Spurious

by Lars Iyer

  Unopened parcels of review copies of books surround him, W. says. His office is thick with them. What can he do? I am the only person who would be interested in such books, W. says. They sicken him. They’re like the ballast attached to a body to make sure it sinks, he says. And he is sinking.

  It’s different for me, W. acknowledges. I get some satisfaction from office work. It makes me think I’ve done something with my miserable life. It makes me feel my life is justified. W. can’t bear it, though. Why does he go into work, then? What’s the point? He could take a few days leave. But W. feels something significant might happen in the office at any moment. He has to be there, W. says. Why? What will happen? He doesn’t know, says W. Something momentous.

  We’re bottom feeders, W. says as he often does. We live on scraps. Soon there will be nothing for us, and then what? Well, the apocalypse will decide it all. It’s coming, we agree. Our second leader told us so. In eight years time, wasn’t it?, W. asks. Four years, I tell him. He’s revised his estimate.—‘Four years’, says W. ‘How will we survive until then? What will we do?’ W. will be waiting in his office, the rain falling.

  W. is still lost in Cohen, he says on the phone. What’s it all about? He could be reading in Dutch for all he knows. Nevertheless, he sends me some notes for my edification, he says. This is what real scholarship is all about, he says.

  I read. Not the apparatus of knowledge itself, but in its outcomes, Ergebnis. Namely, science. And a little later, Unlike all the other fundamental concepts of Erkenntnistheorie, the concept of the infinitesimal does not have its roots in ancient thought.

  I’m impressed, I tell W.—‘You’re always impressed!’, W. says. ‘Anything could impress you, monkey boy’.

  W. says he can only stand reading Cohen for two hours a day. Two hours, from dawn to six A.M, then up for breakfast and into the office. He never understands a word, not really.

  W.’s come to the chapter on conic sections, he says. Do you know what a conic section is?, he asks me. It’s a transverse section through a cone, I tell him. It’s something to do with Kepler. Now it’s W.’s turn to be impressed. I have odd corners of knowledge, he says. Like the German for badger, for example—what was it? Der Dachs, I told him, that’s why you get dachshunds.

  Anyway, W. says, there are three types of conic section: hyperbolic, parabolic and the other one—it isn’t anything-bolic, it’s just normal.—‘I think that’s what it’s called: normal’, W. says. ‘Anyway, which one are you: hyperbolic or parabolic? Do you view yourself as a hyperbolic man or a parabolic man?’

  Sometimes, W. dreams we will become mathematical thinkers, I the philosopher of infinitesimal calculus, he the philosopher of conic sections.

  Mathematics is the organon, says W. pedagogically. Do you know what organon means? He didn’t know himself, W. says. It comes from Aristotle, and refers to an overall conceptual system—the categories and so on.

  W. is growing increasingly certain that the route to religion is a mathematical one. Maths, that’s what it’s all about. Take Cohen, for example. And Rosenzweig. Of course no one can understand Rosenzweig on mathematics and religion, W. says.

  For his part, W.’s been reading his Hebrew Bible again, and wondering how to mathematise it. He’s quite serious, he says. He is currently in an email exchange on the topic with one of his cleverer friends, he says.

  The infinitesimally small is not a concept of thought, but of science, and the science of magnitudes, Groessen. But does not the idea of magnitude presuppose intuition? Thus there appears to be a contradiction between thought and intuition. How can the infinitesimal be a magnitude and at the same time not an intuition?

  W. says he’s since discovered that Groessen, in the last paragraph, can also be translated dimension. He’s not sure what the implications of that might be, though.

  Has he had a thought over the weekend?, I ask W. No, he says, not one. He never thinks when he’s with me. But I think sometimes, W. notes, sometimes I’m capable of thought. There’s sometimes a parting of the clouds, it’s amazing. For a few minutes, I make sense, I speak clearly and thoughtfully, and everyone is amazed. Sal was impressed at Oxford, says W., remembering our conversation in the beer garden. Ah yes, the beer garden, I say, a moment of illumination.

  The problem is that I fear time, W. has decided. I have no stretches of empty time in my day. W., by contrast, always allows for empty time in his day. When he eats, he eats, he doesn’t work. When I eat, by contrast, it is in front of the computer screen, crumbs dropping between the keys.—‘What time do you get up?’, says W., wanting to be taken through my work day. At six o’clock, I tell him. He gets up at four, he says, sometimes earlier. I got up at five yesterday, I tell him.—‘And what did you do?’ I wrote, I tell him.—‘But did you think?’, W. asks. ‘You can’t think and write’.

  Yes, my problem is that I fear empty time, W. is sure of it. Does he fear it? No, he says, but then his house is nicer than my flat. And his living room walls aren’t pink.—‘What were you thinking when you painted those walls?’ It was to bring out the colour of the wood, I tell him. Pink, though! Why pink? It would depress him, says W.

  ‘So what are you going to do about your leak?’, says W. I show him the kitchen. The dehumidifiers, working twenty-four hours a day, are sucking out the damp. They fill up every twelve hours.—‘That’s a lot of water’, says W. ‘Where does it come from?’ No one knows, I tell him. The greatest experts on damp are completely baffled.

