Spurious - Lars Iyer [11]
A little later, in the taxi home: ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ Nothing, I tell him. I have no plans.—‘You should do a book’, says W., ‘if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces’.
‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk.—‘All set?’ We’re all set. Despite his general inactivity, W. is a great advocate of walking: it’s what we’re made for, he says, and speaks of the long walks he used to take on the weekend.
We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle. But why is that?, we muse. Why are we content?’—‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ No, I tell him.—‘Well neither am I’.
We head up into the grounds, the great sweep of lawn running up to the mansion on our right, opening up a great landscape, planned and planted two hundred years ago.—‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, says W. Then, on our left, a beach of pebbles, the sea, and, across the Sound, the distant city, with blue-grey naval ships going to and fro.
‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out over the water. There’s a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: ‘We should go on a trip, one day. We should go to Spain’. And then: ‘We’re not going to go anywhere, are we? We’re men of habit. Simple beings’. And then, ‘Everything’s got to be the same. That’s our strength’.
The last Duke of Edgcumbe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and put the whole estate up for sale. The city bought it. It’s a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up through the woods.
It was here the Dukes and their guests would drive about in their carriages in the twilight, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There’s even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, looking very unconvincing in the autumn sun.
A landslide has taken the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing aslant, though most have fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It’s slow going—very overgrown—and where the cliff has completely collapsed, we have to scramble across scree.
What would happen if we fell? It’s a long way down. But W. and I never think about our deaths or anything like that. That would be pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that. We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.
As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W.—‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy’. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.
W. is growing his hair, he says.—‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. It’s the age of Aquarius.—‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side.
‘The sea makes me happy’, W. says, ‘does it make you happy?’ It does. We stand before the whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcumbe, the far off seabreak with the lighthouse at one end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the farther lighthouse that can be seen standing blue ten miles out against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, shimmeringly blue under the very blue sky: here we are