Lars Iyer's Blog, page 62

Vanessa Palmiero reviews the Italian version of Spurious at Flaneri. 

He had a very strange dream the other night,
W. says. The two of us were on trial for something serious – what, he didn’t
know. The courtroom was deserted, W. says. There was no judge there to bang the
gavel. No defence team, no prosecution. No policemen. But we were guilty, we
knew we were. We’d found ourselves guilty...

‘Has our time come?’, W. asked me. Ages ago, I
told him. – ‘Then what's keeping them?’, he asked. The judgement came too late,
I told him. There are no hangmen, there is no firing squad. The army have all
deserted their posts. The very institutions of the law are empty, their doors
swinging open, files blowing about in the wind.

‘Then who will carry through the sentence?’, W.
asked. There's no one to carry through the sentence, I told him. – ‘Who will
lead us to the gallows?’ There's no one to lead us to the gallows. – ‘Are we to
strangle ourselves?’ I'll strangle you, and you strangle me, and we'll see
where that gets us, I told him.

*

The real philosopher has philosophical dreams,
W. says. Leibniz dreamed of monads, and Spinoza of infinite substance.
Heidegger dreamed of the Being of beings, and Levinas of the face of the Other.

He only dreams of me, W. says. What does that
mean?

My hotel room. W. takes
his seat once again on the Chair of Judgement. It’s time to list my
short-comings! It’s time to examine where I’ve gone wrong! To bury down to the
root-cause!

‘Would you call yourself a moral man?', W. asks. 'Would you call
yourself a man of honour? Do
other people look up to you?
Are others moved by you, inspired by you?' A pause. And then:
'Do you think you've touched other people's lives — in a good way? Do you see yourself as a man
of thought, a man of profundity, a man who will leave a legacy?’

These are the questions that constantly circle in W.’s
head, as he knows they do not circle in mine, he says.

‘How do you think you’ll be judged?’, W. asks me. ‘As
a serious man? As a man
attuned to what matters most?’
And then, ‘Will you be remembered as a great
soul? As a spiritual leader?’
A pause. And then: ‘How do you understand your failure? Who do you measure
yourself against? What standards have you failed to meet?’

Gin!, W. demands. He wants a respite from his
judgement.

W. is soothed by the Plymouth Gin botanicals. He can taste
the oris-root and the coriander seeds. He can taste the orange peel.

Plymouth Gin is our realitätpunkt,
W. says, our rallying point, our place of safety. Sipping Plymouth Gin is
always a homecoming, W. says. A return to what is most important.

If only we had some Vermouth, we could make Martinis,
W. says. In the Plymouth Gin cocktail bar, they swill your glass with Vermouth,
specially imported from America, and then pour it straight out. Only then do
they fill the glass with fresh Plymouth Gin and add a spiral of lemon peel, W. says.
You need Vermouth only to pour it away, W. says, like an offering made to the
gods.

More questions. ‘How many people do you think you’ve
offended?’, W. asks. ‘How many people have you irritated? Have you angered? How many people have tried to
sue you?’, because he knows that some have. ‘How many people have tried to run
you out of town?’

W. begins again. ‘How many appetites have you spoilt?
How many people have you put off their dinner? What would you say is your most irritating
trait? Your most rage-inducing one?’ And then, ‘What do you think your
clothes say about you? And your hair? Your shoes? Does the way you dress befit
your role as a would-be thinker? As a would-be philosopher?'

Still more questions. ‘Do you think you have a noble
face? A dignified bearing? Do you think you have the physiognomy
of a thinker? An intelligent face? Do your rolls of fat make you
uncomfortable? Do you think obesity gives you gravitas? Presence?'
He pauses. 'At what stage would you consider gastric bypass surgery?
Have you ever thought of liposuction? Do you think you come across as a happy fat man, or as a sad fat man? At what stage will you
have your mouth sewn up?

'Of what are you most guilty?', W. asks. 'What is your
greatest source of shame? What is your greatest failing? Do you think you’ve failed? Do you think you should be ashamed? Do you have any real sense of guilt?'
And then, 'What do you think you add to the world?’, W. asks. ‘What do
you think you subtract? What is your net worth to existence? Do
you think you’ve added to the balance of goodness in the cosmos, or
evil? Are you on the side of the angels or the devils?'

‘How do you think you can make amends?', W. asks. 'Do you think you can make amends? How
do you think you can make reparations for damages to intellectual reputation?
For emotional damage? For digestive
damage?

Where do you think you stand in the great chain of thinkers?’, W.
asks. ‘With what historical figure do you most identify? What philosophical
figure? How would you rank yourself in a list of contemporary
philosophers?’ And then, ‘Do you think you’ve understood your time? Brought
it to expression in some way? Are you a diagnoser of your
times, or a symptom of your times? Are you a cultural physician,
or a cultural patient?

W.’s exhausted, he says. The judgement is nearly over. A final round!

‘Do you think you fool people?’, W. asks. ‘Can others read your
stupidity in your eyes, do you think? Can they see your idiocy in your gait?
Your posture?’ And then, ‘Do you have a sense of your idiocy – a real sense? Do
you grasp just how desperately you’ve fallen short?’

*

Dawn. Daylight behind the blinds. The judgement’s over. W. reads out a
passage from Kierkegaard he copied into his notebook:

What does God want? He wants
souls able to praise, adore, worship, and thank him — the business of angels.
And what pleases him even more than the praise of angels is a human being who,
in the last lap of this life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty,
nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that God does it out of
love. 

If he's cruel to me, it's out of love, W. says. It is meant as the
highest kindness, when he sits on the Chair of Judgement, exploring the
many compromises of my life, my betrayals and half-measures. Who else would
have taken notice? Who else would have tried to teach me the meaning of sin?

Ah, would that he had a
similar tutor! Would that someone had the same interest in him! But perhaps my
ingratitude is, for W., only a version of God's cruelty. Perhaps my moaning in protest, as he sits above me
on the Chair of Judgement, is only a way for God to test the extremity of W.'s
love.

My living room. W. takes his place on the Chair of Judgement: ‘Bring me
gin!’ It’s going to be a long night. He has a lot to get through, W. says,
leaning his chair back against the wall.

My failings, my failures: the usual topic. The failure of my life, of my
thought. The failure of my books. Familiar topics. My past failures, my present
ones: yes we know about those, W. says. But my future failings … that’s
what W. wants to talk about tonight.

‘Where will you have gone wrong?’, he says. ‘What will you have done?
What crimes have you yet to commit? How will you have managed to have failed
anew?’

It’s quite a tense, isn’t it, the future perfect?, W. says. Who will
I have disappointed? Him, of course, W. says. Whose hopes will I have
defiled? His, of course, W. says. His hopes.

Ah, what will I have done to him, W., in the future? What terrors await
him? – ‘Will you have written another book? Will you have come up with another
escape plan?’ Ah, but he knows what will have happened. I know. We’ll
have been sacked, and living on the dole. 

Short review in Exodus in The New York Times, by John Williams.

Ian Sansom reviews Exodus for The Guardian.

'The Ironic Genius of Inaction': Tom Jokinen on Exodus for Hazlitt magazine.

Spurious will be published in translation by the publishers Palido Fuego in Spain as Magma, on 4th March.

The publishers have prepared this dossier of translated interviews with me.

 

Lazy and Dangerous muses on my trilogy.

'Drinking at the End of the World': Emily St. John Mandel reviews Exodus at The Millions.