Wittgenstein Jr

by Lars Iyer

  TITMUSS: What about Prince Charles?

  DOYLE: Aren’t you sixth in line for the throne, or something?

  Ede is from one of the really ancient families, he says. There’s a long line of Edes stretching back before the Conqueror—a whole dynasty, with painted portraits hung up and down their stairs, and coats of arms emblazoned over their chimneypieces.

  Edes played at being knights at court, serving the monarch in council and government, Ede says. Edes starred in court masques, and kept their heads down after the execution of the king. Come the Restoration, Edes commissioned new country houses, celebrating the beauty of order, with Doric colonnades and winged griffins and tripod urns. Edes waved at the natives from the backs of caparisoned elephants in the colonies.

  And when the new century came, modern Edes died in blood and fire alongside common folk in the trenches, and married the daughters of the new tycoons of America and South Africa to finance their country estates. Edes kept up the old ways, selling off chunks of their land, hiring out their old halls as wedding venues, and heading to the House of Lords once a week to exercise their ancient privileges.

  There were failures in Ede’s family, to be sure. Insane Edes, driven mad from inbreeding, hidden in attics … Failed-suicide Edes, wheeled around in darkened houses … But in every generation, an Ede steps up. Cometh the hour, cometh the Ede who will pull it all together: the Ede who will become a man of the City, with a pied-à-terre in Richmond, and who will keep the family investments going; the Ede who will see to it that the family fortune grows and grows, and the country estate continues to stand; the Ede who will visit the old pile on the weekends, pulling on his Wellingtons and striding about the ancient grounds …

  DOYLE: And you’re that Ede, I suppose?

  EDE: I am that Ede.

  Half of the class have paid their visits to Wittgenstein’s rooms. A pattern has emerged. He directs questions at you, and you reply, as best as you can. He asks about your parents, about your siblings. About the place you grew up.

  Scroggins reports on the austerity of Wittgenstein’s rooms. Their white walls. The two wooden chairs, one for the host, one for the guest, and the card table between them, for the tea tray. He thinks he did poorly, he says. He’s not sure why.

  Alexander Kirwin describes the buttered scones that Wittgenstein served on a dish; Benedict Kirwin, the metal teapot and two enamel cups, brought in on a tray.

  Wittgenstein likes his tea very weak, Mulberry testifies; he poured a cup for himself almost as soon as he filled the teapot. And he brought a pan and brush from the kitchen to sweep the crumbs from the table.

  Titmuss talked India, he says. His gap year. Wittgenstein seemed interested (EDE: Believe me, Wittgenstein wasn’t interested). Okulu took note of the bookshelves—Augustine in Latin. Freud’s book on dreams. Marcus’s Meditations. Unknown volumes in Cyrillic. In ancient Greek.

  Memorable things Wittgenstein said. To Scroggins: It is never difficult to think. It is either easy or impossible. To Okulu: What stands between us and good philosophy is the will, not the intellect. And then, We must refine the will. To Titmuss: You must know who you are, in order to think without deceit. To Chakrabarti, he said that he was looking for a just word. For a new language of creation. To Doyle: We are latecomers. Disinherited children. And then: We are without tradition. Without belief.

  The unity of his teaching. That’s what he wants us to perceive, he says. His teaching depends on its cumulative effect.

  The recurrence of certain topics, and the disappearance of others. Are we beginning to sense a pattern?

  The rhythm of his lecturing. The long pauses he leaves between remarks: is it intended as a kind of punctuation? Of syncopation?

  Sometimes he pauses in his teaching to pose questions, and reacts to our replies.

  When one of us says something helpful, he raises his eyebrows, and says, Go on. But when he hears something he finds unhelpful, his eyebrows fall again.

  Helpful: Ede’s remark about indiscernibles. Doyle’s remark about syllogistic form.

  Unhelpful: Okulu’s remark about deduction. Alexander Kirwin’s reply about induction.

  Altogether irrelevant: Chakrabarti’s remark about subduction. Scroggins’s remark about production.

  Entirely facetious: Benwell’s sotto voce remark about alien abduction.

  Competition in class: Who can hold their breath the longest? Guthrie tries, holding his breath for a few minutes, before gasping loudly. Mulberry tries, and collapses, blue-faced, on the floor.

