Spurious

Et Tu, Idiot?

Our friends, what has happened to our friends? W. dreamt we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all; that we would be, standing together, a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamt we'd mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs. But he was wrong, terribly wrong, for news has come that they are turning on one another, our friends, just as we, one day, will turn upon one another, W. says.

It has to happen; he sees that now. It has to fall apart. Wasn't his dream, always, that we could hold back the apocalypse? But we will not hold it back; the apocalypse begins with what is closest to us. And what's my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand? Et tu, idiot?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs. Et tu?, as he sees my face is only that of the apocalypse ...

The Cyclone of Stupidity

My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.

How could I understand what I've unleashed?, W. wonders. Does the storm understand that it is a storm? Does the earthquake know that it is an earthquake? I will never understand, says W.; that's my always appealing innocence.

It's time for the reckoning, W. says. It's reached that point. But with whom might he reckon? How to tackle an enemy who has no idea he's an enemy?

Can you see me burning?, W. asks me in his dream. He's on fire! What am I to do? Put him out - but with what? But then I, in his dream, understand: I am the fire. I am what makes him burn.

The Next Day

What will happen the next day - the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. asks. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear? That the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can't avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it's all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he's sure not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It's my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

'If you knew, if you really knew' ... but I don't know, says W. I have intimations of it, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

An Open Stretch Of Water

I am less and less able to listen to the presentations of others, W. notes. He can see it on my face. I can never hide it. At one point, he says I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.

What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don't I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water?

There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the Mersey, when I full intended to catch a ferry, he says. Then there was our aborted Thames trip, the boating expedition all the way upriver ... How disappointed I had been!

Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which there gusts the wind of pure idiocy.

Make It Stop!

Retrospective redemption, that's what W.'s holding out for. It will have made sense, he says. It will always have made sense from the perspective of redemption, that's what he hopes. But there's little sign of it, he concedes. In fact, it's getting worse.

He hears the dull rumble of thunder, W. says. The storm is coming; lightning could flash down at any time. But why does no one else hear it? Why does no one but him know the signs? Make it stop!, W. wants to cry - but to whom? Make it stop! - but not to me, who is only part of the catastrophe, only a catastrophic scrap torn off to torment him.

What is hell?, W. muses. It's when friend falls upon friend, he says. I would turn upon him, wouldn't I? I'm always about to. I'm already poised ...

When friend turns upon friend, that will be the sign, says W. But then hasn't our friendship always involved a turning against him, W.? Hasn't it always meant the destruction of friendship? Yes, that's what W.'s concluded: it is nothing but the destruction of friendship in friendship and as friendship.

The Book on God

My indifference to the idea of God has always disappointed W. He likes to imagine me in another life, he says, as a young priest wandering around in the fields, raising my fist at God's absence.

Sometimes W. thinks we should write a book on God. On God! Imagine! Of course, W. doesn't understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by this word. But at the same time, his own absence of belief seems to him entirely a matter of a blockage of thought, and what he can only describe as a kind of dullness and opacity.

He doesn't have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says; he doesn't know what that means. When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he's come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It's not because he thinks there's some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach - quite the contrary - but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and it is all because of some personal stupidity.

But what would I contribute to our book on God?, W. asks. What would I bring to the project? - 'You could explain your indifference', W. says. 'And then you could draw some cocks'.

My Assignment

Up early, we step into the sun, out to find a cafe. Another day full of possibilities! - 'Which we will crush', says W.

'Have you had any thoughts yet?', W. asks me. None, I tell him.  'It's like Zen', says W. 'Pure absence'.

I should work more, W. tells me. An hour a day, that's all he asks. If I can't work at home, then in the office. And if I can't work in the office, then I should find a cafe.

My assignment this summer, W. says, is to investigate the work of Rosenstock-Heussy. He will continue to read Cohen, he says - he's just bought a book on logic by Cohen from ABE books for 180 Euro - and my task is to investigate the not especially well known work of Rosenstock-Heussy. That way, W. says, we can approach our principal philosophical topic in a pincer movement.

The Problem Of Philosophy

Weil: The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

W.'s proper method of philosophy, he says, consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problem of my stupidity in all its insolubility and then in simply contemplating it, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting, knowing it will never, ever change.

The Idiot

Literature was our great curse, W. says. To be fascinated by something of which we would always be incapable. And it's not as if we know our limits. We keep bumping our heads against them, over and over again, like idiots.

