Lars Iyer's Blog, page 75

There's a poignant moment in an interview with the terminally ill production designer Rashit Satiullin, who, when asked about the Zone, recalls the time he spent living, working and talking with Tarkovsky: 'Here you live being your inmost self ... it's somwhere where you can talk with somebody, something unfathomable'. The interviewer asks him to clarify. Does he mean ...? 'Yes speaking with god. When Andrei was no more I was bereaved of a person with whom I could talk about the most important things. That room vanished'. 'So he was the Room to you?', asks the interviewer. 'Yes'.

Geoff Dyer, Zona

Professor sums up Stalker's little sermon: so the Zone lets the good ones pass and the bad ones die? [...] Stalker doesn't know. It lets pass those who have lost all hope, the wretched, he says in an agony of wretchedness, never once realising that he might (by definition) be among their number. Does wretchedness ever have this capacity to transcend itself? Or is it simply a path to further wretchedness?

[...] Again the impossible paradox of Stalker's relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief - their hope - in it.

from Geoff Dyer's Zona

Upstairs in Foyles, looking through the philosophy books.

‘Do you think they’ll have our books here?’, W. asks, knowing the answer. ‘Of course not!’ His book went out of print as soon as it was published. Before it was published! His publisher went bust. And my books – my so-called books – appeared in the most obscure of imprints, by the most obscure of presses, at a price affordable only by the most prosperous libraries. Our books will have no effect whatsoever! They’ll have no readers!

Oh, he knows I find it funny, W. says. But he has trouble with the sheer anonymity of it all. No one’s going to pay any attention to us. No one’s going to care what either of us is going to write ...

Ah, but he still believes, deep in his heart, that our collaboration might lead to something great, W. says. That's what keeps him going, even if all the evidence is to the contrary. Why can’t I see it? Why have I given up on him? On us?

‘When are you going to take philosophy seriously?’, W. says. ‘You haven’t read anything in years. Are you retiring from philosophy?’, he asks. ‘Have you given up?’ I haven’t, I tell him. – ‘Then why don’t you write some philosophy? You have to externalise yourself. You have to experience your shortcomings’.

W. reads my notebook.

Notes on Hölderlin's confinement. Pallaksch, W. reads. — 'What does that mean?' That was the word Hölderlin repeated to himself in the thirty years he spent mad, I tell W. Pallaksch!, he sang out, as he played his piano madly. Pallaksch!, he cried up to the night, when he couldn't sleep for mania.

Pallaksch!: and isn't that my word, too? Pallaksch: isn't that a word for the wordless that murmurs in everything I have written or tried to say? He hears it in my stuttering, my stammering. In the 'hellos!' that I boom out to near-strangers. And isn't it what I try to say in the middle voice? There was a dampening. There was a infestation of rats. There was a proliferation of Japanese knot-weed. There was and will be writing. There was and will be the desecration of speech ...

Pallaksch, pallaksch: faecal emergencies come, one after another, W. says. Toilet bowls are spattered. The gods, blind and deaf and mad, are screaming. The sky is darkening. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings ...

Manchester was good to us, W. says, as we wait for our separate trains, back at Piccadilly Station. It was good. We gave our talk, fielded questions, we didn’t get lynched ...

Capitalism has triumphed, W. told our audience. Capitalism has conquered the external world, W. said; now it’s going to conquer the internal one, too. The very intimacy of our lives, that’s capitalism’s new frontier, W. said. Our private ideas, our tastes, our moods: that’s what capitalism has set out to conquer now.

In the end our loves and friendships will become capitalist loves and capitalist friendships, W. says. Our innermost hopes and dreams will become capitalist hopes and capitalist dreams. Our sighs will become capitalist sighs. Our wistfulness, capitalist wistfulness. Even our philosophy, opposed as it is to capitalism in every way, will become capitalist philosophy, W. says. Even our thoughts will become capitalist thoughts.

And our despair?, W. wondered aloud. Is that what’s left to us? Is that what remains of the good and the true? Is it in truly experiencing our despair that the path to our salvation lies?

Despair! W. took our audience through the twists and turns of The Sickness Unto Death. Of The Concept of Anxiety. He took them through crucial sections of Marx’s Capital. He conjured up a bearded Kierkegaard for our audience. A melancholy Marx!

W. spoke of the attempt to conquer despair while remaining in it. He spoke of the aim not merely to accept despair, but to invert its meaning, take pride in it, and regard it as a blessing. Despair does not destroy hope, but recruits it, W. said. Seen in the right way, despair contains prospects of joy.

And then W. passed the baton to me. The room, abuzz with excitement during W.’s half of the presentation, fell silent. And I, too, was silent. The sound of construction from outside. The beep of a reversing vehicle.

