Impairment will be the norm, I’d said. Vestigial limbs. The spider people will appear, with their four or five or six spare limbs flailing uselessly in the air.
They’ll be very gentle, the spider people, I’d told our Manchester friends. Very vulnerable. Which means they’ll be set upon at once, their useless limbs pulled off one by one. They’ll be mocked and killed. And probably eaten, I’d said, since there’ll be nothing to eat in the new world. Nothing to eat except spider people.
I drove away our friends, W. says. Futurology and friendship do not mix.
My monk years, W. says. It’s the most mysterious of episodes to him. What drove me to the monks, or, stranger still, the monks to me?
How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among monks as their guestmaster? How did I, out of all the other candidates — and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my role — become guestmaster to a community of monks?
Oh, he knows the story, W. says. It was Kierkegaard that led me there, that’s what I told him, wasn’t it? It was Kierkegaard that made me seek sanctuary during the regeneration of Manchester.
I’d been called to the Job Centre, W. remembers my telling him that. They were hunting us down, the long-term unemployed, the long-term sick. It was time for us to be straightened out and reskilled. Time for flipcharts and group-work and IT training for the new reality.
We were to learn about our transferrable skills, I’ve told W. We were to learn about personal branding. We were to learn about time management and planning and organisation. We were to learn about working well with others, and forming good working relationships. We were to learn about motivation and enthusiasm, about showing initiative and being self-starting. We were to learn about sharing a firm’s mission …
And isn’t that what drove me to the monks? W. says. Wasn’t it in panic that I banged at the monastery gates, and waved my Kierkegaard books in their faces? Save me from the regenerators! Save me from back-to-work training!
But why did the monks take me in? If Dostoevsky had holy fools, W. says, I was an unholy fooclass="underline" A Prince Myshkin without humility; an Alexei Karamazov without goodness; a Saul who never converted; a Judas after his act of betrayal; a Thomas who did nothing but doubt …
Maybe they were testing their spiritual strength, W. says. Maybe they meant to sharpen the edge of their faith along the whetstone of my unfaith. Maybe I was their wilderness, their desert, their devil of temptation. By bringing me close, maybe they sought to bring themselves closer to the presence of God. Maybe it was their effort to force the Messiah.
He sees me in his mind’s eye, W. says. He sees the unholy fool, standing between the monks and the world, admitting guests, showing them up to their rooms which he had carefully readied, preparing lunch and dinner for them. He sees me, W. says, although he doesn’t understand what he sees: the monastery idiot, making beds and running his cloth along the dado, taking the coats and hats of ecclesiastical callers, making pleasantries in the oak-parqueted reception room. He sees me, W. says, the community divvy, arm in arm with a monk he’s escorting across the icy pavement. He sees me, the monastery imbecile, sitting in attendance at ecumenical dinners, smiling on nut-brown Copts, and calling taxis for white-robed Dominicans heading back to the station.
How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? What recommended me to them? What, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean?
Of course, he too has lived with monks, W. says. Over a long summer on Caldey Island, he even thought of becoming one. But, as always on this topic, W. says nothing more. I’d jot it all down in my notebook, he says, and put it all up on the ‘net. A veil must be drawn over some things, W. says. A kind of silence must be observed — and W. took a vow of silence, back when he was thinking of joining the Trappists.
‘There are moments in one’s life … ah, how can you explain it to an idiot?’, W. says, with particular fervour. ‘Sometimes, you’re vouchsafed something … Sometimes …’ No, no, he won’t try and explain, he says.
And isn’t that where it began, W.’s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this one? Isn’t that where he understood that the question of religion wasn’t to be left with philosophers and metaphysicians, and addressed in terms of philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?
He was silent, W. says. He spent whole days in solitary prayer. In the time between services, when they were allowed to converse, he would wander the beach with an older monk, a proper holy man, meditating upon faith and upon the essence of religion, W. says.
‘What does “God” mean?’, W. asked the holy man, like a child. ‘What is religion?’ Sometimes you have to ask the simplest questions, W. says. And the answers he received …? No, he won’t tell me, W. says. He won’t breathe a word.
Some conversations change everything, W. says. It’s not the content of what is said. Nor is it a matter of intensity. Seriousness, yes. That’s essential. Absolute seriousness. But seriousness can be light!, W. says. Speaking seriously can be ease itself! His time with the older monk was spent in easy conversation, W. says. They talked about ordinary things, concrete things. All really profound conversations are about ordinary things, W. says.
Opposite the university, under the motorway bridge. A junkie in a sky-blue jumper asks for money for chippies. W. scrutinises him closely as he gives him some change. — ‘You can never be sure’, W. says. ‘He might have been a ragged philosopher’.
I quiz W. on the strange superstitions of the former Essex postgraduates. Is it really true that you have to leave your back door open in case a former associate raps on your window? Is it really true that a place must always be left at your table, in case a former Essex postgraduate arrives unbidden for a meal? But W. keeps quiet.
I ask W. whether it’s true that there is a secret fund into which the more solvent former Essex postgraduates pay, and upon which their poorer fellows might draw. I ask whether the rumours are true about the University in Hiding, to which all the former Essex postgraduates belong. Are there really secret handshakes and secret winks — certain signs that allow one former Essex postgraduate to recognise another, even though they may never have met at their alma mater? Was W. looking for a secret wink from the junkie in the sky-blue jumper?
Ah, how can he explain it to me, what it means to be a former Essex postgraduate? W. wonders. How can he make me understand?
W. recalls the legend of Chouchani, the Talmudic master who taught both Levinas and Weisel. No one knows where Chouchani was born, W. says. No one knows where he grew up. No one knows where he acquired his immense learning, which did not concern only Judaism and Jewish matters, but mathematics, too, and philosophy, and the arts. He spoke all the living languages of Europe, W. says, and a few dead ones besides.