I close my eyes. - 'What are you contemplating?', W. asks. 'Your next magnum opus?'

'You have to know what you can do, in your case, nothing, and what you can't do, in your case, everything', W. says. 'Where do you think your strengths lie?', and then, 'do you have any strengths?'

What sort of literature would W. write, if he could? - 'I would write a book called The Idiot, and it would be about you'.

Vaster Than Empires ...

'You drink too much, that's your problem', W. tells me. 'Mind you, I'd drink if I had your life'. He'd slope off to the bars every evening as I do, W. says. He'd drink himself stupid in the corner of a pub.

How do I bear it, my day to day reality?, W. asks. But it's quite clear: I don't bear it. My life is in a state of collapse, anyone can see it. I'm in the final act, W. always tells himself. It can't go on, can it? But it does go on, W. says. Empires have collapsed more slowly.

Not Even Desperation

A series of jerks and tics, like those of a hanged man in his final death throes; a series of involuntary and grotesque spasms: that will have been my life, W. says. It's not even desperation; it's more basic than that.

There's a rebellion at the level of my bare existence, W. says. - 'You shouldn't exist. You should never have been born': that's what my body knows. It's what I know at some abysmal level. And meanwhile, there I am twitching over the void, a man half-hung, neck broken ...

Fauns

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad - very bad - and at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Of course, my tendency is to scare them off, W. says. It's to bellow and fuss and deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. tries to keep quiet, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who can go back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe them with soft words and sympathy.

It won't be that bad, he tells them. Don't listen to him. Or: don't worry, everything's going to be fine. Ignore him, he's an idiot. - 'But in their hearts they know', W. says. 'They know what's going to happen'.

It All Ends Here ...

It all ends here, with us, The Star of Redemption open on our desks, doesn't it? It's completely at an end, a whole civilisation. Who allowed it? Who got us into this mess? Who raised our aspirations to the sky, by setting the great books amongst us? Who granted us the chance of commerce with the great ideas?

Because they were too great for us. They were more than our heads could contain. They broke us, and we wandered around dazed. What had happened to us? Something had happened, but what? We'll never understand, that's the tragedy. It will always have been beyond us.

Chatterers

These are the last days, says W. It's finished. Everything's shit, but we're happy - why is that?' Because we're puerile, he says. Because we're inane.

We're chatterers, we're agreed on that, like monkeys. We're never happier until until we've worn speech down to nothing, until we've reached the highest, most rarefied of inanities.

It was different once upon a time, W. says. He spoke little. He was nearly silent, everyone said so. And then he became a lay member of the Trappists, a silent order, W. remembers. That must have been difficult! No, he says. He liked the peace. He wasn't as inane back then. His head wasn't full of chatter. - 'It was before I met you'.

Thought-Provoking

Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out aloud from Heidegger. - 'Most thought thought-provoking is that you think you are thinking', W. says. 'Because you do, don't you?'

The Opposite Of A Swan

W. admires loyalty wherever he finds it. Take the animal kingdom, for example. Swans!, says W. They mate for life! - 'You're the opposite of a swan', W. says. 'Friendship means nothing to you'. And then, 'You're always about to betray me', he says. 'You're thinking about it now, aren't you?' And then, 'You're a betrayer. You'd break the phalanx'. What phalanx? - 'The phalanx of our friendship!' 

Kafka On The Stairs

It's empty time that I fear, W. remembers my telling him, it's always struck him. Empty time, he says - he's rarely heard me speak so movingly on any topic. Of course, it's all to do with my fear of unemployment, he knows that. That's always been my real fear, W. says, which goes back, no doubt, to my warehouse years.

W. has often talked of using my account of my warehouse years as an example in one of his philosophical essays. He's often urged me to write it up, to present it to him as a text he might use in some way. Whenever he thinks about the great questions of philosophy, W. says, he always has my warehouse years in the back of his mind. He knows they are relevant in some way, but how? He hasn't worked that out yet, W. says.

W. has always admired my working class credentials, he says, which are far better than his. When he thinks of me leaving school and working in the warehouse, he is invariably moved and feels the great urge to protect and encourage me. How long were you there?, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps. That long! And what did you do there?, he asks, and when I tell him he's amazed.

Best of all, he says, are my accounts of reading in the warehouse: of the flight of stairs that led up to the roof and no one ever used, and where I went as I began to read my way through the library, W. says. What was the book I started with?, he asks. Oh yes: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, he could never forget that. I began with The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, W. says, and read my way up to Kafka: how was that possible?

