Spurious - Lars Iyer [45]
It’s all over, it’s all finished. This is the interregnum. A little reprieve, an Indian summer. But we’re deep into autumn, and winter is coming—or should that be the other way round? Deep into spring—a new kind of spring, a boiling spring—and a summer will come that will burn away everything.
Maybe it will come later, after we’re dead. Maybe sooner—tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But in another sense, it’s already come; it’s spread its cloak around us. We’re men of the End, of the Very End. We’re men of the Disaster, which no one else knows but us. Which no one else feels. Drink, drink, we have to drink. We unscrew the top of our gin bottle as the train rolls out of the station …
These are the End Times, but who knows it but us? No one. We’re quite alone with our knowledge, which is really a kind of feeling. We’re on our own, we decide. That’s what we have in common: a sense of the apocalypse. A sense that the time has come, and these are the days of our Judgement.
We’ll be found wanting, we know that. We two above all—we’re terribly guilty. What’s to become of us—of us in particular? No one believes in us. No one listens. We’re out on a limb—terribly far—and we’re sawing it off. We’ll fall off the edge of the world. We are falling—who believes us? Who believes in us?
These are our thoughts on the train that rushes through the night. We’re drinking gin with great determination. We have to drink!, drink! until we can no longer say the word, Messiah. That’s our punishment, and we must be punished. This is what it has come to, here in the dark, rushing forward …
What place do we have in the world? None. Where’s it all going? To perdition. To desolation, and to the abomination of desolation. And are we going with it? All the way! That’s where we’re heading now with our gin and our apocalypticism, full speed into the night.
Messianism has driven us mad, or half mad, we decide. What else have we been thinking about? What else has driven us through our reading and writing? We’ll be glad when it’s over: but when will it be over? There’s no sign yet. Messianism hasn’t finished with us.
We’re fated in some way. We’re circling round and round what we cannot possibly understand. And isn’t that why we’re drawn to it? Isn’t that the lure? You cannot understand this idea. You’ll never understand it, not today, not tomorrow. But the day after that?, we ask. The day after tomorrow?
That’s our faith: it’s not faith in the Messiah, but that we might be brought into the vicinity of the idea of the Messiah; that a little of its light might reach us. The Messiah: isn’t he forever beyond us, just beyond? We’ve always just missed him. We missed the appointment …
Wasn’t he supposed to arrive here, now? Not today, and not even tomorrow. But the idea of the Messiah: might we reach that? Is there something left of his passing, some trace—some sign? The day after tomorrow: that’s when it will reach us, if it does: the idea of the Messiah.
But won’t it have been too late? Won’t the page have already been turned? But perhaps that’s what it means: the idea can burn only for those who cannot see it, who have already gone under. It’s on the other side of the mirror, although all they can see are their own stupid faces.
And what do we see, in the reflective surface of the train windows? Whose faces are those behind the glass?—‘My God, look at us’, says W. ‘Look what we’ve become’.
The water taxi to Mount Batten. We’re in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck.—‘Poseidon must be angry’, says W. as the surf splashes over us. W.’s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he’s begun? The sixth? It’s the aorist that defeats him, he says. Every time.
It’s choppy!—‘We should libate the sea’, says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It’s because the mountains are salty and the sea