Authors: Lars Iyer
His mother was a
musical
thinker, he says. A concert pianist. She thought as she played. Reviewers wrote of her
fine equilibrium of intellect and emotion
. Of her
purity of style
. They wrote of her
polyphony
. Of her
unruffled perfection
. They wrote of the
morality
of her pianism. And of her
heart
.
It is possible to be
too good
, he says. My mother was
too good
.
Through the woods. Low beech branches close to the ground. Saplings in protective frames. Big, iron-coloured oaks.
You have to
want
to live, if you are to live, he says. That’s what his brother lacked, he says: the desire to live.
We stop to make way for a Land Rover.
His brother showed
Lebenskraft
, he says—the
ability
to live. But his brother lacked
Lebenswille
—the
will
to live.
Sometimes, he, too, lacks
Lebenswille
, Wittgenstein says. But
we
are full of
Lebenswille
, he says, looking at us with affection. That is why he likes to keep us close.
A small brick outhouse. Then a barn, its doors open, giving into a greeny-black gloom.
The act of suicide means that anything is possible: that is its horror, he says.
Anything
: even striking against the grounds of life, the
life
of life.
Suicide
mocks
the possible, he says. It
laughs
at life. Death
ought to come as
grace
, he says. As the gift of God. As even the
greatest
gift of God.
The end is not about the
will
, he says. We must not
want
the end. The end must come to us. The end must come, like a horse nuzzling our pockets for a treat.
What is divine is the fact that there is an end to our suffering, he says. That our end is coming.
The end is
innocent
, he says. It has God’s innocence.
A canal lock. The black-and-white arms of the sluices. The lockkeeper’s house, flying the flag of St George.
Thought was once a matter of
character
, Wittgenstein says. Of
living
in a certain way. You were judged as a thinker by the way you lived before others. You
showed
what you thought by the evidence of your life.
But thought, now, is a kind of
beetling
, he says. The thinker is a nocturnal insect. The thinker goes about in darkness. The thinker lives and dies unnoticed. His body is swept away with all the others, like a dried-up fly in a dusty corner.
Thinking is no longer an honest pursuit, he says. No longer a
decent
pursuit. There is something
covert
about thinking now. Something
dirty
.
The Fens. Open land, flat to infinity.
He doesn’t like open spaces, Wittgenstein says. Before the sky, you can have no secrets. The light goes right through you. It leaves you no hiding place.
The sky is burrowing into him, he says. Why should he fear it?—the sky is blind; it sees nothing. But he feels that its blindness is itself an eye. An eye that
sees
. A blind eye—an eye that belongs to no one, that
sees
.
And it’s not only the sky, he says. The earth watches
us, blindly. The toad that crawls through the clods of earth watches us, blindly. The circling rooks …
Nothing is watching, he says. Nothingness
itself
is watching. He smiles. Imagine what his colleagues in Cambridge would think were he to speak to them of
nothingness itself
!
Life
cannot
go on as it is, he says. He has to die. He
must
die.
His mental suffering must be matched by a commensurate
physical
suffering, he says. He
must be
dying. He
must be
mortally ill.
How much time is left to him? A couple of months, he thinks. A couple of weeks.
Anything could happen, this close to the end, he says. The old laws do not apply anymore. At any moment, a slow tsunami could break over the Fens …
Does water still swirl round the plughole in the same direction?, he wonders. Does the law of gravity still apply? Do compass needles still point north? Does one plus one still equal two? Does the moon still orbit the earth, and the earth, the sun?
Do the laws of physics still hold?, he wonders. If he walked in front of a bus, would it crush him? If he stabbed himself in the heart, would his heart stop beating? If he cut through his carotid artery, would he bleed to death? If he jumped from St Mary’s, would his body splatter on the ground? If he drank a glass of cyanide, would he die of its toxicity?
