What would my blues name be? W. wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.
On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.’s Facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, with the camera set on automatic. And behind us, the muddy brown waters of the Mississippi, surging along.
America’s so big! we agree. How far is it to the coast, east or west? A thousand miles? Two thousand? Some great, improbable distance, we’re agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive.
There’s so much space here. America’s so exposed. We think of the hurricane damage we saw from the Greyhound bus. Houses torn up, trees uprooted and flung about. I took photos. We’d never seen anything like it. America’s in danger, we agree. It’s too big! It’s too vulnerable!
We think of the coming catastrophe, of the winds that will sweep this country, the deserts that will claim it, the skies that will darken over it. Will it be here that the apocalypse rises to its greatest magnitude?
That’s what Josh T. Pearson sings, W. says, tapping his iPod. ‘The USA’s the centre of JerUSAlem …’
Hope. What is it that keeps us going? W. wonders. Why do we bother, in spite of it all, in the face of it all?
That we know our limitations is our strength, we’re agreed on that. We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness. At least we know it passes above us, like migratory birds in the autumn sky.
We’re landfill thinkers, W. says. Landfill philosophers. But he doesn’t mind. He has the sense of edging forward in the darkness, he says. He has the sense of digging his burrow, of pushing on in dark times.
And what kind of burrow am I digging? W. wonders. What kind of tunnel can a mole make that is without claws, a mole that’s gone mad underground?
In the end, I excel at only three things, W. says: smut, chimp noises and made-up German. That’s all my scholarship has amounted to.
And isn’t it the same with him? Ah, what does he really know? Of what is he really certain? Biblical Hebrew, of course … The classical guitar … The history of philosophy in the German tradition, in the French tradition … Something of the ancient Greeks, and the language of the ancient Greeks … But it’s nothing, nothing, W. says. He knows nothing at all.
If he’s cruel to me, it is the same cruelty to which he subjects himself, W. says. If he’s cruel, it’s out of love, W. says. It is meant as a sign that he expects better. Would that he had a similar tutor! Would that he had someone to list his betrayals and half-measures!
The pelican of mythology feeds its young by tearing strips of its own flesh from its breast, W. says. And isn’t that how he’s fed me: by tearing strips of flesh from his own breast?
How generous he’s been! How unselfish! But in the end, it’s left him even more alone, his generosity. In the end, a great, overfed chick is no company.
The bus back to Nashville. Sounds of screaming. A roaring two-stroke engine. The passenger in front of us is playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his laptop.
W. yearns for his study, he says. He yearns for his bookshelves. He yearns for the tranquillity of his mornings, when he leaves a sleeping Sal in bed so that he can do a few hours of work before breakfast.
I understand nothing of the rhythms of scholarship, W. says, I know nothing of its seasons: of the time of sowing, of tending and caring, and of the harvest, the gathering in of the crops of thought.
Isn’t it that of which he dreams, at the beginning of the summer: of the coming autumn, which will see his thought-crops ripe and ready, bowing in the breeze? Of carrying back the harvest of his ideas, so carefully tended, in his sun-browned arms?
There must be a process of thought-threshing, too, W. says. Of thought-winnowing! The wheat must be separated from the chaff. And there will be chaff, he says. Even the greatest of thinkers cannot avoid chaff. But there is still wheat. Still the evidence of a year’s long labour …
But what would he know of this? His crops have failed, W. says, as they have always failed, and he stands in the empty field, weeping.
Ah, when will we discover the rhythm that will let us work, really work? W. wonders. When, that steady pressure that will make every day a work day, every day launched with a forward push from the day before …
Momentum: to be thrown by thought, loosed, like a stone from thought’s sling … And work, then, will not be mundane, but celestial. We will work as the stars work, as the planets turn in their orbits. Our work will be as one with the slow turning of galaxies, and the steady expansion of the universe out into the infinite … Our work will be indistinguishable from inactivity, from the resting of a God.
Perhaps it is really a kind of Sabbath that we’re looking for, W. says. A time to close our eyes; but not only to rest, to recuperate. We need to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within: who was it who said that? he wonders. We need to let ourselves be touched by a greater work, by a divine labour. Isn’t it only then that we’ll truly begin to work, as though drawn by a hidden current into the centre of our channel?
We must work until we bleed, W. says. We must write until our eyes turn red, and blood runs from our nostrils. Because that’s what’s going to happen to us when we find our idea: blood will flow from our nostrils. Drops of blood, splashing onto the pages on which we are writing …
Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Nietzsche wrote that. With blood, but not our blood. We’ll write with God’s blood, says W., mystically. It will be the blood of God that runs from our nostrils.
Bored on the bus. W. seizes my notebook. He wants to see how America has advanced my thinking. — ‘Ah! Drawings! Who’s that supposed to be?’ Huckleberry Finn, I tell him. There’s the raft. — ‘And what’s that in the water next to him?’ It’s Moby Dick, I tell him. And that’s the Pequod. W. admires my classics of American literature series.
And what is this? A poem? Preppies, it’s called.
Tall / sand in the hair / white teeth / pullovers / deck shoes / white shirts and blouses / yachts with white sails / fuckers
Very perceptive, says W. Here’s another. Cabin Boys, it’s called.
Upstairs, on deck / The preppies are dancing / with their caps worn backwards. / We are the cabin boys / scrubbing their things. / We are angry
He likes that, W. says. It’s very terse.
And what are these? More poems?’, W. asks, turning my notebook upside down and squinting. Lyrics, I tell him. They’re lyrics from Jandek.
I don’t care about philosophy / Even if it’s right.
I could always go drinking / and never come back …
Ah, Jandek, W. says. Who else? Sal has thrown away all the Jandek CDs I burned for him. The Humility of Pain. — ‘That was his forty-fifth LP, wasn’t it?’ His forty-sixth, I tell him.
The Humility of Pain: now there’s an album title, W. says. Jandek has seen things, experienced things, of which we can have no understanding, he says. He is a man of despair, of complete despair. But he is a man of God, too. Doesn’t Jandek always gather his musicians for a moment of prayer before going on stage? ‘Lord give us strength … Lord protect us’. We’re not capable of God, W. says.