W. began with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library ('we had a school library', he says, 'unlike you'). They had yellow dustcovers, W. says. Why was he attracted by that colour, he'll never know. But there it was: The Castle. The gates of literature opened to enclose him.

The Castle, W. says. He didn't have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes, W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. The fatal lure of literature: wasn't that where it began to go wrong?

Of course, he immediately wanted to become a writer, which was a disaster. But then he could form letters, W. says, unlike me. He could actually write a coherent sentence, a task of which I am still incapable, W. says. It was worse, much worse in my case, W. says. It led to all my hopes and dreams, and the perpetual dashing of my hopes and dreams.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of my sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof, The Mammoth Book of Fantasy already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E to himself.

The Tulip Garden

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar - a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

But what would I understand of any this?, W. wonders. What conception could I have of the ceremony of reading, of the rituals that must surround it?

He knows how I read, of course, W. says. There are books piled all over my office. Books leaning against other books. But it means nothing! You can have all the books in the world, but if you know nothing about reading, then ..., W. says.

He's seen me at it, my reading, W. says. I open one page - another - and then what? I make a beginning, I open a book, and not always at the start, and what happens? I invariably open another, W. says. Another and then another.

Anything so as not to be alone with a book, W. says. Alone and undistracted, he says. Alone with a span of time opening ahead of me. Haven't I always feared empty time, W. muses, the time in which something might happen? And don't I, for that reason, fear - really fear - what might happen to me when I read?

Streaming Tears

There are some books, of course, over which W. has wept like a baby, he says. Imagine it! Him! Completely disarmed! Completely overcome! He's wept many times, W. says. There are books that have brought him to tears, he says, great floods of tears. He's always been a pathetic reader, W. says. He's always been tremendously alive to pathos.

Of course, it's different in my case, W. says. My eyes are always dry. When do I weep? Never, W. says. I am only a hooter, a pointer. I can hoot and point at a book, but that's about it, he says. Whereas W. will sometimes read in great sweeps, on a long train journey, for example, my reading is always sporadic and spasmodic; it begins, and is almost immediately interrupted.

In a sense, W. says, I cannot be said to read at all, though I claim to be a reader; I claim to have read books by this thinker and that thinker; I claim to be an admirer of literature. But what can it mean to me, all this philosophy, all this literature? What can it mean to one who has never wept like a baby over the pages of Cohen? What can it mean who has never felt so compelled, utterly compelled by The Star of Redemption, that tears ran streaming down his cheeks?

T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E

Someone, at a certain time in my life, must have praised me too highly, W. says; I show all the signs of that. Someone must have told me I excelled, which of course I have, given my education.

Wasn't I happy in my warehouse? Wasn't I content long before I decided to venture into the university? Shouldn't I have stayed there, reading The Castle in my lunch hour? Should I have remained a lunchtime reader of Kafka and the others, rather than venturing into the university?

Of course, as W. knows, I never really read The Castle. He finds the idea of my reading anything particularly amusing. He can imagine my mouth forming the letters as I spoke them out loud, and the creases on my brow. T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E. - 'It's still an effort for you, isn't it?', W. says.

But in the end, W. doesn't believe I actually read books. - 'They're like totems to you. They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don't understand them'.

The real reader has no need for surrounding himself with books, W. says. The real reader gives them away to others, lending them without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? 

But it's different for me, W. says, for whom all books - and particularly the first one for me, Kafka's Castle - are like the obelisk in 2001, making me jump up and down and hoot excitedly.

The Good and the True

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books - that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library. - 'It's always new for you, isn't it?' And this, W. supposes, is why I never really finish the books I read, but pile them up, one on top of another. I never finish them, says W., but I let them lean, one against the other, on my bookshelves.

'What have you been reading?', W. asks. 'What's caught your fancy lately?' I tell him. W. nods and murmurs. - 'Flusser again, oh yes ... Walser, oh very interesting ....'

W.'s read everything, he says. For a long time, reading was more important to him than anything. Those were his golden years, W. says. He was in his heyday! He doesn't read anything like as much now, W. says. It happens in your late 30s; you find you can't read as much as you used to. You can't read for a whole day, stopping for dinner, and then read in the evening as well, not that this would mean anything to me.

'A bit of Flusser - the editor's introduction, for example - and a little Walser - or an online essay about Walser - that's enough for you', W. says. It's enough of me to have a whiff of literature, and it's the same for philosophy. Have I read, really read Rosenzweig, about whom I talk so passionately? And what about Cohen - have I read him?

