i did various different rune casts about my job, my future “career” and Kenaz appeared in all but one, either as a deficiency or as something i require. The odds of Kenaz appearing in all but one are very slim (even in the one rune cast, the one rune was Kenaz – a 1 in 24 chance) – i tried to calculate the probability and ended up guessing it would be about 60 divided by 300,000. A vestige of teaching myself theoretical Statistics in my insufficiently-wicked youth, i tend to automatically think in mechanistic, mathematical terms.

i must mull over Thurisaz. i believe it indicates a need for ruthless action and chthonic, non-human energies – energies which are nonetheless part of the human, as the thurses are oft kin to the Aesir (note the symmetries between Thor and the thurses). Thorn is the divider, a force which breaks apart, and so allows for the destruction of stagnant forms, the recasting of energy (hence, Jera). It demands reaction; it tests, and if there is anything worth defending, it will awaken deeper energies (Naudhiz).

Right now i feel i should stop blogging for a while. All my blogging energy is dead and must be allowed to either pass wholly away, or to return howsoever it wills. i dare say i will return, as is my wont. In the meantime, i will write more book reviews for the Dabbler, and if the Southrons run them you can read me there.

i guessed that for his test (to be an Air Traffic Controller) he might have to do such exercises while ignoring planned distractions, such as loud noises off, invigilators chatting with each other about hard anal sex, and so on. Accordingly, i asked Todd, a teacher from Chicago, to disrupt the class; he barged in without warning and we had a loud conversation about sex, rape, torture and murder while the Kid worked on his summaries. The Kid did a good job so i went on to bounce about him, making animal noises; when i tired i sat down and stared at him, then read aloud from the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in my West Yorkshire-accented German, then some songs from Schubert and Rammstein.

He seemed able to ignore these without problems, only looking bemusedly up when i began chanting: “Eins. Zwei. Drei” to say: “Is this Rammstein?” For indeed it was. He said he finds it hard to ignore Rammstein, because he knows the songs (i would find it harder to ignore the unknown). So for tomorrow’s class i’ll recite some hip hop songs at him, by some guy called Akon. i may even do some Tom Cruise-esque hip hop dancing.

These are the lessons i most enjoy. On Saturday i “taught” some apprentices, an impromptu thing as the normal teacher is dead or in prison. A class of ten 18-20-year-olds, this is not my idea of a good time. They are impossible to teach. They all talk continually to each other, in German, fondling their iphones; they completely ignore error correction, don’t even look at the board when i give them new vocab. i had them for 3 hours, tried to teach them for the first 90 minutes then gave up and just kept giving them coffee breaks every 20 minutes, and chatted with the only bright student there, ignoring the rest, who were happy to be ignored.

They weren’t as horrible as the apprentice shits i “taught” in Kassel. When i barked “silence!” yesterday’s brats all immediately stopped talking, and stared at me apprehensively, probably expecting a meritorious & well-deserved thrashing. In Kassel, it was necessary to scream and hammer on the table. i recall in one lesson shouting: “Silence, you dogs!”, which worked for about 30 seconds then they began giggling in German again, the disgusting little fucks.

i’ll be paid 100 € for the 3 hours i spent pretending to teach these filthy scum, 26 € for the 90 minutes with the Kid. The first is for a small independent school, the second for McLingua. McLingua has a steady stream of students like the Kid, for whom one has to do out-of-the-ordinary lessons, but the pay is shit. i tire of ordinary teaching, which includes the pretend-teaching of apprentices. One can only teach the same tense, or vocab, so many thousand times before it becomes stale & tedious. It helps that each student is different; but not different enough, alas. My mind goes onto stand-by mode when i teach Comparatives or the Present Perfect, because i’ve done it so many times.

It’s still a billion trillion times better than minimum wage data entry in England. However, i would prefer a job only tangentially to do with teaching English, for example giving people articles to summarise and then chanting Rammstein at them, or sending my armies to war in my name – that is the right kind of job for me.

