W. takes me aside before we get back in the car. I should talk more, W. says. I should try and engage with our hosts!
Ah, why have I never learnt to talk? he wonders. Why has it always been left to him, when we’re in company, to speak for both of us? For long periods, I’m mute, thinking of God knows what, W. says. I’m like some great block of stupidity. Like some great stupid Easter Island statue …
What does stupidity think about? W. wonders. Is it ever aware of its own stupidity? Does it scratch its head and wonder about itself? Ah, but stupidity can never uncover its own truth, that’s its tragedy, W. says. Stupidity can never look itself in the face.
Sometimes he likes my silence, W. says. He imagines it to be a kind of integrity — a way of guarding something, some secret. ‘He knows something’, W. says to himself, looking across at me. Or, better: ‘something knows itself in him’.
One day, they’ll decrypt me, W. likes to think to himself. One day, the Rosetta Stone of my stupidity will yield up its secrets. — ‘You see!’, W. will say. ‘I told you so!’, he’ll say, when they solve my riddle.
Perhaps we should be silent about fundamental matters, W. says. Perhaps there’s nothing we can say that does not immediately destroy what is most important.
But there’s silence and silence, W. says … There is the reserve of the wise man, full of learning, full of modesty, who knows that the truth is infinitely subtle, infinitely complex, and that one must never speak too soon. And there is the roaring silence of the idiot, W. says, which resounds with dark matter and barren wastes and bacteria — with everything that is unredeemed in the universe.
Americans don’t go in for gardening, we notice as we near our hosts’ street: the back garden — brown grass, uncut — simply runs out unfenced onto the road behind. It’s exactly the same with the front garden. But Americans are tremendously neighbourly. Didn’t our hosts’ neighbour bake a pie for us, when she heard we were coming to stay?
Hospitality is a great sign of civilisation, W. says. Our houses should be wholly open to our guests. The guest turns the house into an offering … Of course, I have a flat, not a house, but the same thing holds. And my flat has little to offer except squalor and damp, but the same principle applies.
How many guests W. has welcomed! How many great minds have crossed his threshold! He’s opened his drinks cabinet to them, and his enormous fridge. He’s opened every kitchen cupboard, to whip up a midnight snack for some great mind or other. He’s had whole parties of guests, each person staying in another of his many rooms, each for whom W. threw open his airing cupboard anew, for fresh sheets and fresh duvet covers. Fresh towels!
How many times has he projected Stroszek for his guests on the walls of his vast living room? How many times has he danced in his socks with them to apocalyptic Canadian pop?
And what about me? Who have I had to stay? What thinkers have passed through my door? Just him, W. says. Just him, breathing in mould spores and plaster dust. Just him, wondering why the lights don’t work and the TV doesn’t work and the fridge doesn’t work and why the oven is upside down in the living room.
On the porch, with our sipping gin. Joggers and dog-walkers fill the streets. Fireflies hover over the grasses. This is what they should drink, here in the South, W. says: Plymouth Gin, neat, over ice.
Capitalism and religion, W. muses. Capitalism and religion. — ‘You never were religious’, W. says. I’m a Hindu! I tell him. ‘But you were never really religious, were you?’
My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It brings me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don’t struggle with my faith, or with the idea of God.
W.’s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It’s a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn’t quite know. But at other times he feels as far from religion as could be, and the word faith is ashes in his mouth.
Of course, W. was born a Jew — he’s Jewish through his father’s line, but his mother’s family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase at the age of nine! W. remembers. He demanded to be taken to church. And he was taken, although his family were lapsed. — ‘Nine!’, W. says. That’s when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.
Our hosts’ CD collection. The Golden Gate Quartet, Barbeque Bob, The Hokum Boys, The Mississippi Sheiks: who are these people? Our hosts are opting out of contemporary life, W. says. They’re in internal exile. They’re ransacking the past — a never-existing, arcadian past — to save themselves in the present.
W. puts on the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it sheeks, apparently, he says, reading the inlay. W. admires the sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It’s about rhythm, he says, not about melody. W.’s becoming an enemy of melody, he says. He hates dead syncopations. He hates drums.
But what would any of this mean to me? I’m a Jandek fanatic, for fuck’s sake! He does an impression of Jandek’s singing. — ‘I’m in paaaaaainn’; ‘No one liiiiikes me’. Actually, he respects Jandek, W. says. My instincts were right, for once. We tried to have a Jandek party, of course, down in W.’s house. We forced his students and Sal to sit and listen in silence. — ‘How long could they stand it?’, W. asks. ‘How long?’ He pauses dramatically. ‘Three seconds!’, he says. ‘That’s all they could take. I think Sal shat herself’, he says. She’s never forgiven us for that.
W. laments that I’m no longer open, really open, to music. — ‘You only listen to Jandek’, he says. It’s quite impressive. W. has a certain respect for my obsessions, although they’re absurdly narrowing. My whole life has been nothing other than a series of obsessions, W. says, and this is my latest one.
There’s no point in putting any books in his man bag for our trips, W. says, because he is soon too drunk to read. And there’s no point in carrying his notebook either, because he is soon too drunk to think.
How long have we been away? Two days? Three? But W.’s beginning to forget his former life. Hasn’t he always lived in this way, wandering around America with a moron?
Ah, why did he bring me to America? W. wonders. What is it, in him, that desires his destruction? There’d be sense in bringing someone along to inspire him, W. says, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless I’m his death-drive, for how else can he account for it?
Sometimes, W. thinks that I’m like those people Russell Crowe sees, in A Beautiful Mind. A hallucination. A figment of his imagination. But I’m real, quite real, that’s the trouble. You can exorcise a ghost. But how can you rid yourself of an idiot?
My own corner, that’s where I should stay, W. says. My own corner, with my own interests, which are contracting by the day … But W. insists on bringing me into the world, doesn’t he? Why? he wonders. For what reason?
He had a terrible dream last night, W. says. I was leading him up one of the hills outside Nashville, grim faced and silent. I was much larger than usual, a giant toad, a giant flea with great thick thighs. And W. was much smaller, a wren, a midge. And I was silent: I wasn’t saying a word. I was dragging him up the hill without offering a word of explanation.