Spurious - Lars Iyer [8]
‘What have you done today?’, W. asks me. ‘How do you actually spend your time?’ Weeks and months and years pass, but I seem to do nothing, W. says. ‘What have you read? What have you written, and why haven’t you sent me any of it?’
‘Friends should send each other what they write’, W. says. He sends me everything—everything, and I barely even read it. He doesn’t know why he thanked me in the acknowledgements of his new book, he says. I tell him I was surprised to find myself thanked as part of a long list of friends and colleagues. Didn’t I single him out in my acknowledgements for very special thanks?
W. says I didn’t even read the chapters he sent to me. He could tell: my remarks were too general. I did read them, I tell him, well, nearly all of them.—‘You didn’t read chapter five’, says W., ‘with the dog’. He was very proud of his pages on his dog, even though he doesn’t own a dog. ‘You should always include a dog in your books’, says W.
It’s a bit like his imaginary children in his previous book, W. says.—‘Do you remember the passages on children?’ Even W. wept. He weeps now to think of them. He’s very moved by his own imaginary examples, he says.
He wants to work a nun into his next book, he says. An imaginary nun, the kindest and most gentle person in the world.
What we lack in intellectual ability and real knowledge, we make up for in pathos, W. says.
He’s learnt everything he knows about pathos from me, he says. He can make himself weep at the pathos of his writing. I must be constantly weeping, W. says, night and day, since my writing is based only on pathos and has virtually no other content.
Yes, I am a pathetic thinker, W. says, if I can be called a thinker at all. Of course, so is he. He learned it from me. In its way, it’s quite impressive—the way everything I say is marked with urgency, as though it were the last thing I will ever say! As though I were going to expire at any moment!
Then there’s the way I raise my voice in my presentations, reaching great bellowing crescendos entirely arbitrarily, W. says. They bear no relation to what I’m actually saying. And then I like to go all quiet, too, don’t I?, W. says. All hushed! As if I’d drawn everyone back to the dawn of creation! As if something momentous were about to happen!
All in all, it’s always an amazing performance from me, W. says. I always look as though I want to start a cult. Schwärmerei, W. says, that’s what marks everything I write. It means swarm and enthusiasm, W. says. I’m one of the enthusiasts that Kant hated. It’s all Schwärmerei with me, isn’t it?, W. says.
Sometimes he thinks it’s because I’m working class. I can’t get over the idea someone is actually listening to me, W. says, that I have an audience. Which, come to think of it, is rather extraordinary. I think I’m speaking to people better than me, more refined. Which is, of course, almost always true. I hate them and I love them, W. says; I want only their approval, but at the same time I don’t want it; it’s the last thing I want.
W. has his pathetic moments, he admits. Sometimes he feels the Schwärmerei rising in his breast. Sometimes his voice begins to climb the decibels. But then he knows that I am to follow him, and who will notice his excesses then? I make audiences flinch, he says. I make them twitch in involuntary horror. All that Schwärmerei! All that pathos!
It’s our great fortune to live at the periphery, W. and I agree. He feels an enormous love for his city in the southwest and I feel an enormous love for my city in the northeast. Conversely, I am always overjoyed to visit his city just as he is always overjoyed to visit mine. There’s nothing better than visiting a city at the periphery, W. says, just as there’s nothing worse than visiting a city at the centre (although, he grants, there are peripheries to every centre).
And there is our own peripheriness, W. and I agree. We are essentially peripheral. Who is threatened by us? Who bothers with us? No one, we agree. We have