Spurious - Lars Iyer [2]
I remind W. of his photo album. Photos of the young W., happy in Canada, with his family, who are likewise happy, and then photos of W. in England. The fall, W. calls it. The move, says W., that’s when the disaster happened. His parents brought them back to England, to Wolverhampton, of all places.—‘Wolverhampton!’ says W., ‘can you imagine!’ Ah, what he might have been, had he stayed in Canada!, he sighs.
W. is lost in a Canadian reverie. They had a dog which was half wolf, he tells me, and she would follow him on his paper round, leading him by the arm.—‘She took my hand in her mouth and led me, it was amazing. She never barked. And when we left, she starved herself to death, because she missed us so much. That’s loyalty’.
Above all, W. admires loyalty. Sal’s loyal, he says. She’s loyalty itself, just as he is. You’re not loyal, W. always insists. You’d break the phalanx. You’d betray me—for a woman. He insists on this. When have I betrayed him in the past?—‘You will betray me’, says W., ‘I’m certain of it’.
Canada. Betrayed, I write in my notebook.
Kafka’s our spiritual leader, W. and I agree over cocktails in the Münsterplatz. He’s gone the furthest, we agree. But we need more immediate leaders, too. W.: ‘We’re stupid, we need to be led’. Didn’t we long ago decide we could redeem ourselves only by creating opportunities for those more capable than ourselves?—‘It’s our gift’, says W., ‘we know we’re stupid, but we also know what stupidity is not’.
We ought to throw ourselves at their feet and ask them to forgive us. We always stop short of this, of course. We have to remember not to tell them, each of them, that they are our new leader. It would only frighten them off, W. says. No one should ever know he or she is our leader, we agree. Only we should know. And we should follow them in secret.
In truth, we have found several leaders. Our first leader was always an example to W. and me.—‘I’m not very interesting’, he always insisted, ‘but my … thoughts are interesting’. My … thoughts! We were particularly impressed by the way he said it. My … thoughts … It was as though there were an infinite distance between those words. As though he had nothing to do with his thoughts! As though they had him and not the other way round! He felt a kind of moral duty to his thoughts, we remember. It was as though his life was only a receptacle for something infinitely more important.
‘He was completely serious’, W. remembers, ‘not like us’. Completely serious! And there was a kind of lightness in that seriousness, he remembers, as though thinking were a kind of beatitude. What will we ever know of the infinite lightness of thought? W. wonders. Of thought’s laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker touched with thought?
But then the disaster happened, W. remembers. We told him, didn’t we? We told him he was our leader. We told him what we hoped he’d make us become. We told him of our hopes and fears … That’s where it all went wrong, we agree. We scared him off. After that, we resolved never to tell our leaders that they were our leaders, but we couldn’t help it.
Didn’t the same thing happen with our second leader? Ah, our second leader! He had an absolute lucidity when he spoke of the interlacing of his life and thought, we agree. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, W. says. How frankly and absolutely he spoke of his thoughts, and to anyone who asked! Frankly and absolutely, as though life were a glass to look through and not to live! Or that life was lived at another level, where thinking, real thought, was possible!—‘A level of which we have no conception