Another week begins tomorrow and i know i will find it hard to concentrate to do any real reading or writing. When i get a seat on the s-bahn i read, otherwise not. At McLingua – even with 6 hour gaps between lessons – i can’t focus to do anything but listlessly surf the internet. i generally leave my flat at 0630 and get home around 2200 so there’s no time for focussed reading/writing, only at the weekend, if i don’t sleep it away.

i feel i have fizzled out like a bad firework, and my present life resembles a burnt-out rocket, such as i found on the McLingua balcony last week. Incongruous and pointless but there it is.

i don’t regret these lost ideas, as they are of next to no value. i had good ideas once – ten years ago. Now i seem to subsist on the warmed-up leftovers of my youth, so i sometimes “have” a good idea then realise it came to me first in 1999 and i’m only remembering it now. Likewise i sometimes leaf morbidly through my old journals and am stricken by some marvellous idea i had when i was 24 – and if it were not in my handwriting, and if i couldn’t (with difficulty) remember the circumstances of its genesis, i would assume it was a quotation from someone else.

2. i went hunting for a typewriter in the student quarter of Munich. It was a cool, sunny January afternoon, a good time for wandering & browsing. It is a distinctly student-y area: the old university buildings; bookshops, cafes, none of the usual luxury boutiques. i found nothing but fell victim to my old malady, a poignant, nostalgiac longing for freedom, to do nothing but study, to be free to sleep more than 6 hours a night, to spend all night reading and writing. i have felt this same longing in Durham, Oxford, Cambridge, Göttingen. It is a strange thing as i was glad to leave academia 10 years ago, and i spent my 4 years as a student loathing some of my tutors, and almost all the undergraduates, for being pitiful giggling idiots and/or mercenary knaves.

i don’t know if academia enabled me to think, if having enough time to sleep, to read in solitude, and to write for hours at a time, were the only right circumstances; or whether i would have naturally fizzled out age 25, and become an eventual elberry.

3. i feel drained & beatdown and it’s only the first week of real work. There is mould on my brain and it smells funny.

—

Born in Paris in 1929 of Viennese Jewish parents, Steiner has lived a nearness to the great and terrible. He is something of an anachronism, an old magister in love with language and learning and art. His prose is baroque and overtly rhetorical, and this not with the fashionable gibberish of Literary Theory; it is rather a sinuous and massive articulation. Here he broods superbly on the ambiguous relation of thought to linguistic expression, that is, can thoughts be conceived, let alone articulated, without submission to language and style:

Hence the recurrent trope, so urgent in Plotinus, in the Tractatus, that the nub, the philosophic message lies in that which is unsaid, in the unspoken between the lines. What can be enunciated, what presumes that language is more or less consonant with veritable insights and demonstrations, may in fact reveal the decay of primordial, ephiphanic recognitions.

Steiner is animated by this ambiguity, that language is evidently inadequate, and yet it is the only carrier of thought. The same coin for God and Caesar.

It follows that philosophy and literature occupy the same generative though ultimately circumscribed space. Their performative means are identical: an alignment of words, the modes of syntax, punctuation (a subtle resource). This is as true of a nursery rhyme as it is of a Kant Critique. Of a dime novel as of the Phaedo. They are deeds of language.

There is something fastidious about Steiner; fastidious and gritty. He desires Platonic clarity, pure thought, but he will not deny the murkiness of our executive means, of language in all its inadequate variety. If even the heights of philosophy must be communicated in language, then we must attend to language. It is a messy, unsatisfying business; it would be so much easier to simply apprehend. But such immediacies are no longer possible, having been long since shunted aside by language; so he writes of Wittgenstein:

In many ways, the Investigations invite the conjecture that there is “behind” or between their lines another text. In which formal logic would irradiate everyday speech. That other text remains just out of reach but its mute presence is ethical. It prefigures a condition in which falsehood would be immediately visible and absurd.

As in Genesis 2.19. From this we came, to this we may perhaps return. In the meantime, ordinary language is the means by which we explore and articulate our experience of being alive. Philosophy is consciousness exploring itself, as a mode and energy of being:

We tend to take this revolution for granted, being its products. It is in fact strange and scandalous. Parmenides’ equation between thought and being, Socrates’ ruling that the unexamined life is not worth living are provocations of a truly fantastic dimension. They incarnate the primacy of the useless, as we intimate it in music.