  WITTGENSTEIN (vexed): What’s the matter with you, man?

  Notes passed in class. Mulberry to Doyle: You’re a whiny little bitch. Doyle to Mulberry: You have a micro-penis. Mulberry to Doyle: You have a nano-penis. Doyle to Mulberry: You have a quantum penis. It’s both there and not there.

  Fights in class. Mulberry punches Doyle, giving him a dead arm. Doyle pinches Mulberry, making him squeal out loud.

  Wittgenstein, quoting: Anything a man knows, anything he has not merely heard rumbling and roaring, can be said in three words. He hears only rumbling and roaring, he says. Our rumbling and roaring.

  The view from the window. Heavy gulls, though we’re far from the sea. The wind tearing the last leaves from the tree. The groundskeeper, with a roller, flattening the turf.

  How cold it is out there! And how dark it’s getting, even though it’s only mid-afternoon!

  One more year of study before we have to go outside. Actually, it’s only four-fifths of a year now, before the wind will whip around us …

  Will we really have to go out there? Will we have to make our way in the world? Not now. Not yet. We’re not ready …

  Standing in the corridor, waiting for the previous class to finish. It’s five minutes past the hour.

  Wittgenstein, staring at the door, leather satchel under his arm. Wittgenstein, rocking on his toes. Wittgenstein, knocking loudly. Opening the door …

  WITTGENSTEIN (severely): Excuse me, would you mind …

  Students file out, and then the lecturer, to whom Wittgenstein bows slightly.

  A PowerPoint presentation on the whiteboard. Bullet points. Pictures. Leftover handouts on the desks. Photocopied excerpts from an introductory book.

  Where is our list of key concepts? Where are our aims and objectives? Where are the learning outcomes for our lectures? Where is our virtual learning environment?

  His classes are just a series of remarks, separated by silences. Ideas, in haiku-like sentences, full of delicate beauty and concision.

  Each remark concentrates in itself all of his teaching, he says. Each remark crouches like a wolf ready to pounce, for the one who can hear what he is saying.

  DOYLE: How are we meant to know what lies behind your remarks?

  WITTGENSTEIN (the quote marks audible): Nothing lies ‘behind’ my remarks.

  DOYLE: Is there some theory you’re trying to express?

  WITTGENSTEIN: I am trying to think, that’s all. I am trying to ask questions.

  DOYLE: Then what are we supposed to learn from your lectures?

  WITTGENSTEIN: Structures. That’s all I want you to see. Depths.

  DOYLE: But I can’t see anything!

  Wittgenstein turns over the most ordinary words for inspection. He insists on beginning anew. On starting again, all over again. On discarding false beginnings. On struggling to a yet more originary beginning, on pushing back to ever deeper fundaments. On swimming against the current, against all satisfaction.

  There are moments of apparent progress in his class. Moments of clarification, when he smiles bleakly. But then, there is the perpetual return of doubt. Of despair. Of failure.

  He leans forward in his chair, eyes closed. Then, opening his eyes, he looks up at us, with a pained expression on his face.

  There is something he hasn’t yet realised, he says. Something he hasn’t seen. If only it could be shown to him.

  His torment. Halfway through class, he utters a loud cry.
He’s giving up logic for good, he says. He’d have made a better clown than logician.

  A long pause, before he starts again.

  If a man could write a book on philosophy, which was really a book on philosophy, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world, he quotes.

  He is trying to write such a book, he says. The Logik. Die Logik.

  Wittgenstein, on his chair at the front of the room. Who will come with him to wash off his brain?

  Outside. Wittgenstein, walking ahead of us. Students in surging groups. Students everywhere, a sea of them, moving in fast currents.

  Posh students everywhere. Rah boys in gilets and flip-flops, with piles of bed-head hair. Rugby types, as big as fridges, all red-cheeked health, their voices booming. Rah girls dressed down in gym gear and pony-tails. English roses in horse-and-hound clothing, as though fresh from the gymkhana. Yummy not-yet-mummies in fur-lined Barbour. Ethno-Sloanes, with string tops and slouch-bags. Sloane-ingénues with big cups of coffee, sweater sleeves half pulled over their hands …

  EDE: The Cambridge type. Revolting! When was the last time you met anyone working class at Cambridge?

