Wittgenstein Jr

by Lars Iyer

  EDE: You seem pleased.

  MULBERRY: Oh, I can’t wait for the world to end!

  Rain pours from the mouths of the gargoyles. Chained monkeys … A drowning monk … A faceless figure with a snake in its mouth …

  WITTGENSTEIN: Do you know why God sent the Flood? Men spilled their seed on trees and stones. They copulated with beasts. And the greater beasts copulated with lesser beasts—the dog, with the rat; the cock, with the peahen. (A pause.) So God reversed the act of creation, unleashing the sea he had once sealed up, allowing the waters of the deep to sweep over the land.

  TITMUSS (quietly): Far out, man.

  MULBERRY (quieter still): You’re a fucking hippie, Titmuss.

  • • •

  Inside the Fitzwilliam, sheltering from the rain.

  His brother thought of himself as a kind of Noah, Wittgenstein says, as we wander among the exhibits.

  Logic is what guards against the Flood, his brother said. Against the annulment of order. Against the destruction of goodness.

  Noah sought a sanctuary on the face of the abyss, his brother wrote in his notebooks. And isn’t that what I am seeking: a sanctuary on the face of the abyss?

  As love is stronger than death, so is logic stronger than chaos, his brother wrote in his notebooks. In the storm of the world, the ark of my thought will anchor on the mountain of certainty.

  Guy Fawkes’. Midnight, after the pubs close. Mulberry’s annual derangement of the senses house party.

  Coats in the front room. DJ in the living room. Dealer in the dining room, showing his wares: MDMA, ‘Miaow Miaow’, and a mystery powder he can’t identify. An amusebouche, he says—a free snort for anyone who buys …

  The kitchen. Dozens of cans of beer, wine. A jam-tub full of punch, with floating cherries and slices of banana. Stacks of plastic cups wrapped in cellophane.

  The first bedroom upstairs. Very grand, with sanded floorboards and tall sash windows looking out onto the street. The marijuana zone. Posters: Che in his beret, Bob Marley in Rasta colours. We join the smoking circle.

  Conversation is dopey, making Ede impatient. Where are the Clare College girls Mulberry promised? Ede needs girls!

  EDE: Have you ever been in love, Peters? I mean really in love?

  Ede speaks of his romance with a Master’s daughter. Her summer dress and flip-flops … A lily pond … A raft … Skinny-dipping … A bottle of champagne chilling in the water …

  Great love will be the making of him, he’s sure of it, Ede says. Only romance will teach him what to do with his life.

  The bathroom. Guthrie’s in the tub, reenacting the death of Seneca under Doyle’s direction.

  GUTHRIE/SENECA: As long as you live, keep learning how to live; and this is as true for me, today, as it is for any of you. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living; running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity …

  How noble Guthrie seems! How profound!

  GUTHRIE/SENECA: Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

  Guthrie sniffs cocaine from a mirror. Ede rubs some on his gums (it acts more quickly this way, he says). Mulberry, trousers down, applies his cocaine rectally (it’s even quicker this way, he says).

  The second bedroom (set aside for ketamine, Mulberry tells us). It’s dark inside. The music thumps up from downstairs, bass magnified through the floorboards. Slumped individuals, among them Scroggins … Is it Scroggins? Yes: there he is, lost in a K-hole.

  The third bedroom, Mulberry’s, up a second flight of stairs. Posters. Mapplethorpe’s men fisting. A large drawing of a headless man, with a labyrinth for viscera and a death’s head for genitals, holding a knife in one hand and a bleeding heart in another. A glassed-in roof terrace, full of straggly marijuana plants.

  Mulberry laces a spliff with codeine and passes it round. We have to lie down, it’s so strong.

  The roofs of Cambridge! We’re on top of the world! The sky above us. The sky: an abyss. The night: a great cave. What a night to lose our minds!

  Benwell is letting off fireworks in the garden. Bursts of colour. Cerise. Vermillion. A Catherine wheel spinning. A smouldering fire, spitting out sparks. Ede says he can feel the fireworks. Mulberry says he can taste the pink ones.

