That’s from Samuelson’s Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation, W. says. It’s meant to be an explanation of Rosenzweig’s idea of creation. W. says I am endlessly failing to become what I am not. A thinker. A good person. A true friend.
Then he sends me a third, from Mascolo’s Le Communisme, the greatest of all, he says, and to which he attaches no commentary:
One writes neither for the true proletarian, occupied elsewhere, and very well occupied, nor for the true bourgeois starved of goods, and who have not the ears. One writes for the disadjusted, neither proletarian nor bourgeois; that is to say, for one’s friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence.
Outside, half an inch of rendering now covers the back of the kitchen, I tell W. Today I placed my palm on its grey surface. Wet. Everything’s wet, on both sides of the wall. Apparently there’s a gap between two layers of brick. A gap — that’s where the source of the damp is, I know it, I tell W. That’s where it is: dark, wet matter without shape. Matter without light, as there is in dwarf galaxies stripped of gas.
And the damp’s still spreading. There’s still more of the wall to conquer. ‘It’ll be in your living room soon’, says the damp expert. I nod. Yes, it will be everywhere. The flat will be made of damp, and spores will fill every part of the air. And I will breathe the spores and mould will flower inside me. And I’ll live half in water, like a frog.
It is my own catastrophe, I tell W., it’s very close to me. A secret catastrophe, spreading from the gap between the layers of brick. I take people out there, to the kitchen, and run their hands along the wall. — ‘Feel it’, I say, ‘it’s alive’. They’re always impressed and disgusted.
W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book. His editor proofread the manuscript several times and sent it out for proofreading. His book looks great, says W., except for the ancient Greek, which looks terrible. The Hebrew is okay, but the ancient Greek looks as though it were drawn by a child. It’s hilarious.
His book is better than him, W. and I agree. It’s greater. What’s it about? I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says. The book seems to stream splendidly above us both. Neither of us can follow it. Ah, the long example of his dog! It’s even better than the sections on children in his previous book! W. says he’s amazed too. How did he manage it?
I’m filling in my esteem indicators, I tell W. — ‘Oh yes, what are they?’ He could do with a laugh, says W. ‘How about humiliation indicators? Or soiling yourself indicators?’, says W. ‘Write about the history of your humiliations’, says W. ‘Write about dragging the rest of us down. Write about spoiling it for everyone, because that’s what you’ve done’.
I hold my pen like an ape, W. has always observed, and no doubt I type like an ape too, my fingers slightly too large for the keys. And my book reads as though it were written by an ape, which is the worst thing of all, W. says.
‘Once you were happy on your savannah’, W. says. ‘You were happy romping about with the whole horizon before you. What made you think you could read, let alone write? How did you end up mistaking yourself for a writer?
‘Behold the idiot! That’s what your book proclaims’, says W. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go back to your savannah now? Wouldn’t you like to hoot and romp with your fellow apes?’
Why do I write such bad books? W. wonders. It’s not even that they’re bad at the level of content, which of course they are. The basics aren’t even in place. The fundamentals. — ‘You can’t write’, says W. ‘You’re incapable of placing one word after another’.
Of course, my book was a lesson to him, W. says. His book, he decided, would be as good at the level of style as mine is bad, which is not to say it would be worthwhile at the level of content. But at least it would be legible, says W. At least it would pass the minimum qualification for what would count as a book.
W.’s reading the notes he took ten years ago. — ‘They’re better than anything I could do now’, he says, sending me them. I agree: they are good. ‘I had no girlfriend, barely any work, no television, and above all, no friend called Lars …’ But didn’t W. credit me with freeing him to write? Didn’t I save him from years of writer’s block? All I taught him was shamelessness, W. says. Compromise and half measures — that’s all I taught him.
W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism.
When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known — his name and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery — would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.
A generation later, the second Rabbi — his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life — confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers’. What he wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi — whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure — went to the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs — and that must be sufficient’. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi — his name is well known, and he lived as we do — faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done’. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.
There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot — well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too, were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was upon the fate of Jordan and Peter André. He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.
The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps, I tell W. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. Where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. Dirt from the ceiling crumbles over everything. And it’s so cold, so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.
Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it’s soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it’s sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mould is growing. You can’t rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.
I went out there again just now to remind myself, I tell W. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is that wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I’m breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink — is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There’s something brown. Something wrong. There’s a new process beginning on the wall, I tell W. Something horrible.