Spurious - Lars Iyer [37]
I am a sullen drinker, W. observes. Not for the whole evening, he admits—not even for most of it, but the time always comes when I refuse to say anything at all and slump down in my chair.—‘That’s when your immense belly becomes visible’, says W., ‘during the slump’. It’s like Moby Dick, says W. Vast and white and rarely seen. But there it is in the slump. It always amazes him, says W. It amazes everyone.
I’m not like him, W. notes, for whom every conversation is on the verge of becoming messianic. W. likes to journey with his interlocutor through the apocalyptic and towards the messianic, he says. He believes in his interlocutor, not like me. He believes in conversation. I’m slumped, drunk and silent at one end of the table, W. says, while he is waiting for the Messiah at the other.
Anyone might be the Messiah, W. says. The Messiah might be me, says one Talmudic commentator.—‘Are you the Messiah?’, W. asks me. Is he? It’s all to do with the logic of relations, W. says, his favourite topic. He is the Messiah for me just as I am the Messiah for him, not because of what each of us is for himself, but because of what we are for the other.
Is he the Messiah? Am I? The Messiah would never wear a shirt like that, W. says. He would never wear the trousers that are flapping round my ankles. The Messiah wouldn’t buy his clothes from Primark, says W., he’s sure of that.
Scholem says that there is a tradition of doubling the figure of the Messiah, W. tells me. The first Messiah belongs to the old world, and to the catastrophe that destroys the old world (messianism always entails catastrophe, W. observes). Every horror of the old world is concentrated in him. He can redeem nothing, and what can he desire but his own annihilation?
But then there is the Messiah ben David in whom all that is new announces itself, and who finally defeats the antichrist. He is the redeemer, W., says. He brings with him the messianic age.
Which one am I, do I think?, says W. Which one is he? He can picture me, W. says, working at my desk, or attempting to work (or at least what I call work), covered in crumbs from the packed lunch I eat four hours early, surrounded by books by Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and by other books that explain Schelling and Rosenzweig and Cohen, and then by still other books with titles like The Idiot’s Guide to Jewish Messianism and Rosenzweig in Sixty Minutes.
He can picture me, he says, hungover as usual, bleary-eyed as usual but full of a vague, stupid hope, with the sense that this time, despite its resemblance to all other times, will be different.
This time it’ll be okay. This time it’ll come good. That’s my messianism, W. says, and it’s all I’ll ever know or understand about messianism, that vague sense that things will be different this time, even as everyone else knows they will be exactly the same.
‘Even you feel it, don’t you, that messianic hope? Even you, like the animals who come out of their burrows after winter, shivering but excited. But do you actually think you’re going to be redeemed?’
W. himself can’t shake it free, that hope, that springtime of the spirit. One day, he feels, he will be able to think. One day, his thoughts will rise as high as the Messiah, the sun in the sky of the future. Oh he knows it’s impossible, he says, he knows he’ll never have an idea, but that’s what the coming of the Messiah must mean: the impossible, which is to say, an idea, an idea that would belong to W.
Is that why he writes?, W. wonders. Is that why he accepts invitations to speak? Is that why the hope is reborn eternally in him that it will be different this time? In the end, that’s what we share, W. decides. A sense that the apocalypse isn’t quite complete, and that there are still grounds for hope.
W. reminds me of the old story of the Messiah who remains hidden with the lepers and beggars at the gate