Spurious - Lars Iyer [31]
Has he had any thoughts from his illness?—‘None’. Has his new book advanced any further?—‘No’. Has he written our joint abstract?—‘No again’. And what of my news?, he asks me. I tell him of my plans, my new schemes.—‘Every year a new stupidity! It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?’, says W. ‘What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you?’
I’m at my most idealistic at the start of the year, W. notes, whereas he’s at his most gloomy. ‘Idiocy protects you’, he says. He reminds me of my great follies in the past.—‘Do you remember your Hindu period? Your plans to learn Sanskrit and become a scholar of Hinduism?’ And then there were my plans to learn music theory and become a scholar of music. We both marvel at them. ‘What’s it to be this year?’, says W., ‘go on, I need a laugh’.
The new year! It’s always the same! New ideas! New follies! But W. is ill, and has no plans. Bottles of urine everywhere, hair and nails uncut, scrabbling through piles of unfinished writing, he staggers through the day.
W. is ill and so am I. But W. will never believe I am as ill as he is. I haven’t moved from my sofa in three days; he hasn’t moved from his in a week. I’ve done little but watch DVDs; he hasn’t been able to muster the concentration necessary to watch a film. I’ve lost my appetite, but W. has forgotten he ever had an appetite. And above all, I’m capable of writing, I’ve lost my appetite, whereas W. hasn’t touched a keyboard for a week. Even my illnesses are affectations, W. says.
‘You don’t know what it means to be ill, night and day. Like Kafka. Like Blanchot’, says W. W.’s illness is grand, mine is petty. His draws him closer to the masters, mine only reveals how far from them I have always been.—‘What amazes me’, says W., ‘is that they could ever write a line’. W., in his illness, can write nothing.
Colds come from China, says W. They spread west across the mountains and the steppes. It’s a tremendous journey. From China to Plymouth, but a cold’s reached him nonetheless, although he calls it a flu, since he’s always been prone to exaggeration.
W. was impressed at my recent depression. ‘It’s a sign of your seriousness’, he says, ‘or that even an idiot like you cannot escape seriousness’. These are desperate times, says W., even I must have a sense of that.
W.’s always admired my whining, ‘like a sad chimp, at the limits of its intelligence’, but my depression has taken me beyond that, hasn’t it? ‘You were silent for once’, W. says. I didn’t ring him, or respond to emails … No chatter from me: that’s when he knew things were really bad, W. says.
Of course we’re never really depressed, W. says. We know nothing about real depression. We’re men of the surface, not of the depths. What do we know of those blocks and breaks in the lives of real thinkers? What can we, who are incapable of thought, understand of what the inability to think means for a thinker? And what of real writer’s block—what understanding can we have of that terrible incapacity to write a line for those who have thoughts to set down?
We’re melancholic, that W. grants. Who wouldn’t be? Melancholic, vaguely rueful, knowing we should not be where we are, that we’ve been allowed too much, overindulged … And for what? With what result?
True thoughts pass infinitely far above us, as in the sky. They’re too far to reach, but they’re out there somewhere. Some place where we are not. Some great, wide place where thoughts are born like clouds over mountains.
It’s all our fault, isn’t it? The whole thing is our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything. Yes, we’re responsible. We’re resigned to it: we’re not just part of the problem, we are the problem.
The road is blocked—our road, everyone’s road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the