Wittgenstein Jr

The meaning of life consists in living that life, he says.

God, the name of the absence of God. Of the desertion of God.

God’s left his post. God’s AWOL. God’s drunk on duty. God’s gone mad. God’s lost his mind in the darkness.

The rule must be a thread in the weave of life. The rule must become the exception, and the exception the rule.

Indefiniteness. That’s the rule. The interruption of the rules and all rules. Except the rule of the non-rule. Except for the exception that divides the rule from itself ... 

To be used by thought, like a staff in an old man’s hand.

Intelligence is shamed. Intelligence cowers. Intelligence is made to stand in a corner with a dunce’s cap. The rule of the idiot is complete.

Stupidity is drinking. Stupidity as drunk itself stupid. Stupidity is bellowing in the college courtyard. Stupidity is howling in Cambridge streets.

Idiocy has its face pressed up against the classroom window. Idiocy is hammering at the classroom door. 

Stupidity is grinning. Stupidity is vicious. Stupidity wants revenge on all intelligence.

Flooded by the light of God’s grace. Planted in the garden of the Lord.

The simplicity of the liturgy. God works in us while we rest in Him.

Grace flows in the folds of their garments - Merton.

The great joy of monastic life: that contemplation and praise of god are shared.

The closer the contemplative comes to God, the closer, too, to other men…

To live together like Seraphim, setting each other on fire with the love of God.

Monks engaged in their laundry, repairing their shoes. Beating the dust from their blankets.

The wide bays of the cloister...The sunlight and warmth of the cloister garth... Light on the broad flagstones... 

Rising, with the monks, at 2.00 AM, for Matins. The vaulting of the church half-concealed in darkness, a single candle flickering before the altar, the monks themselves scarcely visible in the gloom.

The long wait for the light. The slow measures of psalmody rising and falling.

Then came the Lauds, full of hope for the rising sun, for the figurative coming of Christ, to banish the darkness.

Then they hailed the risen sun – the risen Christ, and asked god for the grace that would sustain them in their day’s work. And out the monks went to the woods and the pastures. And out he went, too, into the pastures.

And it was there, in the full sun, that the monks chanted the hours, as they split wood or dug in the garden, as they tanned hides, or pruned fruit trees – it was there, sometimes, that they would chant among the wheat-sheaves in the rows of vines. 

A life lived in liturgy - in the simplicity of the Rule. A life of charity, of contemplation. A life in which the lessons worked themselves into his blood and marrow. A life lived in the round of prayer and work and reading. 

A life shared – in fraternal charity. A life charged with radiance. A life of silence, resting in the silence of God. A life given over to the common will ... A life of second innocence, restored innocence. A life of obedience, close to nature, close to God.

The suburbs - where life is stretched thinnest.

Insomnia is his teacher, as it was his brother’s.

Does he dream of a pupil who would exceed him? See farther than him? Know what remains unthought in his thought?

Do we disappoint him? Had he dared hope for more?

Isaac Barrow resigned his professorship in favour of his pupil - Newton. Does Wittgenstein dream of resigning his own position - in favour of one of us?

The teacher as messenger. As bringer of truth.

The teacher embodies of what he teaches. He lives it. His authority is charismatic and not just institutional.

He suffers from the melancholy of learning; it is true, but he is also given over to its ecstasies. 

No, all theory is not grey; the golden tree of light blooms in thought, He, the thinker lives by thinking, and, in thinking, lives.

To be taught. To be the occasion of teaching. To be the messenger of the messenger.

To watch over the gift of the master, to bear the gift and not to spurn it. To assist his thought. To help it come forth. 

And afterwards, when the time comes, to prevent misunderstandings, misinterpretations. To watch over the legacy.

The strange fact that it rests to us – us – to record his life and thought for posterity.

The fact that it falls to us to record what we do not understand, so it will be for other generations to decipher.

The pupil knows the joy of service. Of duty. Of responsibility. We have nothing to do but to be there. To witness. To record. To be the transmitter of a legend, of ideas. So will our names be known throughout eternity.

Of course, the thinker is never understood by his time, we know that. Or only by a few disciplines.

The thinker is a suspicious figure to all constituted powers; the thinker is reviled and cast out.

The thinker is alone but for his pupils. The thinker rides the clouds in thought, stands on Atlas’s shoulders, belongs to the starry heights – but only his pupils know that.

The thinker is the open Delphi, looking upon visions beyond mortal sight. The thinker sees beyond - so far beyond - the little figures of his contemporaries.

