the chance that the steel sphere will buckle and crack. A single drop of water, should it breach the cabin, would shoot through his flesh and bone like a bullet ...

But he thinks of only of sinking yet further. Of the undersea darkness no searchlight can illuminate. Of the creatures of thought’s depths, stranger than any yet seen.

Is he strong enough for thought?, he wonders, as he is lowered further. Can he bear thought – the pressure of thought?, he wonders. What will thinking do to him? How will it change him? Will be ever be able to return to the surface? Will he be capable of living a normal life?

Is thought worth it?, he wonders, as bubbles flood past his capsule. Did he have any choice but to think? To be cursed by thought, by the capacity to think – by the necessity of thought?

Thought comes and goes by its own lights, by its own desires, which are inscrutable, he says. Thought comes and goes as it pleases. It approaches. It denies itself: who can say why?

There are some who are touched by thought, caressed by it. There are those who thought lifts up, whom thought presses upwards to the heavens. There are those allowed to bloom in thought, who live beyond themselves in thought, who live astral lives, wandering through the heavens. But there are those, too, who have been deprived of thought, cast out from it. By a flick of its wing, thought floats elsewhere; by a sudden gust, thought is blown away from you.

Do you think thought cares about what it gives you? Do you think thought pays any heed to us at all? Thought is a blinded eye, he says. Thought is a gaze that does not see you.

There are some who fear thought, fear thought – the power of thought; who fear what thought does to them, what thought makes them. There are some who don’t even want to think, for whom thought is assault and dispossession. There are some who seek to hide from thought, as Adam hid in the thickets of paradise. There are some who flee thought, like Jonah, who ran to the very ends of the earth. There are some who place guns to their temples and press the trigger. There are some who plead for exorcism, plead for lobotomy ...

But there are those, too, who are reverent about thought, who surround it with ceremonies, kinds of thought-prayers. They regard thought as a gift from God, he says. But thought is also ravishment and wildfire and destruction. You can no more pray to thought than to a volcano on the brink of eruption; thought is as indifferent to the thinker as a tornado is to the town it ravages.

Thought happens – or it does not happen, his brother said. Thought comes – or it does not come. You who were thought’s vessel, may soon become the husk of thought. You, who were once touched by thought, are now its empty shell… 

The danger of premature thought. The danger that thought will have come too early, that it will be torn from him too soon.

The danger that he won’t be ready for thought, prepared for it. The danger that he hasn’t read enough, studied enough.

The danger that he lacks the appropriate discipline, that he hasn’t been hard enough on himself; that he hasn’t pushed himself farther. The danger that he lacks an appropriate indiscipline – that he is not open enough, free enough. The danger that he is too guarded to follow his intuition, to go where thought wants him. The danger that thought is too wild for him, that it dances ahead of him, into regions where he cannot follow.

The danger that thought will leave him, that it will send him away. The danger that thought will use him up and discard him. The danger that he is too weak to stand thought, to survive it. The danger that thought will ravage him, like a wild animal. The danger that thought will rip through his body. The danger that it will tear through him, destroying him. The danger of thought’s indifference, that it cares not for its receptacle. The danger of thought’s glory, that it burns too bright for its vessel ...

His teaching.

Each session, the urgency gathers.

We feel it: a sense of the impending end. A sense that a wall will be broken down.

The sense that a vista will soon open before us.  The sense of an ascent nearly completed. The sense of a distance traversed, of our old lives, far below. Of our old concerns, down in the valley.

We will be changed – that’s what we feel. That we are changing… What will we become? Who are we becoming?

There are Japanese soldiers who, not knowing World War II had ended, lived for decades in the jungle, taking every measure to avoid detection, erasing their footprints in the undergrowth, and living on rats and toads, refusing to surrender.

They must be our example, he says. Thought has ended. Philosophy has ended. And we must live on in logic, refusing to surrender.

What he longs for above all other things: a certain cheerfulness. A cheerful companion.

A friend. That's what he is looking for. He wants someone with whom he can relax.

His friend. Wittgenstein will meet him, he says, only on the other side of philosophy. There, on the other side - on the other bank of the river - his friend is waiting for him. 

