Spurious - Lars Iyer [42]
W.’s tired of listing my affects. How many have we got? Eight general categories, I tell him. He looks around.—‘Oh fuck it, that will do’.
W. feels ill from all the drinking, he says. Last night, we had a bottle of red wine, then beer, then we drank Tequila from the bottle. Then we finished off the bottle of Plymouth Gin, then a bottle of Cava and then a bottle of Chablis. It was a good Chablis, wasn’t it? W. says he was in no position to appreciate it. He wants some aspirin, he says.—‘And how are you feeling?’, he asks me. Fine, I tell him. Better than usual.—‘Any thoughts?’ Not one.
We head out to the coast for the day, and eat fish and chips on the Fish Quay. We wander through the deserted markets. It’s a melancholy sight. There’s a special kind of melancholy to the quayside, W. and I agree. What is it? The sense that it’s all over, it’s all finished, and a whole civilisation has come to an end, which in fact it has.
We watch the big seagulls strutting about, and the pigeons.—‘What do you feel about pigeons?’, W. asks me. The Romans brought them to England to eat. They crowd on his window ledge every morning, W. says, cooing and flapping their wings. What miserable birds! He prefers the seagulls, of course. They remind him of the sea, he says, and he loves the sea.
On one side of us, the Tyne broadens as it reaches its end; on the other, a passenger ferry at the dock, ready to disembark for Norway. Should we go to Norway?, W, wonders. Would they make sense of us there?
‘Your problem is that you fear empty time’, says W. as we head back to the city. ‘That’s why you don’t think’. And then: ‘Thought must come as a surprise, when you least expect it’.
Thought, when it comes, always surprises him, says W. But he’s ready with his notebook, he says, which he keeps in his man bag. That’s why I need a man bag, he says, in case thought surprises me. But I fear the empty time which makes thought possible, says W., so I don’t need a man bag.
The next morning, W.’s flight is cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat for another day and night. This place is a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.
When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge.—‘You’ve never felt beatitude’, says W. ‘You’re not capable of it’.
W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious.—‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.
W. says The Ethics is the only book he’s ever thought is completely right.—‘It’s the opposite of your flat’, says W. ‘God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Half your lights, for example. Your kitchen. Your TV. Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittiest thing they have?’, says W. ‘Nothing ever changes for you, does it? There’s no movement forward’.
W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore.—‘You have to read in the original language’, he says. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know anything about that’. Next he’ll refresh his Greek.
W. recalls our Greek lessons, he on sabbatical, me a young student.—‘You seemed intelligent then, full of promise’. Of course, I was no such thing, he realised quickly. W. and the others had the answer book and used to crib from its translations in advance. They liked to watch me squirm with my exercises.—‘Your idiocy was spectacular’, says W. ‘Omoi!, that’s was all you could say. Omoi!, omoi!, like a wounded bull’.
For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus.—‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz—or Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza.—‘Ah, The Ethics’, he sighs. ‘Beatitude!’, he sighs.
The damp, I say to W. That’s my apocalypse. Does he know