Spurious - Lars Iyer [35]
That’s from Samuelson’s Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation, W. says. It’s meant to be an explanation of Rosenzweig’s idea of creation. W. says I am endlessly failing to become what I am not. A thinker. A good person. A true friend.
Then he sends me a third, from Mascolo’s Le Communisme, the greatest of all, he says, and to which he attaches no commentary:
One writes neither for the true proletarian, occupied elsewhere, and very well occupied, nor for the true bourgeois starved of goods, and who have not the ears. One writes for the disadjusted, neither proletarian nor bourgeois; that is to say, for one’s friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence.
Outside, half an inch of rendering now covers the back of the kitchen, I tell W. Today I placed my palm on its grey surface. Wet. Everything’s wet, on both sides of the wall. Apparently there’s a gap between two layers of brick. A gap—that’s where the source of the damp is, I know it, I tell W. That’s where it is: dark, wet matter without shape. Matter without light, as there is in dwarf galaxies stripped of gas.
And the damp’s still spreading. There’s still more of the wall to conquer. ‘It’ll be in your living room soon’, says the damp expert. I nod. Yes, it will be everywhere. The flat will be made of damp, and spores will fill every part of the air. And I will breathe the spores and mould will flower inside me. And I’ll live half in water, like a frog.
It is my own catastrophe, I tell W., it’s very close to me. A secret catastrophe, spreading from the gap between the layers of brick. I take people out there, to the kitchen, and run their hands along the wall.—‘Feel it’, I say, ‘it’s alive’. They’re always impressed and disgusted.
W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book. His editor proofread the manuscript several times and sent it out for proofreading. His book looks great, says W., except for the ancient Greek, which looks terrible. The Hebrew is okay, but the ancient Greek looks as though it were drawn by a child. It’s hilarious.
His book is better than him, W. and I agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says. The book seems to stream splendidly above us both. Neither of us can follow it. Ah, the long example of his dog! It’s even better than the sections on children in his previous book! W. says he’s amazed too. How did he manage it?
I’m filling in my esteem indicators, I tell W.—‘Oh yes, what are they?’ He could do with a laugh, says W. ‘How about humiliation indicators? Or soiling yourself indicators?’, says W. ‘Write about the history of your humiliations’, says W. ‘Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that’s what you’ve done’.
I hold my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers slightly too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it were written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says.
‘Once you were happy on your savannah’, W. says. ‘You were happy romping about with the whole horizon before you. What made you think you could read, let alone write? How did you end up mistaking yourself for a writer?
‘Behold the idiot! That’s what your book proclaims’, says W. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go back to your savannah now? Wouldn’t you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?’
Why do I write such bad books?, W. wonders. It’s not even that they’re bad at the level of content, which of course they are. The basics aren’t even in place. The fundamentals.—‘You can’t write’, says W. ‘You’re incapable of placing one word after another’.
Of course, my book was a lesson to him, W. says. His