Free The Lonely City by Olivia Laing Page A

in the kitchen while everyone else has gone to the ball, and Dracula, who gains his nourishment from the living essence of other human beings. He’d always been acquisitive about people, especially if they were beautiful or famous or powerful or witty; had always desired proximity, access, a better view. (Mary Woronov, in her terrifying amphetamine-memoir of the Factory years, Swimming Underground: ‘Andy was the worst . . . He even looked like a vampire: white, empty, waiting to be filled, incapable ofsatisfaction. He was the white worm – always hungry, always cold, never still, always twisting.’) Now he had the tools to take possession, ameliorating loneliness without ever having to risk himself.
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    Language is communal. It is not possible to have a wholly private language. This is the theory put forward by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, a rebuttal of Descartes’s notion of the lonely self, trapped in the prison of the body, uncertain that anyone else exists. Impossible, says Wittgenstein. We cannot think without language, and language is by its nature a public game, both in terms of acquisition and transmission.
    But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.
    The fear of being misunderstood or failing to generate understanding haunted Wittgenstein. As Terada observes, his ‘confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expectation that he would himselfbe unintelligible’. He had a horror of certain kinds of language, in particular ‘idle talk and unintelligibility’; talk that lacked substance or failed to produce meaning.
    The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
    Though Warhol shared many of Wittgenstein’s problems with speech production, he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation. The films he made in the early 1960s are full of people failing to understand or listen to each other, an investigative process that sharpened with the arrival of the tape machine. The first thing he did with his new wife was to make a book, entitled a, a novel, composed entirely of recorded speech; a celebratory tour de force of idle and unintelligible language, around which loneliness hovers like a sea mist.
    Despite the declaration of the title, a isn’t a novel in any ordinary sense. It isn’t fictional, for a start. It doesn’t have a plot and nor is it a product of creative labour, at least not in the way that term is ordinarily defined. Like Warhol’s paintings of inappropriate objects or wholly static films it defies the rules of content, the terms by which categories are assembled and maintained.
    It was conceived as an homage to Ondine, Robert Olivo, nicknamed the Pope, the