  Three AM. The girls are here. We lie on our bellies, watching them from the terrace. Girls in Barbour jackets, in vintage fur.

  How beautiful the girls are! How beautiful, the fireworks! And we’re beautiful, too. All the young are beautiful.

  Wittgenstein’s brother took his life at twenty, we muse. He knew he was all washed up at twenty. At our age! And we haven’t even begun to live! We haven’t done anything. We haven’t failed at anything. Our lives lie ahead of us. Wittgenstein says we haven’t been tested yet, Mulberry reminds us.

  To kill yourself at twenty! To have finished with life at twenty! To have run out of options at twenty! Twenty: and for your life to have run its course. To be twenty is surely to be stood at the brink of life! To be twenty is yet to have turned the page!

  Perhaps that’s what it means to be brilliant, really brilliant, we speculate: to have already seen past the limits of life. To have seen all the way to the end.

  Is that what brilliance means: understanding the whole of life, seeing the whole? Is it that we’re not clever enough to kill ourselves? We don’t want to die—not now, not today: is this a sign of our shallowness?

  The girls are playing with sparklers. The girls are cooing with delight about their sparklers. How beautiful they are, the girls with their sparklers, making loops in the air …

  They can’t help their beauty, we agree. It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with any of us. We are young, so young. But what does our youth mean?

  A cry from downstairs. Scroggins!

  Down we go, forcing our way through the crowds on the staircase. A glimpse of a glassy-eyed Chakrabarti, with a beer backpack and a suction tube. Of Guthrie, snoring on the floor. Both Kirwins in sweaty snogs with Clare College girls.

  Then Scroggins, like Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now. Muttering obscurely. Running his hand over his face. We can’t understand what he’s saying … The overturning of nonsense … Half words, non-words, speech thickening and wandering and failing …

  And then he’s out—cold. Locked into his private hell.

  Ede googles ketamine. Causes dissociative anaesthesia, he reads. That means you can’t tell whether you’re dreaming or awake, he says. Ketamine can make you feel you’ve died and come back to life, he reads. I’m not sure Scroggins is going to come back to life, I say.

  We wave our hands in front of Scroggins’s eyes. Nothing. And he smells terrible! Has he soiled himself? Yes! Yes, he has! Scroggins is incontinent!

  Mulberry suggests administering MDMA—that’ll pick him up. Ede shakes his head. No. It’s probably best to call the authorities.

  Scroggins is groaning. A deep, abysmal groan. A gurgling in the throat. A kind of living death rattle …

  Paramedics come for Scroggins, lifting him onto a stretcher. Would anyone like to accompany him? No! The ambulance rolls off, lights flashing.

  Ede and I walk off into the night, to let our heads cool off.

  EDE: That girl! That girl! Did you see her?

  I shake my head.

  EDE (swigging from his bottle): How could you miss her, Peters? She was a dead-ringer for that Cressida—Prince Harry’s girl. You know, hippyish. Plaits. Scarf round her hips. Anyway, she’s my future wife … She’s Duchess Ede … (Another swig.) Fuck Scroggins and his emergency. I hope he fucking dies. (A third swig.) Have you ever felt you were made for something, Peters? That you had some greater purpose? That’s what I feel now: I’m made for something. It’s all becoming clear. It’s to do with that Clare College girl. It’s providence. It’s fate. (Fourth swig.) All the light of the world seemed to rest on her face—did you notice that, Peters?

  Ede throws the bottle over a hedge and l
oses his balance. Ede, flat on his back on the pavement.

  He has a faith he never knew he possessed, Ede says. He has means he never knew he had … He feels taller than he was.

  EDE (sitting up): Am I really taller, Peters?

  He’s high, he says, as I pull him to his feet. Higher than he’s ever been. And it’s not drugs. It’s life! Life! He’s never going to sleep.

  He has a sense of the future, he says. Of the real future, which is nothing like our present. Tomorrow will not be like today, he says. Tomorrow is going to be quite different from today …

  He’s been thrown from the track, Ede says. This is a new direction. He’s at the surf’s edge. The waves’ edge. He won’t be afraid to leave himself behind. To relearn everything. He’s going to fight against everything he does not love …

  Our College. The staircase to my rooms. Ede gives me some Zs—they’ll help you zzz, he says. Zolpidem. Zopiclone. Old friends. I swallow a handful, and stagger upstairs.