  DOYLE: There’s Benwell.

  EDE: He’s hardly typical. Besides, he wants nothing to do with us.

  We consider the enigma of Benwell. Why does he always scowl at us, though we, too, attend Wittgenstein’s class? Why does he ignore us?

  Ede thinks it must be a northern thing. Things are grim up there.

  DOYLE: Peters is northern!

  EDE: Well, Benwell is from farther north. The real north.

  Ede conjures up an image of Benwell in his old pit village, wandering past slag heaps and barred factory gates. Past rasping ex-miners on mobility scooters, past workless lads and grey-faced mothers, past the drug-addled and the muttering mad, up to the lonely moorland …

  Ede says he’s always wanted to come from the north. It would legitimate his sense of despair.

  MULBERRY: Despair about what? You’re as rich as Croesus!

  EDE: About everything! If I were Benwell I’d want to blow all this up—the river, the Backs, all of Cambridge … Actually, if I were Benwell, I’d like to blow us up.

  Luckily, there are drugs to dull the pain, Ede says, popping a mogadon and taking an extra one for luck.

  EDE: This is how I got through Eton.

  Wittgenstein, ahead of us, hands behind his back.

  DOYLE: What do you suppose he’s thinking about?

  EDE: Something very, very difficult.

  DOYLE: Why does philosophy have to be so hard?

  EDE: You don’t know you’re doing philosophy unless it hurts. Feel the burn, Doyle-o!

  Wittgenstein points out the faded names of firms on the sides of buildings. Names carved from building stone. Buildings once had a purpose, he says. People, too. There was a time when the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker really were the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. When the Cambridge don really was a don, he says. And when the Cambridge student—any student—really was a student.

  Trinity Street. The gatehouses, with their turrets … The filigree of the pinnacles, spires and domes … The stained-glass windows of King’s College Chapel …

  EDE: They put the cobbles in to impress the tourists, you know. Ye olde Cambridge and all that. It’s like a stage set. The spectacle of the upper class in their natural setting.

  WITTGENSTEIN (turning to face us): The beauty of Cambridge is meant to lull you, to make you let down your defences. The eye is only distracted by beauty. It is only deceived by beauty. Because the old alliance between beauty and goodness has long been broken, and the treaty between beauty and truth was torn up some time ago.

  EDE (quietly): That was my point.

  King’s Parade. Teenage tourists pose against the college walls. One pretends to hold the gatehouse of St John’s between his fingers, another does handstands. A clump of child-tourists are ushered away from the grass by a security guard.

  Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that’s what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …

  Ede’s rooms.

  EDE (doing his Wittgenstein impression): Cambridge dissolving ist. Like ein Alka-Seltzer.

  ME (doing my Wittgenstein impression): Die Logik mit ein kicking k!

  Laughter. How absurd Wittgenstein is! How pompous!

  Still, it would be really something to make an impression on him, we agree. To say something startling in class, to make him look up, surprised. Perhaps you have something there, he’d say. You have put your finger on something, he’d say. Or: You have said something much more important than you realise. Or: Yes, that is certainly worth thinking about. Or: You have identified a genuine issue. Or: I must think about this further.

  Imagine Wittgenstein making reference to you in class. As Ede said to me the other day … Or: Peters raised an interesting point with me …

  Imagine walking through the cloisters with Wittgenstein, solving some logical problem together, voices echoing. Or standing on the library steps, exchanging ideas with hushed vehemence. Or walking silently in thought alongside him on the Backs, musing on some great Problem …

  EDE: Wouldn’t it be nice to be brilliant? Philosophically brilliant! Logically brilliant! Wouldn’t you like to show witty brilliance, at least? A brilliance of repartee at the dinner table? Wouldn’t you like to be a savant, who people fear for and look after? Or a drunken genius, who comes into his own in kebab shops at 4 AM?

  We speak of brilliance stumbling as night becomes dawn. Of brilliance passed out in a flowerbed. Of brilliance sick on the cobblestones … Of stray brilliance, wandering from every track …

  We speak of burning yourself up from the effort of thinking. Of being spent from thinking, like an exhausted horse … Of your life being merely the husk of thought, of the effort to think …

  And for Wittgenstein himself to sit at your bedside, as you expired from thought. For Wittgenstein himself to watch over you, mopping your brow, as you died from thought …

  Wednesday evening. Ede tells me about his visit to Wittgenstein.

