Spurious

by Lars Iyer

  His book is better than him, W. and I agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says. The book seems to stream splendidly above us both. Neither of us can follow it. Ah, the long example of his dog! It’s even better than the sections on children in his previous book! W. says he’s amazed too. How did he manage it?

  I’m filling in my esteem indicators, I tell W.—‘Oh yes, what are they?’ He could do with a laugh, says W. ‘How about humiliation indicators? Or soiling yourself indicators?’, says W. ‘Write about the history of your humiliations’, says W. ‘Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that’s what you’ve done’.

  I hold my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers slightly too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it were written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says.

  ‘Once you were happy on your savannah’, W. says. ‘You were happy romping about with the whole horizon before you. What made you think you could read, let alone write? How did you end up mistaking yourself for a writer?

  ‘Behold the idiot! That’s what your book proclaims’, says W. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go back to your savannah now? Wouldn’t you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?’

  Why do I write such bad books?, W. wonders. It’s not even that they’re bad at the level of content, which of course they are. The basics aren’t even in place. The fundamentals.—‘You can’t write’, says W. ‘You’re incapable of placing one word after another’.

  Of course, my book was a lesson to him, W. says. His book, he decided, would be as good at the level of style as mine is bad, which is not to say it would be worthwhile at the level of content. But at least it would be legible, says W. At least it would pass the minimum qualification for what would count as a book.

  W.’s reading the notes he took ten years ago.—‘They’re better than anything I could do now’, he says, sending me them. I agree: they are good. ‘I had no girlfriend, barely any work, no television, and above all, no friend called Lars …’ But didn’t W. credit me with freeing him to write? Didn’t I save him from years of writer’s block? All I taught him was shamelessness, W. says. Compromise and half measures—that’s all I taught him.

  W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism.

  When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known—his name and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery—would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

  A generation later, the second Rabbi—his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life—confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers’. What he wanted to achieve was done.

  Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi—whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure—went to the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient’. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

  Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi—his name is well known, and he lived as we do—faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done’. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

  There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot—well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too, were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was upon the fate of Jordan and Peter André. He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.

  The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps, I tell W. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. Where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. Dirt from the ceiling crumbles over everything. And it’s so cold, so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.

  Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it’s soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it’s sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mould is growing. You can’t rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.

  I went out there again just now to remind myself, I tell W. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is that wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I’m breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink—is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There’s something brown. Something wrong. There’s a new process beginning on the wall, I tell W. Something horrible.

  You can’t be alone to experience the Messiah, W. says. Not really. And you can’t be sober. The Messiah is drunk, says W. Or he’s what drunkenness allows. Anyone can be the Messiah when he’s drunk, W. says. Of course, he might not know it. W.’s not the Messiah for himself, W. says, just as I am not the Messiah for myself. He’s the Messiah for me, and I’m the Messiah for him. Do I think of him, W., as the Messiah?, W. asks. Well, I should.

  I am a sullen drinker, W. observes. Not for the whole evening, he admits—not even for most of it, but the time always comes when I refuse to say anything at all and slump down in my chair.—‘That’s when your immense belly becomes visible’, says W., ‘during the slump’. It’s like Moby Dick, says W. Vast and white and rarely seen. But there it is in the slump. It always amazes him, says W. It amazes everyone.

  I’m not like him, W. notes, for whom every conversation is on the verge of becoming messianic. W. likes to journey with his interlocutor through the apocalyptic and towards the messianic, he says. He believes in his interlocutor, not like me. He believes in conversation. I’m slumped, drunk and silent at one end of the table, W. says, while he is waiting for the Messiah at the other.

  Anyone might be the Messiah, W. says. The Messiah might be me, says one Talmudic commentator.—‘Are you the Messiah?’, W. asks me. Is he? It’s all to do with the logic of relations, W. says, his favourite topic. He is the Messiah for me just as I am the Messiah for him, not because of what each of us is for himself, but because of what we are for the other.

  Is he the Messiah? Am I? The Messiah would never wear a shirt like that, W. says. He would never wear the trousers that are flapping round my ankles. The Messiah wouldn’t buy his clothes from Primark, says W., he’s sure of that.