Once upon a time, there were thinkers at Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Real thinkers. They strode around the philosophical landscape like Titans. They threw the boulders of thought around, made war on each other, bellowed in the frosty air.

There were once disputes at Cambridge. There were once enmities between dons. This one wouldn’t speak to that one; this one would leave the room when the other entered; this one would denounce the theories of the other in his lectures, and have his theories denounced in turn. There were once schools of thought, in dispute, but circling around the same problems. There were once disputes about methodology. About legitimacy. There were old rivalries between Cambridge colleges, and between Cambridge in general and Oxford in general, and between Cambridge and Oxford as such, and the rest of the world. But it’s all smiles now, Wittgenstein says. All, hello, hello. All co-operation and amiability. All soft skills and placation.

Oh, the dons are busy, he knows that. The dons are busy in their Centres and Institutes. The dons are fully occupied bidding for funding. The dons are busy fighting for money in internal markets. The dons are seeking research monies. The dons are bidding for E.U. investment funds. The dons are looking for corporate sponsorship!

The dons are busy! More busy than anyone! The dons are launching spin-off companies. The dons are busy on the new campus – the business campus. They’re courting venture capitalists over lunch. The dons are seeking business partners across south-east Asia. The dons are looking to export the Cambridge brand! They’re opening a replica of the campus in deepest Shanghai!

But really, the don has become only a parody of a don, he says. The don is no longer part of anything. The don lives only in the performance of donnishness. In a kind of fakery. In a sense, that only makes the don all the more powerful, he says. That makes the don all the more anxious to hold onto the illusion.

He wants an enemy, he says, a betrayer. He wants one who will bring the wrath of Cambridge University down upon his head. He wants a Judas who will bring the wrath of the dons down upon his head.

He wants nothing more than to be handed over to the authorities. He wants nothing more than to be a case to be dealt with.

The horror: there is no one to condemn him. There is no one to tell him where he’s gone wrong. The horror: that he, in his misery, his sin, might be in the right.

The desire to save our Wittgenstein. The desire to hook our arms in his and walk him to safety. The desire to lead him out of this winter into spring. The desire to lead him into the English summer. To show him the larks. To walk through woods of celandines. Through the commonwealth of nature. Through the council of all created things ...

He harms everyone he comes across, he says. He is a baleful influence, he says. Can he honestly say that he hasn’t harmed us, his students, in innumerable ways?, he says. Can he honestly say that he hasn’t sent us utterly off-course?

The dons know how it will end, he says. The dons can see the future, he says.

He will blow out his brains on the English lawn, that’s what they know. He will make a real mess on the English lawn, yes, the Dons are quite certain of it. The lawnkeepers will be extra busy that morning when he dashes out his head on the English lawn, he says. They’ll have to rake out bits of his skull from the grass of the English lawn, he says. The birds will pick at bits of his brain on the English lawn, he says.

The forensic team will set up one of their investigation tents to comb remove every last bit of shattered skull from the English lawn, he says.

Tension. He is coiled like a cobra. What tenseness! What intensity! His stare, looking out beyond us, as if hypnotised. He is waiting for the right moment. Waiting to strike. But when will he strike?

He quotes King Lear: I will do such things –/ What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

His work. But that is the wrong name for it. Really, it is a kind of relaxation, not work, he says. Really, it is a kind of exhalation.

To publish the Logik: no, that’s impossible. The Logik publishes itself.

The Logik will know everything, he says. The Logik will have seen it all in advance. The Logik is a scout, he says. An explorer. To the Logik, everything is clear, he says.

The Logik is a kind of labyrinth, with multiple entrance-ways, and no exists, he says. 

Yes, the Logik will send some of its readers mad, he says. But it will be a sublime madness, he says. A sane madness.

The Logik. Why is it so hard to discern? The fault lies with us, he says. The doors of our hearts are shut. The lamps of our hearts, unlit.

Even we, even we are close to the Logik. The Logik has been with us all along.

It is a question only of opening our eyes to see the Logik. It is a question only of unblocking our ears. The Logik is here, right here, he says. The Logik was here all along, he says.