Grossly physical, we often regard consciousness as a quirk of evolution or just one of those things; not an energy to equal physical being. Philosophy is the examination of this energy and form of being. But no matter if philosophers aspire to bloodless clarity, they necessarily think and communicate in words – the same words we use to buy apples and ask for directions, and threaten and curse. We must use these words; and that which we consider is itself not separate from language, and so what exact clarity could there be, how could we possibly examine our own means of examination? Metaphorically perhaps, not by reference to an objective point of external reference, but by internal echo, by internal comparison and suggestion:

I have suggested that the “discovery” of metaphor ignited abstract, disinterested thought. [...] It is out of a metaphoric magma that the Pre-Socratic philosophy seems to erupt (the volcanic is not far off). Once a traveler in Argos had perceived the shepherds on the stony hills as “herdsmen of the winds,” once a mariner out of the Piraeus had sensed that his keel was “ploughing the sea,” the road to Plato and to Immanuel Kant lay open. It began in poetry and has never been far from it.

Not, that is, to exit the world and stand outside, serenely judging, but to come to some sense of things by metaphor and simile, perceiving the structure and symmetry from within (a barbarian reading Paradise Lost, knowing absolutely nothing of Christian myth). Steiner therefore examines the interactions between style and thought in, among others, Wittgenstein, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Marx, Hegel, Descartes, Bergson, Heidegger, Plato. There is often no sense of an overarching argument; it is rather close-reading and appreciation, an essay in the etymological sense of the word, a sweet attempt. I learnt that Marx isn’t as dull as one might lazily suppose, and that Hegel’s prose is atrocious but worth the trouble (apparently). Steiner dedicates several pages to Wittgenstein, following Guy Davenport’s observation of the similitudes between Wittgenstein and Heraclitus:

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.” Was Wittgenstein, in his notebook for 1948, transcribing a fragment of Heraclitus not yet available to the rest of us?

Astutely worded. Steiner is a close reader of Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein fought with valour on some of the hellish fronts during the First World War – again, that Socratic analogy. He seems to have experienced combat as exhilarating. This may be more significant than his hagiographers and imitators realise. A deep-seated capacity for charring rage inhabited his tensed consciousness, a vital terribilità.

Thematically, Steiner is close by Wittgenstein. Language, culture, meaning – and a simultaneous attraction to, and wariness of, academia. Steiner has long understood that language is central to our consciousness, and so to our culture; and of late he has become reassuringly melancholy about a civilisation long gone into decline, in which language is publicly devalued, and consciousness as an energy and mode of being is summarily (if spuriously) dismissed:

On the horizon lies the prospect that bio-chemical, neurological discoveries will demonstrate that the inventive, cognitive processes of the human psyche have their ultimately material source. That even the greatest metaphysical conjecture or poetic find are complex forms of molecular chemistry.

This is not a vision in which an obsolescent, often technophobic consciousness such as mine can take comfort.

Steiner intuits that if anything can oppose this technocratic horror it will be a kind of philosophy. If so, I think it will be philosophy in the pre-Socratic sense, as Peter Kingsley contends – a form of magic, a means of transforming consciousness and the world. It will be initiation, not entertainment, not matter for doctoral theses and conferences and academic reputation. The true work of philosophy would be a work of magic; and vice versa.

For all its complications and muddle, language is the bridge between consciousness and the world. The bridge binds and alters. Our kind of consciousness cannot do without language (as Steiner notes, even deaf mutes can learn to read); language makes consciousness physical, joins us to our world and to each other. This is ubiquitous and so almost beyond reason; we do not see the air. To turn the mind against language – to cleanse our expressive, and therefore experiential, means – this is brutal and subtle both, this is the philosopher’s task, and he must be brutal and subtle also.

Every salient detail seemed exact – the nose, lips, eyes – it looked very vaguely like me, but somehow totally different. As diplomatically as i could, i put this to the man responsible. He said it’s not only hard to portray distinct features (e.g. the nose), but he also has to put them in the right relation to each other. So the nose, lips, eyes, are all correct, but not in exactly the right relation to each other, and so i look like a gay Puerto Rican dwarf, like it or lump it.

i guess this second part is harder, because subtler. To represent a complex form (e.g. a face) you have to accurately picture each component (e.g. a nose), but also to place each component in exactly the right place; so if the bottom lip is accurate in itself, but placed just a few degrees or millimetres out of the true, you look like a gay Puerto Rican dwarf.