  Class in five hours, I remind myself, setting the alarm clock …

  2

  Silence in the classroom.

  Mulberry’s asleep behind sunglasses. Ede’s sunk so low, his head is level with the tabletop. Alexander Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Benedict Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Titmuss looks vacantly out the window. Guthrie looks vacantly at Wittgenstein. Chakrabarti just looks vacant. Scroggins, usually the most vacant of all: missing.

  The effort of thinking. Wittgenstein stands silently in the corner of the room. He grasps his head. He shakes his head. Sweat streams from his face.

  Divine help: that’s what he needs, he says. We cannot think by ourselves, no more than we can create ourselves.

  Wittgenstein asks a general question, and waits for a reply.

  Silence.

  He asks his question again, slightly rephrasing it.

  More silence.

  He asks it for a third time.

  Still more silence.

  Okulu ventures a timorous reply. Wittgenstein waves it aside.

  Doyle says something. Not good enough!, Wittgenstein says.

  Silence, stretching out. Silence, the equivalent in time to Death Valley. To the Russian steppe. To the surface of the moon … Oh God, someone say something!

  Wittgenstein’s silence, his eyes closed, like a man already dead. How old he seems! As though he’d read everything and forgotten everything. As though he’d lived not one but several lives.

  His silence. He wants to carry us down, as into the depths of the deepest lake. Like the concrete boots that drag down a body. Down he takes us—into the green depths. He wants to drown us in his depths. But we do not want to be drowned … We are too young to be drowned …

  A walk on the Backs, Wittgenstein walking ahead.

  We discuss our most recent hangovers. Mulberry lay in bed for three days. Doyle hallucinated giant spiders dropping from the ceiling. Titmuss heard his name being called by the trees and the flowers. Benedict Kirwin caught the clap. Ede says he’s still drunk from last weekend. Guthrie’s never had a hangover, he says, since he’s never stopped drinking. (He’s drinking now, sipping from his hip flask.)

  Wittgenstein stops. Turns to us.

  Five years of philosophy: that’s all any of us is good for, he says.

  It was all his brother was good for, he says. And now it is five years since his brother’s death. Since his brother’s suicide. Five years in which he, following his brother’s example, has tried to think …

  Sometimes he wishes he had never begun his studies in logic. His studies in philosophy! Sometimes, he longs for it all to have been a dream. For his logical studies to have been a kind of fever …

  To wake up, with his mother’s hand on his brow. To wake up, with his brother beside him, in the attic room where they used to sleep—his brother who had likewise never begun his mathematical studies, his logical studies; his brother, who had never set out for Oxford, as Wittgenstein had never set out for Cambridge … To wake up, and chatter with his brother about the trees they would climb that day, or the pits they would dig, or the rivers they would ford, or the theatrical sketches they would put on, or the songs they would sing together at the piano, or the dens they would build in the woods, or the birds that would sing above them. To wake up, and speak of anything but their studies, anything but mathematics, anything but logic.

  The Maypole, after class.

  DOYLE: Have you heard? They’ve had to remove Scroggins’s bladder.

  EDE: What! Why?

  DOYLE: Ketamine damage. After the party.

  A shocked pause.

  Ede googles bladder.

  EDE (reading): The organ that collects urine excreted by the kidneys before disposal by urination. Can you live without a bladder, do you think?

  Ede googles living without a bladder.

  EDE: They have to find some other way for you to piss. A colostomy bag, or something.

  Miserable, we all agree. A bladder is really something you’d miss.

  A don in our class; one of the older faculty members. Slippers and blazer, and a pipe poking out of his pocket—do people still smoke pipes? Mug of tea in his hand. How cozy he looks!

  Wittgenstein greets him courteously. The don says he’d prefer not to sit on one of the classroom chairs. Doyle goes to get an armchair from the common room, and we move our chairs to make space for it when he returns. The don sits and pulls out a notebook.