Starting slowly, quietly, I began to extemporise on what I called the time of stupor, the time of drifting. I spoke about Tarkovsky’s Stalker, about Tarr’s Damnation. I spoke about untensed time, about time out of phase, about temporal puddles and temporal ox-bow lakes …

I talked about Manchester as rust-zone, as sleeper. I spoke about the past and the rotting of the past. I spoke of those parts of the city that were cut off from time. I spoke of the unregenerated and the unredeemed. I spoke of the Sabbath, of the interregnum, of the great holy pause …

I spoke of attenuated despair, of grief stretched thin. I spoke of diffuse melancholia, and the of the disorders of the vague. I spoke of the fear of the everyday – of cop show repeats on daytime TV, of Columbo and Magnum P.I. I spoke of stale beer and gingerbread men.

I spoke of falling to the level of the everyday. Of letting yourself fall. I spoke of watching the end credits of Neighbours not once, but twice a day. I spoke of what Perec called the infra-ordinary, and de Certeau, the murmuring of the indefinite. I spoke of peripheries without centre, and of suburbs which never reach the city.

I spoke of nightbuses and eternal rain. I spoke of five hundred different kinds of boredom. I spoke of the wisdom of the long-term sick and the unemployed. I spoke of kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.   

I spoke of empty hours and empty days. I spoke of wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. I spoke of misty thoughts yet to coalesce. I spoke of hazy skies and clouds of midges.

I spoke of being lost in time, buried in time. I spoke of time piling up like a great snowdrift. I spoke of space as an ache, as a wound, as a sigh. I spoke of space as a prayer, as a plea, as a poem.

I spoke of the nihilism of Joy Division. Of music which came from the other side of death. I spoke of rigor mortis and lockjaw. I spoke of the dancing chicken of Herzog's Stroszek.

I spoke of the anti-gravity of dub. I spoke of the Rastafarians of Old Hulme. I spoke of polytricks and the Bablyon shitstem. I spoke of the exodus and of the repatrination. I quoted Prince Far-I: ‘We’re moving out of Babylon/ One destination, ina Ithiopia …’, I quoted. ‘Ithiopia, the tyrants are falling/ Ithiopia, Britain the great is falling …’, I quoted.

W. was moved, he says. I was moved. Our audience broke out into spontaneous applause. He’d thought my prophetic days had gone, W. says. He’d thought my oracle had shut up shop ...

Stuck again. W. looks into the air. He grinds his teeth. He clenches his fists, then unclenches them. Then he sees me looking at him. – ‘You enjoy this, don’t you?’, W. says. I enjoy watching him groping for thought.

W. thinks of his other collaborators, over the years. Of others in whom he had placed his hopes. One by one, they were picked off by careerism, by laziness, by the temptations of applied ethics and the writing of introductory books. Of course, it was really the futility of thinking that destroyed his collaborators. The lack of recognition. They expected their thought to be rewarded! They expected that the world would be interested in their Denkwegs, in their paths of thought. When that didn't come, they sought recognition through other means.

With me, there's the opposite problem, W. says. My disregard for the world. My indifference to the opinions of others. My aim is to make thinking yet more futile. It is to make philosophy part of my vagrancy, part of my escape from the suburbs. I take delight in the oblivion of thought. In wearing it out. What have I ever sought but to undo philosophy; to unwork it, just as Penelope unpicked by night the tapestry she wove each day?

Somehow, he senses that my unworking is greater than all his philosophical labours, W. says. That my non-philosophy encompasses his thought and dissolves it. Will his legacy lie in his books and articles: in his studies of messianism (his mathematical messianism) or in my destruction of his legacy? He thinks of the painting of de Kooning that Rauschenberg erased. He thinks of the paintings Francis Bacon would buy just to kick them to pieces on the street.

W. reads me a passage from the new Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on Hermann Cohen:

In Cohen's hands, this historical orientation contributes in no small part to other aspects of his writing that none of his readers can fail to notice: its obscurity, repetition, and sometimes unnecessary length.

Don’t they understand that Cohen should be praised for his style?, W. says. That the philosopher, least of all, is obliged to be clear? The philosopher shouldn’t understand what he’s doing, W. says. He shouldn’t know where his thought is going; and nor should his readers.

A thinker should be at least regarded for his unthought as well as his thought, W. says. In what remains undeveloped in his work. Unseen!

W. speaks about the work of commentary, which is completely different from the work of introducing a thinker. An introduction makes the work of a philosopher intelligible to a time, and thereby reduces it to the preccupations of that time. A commentary, by contrast, makes the work of a philosophy untimely. It shows us that we have no idea of who that philosophy was as a thinker, and that we've hardly begun to read his work. And doesn't commentary reveal this by focusing on the very obscurity and repetition of the philosopher's work? In its no doubt unnecessary length?

