Spurious - Lars Iyer [16]
‘What about you?’, W. asks. ‘Where do you write your thoughts?’ I tell him I’m too troubled to think. W. says he’s troubled too, who isn’t? But neither of us really is troubled, W. says. He always thinks of us as joyful, he says.
Drunk in the sun, we offer encomiums to one another. I never make him feel anything other than joyful, says W. I tell him he is able to momentarily make me forget my troubles and that this is his great gift.
W. and I are celebrants of rivers, and always feel the need to hail them.—‘The mighty Tyne!’, W. might say, and I might say, ‘the mighty Plym!’ The sight of a river is always an occasion. So, of course, is that of the sea. It’s the ozone, says W., it makes you feel alive.
It does, and in particular the view of the sheet of the sea, just past Exeter. The whole sheet of the sea, viewed from the train, neat Plymouth Gin and ice in our plastic cups.—‘This is happiness’, says W. Of course, they’ll have to reroute the trains soon. They’re electrical and short circuit when the surf splashes over them. Sometimes they stop for hours, immobile on the track.—‘It’s the new trains’, says W. ‘They’re shit’.
W.’s felt ill nearly all his adult life, he says. When was the last time he felt well?, I ask him. He can’t remember.—‘It’s been years’, he says suddenly. ‘Years!’ He used to go for great walks on the moors, he remembers. That’s when he last felt healthy: on his great weekend walks, when he would set off with his walking friend (whatever happened to him?) with no particular end in view. They’d just walk for miles across the moors.
There’s nothing better, he says, than to climb up to the moors, and see the blue strip of the sea in the distance. Are there really big cats up there, panthers and the like? He never saw any, he says. There might be. But his moor walks are long since over. He lacks something, W. says. There’s something missing in him. Why doesn’t he go on his great moor walks any more?, he wonders, as we look out to sea.
It’s important to hail rivers, we both agree, but just as important to hail the sea, although we do not do so by name. We do not, for instance, hail the sea south of Edinburgh as the North Sea, or the sea south of Exeter as the Atlantic (is it the Atlantic?, I ask W. It is, he says.). A simple, ‘The sea!’ is enough. Just as when we see the edge of the moor on our train journeys in Devon, we cry, ‘The moor!’
Ah, the moor! W. is feeling regretful again. How can he become a better person, a better friend? How might he become a better thinker? His life is full of regret, he says, and gets out his Cohen. He’s going to read now, he tells me, and I’ll have to entertain myself.
On the train, W. and I sip Plymouth Gin from plastic cups.—‘How come you got more ice than me?’ He reaches over and grabs a handful of mine.
Meanwhile, his book lies unread on the table.—‘Cohen’, sighs W., ‘that’s what I should be reading, instead of talking idiocies with you’.
Then he tells me about calculus and God.—‘Calculus: that’s why Cohen thought God existed. It’s all about maths!’ W.’s dad tried to teach him calculus, but he didn’t understand a word.—‘I wasn’t ready’. W.’s found an instructional website now. He does exercises.
A little later he says, ‘We’re not religious. We’ve got no interest in religion. We’re not capable of religious belief’.
We know what genius is, says W. aphoristically, but we know we’re not geniuses. It’s a gift, he says, but it’s also a curse. We can recognise genius in others, but we don’t have it ourselves.
Max Brod, so unselfish in his promotion of Kafka, yet so given to a vague and general pathos—to amorphous stirrings wholly alien to the precision of the writing of his friend—has always served as both our warning and our example.
What could he understand of Kafka? Weren’t his interpretative books—which did so much to popularise the work of his friend—at every turn, a betrayal of Kafka? But then again, didn’t