This helped me understand the way our bodies and personalities change, from life to life. Apparently, i look like my last life; i don’t see it myself, for in most respects we look totally different. Perhaps it is that the patterning logic of our faces is the same, that though my nose is longer, my ears bigger, etc., these components stand in the same relationship to each other as do his, to his.

In the same way, a man’s lives can seem very different, yet there is a deep and subtle continuity. The essential nature acts like a hinge about which many lives can turn, often with enormous surface variation. For myself, knowing something of my “hinges” helps; i won’t take the same grim path as in my last life, but nor will i go too far the other way, and be too nice, in an effort to please. As i get older i feel this is who i am and i shouldn’t try to make doomed compromises with idiots & Southrons.

2. i taught the Kid again today. He passed his initial air traffic control exam (47 out of 5o applicants failed) and faces a tougher test in 3 weeks, in which he will have to chat with strangers to observe his social skills, and read & paraphrase texts. i wanted to find an article about airports but the McLingua PCs were all in use, so instead i photocopied a page from Ian Donaldson’s life of Ben Jonson and told him to summarise it. He did an extremely good job in under 10 minutes. i suggested that in the test they might purposely distract him from his task, e.g. two supervisors may talk about sex orgies to confuse & bewilder; and that i should therefore try to distract him from future exercises. He agreed so on Monday i’ll give him some articles about airports, planes, prostitution, and ask him to summarise them while i talk loudly about horrible orgies with anyone i can cajole into helping me. i will also stride about the room making pointless remarks about dwarves and then rummage loudly about in my bag for Puerto Rican pornography.

3. Three of my students, in different groups, have asked if i’ve thought of acting or doing stand-up comedy. i thought they were joking but it seems not. The latest was an intelligent, thoughtful woman at a large German company, she remembers bits & pieces of another life so we have some odd conversations and she made me ginger lebkuchen for Christmas. When i realised she was serious, i said that i feel no interest in performing for money, for people who expect me to make them laugh. My lessons often cause mirth, as i enjoy setting up Frank Keyian roleplays and grimly narrating my various torments & afflictions & hatreds, but i wouldn’t want to do this for money, with the expectation that i will always make people laugh or i’m back on the streets hustling for pizza crusts.

She argued that if i marketed myself as a comic i could have a bigger audience. Putting aside the sheer improbability of my being able to break into what i imagine is a very tough circuit, i don’t want a big audience. It seems to me that the more one tries to appeal to a broad spectrum, the shriller & louder one becomes, until one is nothing more than a man standing on a box shouting into a megaphone made out of leftover cereal packets and posting one’s CV on the internet. There is no need for an audience. To quote the 80s classic Robin of Sherwood, nothing is forgotten.

4.  i once wanted to be published, to get money so i could (maybe) escape a lifetime of minimum wage data entry jobs. Now i have a bearable job that just about pays enough to live, i am content to write for myself. i am wary of representation. Any representation will fall short and the better the attempt, the more likely it is to be mistaken for the thing itself. Human consciousness is fundamentally to do with representations (language, metaphor, art). It is natural to wish to represent reality, and to try to apprehend reality through representations; it makes me profoundly suspicious and prone to destroying my own writings and, if i could, others’.

Even now i don’t like the idea of being read by too many people. i am a northerner, suspicious of big city types. They are all damnable Southrons, belly-patting fools and apple polishers. The terrible fire will come upon them and consume them as the dry leaves are consumed by a sudden blaze, and they will cry, ah, ah, we are eaten in the flame, we are stricken, we are devoured, our guts spill out. As dry leaves in the furnace the Southrons will be burnt up, none will come hence, none will remain.

Because any bad reports will not spread to Munich, i felt free to teach without restraints, e.g. with the Present Perfect:

elberry: Akhbar, has Frank ever killed anyone?

Akhbar: Frank, have you ever killed anyone?