Easter. And there will have been no need to write the Logik. The Logik will have written itself, he says. The Logik has always been everywhere in the world.

In the end, the Logik will happen by itself. The Logik will happen – as life happens. A spring happens.

The Logik will be indistinguishable from the Spring. From the coming spring.

Easter. The Logik could be be expressed in just one word: a greeting, he says. A word as simple as, Hello.

The Logik – the whole of his Logik – could be expressed in a gesture – in a nod of the head.

Easter. The Logik will be a path. He says. No: it will be petering out of a path. The Logik will be where we find ourselves lost, he says.

The Logik will live behind our eyelids, he says. We’ll close it between our hands in prayer.

Easter. The Logik will become a kind of weather, he says. A kind of atmosphere. You will pass through the Logik as through light morning mist, he says. The Logik will settle on you, like Saharan desert dust is sometimes deposited on cars. The Logik will fall like heavy drops of rain that bead the dust.

Easter. The Logik will no longer be his book, he says. The Logik will belong to everyone, he says, though everyone will have forgotten how to read. Only there will be no need to read, he says. Or reading will be the same thing as looking, as hearing.

Easter: the world will merge with what has been written about it. The world will be nothing other than his Logik, and his Logik will reveal itself as the world.

Resurrection: the Logik is really his confession, he says. And Easter will be his absolution.

Will spring release him from his Logik?

Spring. There will be leaves on the dead tree. A resurrection, that’s what he’s waiting for. An Easter of logic.

Spring. The exile will be over. He will have come home, he says. Or rather, he will have seen the whole world as his home. 

Only philosophy is relay serious, Spinoza said. The rest is a toy. But it is the other way round, Wittgenstein says.

Expectation, he says. He can see it in us. We are waiting for his teachings to have finally made sense. We want to know where we have been, where we have travelled. Will the road we have travelled at last appear as a road, and not as an aimless wandering?

Aporia, he says. Behalah.

Here, he says. Now. The eternal present ... he claps his hands. He has nothing more to teach us. But then he never had anything to teach.

Just to stand with your feet upon the earth. Just to open your eyes.

Just to be here – here. To be of God. With God. And no longer asking, Why?

To begin again – to build up his life from rituals. To live in an ordinary way.

Religion is nothing apart from the ordinary, he says.

We are incapable of experiencing our time as our time, he says. Of the time of the end – as the end.

Our experiences do not reach deeply enough. We are unreal. Unmoored.

We live in calamity. Behalah. The world has already ended.

Idiocy is roaring. He heard it roaring in the night. Or was it just the drunken students?

Last night, he dreamt his brother was smiling. Last night, he dreamt his brother was weeping.

We play, he says. Only that.

We are the dicers at the foot of the cross.

That there’s no such thing as logic: isn’t that what he’s teaching us? 

Philosophy is drunk, he says. Granted, it’s a very cerebral drunkenness.

To give everything up for the collective: even yourself? To own nothing – not even yourself. 

To work – do you know what that means? Exhaustion – do you know what that is?

We must not trust the philosophical impulse, he says. 

Sometimes, he wishes for nothing more than to ward philosophy off.

Socrates’s wisdom lies in his awareness that he is not wise, he says. But that awareness – that so-called wisdom – means Socrates has not understood the extent of his non-wisdom.

It’s not, as the Cabbalists say, that beauty was once a golden whole that was shattered. Beauty is real. Paradise is here. It is we who have shattered.

After class, the Junior Common Room for Neighbours. He has watched Neighbours every weekday for twelve years, he says. Sometimes twice a day.

Sometimes, you have to empty the head, he says. Sometimes, the head must be emptied.

Thought can be a kind of sickness, he says. Do we understand that?

He holds his head in his hands. He shakes his head slowly. But there is no affectedness to him. He is never embarrassed.

He is sincere. He is nothing but sincere.

That there is sincerity: isn't that his lesson for us? That there can be sincerity?

We are enclosed by no horizon, no tradition, he says. We are part of nothing, and therefore can learn nothing new.

We have no positions. No opinions. We think every opinion is worthy the same.

We don’t come to realisations. We don’t have experiences. Epiphanies – what can they mean to us?