  W. wants to understand me, he says. He’s decided to list my affects. You can do it for any living thing, he says. A tick, for example, responds to heat and warmth.—‘It’s a very simple being. Like you. You’re simple’.

  ‘We’ll start with the living room’, he says. Am I taking notes? I’m writing on a post-it pad.—‘It’s cold’, he says. ‘Write that down. I’m freezing. How can you live like this? And it’s dark’, he says. ‘There’s no light. I can’t see anything. And it’s damp. That’s another affect’. It’s better than it was, I tell him.

  Why am I always putting vaseline on my lips?, W. wonders.—‘Vaseline’, he says, that’s another of your affects. The internet. That’s what scholarship is for you, isn’t it? How can you go on reading that bilge? You’ve got no honour. No shame. No goodness’.

  W. looks out of the window at the rotting plants in the yard.—‘Horror. That’s your other affect, isn’t it? Look at it out there. It’s shit. How can you live like this?’

  W. is delineating the basic categories, he says.—‘Television. You like TV, don’t you?’, says W. I tell him I don’t watch it that much.—‘I’m not surprised. The remote is broken. How can you watch anything?’

  ‘So what else do you do? Are there any affects for you in the bathroom?’ I’m indifferent to the bathroom, I tell him.—‘What do you think about when you’re in there?’ Nothing, I tell him. You, I tell him, and he laughs.

  ‘Well then, your bedroom. Is that where you do your reading? You don’t really read anything, do you? You don’t read. And what about the kitchen? Those stacks of tinned fish. You eat the same thing every day, don’t you? Exactly the same thing!’ W. is a believer in a varied diet, he says.—‘I try to vary what I eat. Not like you’.

  W. concludes he has a larger range of affects than me. He lives with someone. That’s what does it.—‘Otherwise I’d be a sad fucker like you’. Of course W.’s house is much nicer, he points out. It’s not cold, for one thing. Or dark. Or damp.

  The previous owners dug right down to the foundations to get rid of the damp, W. tells me. They put down a layer of plastic sheeting, then a layer of concrete, then another layer of sheeting, all the way up.—‘It’s dry as a bone’, W. says.

  W.’s tired of listing my affects. How many have we got? Eight general categories, I tell him. He looks around.—‘Oh fuck it, that will do’.

  W. feels ill from all the drinking, he says. Last night, we had a bottle of red wine, then beer, then we drank Tequila from
the bottle. Then we finished off the bottle of Plymouth Gin, then a bottle of Cava and then a bottle of Chablis. It was a good Chablis, wasn’t it? W. says he was in no position to appreciate it. He wants some aspirin, he says.—‘And how are you feeling?’, he asks me. Fine, I tell him. Better than usual.—‘Any thoughts?’ Not one.

  We head out to the coast for the day, and eat fish and chips on the Fish Quay. We wander through the deserted markets. It’s a melancholy sight. There’s a special kind of melancholy to the quayside, W. and I agree. What is it? The sense that it’s all over, it’s all finished, and a whole civilisation has come to an end, which in fact it has.

  We watch the big seagulls strutting about, and the pigeons.—‘What do you feel about pigeons?’, W. asks me. The Romans brought them to England to eat. They crowd on his window ledge every morning, W. says, cooing and flapping their wings. What miserable birds! He prefers the seagulls, of course. They remind him of the sea, he says, and he loves the sea.

  On one side of us, the Tyne broadens as it reaches its end; on the other, a passenger ferry at the dock, ready to disembark for Norway. Should we go to Norway?, W, wonders. Would they make sense of us there?

  ‘Your problem is that you fear empty time’, says W. as we head back to the city. ‘That’s why you don’t think’. And then: ‘Thought must come as a surprise, when you least expect it’.

  Thought, when it comes, always surprises him, says W. But he’s ready with his notebook, he says, which he keeps in his man bag. That’s why I need a man bag, he says, in case thought surprises me. But I fear the empty time which makes thought possible, says W., so I don’t need a man bag.

  The next morning, W.’s flight is cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat for another day and night. This place is a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.

  When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge.—‘You’ve never felt beatitude’, says W. ‘You’re not capable of it’.

  W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious.—‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.

  W. says The Ethics is the only book he’s ever thought is completely right.—‘It’s the opposite of your flat’, says W. ‘God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Half your lights, for example. Your kitchen. Your TV. Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittiest thing they have?’, says W. ‘Nothing ever changes for you, does it? There’s no movement forward’.

  W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore.—‘You have to read in the original language’, he says. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know anything about that’. Next he’ll refresh his Greek.

  W. recalls our Greek lessons, he on sabbatical, me a young student.—‘You seemed intelligent then, full of promise’. Of course, I was no such thing, he realised quickly. W. and the others had the answer book and used to crib from its translations in advance. They liked to watch me squirm with my exercises.—‘Your idiocy was spectacular’, says W. ‘Omoi!, that’s was all you could say. Omoi!, omoi!, like a wounded bull’.

