& even today I may not be able to produce anything better than a jumble of incoherent sentences

Oh, God, I may have used Wittgenstein to cure a moral fault in myself. I'm not sure which of us that's going to embarrass more.

While in Raven Used Books on Wednesday with rushthatspeaks, I bought Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958), the second edition with Wittgenstein's letters included.¹ I'd never heard of Malcolm as a philosopher, but the memoir is affectionately and seriously written and unless they were popular anecdotes, looks like the source for several scenes in Jarman's film. He is trying both to honor and to demystify Wittgenstein (who had a hero-cult in his lifetime already) without whitewashing him; I think he succeeds, since Wittgenstein by Malcolm comes off as brilliant, depressing, electrifying, exhausting, a restlessly unhappy man, and a weirdly lovable one, which about fits what I've gathered from other sources, including Wittgenstein.² I am afraid the letters are just incredibly endearing. There are fifty-seven of them, written over a period of eleven years (1940–1951, the last dated thirteen days before his death); they tend toward the rapid-fire jotting stream-of-consciousness and generally give the impression that if blogging had been available in Wittgenstein's lifetime, no one would ever have pried him off the computer. He loves the American detective magazines which he can't get during the war, so the Malcolms send him care packages of Street & Smith—he seems to have bounced hard off Sayers, but he spends several letters trying to track down further stories by Norbert Davis, author of Rendezvous with Fear. He has a thing about schmaltzy holiday cards. ("Tell Doney his Christmas card wasn't soupy enough.") He drinks a lot of instant coffee. He has to tell Malcolm he's sent him a surprise present—"I thought you mightn't have it & that it might interest you"—because he's afraid it got lost in the mail from London, which it didn't. He can never quite stop talking philosophy. And he cannot go three letters without starting to apologize for how useless and uninteresting he is:

—As a matter of fact I've been feeling pretty rotten most of this summer. Partly because of bad health, partly because my brain was no d . . . good at all and I couldn't work. I'm feeling a bit better now. That's to say, my health is entirely all right & my mind seems a little more active. But God knows how long that will last.

My work is going damn slowly. I wish I could get a volume ready for publishing by next autumn; but I probably shan't. I'm a bloody bad worker!

Talking of philosophy: my book is gradually nearing its final form, & if you're a good boy & come to Cambridge I'll let you read it. It'll probably disappoint you. And the truth is: it's pretty lousy. (Not that I could improve on it essentially if I tried for another 100 years.)

But now my brain feels burnt out, as though only the four walls were left standing, & some charred remains!

I felt exceedingly depressed for many weeks, then fell ill & now I'm weak & completely dull . . . I shan't write more today, I'm much too dull.

. . . & as I'm anxious to make hay during the very short period when the sun shines in my brain . . .

I hope all of you are well, & I hope you won't find me a terribly disagreeable companion & bore when I come.

I'm saying this because I don't want him to believe that I'll be a sociable person.

This letter is probably frightfully stupid, but I can't write a more helpful one.

My mind's completely dead.

That's a selection. By the fourth or fifth disclaimer, the reader wants to reach through time to Rosro, grab the philosopher by his shirtfront and start shouting, "For God's sake, you're bloody Wittgenstein, knock it off already!"

I do this all the time.

In posts. In conversation. In e-mail. I'm pretty sure I told people my name when I introduced myself at Arisia, but I'm also pretty sure I told them I'd slept about three hours and was completely brain-dead. It's my own reflexive οὐ δεινὸς λέγειν. And I don't even have the excuse of being bloody Wittgenstein! If it's that annoying in one of the acknowledged minds of the twentieth century, I can only imagine how much it ticks people off in me. It doesn't matter that I feel as though my brain decamped years ago: I need to figure out how to stop telling everyone about it. It's either that or revolutionize philosophy.

In other news, I have a fever and sore throat (and have just this sentence begun to cough, which I consider completely unnecessary), but yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copy of the latest annual not-Not One of Us publication, Under Review, which contains both my poem "Theseid"—the one that starts with the kouros of Poseidon—and a review of A Mayse-Bikhl by Erik Amundsen that I should probably write a poem to thank him for, because it's possessed. "The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves" has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. fleurdelis28 has uncovered evidence that I should have a hereditary feud with the Daily Mail. I have survived this week. I just wish TCM were showing something I could stare at. I suspect I'm going to read Transcendentalist biography instead.

1. I had to give up Victor Serge's Conquered City (1932) and a volume of the letters of Robert Graves in order to afford it, but I am seriously thinking about trying to go back for the latter. The letters to Siegfried Sassoon are interesting especially after reading Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991), but it's the one in which Graves worries about what his researches for The White Goddess are doing to his mental health that really charmed me: "I find myself making the Bards into Moon-men and the minstrels into Sun-men. Help!"

2. I had one disagreement with Malcolm and it was linguistic: "A characteristic remark that Wittgenstein would make when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was 'He is a human being!'—thus implying that most people fail even to be human." Well, yes, that's one reading. Around here, though, we just mean someone like that is a mensch.