Frank: I have never killed anyone yet.

elberry: You haven’t killed anyone yet.

Akhbar: Frank hasn’t killed anyone yet.

This later escalated as the students spontaneously asked each other: “have you ever vomited after eating fish?”, “have you found the boy of your dreams” (this to another guy), and “have you ever cheated on your wife?”

2. i feel happy, a strange & confusing emotion for an elberry of my calibre. i seem to have enough work to survive, i like my flat, i like most of my job, i even have some social contacts in Munich, and Juniper here in Kassel. The work could end at any moment, leaving me with a choice between death and a return to minimum wage data entry jobs in England; my groups will naturally come to an end and new groups might be awful; and i’ve learnt not to place any great trust in friendship. Nonetheless, at the moment all is well. This makes me feel a little wary and restless, as if something bad must surely lurk round the corner, something of unprecedented horror. It is hard to say what this could be, since most horrors have already been precedented in abundance, but i remain alert and suspicious.

i feel i need to get on with some absorbing writing/murder project, to use my superfluous mental energy. However, i usually leave my flat before 0700 and get back at 2200ish, so it’s quite difficult to find the time. i often have gaps in my day but seem unable to think at McLingua, and i certainly can’t afford to go to a cafe every day, so i just kill the time staring at the internet in McLingua, drinking their coffee and waiting for the unprecedented horror. i’m considering writing an Ablutions-style book about my office work years, in the 3rd person, to amuse myself, but it doesn’t interest me enough to do it by hand, and i hate writing at length on computers. A pity it’s apparently not possible to buy working manual typewriters anymore (i bought two on ebay, both supposedly in good condition: the first broke after a month, the second didn’t work at all), but then i could only use them in my flat and i’m hardly ever there. Circumstances conspire against me – circumstances and gnomes with poisoned garden forks.

3. i had some booze with Gordon last night. He’s an interesting and annoying quasi-Buddhist Cognitive Scientist. Like every single Buddhist/Zen hipster i’ve met, he likes to parrot the sayings of some guru or another, in his case Jack Kornfield. Again, as with all Zen hipsters he talks and thinks a lot, but likes to say “you talk [or think] too much” if i disagree with him or he can’t understand me.

Gordon: Do you often have the experience of seeing something sad, that would make normal people cry, and you don’t cry but feel that you should?

elberry: i don’t know. i don’t think so. i suppose if i feel sad, it’s not really unusual for me and i can’t be crying every day. i can feel sad but without being upset by the fact of being sad.

Gordon: Stop! You are thinking too much! Don’t think! Don’t try to analyse your emotions! Just observe them.

elberry: i usually don’t even observe them. i only really think about things if they puzzle me. So if i feel  -

Gordon: Stop! Don’t think! You shouldn’t think!

elberry: You just asked me a question about my emotions. How am i supposed to answer it without thinking? And what do you  mean by “think”? i just feel the emotions in a particular way, then my mouth opens and words come out. Is that “thinking”?

He then tried to palm off a Jack Kornfield book on me, telling me “you need this more than me”. It was my book in the first place and when i left Kassel i gave it to Gordon, saying i wouldn’t want to re-read it for a while, when the truth is i would probably just have thrown it away. i find these hipster Zen books uninteresting, not wrong but full of platitudes and truisms. If you need a book to tell you that it’s better not to be a total asshole, you’re probably such a total asshole that no book could ever help you.

Still, it’s all right for some people, i suppose.

4. i left Gordon’s place at 11 pm and took the tram back to Juniper, reading Pete Dexter’s (excellent) Deadwood and eating liquorice like a Viking. In the dark i lost all sense of direction and promptly headed the wrong way, wandered hopelessly about, bleating like a frightened lamb, and eventually i had to call Juniper to ask where i was. Given i lived in Kassel for 12 months, and i’ve now visited Juniper’s flat 4 or 5 times, this seems a bit much. However, it demonstrates something of the way my mind works, and of my essential character, that i can so easily get lost in a familiar city. It only takes slight changes (e.g. darkness) for a city to seem almost wholly alien to me, and i have to as it were start anew. i need to walk a route myself before i really know my way about; it’s not enough to know the layout, i seem unable to abstract from this knowledge and calculate how to get directly from A to C, if in the past i’ve only gone from A to B and B to C, etc.

