Spurious - Lars Iyer [36]
W.’s reading the notes he took ten years ago.—‘They’re better than anything I could do now’, he says, sending me them. I agree: they are good. ‘I had no girlfriend, barely any work, no television, and above all, no friend called Lars …’ But didn’t W. credit me with freeing him to write? Didn’t I save him from years of writer’s block? All I taught him was shamelessness, W. says. Compromise and half measures—that’s all I taught him.
W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism.
When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known—his name and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery—would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.
A generation later, the second Rabbi—his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life—confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers’. What he wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi—whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure—went to the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient’. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi—his name is well known, and he lived as we do—faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done’. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.
There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot—well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too, were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was upon the fate of Jordan and Peter André. He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.
The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps, I tell W. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. Where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. Dirt from the ceiling crumbles over everything. And it’s so cold, so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.
Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it’s soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it’s sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mould is growing. You can’t rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.
I went out there again just now to remind myself, I tell W. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is that wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I’m breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink—is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There’s something brown. Something wrong. There’s a new process beginning on the wall, I tell W. Something horrible.
You can’t be alone to experience the Messiah, W. says. Not really. And you can’t be sober. The Messiah is drunk, says W. Or he’s what drunkenness allows. Anyone can be the Messiah when he’s drunk, W. says. Of course, he might not know it. W.