  Has the don come to steal ideas? To perform some kind of sabotage? Is the don letting Wittgenstein know he is being watched? Is the don an infiltrator? A spy? Is he preparing a Wittgenstein dossier for the authorities?

  The don takes notes as Wittgenstein speaks. Meticulous notes. And when the lecture finishes, the don stands to leave. Wittgenstein, catching his eye, gives a little bow. The don bows back.

  Afterwards, we walk along the Backs.

  The Cambridge trap is closing around him, Wittgenstein says. Good! Let it close! The noose of Cambridge is being tightened round his neck. Good! Let them kick away the stool!

  The dons are coming for him, he says. Of course they are! They can sense what he is. They know he comes to judge Cambridge. And they know their own time is passing. The time of the don is no more.

  • • •

  Once, the dons were part of something, Wittgenstein says. Part of the genius of Cambridge, like the ivy on the bridges, like the boathouses along the river. Once, the dons carried the whole history of England on their shoulders, in their processions and their ceremonies—soaring patriotism, a sense of moral purpose, eccentricity, unworldliness, diffidence: resting on the shoulders of the dons.

  All of England was once a lawn, Wittgenstein says. The whole of the country, with its uplands and lowlands, with its suburbs and towns, was once the quintessence of lawn.

  The English lawn ran right into the Houses of Parliament. It ran right into Buckingham Palace, into Whitehall and the Law Courts. And into the media empires and the great publishing companies.

  The English lawn rolled up to middle-class houses, just as it rolled up to aristocratic mansions. And even if it was halted by working-class concrete, it ran nonetheless through the heads of the working classes, just as it ran through the heads of the middle classes and the upper classes—a timeless idea of England.

  England has always imagined itself in terms of rural idyll, Wittgenstein says. Of the fields’ patchwork, all openness and breadth. Of the village green, with its war memorial. Of the parish cemetery, covered with elms. Of pretty little wildernesses, marked off from working land. Of ornamental lawns, close-clipped victories over age. Of informal lawns, with deer parks and temples. Of panoramic lawns, divided only by ha-has. Of landscaped lawns, framing the great country houses …

  It was for the green peace of meadow and hedgerow that English soldiers defended their country from foreign invaders, Wittgenstein says. And it was for the rural idyll they went forth to conquer the world. Wasn’t it a simulacrum of the English law
n that they watered in the hill stations of India? Didn’t they try to roll out the English lawn in the white mountains of Kenya?

  And it was in the name of the English lawn that the enemy within was kept down, Wittgenstein says. The Peasants’ Revolt was crushed for seeking equality on the English lawn. The Diggers were transported for declaring that the English lawn was part of the commons. And the new industrialists sent their sons to become good little gentlemen in the public schools of the English lawn.

  But never was the English lawn so lush as in the great universities of England!, Wittgenstein says. Old expanses of lawn, strewn with meadowsweet and buttercups in high summer. Crocuses blooming in spring. Students picnicking, all white-flannelled elegance.

  And the old dons, of the great universities of England—the English lawn ran through their hearts, Wittgenstein says. The old dons lived out their lives on the English lawn. They sipped warm beer and watched cricket on the English lawn. They munched crustless sandwiches at garden parties on the English lawn. And one day, they were laid to rest in the English lawn.

  The dons drew all their strength from the English lawn, Wittgenstein says. They were always sure of things on the English lawn. You could never best a don on the English lawn. You would only break your lance tilting at a don on the English lawn.

  Of course, the English lawn was ultimately provincial, Wittgenstein says. The philosophy of the English lawn was concerned exclusively with English lawn issues, which is to say with nothing of any real importance. Nothing really mattered in English-lawn philosophy, he says. Nothing was really at stake in English-lawn thought. The don was a lawn-head! No more than a lawn-head!

  But perhaps there was something to the world of the dons, Wittgenstein says. Perhaps there was something to be said for donnish amateurism, for donnish pottering-about. Perhaps there was a value to pass-the-port philosophy. To home-counties philosophy! Perhaps there was a freedom to the English don—no German stuffiness, no French pretension …