Free Spurious by Lars Iyer

stupid editorial comments that generations of scholars would read to one another in disgust and amusement.
    ‘We’re in free fall’, says W. ‘Or Limbo. We must have committed a terrible crime in a former life, that would account for it, wouldn’t it? That’s what you Hindus would say’.
    This is our Purgatory, W. says, or perhaps it’s just his. Perhaps I am his Purgatory, says W., and I am his Limbo. Perhaps his friendship for me is only a punishment for some great crime he committed in a former life, he’s not sure what.
    Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It’s the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I’ll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse, which is just a way to avoid it altogether.—‘You have to run up against your idiocy, to shatter yourself against it’, W. says. ‘Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy’.
    My idiocy is theological, W. tells me. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says. I am that I am , says W., that’s all it says.
    On the other hand, he says, sometimes my idiocy is only a simple absence, a pellucid sky. Not a thought crosses my mind for weeks, does it?, says W. Nothing at all. I’m untroubled by thought and untroubled by thinking.
    His idiocy, says W. is more a kind of stubbornness or indolence. It’s never thunderous as mine can be, and nor is his head ever really empty. His idiocy is only a niggling reminder of his own incapacity, against which he runs up freshly each day.

 
    Sometimes I think the damp is receding, I tell W. on the phone. True, the air is still full of water and little spores of mildew—no doubt of that, but the plaster is lightening, there at the edges where it was most soaked, and the walls no longer run with water, though the new cabinets are still full of mildew and the whole flat smells of damp and rot.
    It’s the oldest smell, the most familiar one: the great rotting of everything, the great saturation. Away for a few days, my return confirmed it, I tell W.: home, for me, will always mean the smell of damp, and that first of all. Open the door, there it is, the old smell, breathe it in, along with the spores of mildew …
    Of course, I’m also worried that the damp is returning to itself to regather its strength: withdrawing only to bloom once again across my walls and ceiling, only more magnificently this time, with a new palette of colours. What colours this time? What richnesses? No doubt the damp is regathering itself to return, I tell W., with more force, with more splendour, and with new and splendid spores to send out into the air.
    There’s crumbled brick and wood on the work surfaces, I tell W.: the ceiling continues to cave in; the hole is still wide open. What’s up there? Something terrible. Something dark. There’s an open slice between the flats. I hear the voices of the tenants upstairs echoing there, ghostly, so I can’t make out what is said. Yes, there’s something terrible there, the source of all damp, there between the flats.

 
    ‘So how fat are you now?’, says W., ‘you must be really fat. Are you eating at the moment? What are you eating?’
    W. has always been intrigued by my eating habits. He likes to put his hand on my belly.—‘It’s big’, he marvels. ‘But this is just the start. You’re going to be enormous’.
    W. remembers the elasticated trousers of the American professors he’s met. There was a whole herd of them, he says, like walruses on a beach, all with elasticated trousers. That’s what you’ll be wearing soon, says W., great billowing trousers with trouser legs like circus tents.
    Food is a sacrament, W. has always believed, which is another reason he