Free Spurious by Lars Iyer Page B

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    W. admires my adamantine apocalypticism , he says. It’s very cold and pure, he says, like the sky on a winter morning.—‘Your sense of the apocalypse is absolute’, he says, ‘you’re sure of it’. He’s not sure of it, he says. He still believes something could save us, though he also knows nothing will save us. He knows nothing will save us, but he feels something will save us, that’s the thing.
    That’s his messianism, W. says. But there’s no messianism in me whatsoever, W. acknowledges. I’m far beyond that. Some process has completed itself in me, he says. Something, a whole history has been brought to an end.
    How long has he been reading Rosenzweig?, W wonders. It’s like rain hitting a tin roof, he says. Nothing goes in. It makes no impression. But at least he does read; at least there is the steady rhythm of his non-understanding as it beats against his intelligence. He knows his limits, W. says, because they are constantly tested. He has a sense of what he does not know.
    What’s he working on, and why is he bothering?, W. asks himself. What does it matter? Why does he read these books that are too hard for him? Why does he batter himself against the wall of mathematics? What difference does it make? What’s it all for? Who could he possibly influence or persuade?
    And finally, who will listen to him but me, who has no idea what he is talking about, and can only regard the work of Rosenzweig and Cohen with the awe of an ape before the thundering power of a waterfall?—‘What can it possibly mean to you?’, says W. That’s what makes it even worse: the only person paying attention to him, says W., is the one least capable of understanding anything he says.
    But then too, W. says, he doesn’t really understand Rosenzweig and Cohen either, and he too can only hoot and point like an ape at their mighty oeuvres.

 
    Yesterday, I tell W., the workmen came and took the ceiling down and fitted new joists next to the old, rotten ones. Then they hammered boards over the joists. But it makes no difference: the walls are still wet.
    ‘It’s what will happen if you lay plaster on wet brick’, the Loss Adjuster told me, looking at the discoloured walls of the kitchen, deep brown and rich green.—‘It’s very porous’, she said of the new plaster. ‘That’s why the damp spread so quickly’.
    ‘Your bathroom’s okay’, she said, ‘but we’ll have to dry out your wall. Everything’ll have to come out. We might have to replace the cupboards, too. And you’ll have to empty them. And we’ll need the washing machine out’. Looking up at the ceiling she said, ‘I’m surprised the washing machine from upstairs hasn’t come right through. The joists are completely rotten’.
    She warned me I wouldn’t be able to cook, I tell W. Never mind!, I said, and meant it. For months, I said, there was no electricity in the kitchen. Nothing worked; I couldn’t cook, even if I wanted to. For months! Because of the damp! Because the electricity was affected by the damp! In the end, I had to get the kitchen rewired.—‘I’ve never seen anything like it’, said the electrician. Not even in an old house?—‘Never’, he said.
    W. always flails about when he has to do administrative work. He pings me obscenities and shaky drawings of cocks. He rings me up and asks me how much I’ve eaten. This seems to calm him.
    I always exaggerate. I’ve eaten too much, I tell him, far too much!—‘Go on, tell me, what’ve you eaten?’ I tell him he’s a feeder.—‘Go on, tell me’, says W., getting excited. ‘How fat are you now?’
    All jobs are becoming the same, W. observes. We’re all administrators now, all of us. What do any of us do but administer? We administer and prevaricate about administration. Work time is either administration time or prevaricating about administration time, which occupies an enormous part of W.’s day, he says.
    He doesn’t know how I just get on with it , he