  He knocked at the door, exactly on the hour, and almost instantly felt watched through the grille. Then the door opened, and there was Wittgenstein. He seemed frail, despite his height, Ede says. Vulnerable.

  Ede felt nervous, he says. A little drunk, though he hadn’t drunk a thing. He thought he was going to say something stupid.

  Wittgenstein asked his usual questions. Ede let out that he was heir to a duchy—he’s not sure why. Wittgenstein nodded. He, too, has known privilege, he said.

  Ede needed the loo. He asked him where the toilet was, and felt vulgar.

  So Ede stood pissing in Wittgenstein’s toilet. He felt he ought to have sat on the toilet to piss, he says. He noticed the dried lavender in a little pot in the bathroom. A tube of Aquafresh beside a toothbrush.

  EDE: Genius uses Aquafresh.

  Ede felt like a dolt through it all, he says. He couldn’t express himself. He couldn’t say anything witty. Anything memorable. But then, there wasn’t much space to speak. It’s Wittgenstein’s show, not yours, Ede says. Wittgenstein’s the star, even if he pretends he isn’t.

  But his rooms really are different from other dons’, Ede says. There’s no wall of leather-bound books. No clutter of collectibles. No kitsch souvenirs as talking points. No bottles of college sherry, one dry and one sweet. No bottles of beer for undergraduates. No shabbiness—no sagging armchairs, no coffee-stained rugs. It’s very clean, very austere.

  EDE: He told me about his hot baths. He boasted about the temperatures he can stand. And he said something about his hatred of carpets. You can’t keep them clean!

  There was a flowering plant on Wittgenstein’s windowsill, in a little pot, Ede says. And he heard the sound of a piano being practised, a couple of floors down. And he caught a glimpse of Wittgenstein’s neatly made
bed, through a half-open door. And he saw the views from Wittgenstein’s rooms, which look out over the red-tiled roofs, towards the river.

  I tell Ede about my visit to Wittgenstein. The same stairs, the grille, the tea, the quiz. Wittgenstein set the tone, and I told him all sorts of silly things. My parents’ farm. My scholarship. My hatred of boarding school. My nostalgia for the hills of Yorkshire, as compared to the flatness of Cambridgeshire. My fruitless search for the so-called Gog Magog Hills in the Cambridgeshire countryside. My poetry …

  EDE: Your poetry! What a sensitive young man you are, Peters.

  ME: He quoted Blake. And Cowper.

  EDE: Yes, yes, but did you get anything interesting out of him?

  ME: He said he doesn’t read philosophy any more. If a book doesn’t make you want to throw it aside and think your own thoughts, what use is it?, he said. And another thing: he has a brother.

  EDE: Really!?

  ME: Yes, he mentioned him in passing. As my brother said of Oxford … Something like that.

  EDE: Very interesting.

  Ede opens his laptop and googles Oxford, coupled with Wittgenstein’s real surname. A news article: Oxford Don Suicide.

  EDE: Very, very interesting—doomed genius. (Then, summarising): The brother was a brilliant young mathematician. A prodigy. Went up to Oxford at fifteen. Finished his doctoral studies at nineteen, when he became a Junior Research Fellow. Took his life at twenty. Well!

  How old is Wittgenstein?, we wonder. Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Definitely a potential suicide, we agree.

  Ede googles logic and suicides, but gets nothing. He googles maths and madness.

  EDE: Cantor sent himself mad, when he was investigating infinity, apparently. Gödel, too—he starved himself to death …

  The framed picture of Descartes on the classroom wall. (A degenerate, Wittgenstein says.) The framed picture of Leibniz. (A monster of thought, Wittgenstein says.)

  The philosopher looks different from other people, Wittgenstein says. The philosopher’s face has secrets. Hiding places. The philosopher is incapable of a simple smile.

  There are no signs of philosophy in our faces, he says, looking round the class. Because we know nothing of fate, he says. Nothing of fatality. We do not understand what it means to be destined.