  For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus.—‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz—or Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza.—‘Ah, The Ethics’, he sighs. ‘Beatitude!’, he sighs.

  The damp, I say to W. That’s my apocalypse. Does he know I have mushrooms growing from the ceiling? Does he know they’re gathered in the far upper corner of the kitchen? It used to make me shudder, I tell W. I used to hate it. But now …

  I’m fascinated by the damp, I tell W. I can’t help it. I go out there again, to the kitchen, to the bathroom. I put my hand on the clammy wall. The damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but the one who sees it, touches it? Who am I but the one with its spores in his lungs?

  One night it grew me, I tell W. One night a spore unfolded itself to a make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue …

  Somewhere, on the other side of the wall, life has reached a new level, I tell W. Somewhere, damp mutters to itself; damp dreams, there behind the wall. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will it say when it wakes up?

  What will he write about next?, W. muses. What’s to be his next project? He’s casting about, he admits it. Wasn’t he supposed to learn Greek this summer? Protestant guilt keeps driving him into the office, he says. In he goes on the bus, thinking he ought to be doing something, but not quite sure what. He sits in the office among the parcels of review copies of books he keeps receiving. There are dozens of them, piled up all over the place. They depress him enormously. He can’t bear to look at them.

  For my part, W. notes, I still have a stupid excitement about books. It’s because I’m illiterate, W. says, and because they’re slightly above the level I can understand. Whenever I visit, I insist on opening the parcels and filling up W.’s shelves with fresh new books, reading him the most ridiculous of the blurbs. It must be the bright covers that attract me, W. says, whereas they depress him horribly.—‘All these books!’, he says, with weary horror. ‘Look at them!’

  Whatever happened to W.’s publisher? Once the most generous and gregarious of men, he insisted upon travelling hundreds of miles to visit W. and take him out to dinner. They spent days going over the manuscript, which was properly proofread (not like mine, W. says, which was farmed out to Malaysia). And he’d decided on a full colour cover for the paperback—an expensive undertaking, W. notes. Granted, the final version still had typos on the first page (to his amusement) and even in the blurbs on the back (which he found even funnier), but it was a handsome volume, and one of a series of handsome volumes.

  But what’s happened to the publisher? He’s gone out of business, that much is clear. Of course, you could never get hold of his books anywhere, which also amused W. As soon as his book was in print, it was out of print, he said. It was always and already out of print, he said, which was fitting, he said. Luckily, he got a box of free copies, says W., which he sent to his friends. Were it not for that, no one would believe it had existed.

  To W., it’s completely inconsequential whether the book is in print or not. You should always publish with friends, he says, and the publisher was a friend. But where is he? He doesn’t reply to emails or telephone calls, W. says. Doubtless there’s no longer a computer in his office, nor a telephone, he says. Doubtless the office has long been stripped and demolished, and he’s sitting sobbing in the ruins.

  You should always publish with friends, W. notes, and that’s all he wants from his vanished publisher: a sign of friendship, of their shared failure. That’s all he would want from any of his friends, who are all failures, whether they know it or not.

  Why has everything become so absurd?, I ask W. Why has it all come apart just at the moment when we might have got somewhere? But W. reminds me of what we both know: that any success we’ve had is premised upon exactly that absurdity.

  We’re like captains of the Titanic, we tell each other. W.’s already steered his ship into the iceberg. It’s wrecked—all hands lost. W. remains on the bridge, the last man standing, but there’s not long left.—‘It’ll be your turn next’, says W. ‘How long do you think you’ll last?’

  The iceberg’s looming, I tell W. I’m mesmerised by it. So was he, says W. He knew it was coming and that it could only come. He knew that any success he had had was premised upon this greater and pre-ordained failure. He’s dignified in defeat.—‘Not like you’, he says, ‘gnashing your teeth and wailing from the rooftops’.

  I am getting to know the moods of the damp, I tell W. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And t
hen, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased, and if so, with what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them.

  Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly, high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along—the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it’s not running with water as it used to be. Dehumidifiers work night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pinpricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only contained?

  The damp and I are companions in the quiet flat. Little happens here; the damp does its work as moisture is drawn through the filters of the dehumidifier into its transparent collection tray, and I try to do mine. When I am away, I tell W., I think the damp plunges forward like a dark wave; I can smell it, very thick in the air, when I open the door. Damp in a wave, welcoming me home, thick and brown and wet in the air.

  Sometimes I sponge down the walls with a mixture of water and bleach. It needs to be done in the bathroom, too, where black spores of mould are forming. And the wallpaper in the bedroom, too. But these are only symptoms. I touch a cool sponge to the wall as to a fevered brow. Be calm, be still, do not toss and turn. And now I imagine the damp is a dream of the wall, that it is lost in itself somehow, and that if the wall were only to open its eyes and see me, then all would be well. But the wall seems to fall into itself. It’s lost in damp, or damp is what rises up when the wall disappears into its coma.