Spurious - Lars Iyer [13]
We’re off on another trip.—‘How many shirts are you taking?’, asks W. on the phone. Four, I tell him. Four! He says he’ll only take two. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says.—‘You sweat a lot, don’t you, fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking?’ Four, I tell him.—‘Four pairs of pants’, W. muses. He’ll take four as well, he decides, and four pairs of socks.—‘How many pairs of trousers will you take?’, asks W. One, I tell him.—‘One!’, W. says, ‘after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing?’ W.’s going to take two pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.
On the train to Dundee. ‘What are you doing?’, says W. I’m playing Doom on my mobile phone.—‘I haven’t seen you open a book for days’, W. says. Later, I take some gossip magazines out of my bag.—‘Why do you read them?’, says W. ‘Didn’t you bring a book?’ W.’s reading The Star of Redemption again.—‘A proper book!’, he says. ‘I don’t understand it, though’. He shows me unmarked pages. Pages without any annotations, he says, except for question marks, meaning he doesn’t understand, and exclamation marks, meaning he’s totally lost.
‘So what are you reading, then? Who’s that?’ Jordan, the model, I tell him.—‘Who’s that?’ Peter André.—‘Oh yes, I like them, they’re funny’. He laughs at the pictures of grossly obese women on the next page. ‘That’s you in a few years’, he says. ‘When do you think you’re going to get as fat as that? It’s going to happen, isn’t it, the way you’re going?’
‘You need a man bag’, says W., and shows me his. ‘You see? You can fit everything into it. Everything and anything’. His bag sits on his hip, and hangs from a leather strap round his shoulders. He decides we should spend the day before the conference looking for a man bag for me.—‘You need to smarten up’. Rucksacks won’t do. Man bags are the thing.—‘And you should get rid of that jacket’.
‘So, what have you got in your rucksack?’, W. asks. ‘Go on, show me, I could do with a laugh’. I take out another gossip magazine, and then another. He gasps in horror.—‘My God, there’s no hope for you’.
Then some snacks. Nuts, first of all.—‘What kind of nuts are those? Can I have some?’ Then popcorn.—‘Popcorn? No wonder you’re getting fat’. Then pretzels.—‘Where do you think you’re going? Up Everest?’ Then a book.—‘Load of shit! You read too much secondary stuff’. Then my notebook. W. is very pleased with this.—‘Let’s have a look’.
He flips through the pages. Drawings of cocks, of monkey butlers. He’d taken it from me at a presentation in order to formulate his Hebrew question before he asked it.—‘Ah, my Hebrew question! My finest hour!’ He’d quoted from the book of Genesis from memory, in Hebrew, like a real scholar, we both remember that. Something about the tohu vavohu, wasn’t that it?—‘The tohu vavohu’, says W., ‘exactly’.
Then he tosses the notebook aside.—‘So, what thoughts have you had? Tell me. I need entertaining’.
We read the papers. Our stomachs hurt. A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he’s ever felt.—‘Drunk and then ill. Drunk and then ill … That’s your life, isn’t it? How do you do it? How can you live like this?’
What has he got in his man bag?, I ask W.—‘I’ll show you’. He places a large notebook on the desk. In the front, he says, he writes the ideas of others in black ink, and in the back, in red ink, he develops his own ideas.
How many ideas has he had? He opens the notebook for me.—‘Mmm. Quite a few’.—‘Can I copy some out?’ W. says I can. A book must produce more thought than it itself has, I write. The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics, I write. And the best one, It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster—I copy that out, too.
Are those ideas?, I ask him. They’re on the way to ideas, W. says. W. asks