Altar

Some kind of shrine. Half submerged.

A shrine to what?

Like that sunken church in Nostalghia. Where Gorchakov gets drunk and recites poems.

So let’s recite some poems. From memory! A bit of Hölderlin. The late fragments. Auf Deutsch. Can you remember them in German? Hölderlin, Helmut? We demand Hölderlin! We must have Hölderlin!

Okay, if not Hölderlin, how about Heidegger. Some hot stuff from the Black Notebooks. About how he hates British philosophy. Where he says Analytic philosophy is Sputnik and so on …

What’s the most continental of continental philosophers to read out? Obscure as fuck. Really headwrecking.

The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.

Oh yeah. That hits the spot. The sort of thing that could never, never be published in the UK. Except in translation by some university press, after the person was dead famous and everyone in modern languages was raving about them.

Imagine what the analytic philosopher would do if they heard that. They’d pop. They’d spontaneously combust. Spit out their pipes. Gasp. Die of heart attacks.

Start a petition, more like. Write a stiff letter to the Times.


We need to be darker. We need more despair. We need to cry out. Then something might happen.

Whose words can we use? Who wrote the most despairing words? Who wrote the most wretched things ever written.

Jandek, of course.

Leopardi.