Lars Iyer - Spurious

• Название: Spurious
• Автор: Lars Iyer
• Издательство: Melville House
• Жанр: Современная проза
• Год: 2011

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about.

Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus… before it is too late. Or, he has to move.

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‘How can you live like this?’, said W. exasperated beyond belief. ‘How?’ I’ve always maintained that this is my five year hole. Everyone should be allowed one of those. Deleuze had one, didn’t he? A five year hole, that’s what he called it, in which he wrote nothing? — ‘But Deleuze was working’, says W., ‘and you don’t do any work, do you? What happened to you? How did you get like this? Why don’t you read anymore? Why don’t you write?’

W. finds the collapse of his protégé quite fascinating. — ‘When did it all start going wrong? When did you first become aware of it?’ There’s something spectacular about my decline, W. decides. Something Faustian. — ‘What kind of bargain did you make with the devil back then? How did you appear so intelligent?’ And then: ‘Well, he’s carried your soul off now, hasn’t he?’

Then, in a spirit of diagnosis: ‘Describe your work day to me. What do you do?’ I tell him I get up very early. — ‘How early?’ Never later than six thirty, I tell him. — ‘I get up at five!’, W. says, ‘Earlier sometimes!’—Then I do two hours of work, I tell him. — ‘What kind of work? What does it involve?’ I read … — ‘What kind of reading? In the original language? Primary, rather than secondary?’ I write … — ‘Ah, that’s your problem. You try to write too soon. You have to slow down. Read more slowly. That’s why I read things in the original’. Then I go to the office to do my administering, I tell W. — ‘Ah, your administration’, says W., ‘that’s what stops you from writing your magnum opus, isn’t it?’

A little later, in the taxi home: ‘Your decline. Where were we? What are your plans? What are you writing?’ Nothing, I tell him. I have no plans. — ‘You should do a book’, says W., ‘if only so I can hear you whine. I like it when you whine in your presentations. Like a stuck pig, crying out! No, it’s more plaintive than that. Like a sad ape. A sad ape locked up with his faeces’.

‘Right, you’re my eyes’, says W., leaving his glasses behind as we set out on our walk. — ‘All set?’ We’re all set. Despite his general inactivity, W. is a great advocate of walking: it’s what we’re made for, he says, and speaks of the long walks he used to take on the weekend.

We’re essentially joyful, reflects W. in the ferry to Mount Edgcumbe, that’s what saves us. We know we’re failures, we know we’ll never achieve anything, but we’re still joyful. That’s the miracle. But why is that? we muse. Why are we content?’—‘Stupidity’, says W. And then: ‘We’re not ambitious. Are you ambitious?’ No, I tell him. — ‘Well neither am I’.

We head up into the grounds, the great sweep of lawn running up to the mansion on our right, opening up a great landscape, planned and planted two hundred years ago. — ‘They must have thought they had all the time in the world’, says W. Then, on our left, a beach of pebbles, the sea, and, across the Sound, the distant city, with blue-grey naval ships going to and fro.

‘See, what more do you want than this?’, says W. Later, rising up into the woods, we sit and look out over the water. There’s a ferry, travelling out to Spain. W.: ‘We should go on a trip, one day. We should go to Spain’. And then: ‘We’re not going to go anywhere, are we? We’re men of habit. Simple beings’. And then, ‘Everything’s got to be the same. That’s our strength’.

The last Duke of Edgcumbe, W. tells me, married a barmaid from the pub, and put the whole estate up for sale. The city bought it. It’s a miracle, we agree, as we walk out along the shore to where the path rises up through the woods.

It was here the Dukes and their guests would drive about in their carriages in the twilight, imagining they were in some Gothic romance. There’s even a faux-ruined folly built on the hill, looking very unconvincing in the autumn sun.

A landslide has taken the woods with it; some trees still stand, growing aslant, though most have fallen. The path has been diverted, but W. prefers the old route. It’s slow going — very overgrown — and where the cliff has completely collapsed, we have to scramble across scree.