W. even offered to lend me Religion Out Of The Sources Of Reason, he says. He would have offered to buy it for me, but there was no point. - 'It was enough for you that it existed'. Enough, for me, that there was a man called Cohen and a man called Rosenzweig, and that they wrote books once, a long time ago.

'Please Kill Me'

I'd like to start all over again, wouldn't I?, W. asks. I'd like to confess, to tell everyone my story only to wipe it away, to erase and delete until there was nothing left. I'm forever waiting for judgement, W. says. I'm waiting for the party leader to expel me, or the police to arrest me. I want to be sent down, W. says. I want to place my neck on the guillotine - indeed, that's all I want.

Pass sentence on me! Tell me what I've done wrong!: that's my message to the world, W. says. And indeed, I do more and more wrong, W. says. My guilt becomes deeper with every second that passes, and isn't that part of my problem? Doesn't it become more and more acute? Soon I'll no longer speak, only wail, W. says. Soon I'll only type the words, please kill me, over and again.

Autocritiques

Paranoia, W. says. Have I always felt paranoid?Do I really think someone's watching me, that my footsteps are being followed? In truth, I'm only following myself, W. says. In truth, I only stalk myself, in horror at myself, and not only of what I have become.

That I am at all: that's what causes my paranoia, W. says. That I even exist: even I know, W. says; even I know somewhere that I am entirely at fault.

Of course, I didn't ask to be born, W. grants that. Which one of us did? But I was born, and that's the problem - my problem, W. says, and everyone's problem.

And isn't that why my life is a series of autocritiques?, W. wonders. Isn't that why it has always resembled a kind of staged confession, a show trial, in which I repent for everything I have done and even in the end, the fact that I did anything at all; and indeed that I was, that even existed in the first place.

It wasn't me! That's what I want to cry to the world. It wasn't my fault! But it was me, W. says; it was my fault, and indeed my only, basic fault: that I ever lived at all.

A few notes from Thomas F. Barry's article on Handke.

Here is Handke himself:

When I was 36 years old, I had the illumination of slowness. Slowness has been since this time a principle for my life and my writing.... Perhaps instead of slowness one could speak more exactly of a deliberateness. Never, never become fast, never suggest, always keep a distance to things and be cautious.

Barry remembers this from The Afternoon of a Writer:

You know of course slowness is the only illumination I have ever had.

Barry: The productive otherness of the experience of literature in acts of reading and writing is, as Handke phrased it in his acceptance speech for the Buchner prize [...]

nothing other than poetic thinking that is all about hope, that allows the world to begin anew again and again whenever I, in my obstinacy, have already considered it predetermined, and it is also the basis of the self-awareness with which I write.

Barry: Handke's preface to the original German edition of The Weight of the World gives the reader some insight into what kind of radical literary experiment he was taking with his journals, an experiment that focuses the attention of both writer and reader on the nature of perception and its formulation in language. Handke calls this first journal 'a sort of novel or epic of everyday occurrences'.

Barry tells us how Handke's plan for the notebooks changed: 'Handke soon realised that he was paying attention to only those thoughts and events that suited his plans and everything else became insignificant and thus forgettable'. 

But precisely through this state of heightened attentiveness, into which I had thought myself, I became aware of the daily forgetting.

It is thus to this 'daily forgetting' (a beautiful phrase) that Handke will now attend. Is that what The Afternoon of a Writer is about? And My Year in No-Man's Bay?

Reflecting on his earlier fiction, Handke says:

These narratives and novels have no story. They are only daily occurrences brought into a new order. What is 'story' or 'fiction' is really always only the point of intersection between individual daily events. This is what produces the impression of fiction. And because of this I believe they are not traditional, but that the most unarranged daily occurrences are only brought into a new order, where they suddenly look like fiction. I never want to do anything else.

And he says this:

The more I immerse myself in an object, the more it approaches a written sign.

Handke has published 4 volumes of his journals, which he began to keep in the mid 70s. Was this amidst the general crisis to which he alludes at the beginning of My Year in No-Man's Bay?

There was one time in my life when I experienced metamorphosis. Up to that point, it had only been a word to me....

Very early on, while at the famous Group 47 meeting, he says:

Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions.

His Responsibility

Glee: that's what W. always sees on my face. That I'm still alive, that I can still continue, from moment to moment: that's enough for me, W. says. He supposes it has to be. If I realised for one moment ... If I had any real awareness ... But it would be too much, W. says I couldn't know what I was and continue as I am. I couldn't come into any real self-awareness.

