Spurious - Lars Iyer [21]
Then there’s the leak below the house, I tell W. You can hear the water streaming. The plumber said it might be spraying up into the walls, and that that might be the cause of the damp. It’s like acid, the plumber said, it’s eating the brick away. I should do something about it.—‘Can you hear it?’, he said, turning off the stopcock, and going up to the flat above mine to turn off their stopcock. ‘Well, can you?’ And he’s right. There’s a great streaming, a rushing. Water somewhere close and rushing, spraying up into the wall and rotting it from within.
The plumber pitied me so much I had to press money on him, I tell W. He didn’t want to take it. He’d never seen anything like it, he said, standing, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed hypnotised. He wouldn’t leave, but just stood there, looking. And even when he went out the front door, he was still shaking his head.—‘Howay, it’s terrible, man’.
Meanwhile, I throw out my pots and pans, which are rusting in the kitchen. Nothing is salvageable. The tins in the cupboards rust into the shelves. The washing powder box has liquefied. The walls, once a new, replastered sand, have turned deep brown, and in places, green. All along the window ledge: deep green. What horror! And small snails sometimes fall through the hole in the ceiling, I tell W., but I don’t mind that.
And there’s mildew, mildew everywhere, spreading, its spores drifting through the air. Perhaps I’ll become tubercular, I tell W., and that will be the making of a true European intellectual. But in truth, when I cough—and I do have a hacking cough that won’t leave me—it drives the few thoughts I have from my head, I tell him. W., who is also ill, is likewise disappointed with his cough. He’s just ill, he says, and it doesn’t help with his thinking.
These are truly the last days, W. says, over honey beer in Cawsands. How long do we have left?—‘Oh, not long. We’re fucked, everything’s fucked’. This as we look out to sea.—‘But we’re essentially joyful’, says W., ‘that’s what will save us’. And then, ‘Actually, it won’t—we’re too stupid. We’ll be the first to go under’.
Where did it all go wrong?, muses W. We both know the answer: literature! If only we understood mathematics! If only we were mathematically inclined!
W. has books about maths, and every year he tries to read them.—‘I can never do differential equations’, he says. It’s like Greek: every year he tries to learn the language, but falls at the aorist.—‘The aorist breaks me every time’, says W. We list the names of our friends who are mathematically inclined, and sigh.—‘They’ll amount to something’, says W., ‘we won’t’.
But what we do have, says W., is joy. We are essentially joyful. I agree.—‘We are content with very little’, W. says, ‘it doesn’t take much to keep us happy’. The inane are happy, we agree. We are quite content, as idiots are.—‘I think that’s what you’ve given me’, says W., ‘idiocy’.
We’ve always known our limitations, W. and I agree, which is very different from accepting them. In fact, our entire lives have been concerned with not accepting our limitations, and battering ourselves against them like moths against a window.
Our limitations fascinate us, we agree. From the first, we aimed ourselves against them, in defiance not of the world that expected something from us, but of our own expectations.
Of what did we think we were capable? From whence came that ferocity of hope? Ours is a very pure kind of idiocy, we agree. We’re idiots, we agree, idiots who do not quite understand the depths of their idiocy. We’re mystics of the idiotic, we