He has a fear of time, Wittgenstein says. Of
open
time. Of empty moments. Empty hours. A fear of
intervals
. Of time that is not dedicated to a particular task. Time of which he
is not the master. A fear of the thoughts that run through his head. Of the thoughts
about
thought that run through his head …
Life is too long, not too short, he says. Life is eternal.
He has experienced
every kind of mental illness
, he says. Not one mode of madness is closed to him. He’s heard hostile voices. He’s felt that his mind is being read. He’s felt persecuted. Tormented, by alien forces. He’s experienced great highs, manias. He’s felt grandiosity. He’s felt chosen. He’s felt that only
he
could save the world.
And he’s experienced terrible despairs, he says. Abysmal depression. He’s had to keep away from sharp knives. From exposed pipework. From bottles of bleach. From high places …
He’s hallucinated, he says. He’s seen the skull of Cantor, full of worms. He’s seen the brain of Gödel, invaded by maggots.
He’s pulled out his hair. He’s picked at his skin. He’s counted his footsteps in intervals of two. He’s sat, mute, for weeks on end, staring at the wall.
Has he ever known joy?, Wittgenstein wonders. Has he ever known happiness? Has he
lived
? Has he for one minute known what it means
to live
?
Has he ever
breathed
? Has he ever drawn a single breath? To breathe, to really breathe, must
hurt
—he’s sure of it. To really breathe must give you
pain
in your lungs—at the bottom of your lungs.
Has he ever
looked
? Has he ever even
opened his eyes
? Has he ever
spoken
? Has he ever uttered anything
true
?
No one can speak the truth if he has not mastered himself, he says.
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is
at home
in the truth.
Everything must come from the heart, he says.
He wants to say only what he
has
to say. He wants to drop everything but the essential.
But what is it: the essential? What is it that he
has
to say?
Driving home through the Fens.
Flooded pasture. Meadows full of standing water. Saltwater wetlands. Tidal creeks and meres. Rivers braiding, fanning out.
You get a sense of what the Fens used to be like, before they were drained, Wittgenstein says. Settlers building on banks of silt, on low hills, on fen edges. Towns like islands in the marshland.
We imagine the first scholars, expelled from Oxford, founding the new university in Cambridge. We imagine the first colleges growing out of boardinghouses. The first classes, teaching priests to glorify God, and to preach against heresy. The first benefactors, donating money for building projects. The first courtyard design, at Queens College, the chapel at its heart. The first libraries, built above the ground floor to avoid the floods. The lands, drained along the river, and planted with weeping willows and avenues of lime trees. The Backs, cleared, landscaped lawns replacing garden plots and marshland. Cambridge, raising itself above the water. Cambridge, lifting itself into the heavens of thought …
The rabbis thought that the old earth, Adam’s earth, was as flat as the Fens, Wittgenstein says. That it enjoyed a perfect climate, a perfect summer. No extremes of weather—no thunder or ice, no snow or hail. It was the Flood that changed it
all, the rabbis thought. It was the Flood that altered the surface of the earth.
Noah’s ark came to rest on Ararat, Wittgenstein says. On the mountains. And Noah’s family, and all their animals, had to go down from the mountains into the new valleys, into the changeable weather of the world.
His brother used to say that thought is always of the heights, Wittgenstein says. Of the mountains. The thinker must soar above everything. Close to the truth. Close to eternal things.
His brother dreamt of a
celestial
logic, Wittgenstein says. A system of logic that blazed in the sky. A logical system at one with the order of things, that might be divined in the order of things. A logic that God Himself must have studied, before embarking on the Creation.
It is a terrible thing for the thinker to be sent down from the heights, his brother told him—to be forced to return to the world.
But what if thought is
low
, and not high?, Wittgenstein says. What if the thinker’s place is
below
things, or
with
things, rather than
above it all
?
What if to think is to
sink
, not to rise?, Wittgenstein says. What if thinking is falling, failing, defeat? What if thought is the
eclipse
, not the sun? What if thought is
mist
, not clarity? What if thought is getting lost, not discovering? What if thought is waylessness, and not the way?