The thinker is a man out of joint, the insomniac of the present. The thinker is awake when others are asleep. He burns with his studies through the night. He takes down his thoughts as in letters of fire, as in holy writ ...

Myths surround him. Parables. The truth is hard to uncover, if it is uncoverable at all. No one is sure of his provenance, of his upbringing; no one can place him. He is his own law. He comesand goes, like thought itself.

The luminosity of his presence... His god-touched charisma... The mysteriousness of his pronouncements... The wonder of his signs...

Logic will banish the devil from his face. It will banish philosophy from his face. 

Logic will banish his face from his face, until it is only the face of God that looks back at him.

His Logik will lead logic beyond books.

A logic uncontained by pages. A logic of life, of love. A logic that glistens.

Socrates learnt to sing in the last hour of his life – he often reminds himself of that.

The Kabbalistic mystics gave instruction to one pupil only, he says. Perhaps it will be the same with him.

He quotes Baal Shem: 'Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on’.

Only a master can be taught by a master, he says.

It is impossible to teach love, he says. Schopenhauer said that.

We must not think about our thinking, his brother said. We must not philosophise about philosophy. To know our dividedness, to state it, is to be divided yet further.

Our time is not real to him. It is not substantial.

Why can he write nothing but fragments?

His fear: that no one will understand the tone of his work.

He does not so much write, he says, as cut and reshuffle.

He prunes and rearranges, he says. That is all.

Everything must be destroyed, he says. He must start all over again from zero.

What he is doing is negative work, he says. 

A man is choking, and you deny that that there is no air for him to breathe, he says. 

His fear: that his pains are full of vanity. That he is altogether too weak to get to the bottom of the truth.

Sometimes, he thinks idiocy might take some turn, that there might be a kind of mutation of stupidity, that stupidity might blossom. The paths of idiocy are mysterious, he says.

He means to hollow out philosophy, he says. To prepare for its end.

To render philosophy inoperative: that’s his aim. To suspend its work, its operation.

On his desk, tiny slivers of paper. What has he been doing? Then I see: he has been trimming down a photograph. He has been cutting its edges, changing its dimensions. The photograph: a young woman, eyes closed. My mother, he says. My mother as a young girl.

In his dream, the Logik is light, he says. The Logik laughs.

He speaks of the demented grin on the face of philosophy.

He is the opposite of a martyr, he says. The opposite of a saviour. He brings not salvation, but destruction, he says. He witnesses no truth, only the black sky without truth.

It’s not that logic is too difficult for us, he says, but that we are too high and mighty for logic.

You need to get low to reach logic, he says. You need to be beaten down.

That’s what his lectures are supposed to be doing to us, he says: beating us down. 

Logic is the ice-shard, he says. Logic entered his heart and hardened it.

He needs to draw the ice-shard out. He needs his heart to open.

The splinters of the devil’s mirror lie in our eyes and in our hearts, his brother told him.

It is only by weeping – really weeping, with tears of repentance – that you will flush the splinters from your eye, his brother said. And it will only by loving – really loving, on your hands and knees – that you will bleed the splinters from your heart.

His imposture. He dared stand up, when he should have stayed down. He rose, when he should have lain.

He speaks of his loneliness. His isolation.

He speaks of his animal desire for warmth. Of his human desire for a friendly face ...

One day, a bell will sound through his loneliness.

One day, the pitch of his loneliness will reach a kind of purity. 

The will to work is wearing him out. But not the work itself

Spontaneity: that is his aim. To think spontaneously, as by a kind of reflex.

A thought must arrive all at once, or not at all, he says.

We must retrain our instincts if we want to think, he says. We must remake our most basic responses to the world.

My dream. The Logik is complete, Wittgenstein tells us. The Logik is the world; it is identical with the world, like a map that is nothing other than the territory.

My dream. Wittgenstein wears Guthrie’s face. Wittgenstein (Guthrie) drinking – Wittgenstein (Guthrie) lashing out. Wittgenstein (Guthrie) scrawling obscenities in the snow. Wittgenstein has become Ede, skiing with Tara-Palmer-Tompkinson in the Alps. Wittgenstein has become Titmuss, wondering on the Deccan plain. Wittgenstein has become a Kirwin twin, having tears tattooed in the corner of his eye. Wittgenstein has become Scroggins, urine gathering in his colostomy bag. Wittgenstein has become, with a FUCK THE FUCK teeshirt. Wittgenstein has become Doyle, directly Byron’s Pool: The Musical.

My dream. Snow falls across his sleeping body. Snow falls – and covers him. And Wittgenstein is forgotten. I have forgotten him. We have all forgotten him.