Spurious - Lars Iyer [22]
Idiocy, that’s what we have in common. Our friendship is founded upon our limitations, we agree, and doesn’t travel far from them.
We’re full of joy, W. says as we walk back from the supermarket, that’s what saves us. Why do we find our failings so amusing? But it does save us, we agree on that; it’s our gift to the world. We are content with very little: look at us, with a frozen chicken in a bag, and some herbs and spices, walking home in the sun. The gift of laughter, I say.—‘The gift of idiocy’, says W.
‘These are truly the last days …’ W. is making me listen to Godspeed’s Dead Flag Blues again. ‘Shut up and listen’. He plays this to the students, he says. And he makes them watch Béla Tarr. That’s what he calls teaching, he says.
The last days! What are we going to do?—‘We’ll be the first to go under’, says W., ‘we’re weak. Gin?’ Yes to gin, no to the apocalypse. What time is it? Already late, though you can never be sure in the shuttered living room.
Rosenzweig wrote the entirety of The Star of Redemption on postcards to his mother, W. says. All of it, every line, from the Macedonian front, where he was fighting. Admittedly, there wasn’t much to do at the Macedonian front—that’s not where the big battles were, but nevertheless. An entire book! Written on postcards! One after another! To his mother!, W says.
Rosenzweig! He’s the measure of all things to us. The measure of commitment (he meant every word!). The measure of religiosity. The measure of integrity. He turned his back on the university!, says W. He devised a new form of educational institution! He taught young Jews … He lived what he thought. He acted on what he thought, which is inconceivable to us now (as is even the capacity to think).
Rosenzweig is our guiding star, burning brightly above everything. He’s our inspiration. Ah, if only we could write like him, wholly in declamations! If only we could let our thought flash out in sentences like bolts of lightning!
Imagine him, Rosenzweig, at the Macedonian front, says W., shells falling around him. Imagine him in the trenches (were there any trenches in Macedonia?) propped up against a dirt wall, writing another postcard to his mother.
Dear mother, he would write, and then off he’d go, W. says. Dear mother, and then he’d write his thoughts about God or death or Judaism horizontally, in the space left for you to write, and then vertically, as they used to do in the nineteenth century.
He might die at any moment! A shell might fall and explode then and there! But he’s writing horizontally, then vertically and then slantwise across his postcard. Death was very close to him. And not just his death, but the death of everyone and everything, the death of old Europe. Didn’t Rosenzweig above all understand the apocalypse? And didn’t he understand how the messianic idea must be thought from within the apocalypse?
By the time The Star of Redemption was published, he’d already left the university, W. says. He’d left it behind! He’d founded a new kind of establishment.—‘He was educating young Jews’, says W. ‘Including Kafka. Did you know he taught Kafka?’, W. says. ‘Well he did. Rosenzweig taught Kafka. Which is quite extraordinary, when you think about it. Kafka and Rosenzweig, in the same room as one another, teacher and pupil’.
Thought!, cries W. What does it mean to think? Why can’t we think? Why are we so singularly incapable of thinking? We cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, he says, but we’re not thinkers. We’ve failed at the level of thought.
He knows they’re out there, W. says, real thinkers. He knows how natural it is for them, how they glide through the milieu of thinking like whales through deep water. It’s effortless! It’s as natural as breathing! They’re used to thought, they’re fully confident of their ability to think, which might as well be God-given.
They can’t help it! They couldn’t do otherwise! Thought is their element, their milieu, we agree, just as idiocy is our element