What would happen if we fell? It’s a long way down. But W. and I never think about our deaths or anything like that. That would be pure melodrama. Besides, if we died, others would come along to replace us. Our position is structural, we’ve always been convinced of that. We’re only signs or syndromes of some great collapse, and our deaths will be no more significant than those of summer flies in empty rooms.

As we look out to sea, a great shadow seems to move under the water. He can see it, says W. — ‘Look: the kraken of your idiocy’. Yes, there it is, moving darkly beneath the water.

W. is growing his hair, he says. — ‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. It’s the age of Aquarius. — ‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side.

‘The sea makes me happy’, W. says, ‘does it make you happy?’ It does. We stand before the whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcumbe, the far off seabreak with the lighthouse at one end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the farther lighthouse that can be seen standing blue ten miles out against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, shimmeringly blue under the very blue sky: here we are again!

To think it will all end so soon! To think we’re on the edge of the greatest catastrophe! The oceans will boil, the sky will burn away into space. And won’t we be the first to be swept away? Won’t we be the first to go under?

The apocalypse is close, we know that. The apocalypse is coming, of that we are certain …

As we walk towards the lido, W. tells me about the Greek phalanx. The soldiers locked their shields together, he says, to form a great defensive wall. Their bronze-tipped spears would poke out of the front. Together, loyal, they were almost invincible, says W. — ‘Of course you wouldn’t understand any of this’, he says. ‘You’re not loyal. You know nothing of loyalty. You would break the phalanx’, says W. ‘You’d be the first to break it’.

W.’s great fantasy, and he must admit, he says, that it is a fantasy, is of forming a community of writers and thinkers, linked by mutual friendship. Together we’ll be capable of more than we might do on our own. That’s what he’s always hoped, says W. It’s what he’s always dreamt of.

Above all, we have to avoid the traps of careerism, says W. Loyalty and trust, that’s what matters: we have to be prepared to die for one another. — ‘Literally that: to die for one another’, W. says. ‘It’s all about the phalanx’, W. says. ‘The phalanx you would immediately betray’.

That’s the ultimate paradox, W. observes: that one with such faith in friendship should end up with such a friend. Would I die for him? No. Would I immediately betray him, given any opportunity? Yes. In fact, I’ve already done so several times.

Where did it all go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same answer: me. It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.

‘When did you know you were a failure?’, W. repeatedly asks me. ‘When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own — not one’?

He asks me these questions, W. says, because he’s constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He’s not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.

What amazes him still further, says W., is that I am almost entirely lacking in the same amazement. I’m like the idiot double of an idiot, W. says, being of the same intelligence (or nearly the same intelligence; I am a few IQ points behind him), of the same degree of laziness (or nearly the same laziness; I am more indolent than he is), but entirely lacking an awareness of what I so signally lack.

Every year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. It amuses W., who knows I will never escape and nor will he. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like everybody else’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism. And what was it last year? It was music, wasn’t it? I was going to become a great scholar of music.

But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music? — ‘Nothing at all’, says W., ‘about either subject’. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music? — ‘None at all!’, says W. ‘Not one bit!’

There’s no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I’m stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?

W. has been lost in bureaucracy, he says on the phone. He tells me about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been. — ‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When W. was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, he says.

In W.’s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it’s the key to great thoughts, he says, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that.

Still, he’s disappointed that not one thought has come to him, not one, especially as it would pertain to the great crises that have gripped the world. He always thinks one might. It worked for Kafka, didn’t it? And what about Blanchot? But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

We’re off on another trip. — ‘How many shirts are you taking?’, asks W. on the phone. Four, I tell him. Four! He says he’ll only take two. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says. — ‘You sweat a lot, don’t you, fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking?’ Four, I tell him. — ‘Four pairs of pants’, W. muses. He’ll take four as well, he decides, and four pairs of socks. — ‘How many pairs of trousers will you take?’, asks W. One, I tell him. — ‘One!’, W. says, ‘after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing?’ W.’s going to take two pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.