  Scholem says that there is a tradition of doubling the figure of the Messiah, W. tells me. The first Messiah belongs to the old world, and to the catastrophe that destroys the old world (messianism always entails catastrophe, W. observes). Every horror of the old world is concentrated in him. He can redeem nothing, and what can he desire but his own annihilation?

  But then there is the Messiah ben David in whom all that is new announces itself, and who finally defeats the antichrist. He is the redeemer, W., says. He brings with him the messianic age.

  Which one am I, do I think?, says W. Which one is he? He can picture me, W. says, working at my desk, or attempting to work (or at least what I call work), covered in crumbs from the packed lunch I eat four hours early, surrounded by books by Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and by other books that explain Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and then by still other books with titles like The Idiot’s Guide to Jewish Messianism and Rosenzweig
in Sixty Minutes.

  He can picture me, he says, hungover as usual, bleary-eyed as usual but full of a vague, stupid hope, with the sense that this time, despite its resemblance to all other times, will be different.

  This time it’ll be okay. This time it’ll come good. That’s my messianism, W. says, and it’s all I’ll ever know or understand about messianism, that vague sense that things will be different this time, even as everyone else knows they will be exactly the same.

  ‘Even you feel it, don’t you, that messianic hope? Even you, like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but excited. But do you actually think you’re going to be redeemed?’

  W. himself can’t shake it free, that hope, that springtime of the spirit. One day, he feels, he will be able to think. One day, his thoughts will rise as high as the Messiah, the sun in the sky of the future. Oh he knows it’s impossible, he says, he knows he’ll never have an idea, but that’s what the coming of the Messiah must mean: the impossible, which is to say, an idea, an idea that would belong to W.

  Is that why he writes?, W. wonders. Is that why he accepts invitations to speak? Is that why the hope is reborn eternally in him that it will be different this time? In the end, that’s what we share, W. decides. A sense that the apocalypse isn’t quite complete, and that there are still grounds for hope.

  W. reminds me of the old story of the Messiah who remains hidden with the lepers and beggars at the gate of Rome. There he was all along; but is he there? When the Rabbi stands before him to ask when he will come, what does he say? Today, if you will hear my voice.

  Today! Then the Messiah is here! But he is not here. There are conditions to his coming, and the leper-Messiah, who binds his wounds alongside the beggars at the gates of Rome, is not here yet.

  There’s a great lesson in this, W. says, though he’s not sure what it is. When’s the Messiah going to come? Today? Tomorrow? He’s not sure, W. says, but it’s only when you’ve exhausted everything, when there’s no more hope, that the Messiah might appear.

  Of course, I’ve long since worn W. out, he says. I’m hopeless, W. says. I’m unredeemable. W. knows it. But why then does he talk to me? Why does he continue with our collaboration?

  Perhaps he hopes for something nonetheless, W. reflects. And perhaps it’s only when he gives it up that the Messiah will arrive. Which would make me some kind of antichrist, W. surmises. A kind of living embodiment of the apocalypse.

  The electrician came out, I tell W.—‘It needs rewiring’, he said, ‘the whole flat’. I ignored him. There was light, and that was enough. The light in the kitchen is still working. It doesn’t flicker; it’s steady. Which means you can gaze upon the damp. You can gaze, fascinated, at the damp and the plaster mottled with damp. It doesn’t hide, the damp. It isn’t shy. It is there, obvious. It announces itself calmly. It says, here I am, with quiet plainness. And there it is, I tell W. A fact. Absolute damp. Damp beyond all damp meters.—‘It’s off the scale’, said the drying expert who’ll bring the machines.

  Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. Grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. The wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. And along the window sill, the plaster has turned a mottled green.

  I have a small fan heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that, I tell W. Gradually, the plaster changes colour from an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and black mould, to a calmer, lighter pink. It seems a miracle; it seems I’m winning, I tell W., how can this be? But then it comes back again, a wave of dark brown.

  Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There’s always a layer of water on the wall like a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way? What is the meaning of the salt crystals which form on the wall? Is the salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut fascinated only by its changing surface.

  Whole religions have formed around less, I tell W., around damp, and the source of damp.

  W. sends me some quotations from the Talmud.

  Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail.

  W. likes lists, he says. It’s a Borges thing.—‘This quote is especially for you’, he says:

  Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.

  ‘For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?’, says W. ‘Years? Millennia?’