Morgana said i was a physical learner type, i.e. i need to do something myself before i understand it. It’s not enough to understand a theory and then apply it, i have to actually do it, make mistakes, redo it, again & again, before i feel comfortable. This perhaps explains why Zen hipster books don’t mean anything to me; i need to think it through myself, and for this i find literature & philosophy better, as an instigator. In Emily Dickinson, you experience the failure of language before the inexpressible; to read Dickinson well is to immediately apprehend this failure, which Zen books talk about as if it were an easy lesson and can be passed from Zen master to hipster as just another piece of information. Emily Dickinson fails but there is failure and failure: bad writing doesn’t even approach the inexpressible, it fizzles out halfway and falls to earth, spent; good writing reaches almost beyond itself, it confronts the point of high failure (the mystical) and is consumed by that which it is not. So the incandescent failure of Lear or Hamlet, or Dante, when all else is stripped away and then the words turn on themselves, and blaze.

5. To my delight, i came across a picture of a very Juniper-looking woman on my travels, and she (amused, and failing to see the resemblance), gave me permission to post it. Her hair is short now but ten years ago it was long, and she looked thus:

Und schlief in mir. Und alles war ihr Schlaf.

(And slept in me. And all things were her sleep)

-

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. MD Herter Norton

He dropped his girlfriend off then we drove up together alone, talking manly talk and listening to 90s dance music (his preferred driving music). Most of it was not my cup of tea but this amused & pleased me:

i discovered that it is possible to dance while sitting down, as we both danced and sang merrily along at 200 kmph (with disgust, he told me the Kurganmobile can only easily go up to 200; his old Audi could go up to 240). Then it ended and he cursed the mechanics who had fitted his huge black Kurganmobile with cheap windscreen wipers: “These are bullshit wipers! I am so fucking angry! This is so total bullshit! I will take them off and kill everyone with them! I will go to the garage and say hey, fucker, now you die with your bullshit windscreen wipers! And I will kill them all!” Naturally i encouraged him, as after all i am his teacher and so obliged to provide moral instruction & guidance in loco parentis, loco being the operative word with the Kurgan.

He drives like the Kurgan, fast and brutal, usually smoking or eating a burger. He has a disconcerting habit of suddenly letting go of the wheel to gesticulate or grab cigarettes, usually while accelerating into a bad death curve and overtaking lesser vehicles with contempt.

When we arrived at Kassel i asked if i could contribute something to the fuel, since a train would have cost me 50 €, even with my Deutsche Bahn card. He said, puzzled, “why?” i tried to explain about how he had saved me 50 € but he didn’t seem to understand the concept of payment so i instead invited him for coffee with Juniper. He exposulated amusingly about the rich kids at his company: “one guy, this is so bullshit, the first problem he has in his whole life when he is 18, should he buy a red Porsche or a white Porsche, and this is his last problem. This is so fucking bullshit.”

i am now with Juniper and will return with with the Kurgan on the 30th Dec, or stay a few days longer and head down on 2nd Jan by train. i look forward to teaching the Kurgan at his company in January. He is the jungle VIP, an original Aryan wildman killer and expert with assault rifles and hand to hand weaponry, echt Kurgan. i seem to attract people like this, in my first life also, leaders and killers of men.

Happy hallowe’en, ladies.

i feel uninterested in writing anything. i do occasional, shit reviews for the Dabbler but only to get free books. The last few days i’ve been thinking about my novel and its great flaws; one day it will take perfect form but at the moment i don’t care what happens to it. i feel sick of vile public utterance. Perhaps it is to do with my job, where a great deal of my energy goes into suppressing my personality, trying NOT to speak. The necessity of a kind of secrecy – combined with apparent social engagement – is depressing and seems to generally inhibit my desire to publicly communicate. The idea of public communication is strange and highly suspect; i can understand talking or writing to one other human being; i can just about understand communicating to a group of friends & cronies & assistant murderers, but to write something so ANYONE can read it – why would anyone want to do that? Even with comments disabled i find myself wondering why i do this. It seems highly perverted.

It should be against the law.