That's why the true thinker always awaits his commentator, W. says. Didn't Husserl await Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty? Wasn't Rosenzweig reborn in Levinas? Sometimes, W. dreams that the work of Cohen has awaited his commentary. Rozensweig's, too. Isn't W.'s mathematical messianism the commentary that will render these thinkers untimely?

Sometimes, he thinks that it might be the same with Kierkegaard, in our collaboration, W. says. Sometimes, he thinks that Kierkegaard’s despair of capitalism, about which he wrote nothing at all, is the unthought that will echo through our speculations.

When do you work?’, W. says. ‘When do you have ideas?’ But he knows the answer. I am too busy to work, I tell him. I am troubled to have ideas.

I’ve been institutionalised, W. says. Bureaucratised! It was when I became the perfect administrator that I stopped doing any real philosophical work.

What do I do in my office?, W. wonders. Answer emails. Fill out spreadsheets. Take home management communiqués, and read them with bloodshot eyes. And what do I do in the evenings? He sees me, in his mind’s eye, W. says, opening a bottle of wine in the squalor of my flat after a day at work. He sees me, booting up my laptop, getting ready to write.

But that’s my problem!, W. says. I think that writing is the same as having ideas, when in reality, they are entirely different. You have to stop writing to have an idea, W. says. You have to pause and wait. Thought has to come to you, W. says, not you to it. You can't force thought by writing.

My writing is really the enemy of philosophy, W. says. Its waters close over the head of thought. Its dark matter occludes the sprawl of stars and planets. Its mantras drown out the holy scriptures.

In the beginning was the non-Word, W. says; in the beginning, there was no beginning. A kind of eternal seething instead. The licking of black flames... Nothingness turning in nothingness... The void, thickening, and thinning out... That's what he hears in my writing, W. says. That's what rumbles in his head when he reads me online.

Of course, it’s worse for me when I actually stop writing, W. says. It’s worse when I collapse into my bed and try to sleep. He pictures me, staggering around my flat in the early hours, amidst the squalor, amidst the mould spores and the flies, preparing for bed. He sees me, drunk, or half drunk on Tesco’s cheapest wine, ranging around my flat like the abominable snowman, with my dressing gown flapping around me ...

‘You can never sleep, can you? You’ve never been able to sleep’, W says. He sees me, lying sleepless in bed, full of great paranoid imaginings about the way I think they’ll sack me. He sees me, lying there, quite panicked, fearing that I’ll be sent back to the dole queue. And he sees me, falling asleep at last, collapsing into unconsciousness at last, just as dawn breaks, and the birds start singing, just as, at the opposite end of the country, W. is waking up, ready to begin his studies. He sees me, dreaming fitfully about working out my notice and exit interviews. He sees me, mouthing the words, No!, No!, in my half-sleep ... And he sees my eyes open again, the Leviathan awake, rolling out of my bed like a Spital Tongues Gargantua ...

Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certainty that everything outside this one thing has  no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises - and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements - with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitve materials - with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.

Arvo Pärt, liner notes

The ascent. We climb higher to where the river Dart is supposed to have its source. This is the source of the water they use in Plymouth Gin, W. says. It's the peat which gives it its special softness. And the way it's filtered through granite.

W. passes me his hipflask. We’ve brought our gin back to its wellspring! To its Eden! We’ve completed the circle. We drink to the Dart, and to the rain that feeds the Dart. We drink to the clouds, and to the seawater that evaporates to make the clouds. We drink to the sea and to the rivers that feed the sea.

We drink to our digestive systems. Our gin-processing systems! And we fantasise, as we drink, about a thinker of the moors, a thinker lost on the moor like King Lear and twice as mad as him. About a thinker whose madness is his thought, W. says mystically.

He'll be our Hölderlin, who grasping Zeus's lightning - madness itself -, will pass it to us 'wrapped in song'. He'll be our Artaud on his mad Irish quest, looking for Saint Patrick in the bogs. He’ll be our Judge Schreber, visited by little men from Cassiopeia, Wega and Capella, who warned him in tiny voices of the approaching end of the world ...

He’ll be our Louis Wain, with his cosmic cats. And he’ll be our post-conversation William Kuzelek, painting the grain elevators on the Saskatchewan prairies, painting the vast sky above the prairies. Canadian madness is lucidity itself, we agree.

Our thinker will be a playmate of God, who, now God is dead, sings of God's absence on the high moor. He'll be a thinker of the roof of the world, who will stay up high on the roof, refusing to come down.