Perhaps the waters of the Flood are
baptismal
waters, Wittgenstein says. Perhaps there are
joyful
names for the disaster …
We take our leave at his door.
How much time he has spent on his own!, Wittgenstein says.
No friends—not now
, he’s always said to himself.
Not until my work is done
.
But perhaps he has made friends, he says. Perhaps
we
are his friends.
Walking back to our rooms.
EDE: Did we save him, do you think? Have we done something good?
ME: I think we have. I think we did.
EDE: Why did we bother, I wonder?
ME: Because he was flagging. Because he needed us.
EDE: You’re very tender, Peters. I hope you’ll be around to save
me
when the time comes. (A pause.) My God, we’ve been sober for two whole days!
Ede’s rooms. Titmuss arrives with a bottle of cognac; Doyle and Mulberry, with a bottle of absinthe.
Ede pours it all into a saucepan on the stove.
EDE: Gentlemen—did you know it’s possible to
inhale
alcohol? It bypasses the stomach and goes straight to the lungs and brain. No need for the middleman. Digestion’s strictly
old school
. You’re supposed to use air pumps to vaporise it, and then pour it over dry ice. But I don’t see why you can’t just heat it and sniff.
We crowd round the saucepan, breathing deeply.
Delirium. Both Kirwins have passed out. Their hyper-fitness makes them vulnerable, we agree. A bit like Bruce Lee.
MULBERRY: The room’s spinning.
DOYLE: My head’s about to fall off.
MULBERRY: Ede, why are there two of you?
DOYLE (panicked): Help me! I think I’m going to die.
EDE: There’s no way for the body to get rid of the alcohol. You can’t vomit your way out of this one, Doyle. You’ll just have to sit it out.
Titmuss launches into one of his India stories.
We lie, listening, in liquid-free drunkenness.
What a cliché Titmuss is!
Titmuss the India connoisseur. Titmuss moved by poverty
and staring peasants. Moved by being moved by poverty and staring peasants. Supposing himself to have learnt a
great Indian lesson
, and—worst of all!—supposing himself to have a great Indian lesson to teach!
Only three weeks in India, and a new Titmuss was born. A
heartfelt
Titmuss, unknown to friends and family. A
compassionate
Titmuss with tears of joy in his eyes, as happy as the saints of God … A
great-souled
Titmuss, full of gap-year wisdom … A
karmic
Titmuss, dreaming of the thousand incarnations of the Titmuss-soul before him—of Titmussslugs and Titmuss-bats and Titmuss-ground-sloths. An
eternal
Titmuss—born an amoeba, born an ant, working his way up to a pasty Cambridge student.
The next day. The Kirwins, running through the snow.
EDE: Do you think the Kirwins have ever known despair?
The Kirwins are too vigorous to have known despair, we agree. Unless they are vigorous
because
of their despair. Unless the Kirwins nurse some deeply buried
horror at life
from which they flee in triathlons and Ironman contests …
The Kirwins’ tragedy is that there’s no war for them to die in, we agree. No chance of glory, no heroism. Ede imagines them charging some machine gun nest, without a thought for their safety. He sees Alexander Kirwin hurling back an enemy grenade, and Benedict Kirwin offering his body as a human shield to protect the soldiers behind him.
Of course, they could join up to fight in one of our stupid modern wars, Ede says. He imagines them blown up by roadside IEDs. But then, they’d learn to walk again on plastic legs, and salute visiting royalty with plastic arms, and enter the Paralympics, and head to the North Pole with Prince Harry. The Kirwins are irrepressible, Ede says.
The Kirwins will probably excel on the
corporate stage
, we agree. They’ll work their way up to the boardroom. But they’ll be haunted by a strange
emptiness
, we imagine—the same emptiness that makes them come to Wittgenstein’s classes. And one will die in a supposed shooting accident (a gun pressed accidentally to his temple: how was
that
possible?). The other, shortly afterwards, will fly his light aircraft into an electricity pylon. They’ll kill themselves without really knowing why …