Expect nothing from the world! I said to myself, didn’t I? Sit life out! Go on the dole! On the sick! Claim to be seeing things! Hearing things! Claim to be in the grip of imaginary mental illnesses! Get yourself committed! Locked up! Dream away your life in a serene captivity!
But then there was Kierkegaard, W. says. Then, for some reason, Kierkegaard saved me. Either/Or: that was the book I came across in an Old Hulme jumble sale, I’ve told him that. Either/Or: that was the book which awoke me from my bohemian slumbers.
Of course, my type usually lose themselves in conspiracy theories and books about UFOs, W. says. My type usually lose themselves in the collected works of Colin Wilson, or in Dennis Wheatley’s Library of the Occult. So why Kierkegaard? What was it about Either/Or?
Was it the infinite variations on the expression of despair of A., the pseudonymous author of the first part of Kierkegaard’s book, that impressed me? W. wonders. Was it A.’s pages of lamentations? Or was it the call-to-arms of B., the pseudonymous author of the second part of Kierkegaard’s book, that spoke to me? Was it B.’s exhortations to look at oneself in the mirror?
Either a life mired in shit, or a life of thinking about a life mired in the shit: isn’t that the choice Either/Or presented me with? W. says. And so shit began to think about itself, W. says. Shit looked at itself in the mirror …
I read Philosophical Fragments as gangs of Hell’s Angels fought outside over drug deals, I’ve told W. I read the Concluding Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments as I heard gunshots in Woodcock Square. I read Repetition in the laundrette, and Fear and Trembling as I queued for patties in SamSam’s.
I zigzagged across the greens to avoid the marksmen, with my copy of Stages on Life’s Way, didn’t I? I cracked open the spine of The Concept of Irony as my breath froze in the air in my sunless back room. I began The Concept of Anxiety as I stamped my feet for warmth by a fire of old plywood on an upper deck. And I filled notebooks with my thoughts on The Writing Prefaces and The Book on Adler, while muggers waited in dark corners, with their Stanley knives and screwdrivers.
Did I bother the rastas about Kierkegaard? W. wants to know. He can imagine it, he says. He sees it in his mind’s eye: the failed bohemian talking about Kierkegaard to the rastas. Did I bother the crusties about Kierkegaard? W. can see that as well, he says. The failed bohemian blathering about Kierkegaard to the crusties. And what about the junky ravers — did I bother them? He can see that, too, W. says: bug-eyed ravers staring blankly at the failed Bohemian chattering about Kierkegaard …
Oxford Road. W. fans himself with his copy of The Star of Redemption. Manchester is so humid, he says.
We head to the cool of the Manchester Museum. Dark halls of mummies. Preserved insects pinned on display boards. On the top floor, I show W. the living wasps’ nest in a box of glass: a slice of honeycombed nest, with wasps crawling all over it.
But W. is only interested in reading the plaques about Egyptian mythology. About the beasts of chaos depicted in the mausoleums of the pyramids: hybrid creatures, half frog, half bat; mad dogs and storm-demons; flying vipers and scorpion-men. He reads about Apep, the evil god, their three-headed, six-eyed leader, who could neither see nor hear. And about the cry of Apep, because that’s all Apep did, W. says: cry and lament his own existence, as he slithered through the primordial darkness.
I tell W. about the three-headed, six-eyed dragon that Indra defeats in Indian mythology. And about the three-headed, six-eyed dragon that Marduk kills in Iranian mythology. I tell him about the monsters of Indian mythology: of Snavidka — who boasted that when he reached adulthood, he would take heaven and earth as his chariot. And I tell him of Gandarva, the dragon of the sea, who threatened to blow out the stars and swallow the sun …
Paganism! W. cries. Heathenism! These are the monsters Judaism sets to flight. In some ways, they remind him of the beasts the prophet Daniel sees, in his visionary dream, W. says. A lion with eagle’s wings … a bear-like blob … a four-headed leopard … And then, the fourth beast of Daniel’s dream, the most terrible of all, with its ten horns, and an eleventh one sprouting from its back, with a tiny mouth and tiny eyes, screaming that it is about to turn the world into a waste of desolation.
Of course, the beasts are only personifications of the tyrants, W. says. Of the Seleucid Empire. Of the Babylonian invaders. They are ways of talking about the destructive element of the last days, before God’s justice prevails. Before salvation comes, the forces of chaos will rage as never before: doesn’t the Bible tell us that? Before redemption comes, before God reigns on earth, there will be a period of terrible tribulation: that’s what Daniel sees in his vision, W. says.
Sometimes W. wants to send up a great cry of dereliction. Not his dereliction, he says, but dereliction in general. Abandonment.
Who has abandoned us? Who has left us behind? Who left us to ourselves, and left him to me? Who thrust me into his arms like a foundling?
The times are changing, W. says. A whole epoch is ending. He fears that we are its gravediggers, W. says. That the pit we have dug for ourselves — the disaster of our careers, the ludicrous posturing of our lives as thinkers — is the tomb into which philosophy itself will be lowered …
Plato is turning in his grave, W. says. Kant is spinning in his grave. Did Cohen see what was coming? Did Cassirer?
The apocalypse has always been our alibi, our excuse, W. says. The greatest of sick-notes. What we could have done, if the end hadn’t seemed so close!
Of course, the apocalypse was also the condition of our thought, W. says. Why else have we felt such an urgency to think? Why else has our thinking been so marked by despair?
We were born of the apocalypse to think the apocalypse, W. concludes. We are only the way the apocalypse has come to know the nightmare of itself. Because apocalypse does suffer from itself, W. says.
The apocalypse doesn’t want to be the apocalypse, that’s the thing, W. says. That’s why we should pity it, and pity ourselves, as the ones in whom the apocalypse has awoken to self-awareness. And that’s why W. should pity me, who am so much closer to the apocalypse than he is.
My insomnia is only the insomnia of apocalypse, W. says. My obesity is only the obesity of apocalypse. And my idiocy is only an apocalyptic idiocy, a way for the apocalypse to say, end me now!
‘What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim’, W. reads from his notebook, ‘but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?’
True happiness: what can this possibly mean for W.? What sense of it can he have? I’ve been in his life too long, he says. Far too long, blocking the sun of what might have been his happiness with the great round moon of my stupidity.
Ah, the lunar eclipse of his life! The obliteration of his hopes and dreams! He knows his happiness, what he might have been, only from the faint glow of its corona.