'That's what saves you', W. says. 'Your stupidity'. If only he knew ... That's what everyone thinks when they see me, W. says. That's what he thinks.

Meanwhile, it's left to him to bear the terrible fact of my existence, W. says. It's his problem, not mine as it should be, W. says. Everyone blames him for me. What's he doing here?, they ask. Why did you bring him? But he had to, W. knows. He has all the excuses. He's sorry in my place. I'm his responsibility.

The Cheat

'You've cheated us!', W. says. 'You've cheated everyone!' My very existence involves a horrible kind of deception, W. says. You only cheat yourself, that's the saying, W. says. But I've managed to cheat everyone but myself, because that's all my existence is: cheating.

'You've broken every rule', W. says. 'You've spoilt the game for everyone'. Why? Because I exist, W. says. Because I shouldn't exist, and do.

'How did you catch us out? How did you catch the world out?' It's a mystery to W. Someone should have been looking, he says. Someone should have been watching out. As it is ... Who's going to put me out of my misery now? Who's going to wipe the grin off my face?

Victories

'What keeps you going?', W. asks. 'What - minute to minute?' If he has my life, W. he says, he'd kill himself straightaway. It's a disaster, a travesty. - 'How do you go on? How -really?' W.'s never been sure. He has enough trouble with his life, he says. It's already too much. But mine - mine!

He shakes his head. - 'If you had any decency ...' But I don't, do I? I'm still alive! It's a kind of triumph for me, isn't it? It's a little victory, minute to minute: the knowledge that I still exist and I still annoy him, W. It's why I always look so gleeful. It's why I always look as though I've pulled one over on the world, which in fact I have.

Down - And Out

Has it really come to this?, W. wonders. It has. Is it going to get any worse? Much worse. This is only the beginning. He feels like a Marie Antoinette being lead out to the chopping-block, he says. He feels like Joan of Arc being bound to the stake.

When's the blow going to come? When are the flames going to leap up and surround him? It'll be a relief after everything that's happened, W. says. The horror of not-knowing will come to an end. For that's all he's experienced since he took up with me, W. says. The horror of not knowing where the next step will lead, for example, he says. The horror of the uncertainty of his destination.

For where's he been heading all this time? Downwards, that much is obvious. Down - and out - that, too is obvious. We've long since left all friendly terrain. We've long since left the last human house. We're in the wilderness now, W. says, mapless and unsure.

The Death-Drive

Why does he listen to me?, W. says. But he knows why. There'd be sense in keeping people around to inspire him, W. says. But not to destroy him. Unless it's his death-drive, W. says. Unless I'm his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

Ostracism, that's what I've brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.'s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth, and there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want for himself? Ah, there's no way of telling. He'll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We're heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pine trees to where nothing can live.

Atlantis

W.'s workfiles mean little to him now, he says. There are dozens of them now, saved in a folder called Notes, one after another, on every kind of topic. Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, for example. Hermann Cohen's Religion of Reason. He saves them to his folder and forgets them immediately, W. says.

What are they all for? What do they mean? Didn't a friend of his set up a website in his honour? Didn't he put up some of W.'s miscellaneous notetakings? It was a disaster, of course, W. says. You should never venture casually into the public domain. It's something over which you should exercise the greatest caution.

He always does the opposite to me, W. says, that's his policy. Take my attitude to the internet, for example. Take my advocacy of the world of blogging. A few years ago, I was a blogging-advocacy-madman, W. remembers. I spoke of nothing else.

I told him of Rilkes of the blogosphere, of blogospherical Nietzsches. I spoke of the new commons, of new modes of writely collectivity. Couldn't we envisage the online fuflilment of Blanchot's La Revue Internationale? Couldn't we bypass the institutions and channels of conventional thought?

Even W. was persuaded, or some part of him was. Even he thought something was happening, that something might come of it ... We started a group blog, of course. - 'And then what happened?', W. says. 'Tell me. Start at the beginning'. When I say nothing, he says, as he always does, 'You ruined it! You destroyed it straightaway!'

I published like a maniac, W says. Post after post, one after another. No one else had a chance! No one could get a word in! 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 it might rise up, a calm island in the midst of a sea of madness.

But that's not what happened, is it? It was drowned! Everything he wrote was drowned! It was like Atlantis all over again, W. says. That's when he learnt the internet was only a support network for my fantasies.