  W. is sure he heard somewhere or another—at a lecture, symposium or suchlike—about the stupid Messiah, and this has oriented his research ever since. The stupid Messiah, whatever can that mean? When did this figure appear? Under what circumstances?

  Of course, there is a long tradition of the occultation of the Messiah, W. says. The idea, that is, that the Messiah has already arrived, if only we could find him (if only we knew how to find him). Then there’s the belief that it’s only when certain conditions are satisfied that he will reveal himself to be where he always was. The moral improvement of humankind, for example.

  But what could it mean to think of a Messiah so stupid that he is occulted from himself? Of a Messiah who does not have the intelligence to know he is the Messiah? There’s a tradition, of course, that the Messiah would be the one who broke the law rather than simply fulfilling it. Whence the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi, whose followers likewise committed apostasy, it being a sign for them of the kind of test the Messiah would ask them to undergo.

  Would the stupid Messiah have stupid followers?, W. wonders. Followers so stupid they wouldn’t know who they were following, or what it meant to follow? Mystery upon mystery, says W. But at least it goes some way to explaining my significance vis-à-vis messianism. Because I’m attracted to it, aren’t I, in my own stupid way? Even I have a sense of the importance of the messianic idea as I circle around it in my stupidity.

  W. is a little less unwitting than I, he says, a little less stupid. And perhaps that means I’m a truer follower of the stupid Messiah, he says, he’s not certain.

  Are we religious?, we wonder. I’m never quite sure. We feel things about religion, that’s already something. There’s an immense pathos about religious matters for us, that’s certain. But are we religious, I mean really religious?

  Wasn’t it pathos that nearly made a Christian convert of Rosenzweig?, we wonder. Wasn’t it the pathos of his friend Eugen Rosenstock, with whom he spent so many nights in conversation? There was one conversation in particular—that of the night of June 7th, 1913—which ended with Rosenzweig holding a pistol to his temple.

  He had confronted the Nothing, he said later. He’d come to the very end. Rosenstock had persuaded him Judaism was outmoded, forgotten, and that Christianity was the only way redemption could be brought to the world. Rosenzweig agreed, but that wasn’t what disturbed him. Asked what he would do when all the answers failed—when the abstract truths of logic failed to satisfy him—Rosenstock had said with great simplicity, I would go to the next church, kneel and try to pray.

  Kneel and try to pray: that’s what moved Rosenzweig, W. says. It moved him immeasurably, because those words came from a scholar, a thinker like him, not a naïf or a romantic. Forget the argument about redemption and Christianity and world history, it was pathos that brought about Rosenzweig’s crisis, W. says. The pathos of a scholar who would live in faith and offer it as testimony.

  Rosenzweig, of course, did not convert. Or rather, he converted back to Judaism. If he was to become
Christian, he wrote to Rosenstock, it was to be by way of Judaism, W. says, even though his relationship to Judaism was weak. Even though his family was almost entirely assimilated.

  But then a few days later, he attended the Yom Kippur service in an orthodox synagogue in Berlin. Up until that point, he felt one’s relationship to God depended upon the mediation of Christ. And after it? Read The Star, and you’ll see the Yom Kippur service is placed at the height of Rosenzweig’s account of Jewish religious experience. At the height! Pathos again, says W. It’s all about pathos.

  Of course, there’s pathos and pathos, W. says. What could we understand of Rosenzweig’s despair after his conversation? How could we understand why he held a pistol to his temple, or what seeing the Nothing might mean?

  Hadn’t our second leader spoken to us at length of his faith? Hadn’t we heard from his lips the testimony of one as far as possible from naivety or romanticism? But we were plunged into no crisis. We didn’t contemplate our own deaths, or no more than usual. What did we feel? Stirred, moved to be sure, but it didn’t translate into action.

  Did we rush to a church and kneel and try to pray? Did we hold guns to our temples, or flail about in contemplation of the Nothing? Did we set about writing our own Stars of Redemption? Of course not. We fell short, says W., as we always fall short. But short of what? What idea could we have of faith, of the pathos of faith, as it streams infinitely far above our stupid heads?

  ‘How depressed are you?’, W. asks me on the phone. Very, I tell him. W.’s in his office in the southwest of the country, and I am in mine in the northeast. W. says he’s looking out of the window and thinking of his failure. How has it come to this?, he thinks to himself over and over again.