The Mutants

I also went through a Thomas Bernhard phase. I had asked my dad about him one day, and, as was his compulsion, the next he dropped off Bernhard’s entire shelf, wrapped in tin foil and smelling of stale cigarettes, a gift from an increasingly shut-in man on a mental-disorder stipend. With his books, I inherited from my dad a finicky inability to read work in translation, and imitated his writer’s block as well. (I remember the moment in second grade when I decided it would be hard for me, too, to write.) But Bernhard’s German sentences survive Englishing, thrive, burrow. They are ear-and-brain worms. The Lime Works is not his most famous novel (The Loser) or his best (Correction or Extinction), but it might be his craziest-making. The protagonist has a book in his head, fully formed in his head, fully formed in his head for two or even three decades, and is only waiting for the ideal moment to ruthlessly flip his head over and drop everything in his head onto the paper, all in one motion. Instead, you learn on page 2 or 3, he shot his wife, once or twice or perhaps three or even several times. Bernhard, of course, wrote many books.

Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro that he realized there was no such thing as an ideal, not to mention a most ideal moment in which to write such a work as his, because there simply could be no such ideal moment, or most ideal moment, or point of time whatever for any undertaking or cause of any kind. Like thousands of others before him, Konrad said, he too had fallen victim to a mad dream of one day suddenly bringing his great labor to fruition by writing it all down in one consistent outpouring, all triggered by the optimal point in time, the unique moment for perfect concentration on writing it. And now he would never be able to write it, neither in the prison at Stein nor in the mental institution at Niedernhardt; Konrad’s book, like Konrad himself, was a lost cause (Wieser), an immense life work, as one must assume (says Fro, doing a sudden complete about-face) totally wiped out. Here was a failure, owing to a chronic deferment …

Earlier this year, When We Cease to Understand the World, a 2020 novel by the Dutch-Chilean Benjamín Labatut, manifested in my consciousness. Barack Obama recommended it; every tenth tweet recommended it—the universe was shaking me awake. I ordered it in February and forgot about it until a July Guardian profile of the author. Labatut and I are the same age, and the things he said were things I might once have:

“I’m not a serious thinker,” he continues. “I’m a writer: that’s very different. I think a writer’s intelligence has to be alive, has to be incomplete. It has to carry contradiction. It has to be sort of haphazard and amateur. …

“The people I admire the most in every field have this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside. I knew that I didn’t have that, so I did a bunch of very irresponsible things trying to kickstart that. And when you put yourself through that sort of ordeal, you never know what shape your mind is going to have at the end of the day. It was catastrophic for me in many ways, but it also helped pave a personal path to writing.”

So he did psychedelics (or ritual magic) to open himself to a higher intelligence. You could say, though I would not, that I have done the same. I have never been interested in possession by anyone other than myself or God. But it is tricky to deal with the intermediate intelligences—the higher self, archetypes, devas and kami and elementals, Pleiadians and Arcturans, ascended masters and logoi, asuras and demons, the angelic hierarchy, the various pagan gods—without falling into confusion or delusion. They are aspects of God (of God or Satan?) and aspects of self (mind, psyche), and appear to have an independent existence besides. This is a paradox beyond intellect. Solipsism becomes an inviting position. Everything is the self. Everyone is myself. Life is but a dream.

I have some evidence for this position, or one that could be confused with it. Labatut’s book, whose sentences I found myself unable to read, contains a light fictionalization of the lives of Alexandre Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochizuki, two mathematicians verging on mystics. To prove the abc conjecture, a deep problem in number theory, Mochizuki, self-described “Inter-universal Geometer” and with a lexicon that surpasses science fiction’s, invented a math that other mathematicians still cannot understand. Perhaps it is nonsense. But his website is the most beautiful on the internet. Grothendieck transformed math by abstracting it more deeply than anyone before him. I find this passage to be extremely, even dangerously, seductive:

I can illustrate the approach with the image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time, you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months—when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!

A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration. The sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it … yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.

Then he quit math, withdrew to the countryside, and spent the end of his life conversing with God in the form of “the Dreamer” who dreams our dreams.

I have a folder on my laptop from 2013–17 called “god bows to math,” after a Minutemen song I like. This folder contains folders called “grothendieck” and “mochizuki.” “Here was a failure, owing to a chronic deferment,” Bernhard writes. In 2013–17, you could say I deferred my book; I could say I was still soaking it in the sea. Regardless, Labatut wrote his. Leibniz and Newton discovered calculus independently in the late seventeenth century. The Dreamer dreams certain things at certain times of night. He offers a fragment of Himself to a man or a woman; if they hesitate, offers it to another. Nothing personal.

Much is showing itself to me while I sleep. I am happy for Labatut—I am happy for myself.