Wittgenstein Jr

by Lars Iyer

  That his shadow has fallen on Cambridge: too much! That the shadow of Cambridge has fallen on him: too much! That his silhouette has been spied in the Cambridge evening: too much! That his feet have impressed the Cambridge turf … That his breath has clouded the Cambridge morning … That his eyes have rested upon Cambridge sights … That his ears have been thronged with Cambridge noises … Too much! too much! too much! too much!

  Ah, but the dons know how it will end, he says. The dons can see the future. He will blow out his brains on the English lawn, they know that. And the lawnkeepers will rake out pieces of his skull from the English lawn.

  We drive out to the country.

  A clearing, ready for building. Stumps of trees. Diggers. Crates. Long metal pipes in piles. All for a new housing estate, beyond the suburbs of Cambridge.

  A line of just-built houses without feature, blank-faced, simple. No shadows. No lines. A sheer wall of bricks and glass and plastic doors.

  Red and blue For Sale signs. A show home on the corner. A flag by the show home, the developer’s name flapping in the wind.

  It may seem that Cambridge is expanding outwards, Wittgenstein says. That these are the new suburbs of Cambridge. But really it is the other way round. The suburbs are expanding into Cambridge. Cambridge is being engulfed by the suburbs. Drowned by them …

  What if he and his brother had lived ordinary lives?, Wittgenstein says. What if they had never embarked upon their life of the mind?

  Why can he not accept the world as it is?, he says. Why is he unsatisfied with ordinary life? Why can he not let things be things, and the world be the world?

  Plastic polytunnels. A wartime bunker with galvanised tin walls.

  Sometimes, he wants only to let it all go, he says. To rest. To sleep. To let the world go its way. He dreams of a world that is liberated from him. Of a time when he is unremembered.

  He dreams of his disappearance. Of the world without him. Of the world after his thought. After all thought. He dreams of having no need to think. He dreams of the light and grace of the world after philosophy …

  He tells us a story.

  Once upon a time, the devil made a mirror that mocked the things it reflected—that laughed at all beauty and goodness and grandeur. In his daring, the devil carried the mirror heavenward, so that he might use it to ridicule the angels, even to scorn the Saviour Himself. But, dazzled by heaven’s light, the devil lost his grip as he flew upward. The mirror fell and shattered, and splinters of its mocking surface fell into the eyes and hearts of all human beings. And thereafter, all human eyes laughed at the Creation, and all human hearts laughed at love. And thereafter, there was no such thing as human innocence, nor human silence. And thereafter, there was no such thing as an innocent thought.

  WITTGENSTEIN: That’s how philosophy was born. Philosophy is a way of laughing at beauty and goodness and grandeur. A way of laughing at life!

  EDE (gently): Then why do we bother with philosophy at all?

  WITTGENSTEIN: Because philosophy stands between us and salvation.

  Brightly coloured horse-jumps. A rider, circling the field, bobbing in the saddle.

  Sometimes he wonders if we students aren’t already on the other side of philosophy, he says. That philosophy, that all thought, is a matter for him, but not for us.

  Are we the clue?, he asks. Are we the gateway out of philosophy? Perhaps the clue is in our faces. Perhaps it is there, right there. Perhaps the clue is in our laughter. If he could only get to our laughter …

  A solitary horse in its field, standing by the fence. Wittgenstein leans forwards and breathes softly into its nostrils.

  When he sees a horse, he feels that life itself is before him, he says. In truth, horses were never expelled from paradise. The horse, in particular, is close to the divine.

  There was no better horseman than his father, Wittgenstein says. No better man!

  He has no bad memories of his father—not one, he says.

  WITTGENSTEIN: My father was a man of absolutes. Of certainties. (A pause.) A man of certainties can act. (A pause). My trouble is that I have no certainties, and therefore cannot act.

  His mother was from a thinking family, Wittgenstein says. From a line of thinkers, from old Vienna. He had a thinking grandfather, he says. And a thinking grandmother. It goes back for generations.

  They were Viennese Jews, his mother’s family, he says. Then they were Viennese Catholics. Then, with the Anschluss, they were Viennese Jews again. They haunt our steps, that we cannot go in our streets. His great-grandfather paid off the Nazis, and the family fled the country, he says.

  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.<
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  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 …

  EDE: Have you seen their motivational phrases? (Reading from the Kirwins’ Facebook page:) I can therefore I am. You are never too old to set another goal. If you can dream it, you can do it. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Either you run the day or the day runs you. Winners never quit and quitters never win. The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. To begin, begin.