Can I imagine what Toronto is like? W. asks. Can I conceive of Montreal, the jewel of Quebec? And Ottawa: what does Ottawa mean to me? He remembers Ottawa, W. says. He has loving memories of Ottawa.
Winnipeg. Edmonton. Yellowknife. Whitehorse …: W. whispers to himself as if incanting. He hasn’t seen these cities, W. says. He can’t imagine them …
The Canadian city is part of the wilderness, W. says; it includes it. To be inside the Canadian city is also to be inside the Canadian wilderness, he says mystically. The Canadian city is only a fold of the wilderness, a way of answering it, of continuing it in another medium.
The Canadian city is full of space, W. says. Its boulevards remember the ice-plains, its skyscrapers the gleaming summits among the mountains. Its windows flash back the aurora borealis to the sky. And its night-time darkness remembers that of the thick pine forests that cover the land.
And the Canadian city is full of time, W. says. Everyone has time. People — strangers — stop and talk to one another. The Canadians are a patient people, W. says. They’re not to be rushed.
The Canadian city: that’s where we would learn what patience was, W. says. That’s where we would learn to take deep breaths and walk upright. — ‘Even you! Even you might learn to take deep breaths and walk upright’.
And I might learn French, too, W. says. That’s where he learned his French, in Canada, W. says. He grew up speaking French, Canadian French. The French of the Quebecois, he says. The French of the wilderness.
That’s how you can calm a wilderness bear, W. says: by speaking to it in Quebecois French. That’s how you can calm a wilderness wolf: by speaking softly, in a language full of space and time …
The hotel bar.
We need to work! W. says. To think! But our minds are blank. We sit back in our chairs. We stretch our arms, then our legs. W. yawns and then I yawn. W. gets up and goes to the loo, and then I get up and go to the loo. Should we get something else to drink? I wonder. Nothing else! We’re here to think, not drink, W. says.
We pause to finish the dregs of our pints and look around the bar. Do they sell pork scratchings? we wonder. W. sends me to the bar to ask about pork scratchings. — ‘Fuck off and let me think’.
I come back with two more pints. W.’s still stuck. We rub our bellies with our hands and then pat the tops of our heads. Then we pat our bellies and rub the tops of our heads.
Inspiration! A thought’s come to him, W. says. A thought prompted by Kierkegaard! — ‘Take dictation! We refuse to confront the real object of our despair’, W. says, ‘We inflict despair on ourselves’. And then, ‘We have to become conscious of our despair: that we are each both the subject and the object of our despair’.
Hasn’t he always blamed me for his despair? W. says. Hasn’t he always assumed that it’s all my fault? If only I could be rid of Lars, that idiot, he’s said to himself. If only I could ditch Lars somewhere …
But what if it isn’t all my fault? What if the fault lies with W. himself? ‘Despair is the gateway to the eternal’, W. reads from his copy of The Sickness Unto Death. ‘Salvation will come, but only when we choose despair’: that’s what Kierkegaard writes, W. says.
Has W. chosen despair: can he really say that? he wonders. Has W. chosen me, the chief cause of his despair? Because that’s what he must do, if he wants salvation. I, who am W.’s obstacle, am also his gateway. I, who block W.’s path, am also nothing other than his path.
It’s not enough to say ‘no’ to me, W. says; he has to say ‘yes’, too. It was by embracing the leper he met on the highway that St Francis began his life as a mendicant. W. will have to embrace me, and then be embraced, not by me, who am not capable of embracing anyone, but by the Power that stands behind us both, testing us both, W. says.
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, W. says. 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. And when that didn’t come? They sought recognition through other means.
He faces the opposite problem with me, W. says. I’ve long since thrown my arms around futility. I’ve long since driven my Denkweg into the quagmire of the blogosphere. The opposite of recognition: that’s what I want, isn’t it? W. says. Public humiliation: that’s what I crave …
W. googles imbecile and then idiot. He googles enemy and betrayer. W. googles morbid obesity. He googles liposuction and gastric bands. And then W. googles my website. — ‘Let’s see what rubbish you’ve written today’.
Ah, my internet delusion, W. says. My blogospherical delusion. Didn’t I try to persuade him that the next great movement of thought would take place online, bypassing the conventional channels of thought? Didn’t I tell him of blogger-Lispectors of the future, of internet-Weils to come?
W. was actually persuaded, he says. Or some part of him was. He actually thought something was happening, that something might come of it. We started our group blog, didn’t we? he says. Our collective. — ‘And then what happened? Tell me. Start at the beginning’. A pause. ‘You ruined it! You destroyed it!’
He remembers it all, W. says. I wrote like a maniac. Post after post, one after another. No one else in the collective had a chance! No one could get a word in! Logorrhoea: is that what I had? Blogorrhoea! I was a maniac of writing, W. says. I was a Rasputin of prose.
I wrote on the last wildernesses in the Home Counties. I wrote on life in the suburbs of the Thames Valley. I wrote on my beleaguered childhood. And I wrote of the damp invading my flat and of the rats beneath my flat. I wrote about the end of the world, without understanding that my writing was also part of the end of the world.
Occasionally, W. would put up one of his considered, reasonably-written posts, he says. Every now and then, after much thought, W. would put something up — a modest post, soberly written — supposing that, surrounded by my madness, his post might seem all the more reasonable. He thought his post might rise up, a calm island in a crazy ocean.
But that’s not what happened, is it? His post was swamped! Everything he wrote was drowned! It was Atlantis all over again. That’s when he learned that the internet was only a support network for my fantasies, W. says. That’s when he learned that the blogosphere was invented for people like me.
W. reads me a passage from one of Debord’s films: