Spurious - Lars Iyer [30]
Conversation! All real conversation is messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said—quite the contrary, but the fact that it is said at all, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that?—‘You’re conversationally lazy’, W. says. ‘You can’t be bothered, it’s obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights’.
For his part, W. is never happier than when he is pressing a conversation towards the messianic. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life-changing. That’s what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I’d have no sense of that.
Every conversation must be driven through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, that’s W.’s principle; the shared sense that it’s all at an end, it’s all finished. He loves nothing better than conversations of this kind, W. says, when everything’s at stake, when everything that could be said is said.
That’s when messianism begins, W. says. You have to wear out speech, to run it down. And then? And then, W. says, inanity begins, reckless inanity. The whole night opens up. You have to drink a great deal to get there. It’s an art. The Poles have it, W. says. They understand what it is to drink through the whole night. And that’s what the Hungarians are doing in the bars in Béla Tarr films, W. says. Steadily, patiently, they’re drinking their way through the night.
All drunks have something of the Messiah about them, W. says. They speak a lot, for one thing. They feel they’re on the verge of something, some great truth. He does when he drinks, W. says. Once he starts drinking, says W., he can never stop, it’s quite impossible.
It’s because of the faith it gives him, says W. It’s because of what drinking reveals: the whole night, the apocalypse, but also the patience to get through the apocalypse, to dream of the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might get better again.
The whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.
The smell is overwhelming. I feel faint, I tell W. on the phone. The other day I went outside to look at the kitchen wall. Naked brick, exposed. I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out the stuff between the bricks. But it was the brick itself that started to come off, I tell W. The brick itself, rotting as I touched it. It’s wet and runny, I tell him. It comes off on your nails as you scrape it.
Inside, I tell him, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then—in another hour, or two more—pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same clammy brow it was before the drying.
But still I watch, I tell W. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is the wall drying out? Has it begun to dry out?, I ask myself like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time—today I thought I’d lose my voice, I tell W. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I approach the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.
W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. – ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill’. I ask