On the train to Dundee. ‘What are you doing?’, says W. I’m playing Doom on my mobile phone. — ‘I haven’t seen you open a book for days’, W. says. Later, I take some gossip magazines out of my bag. — ‘Why do you read them?’, says W. ‘Didn’t you bring a book?’ W.’s reading The Star of Redemption again. — ‘A proper book!’, he says. ‘I don’t understand it, though’. He shows me unmarked pages. Pages without any annotations, he says, except for question marks, meaning he doesn’t understand, and exclamation marks, meaning he’s totally lost.

‘So what are you reading, then? Who’s that?’ Jordan, the model, I tell him. — ‘Who’s that?’ Peter André.—‘Oh yes, I like them, they’re funny’. He laughs at the pictures of grossly obese women on the next page. ‘That’s you in a few years’, he says. ‘When do you think you’re going to get as fat as that? It’s going to happen, isn’t it, the way you’re going?’

‘You need a man bag’, says W., and shows me his. ‘You see? You can fit everything into it. Everything and anything’. His bag sits on his hip, and hangs from a leather strap round his shoulders. He decides we should spend the day before the conference looking for a man bag for me. — ‘You need to smarten up’. Rucksacks won’t do. Man bags are the thing. — ‘And you should get rid of that jacket’.

‘So, what have you got in your rucksack?’, W. asks. ‘Go on, show me, I could do with a laugh’. I take out another gossip magazine, and then another. He gasps in horror. — ‘My God, there’s no hope for you’.

Then some snacks. Nuts, first of all. — ‘What kind of nuts are those? Can I have some?’ Then popcorn. — ‘Popcorn? No wonder you’re getting fat’. Then pretzels. — ‘Where do you think you’re going? Up Everest?’ Then a book. — ‘Load of shit! You read too much secondary stuff’. Then my notebook. W. is very pleased with this. — ‘Let’s have a look’.

He flips through the pages. Drawings of cocks, of monkey butlers. He’d taken it from me at a presentation in order to formulate his Hebrew question before he asked it. — ‘Ah, my Hebrew question! My finest hour!’ He’d quoted from the book of Genesis from memory, in Hebrew, like a real scholar, we both remember that. Something about the tohu vavohu, wasn’t that it? — ‘The tohu vavohu’, says W., ‘exactly’.

Then he tosses the notebook aside. — ‘So, what thoughts have you had? Tell me. I need entertaining’.

We read the papers. Our stomachs hurt. A few days in my company, says W., and he feels iller than he’s ever felt. — ‘Drunk and then ill. Drunk and then ill … That’s your life, isn’t it? How do you do it? How can you live like this?’

What has he got in his man bag? I ask W. — ‘I’ll show you’. He places a large notebook on the desk. In the front, he says, he writes the ideas of others in black ink, and in the back, in red ink, he develops his own ideas.

How many ideas has he had? He opens the notebook for me. — ‘Mmm. Quite a few’.—‘Can I copy some out?’ W. says I can. A book must produce more thought than it itself has, I write. The messianic is the conjunction of time and politics, I write. And the best one, It might be better to speak of a negative eschatology. Anticipation of the future as disaster—I copy that out, too.

Are those ideas? I ask him. They’re on the way to ideas, W. says. W. asks to see my notes. — ‘What’s this drawing of a cock supposed to mean?’

Next, W. takes out The Star of Redemption. — ‘I don’t understand a word. Not — a—word. I don’t suppose you can help me, either’. Next, he sets down a packet of moisturising wipes. What else? — ‘Nothing else. But I’ve got room for everything in my man bag’. I tell W. his man bag is very continental. — ‘Oh yes, I’ll bet Rosenzweig had one. And Kafka’.

Before beginning to give our collaborative presentations, W. and I always dab our wrists and then the skin behind our ears with moisturising wipes. It calms you down, W. says. It prepares you for the task ahead. He takes his wipes everywhere with him. — ‘I learned it from Sal. You see — this is what women can teach you’.