Bus passengers watched me lug up the aisle with a case full of my brother’s life before Buddha, which wasn’t long ago, eight months or so since he’d left for Spain. Before Buddha he’d had Heidegger. Before Heidegger? There’d been things, weekend Paganism or Evangelisms for a summer here and there, so Buddha hadn’t been a big surprise when he left in July, but it made me think, what’s the use of spending so long reading Being and Time if Heidegger, even Heidegger, can’t help? Can’t help someone like my brother from being so easily converted, I mean, and months later emailing to say he’s done with Triratna Buddhism.
I’d only days ago stopped smoking when he emailed, and he asked if I’d PayPal him £500 for flights, expenses etc. and he’d give back anything left over and owe me the rest. Maybe if I’d opened his email at a different hour, not in those evening hours invented to torture us quitters, I might’ve answered differently, but I wrote:
Heidegger haikus don’t pay so well? If you’re still bumming around Spain I’ll make it a hol and come get you myself. Send an address. Sent £100 because I’m your Sister of Mercy and so you don’t starve before I get there.
I pictured us going to McDonald’s, eating ourselves out of our own holes. I’d pay, so long as we ate junk food, and I didn’t hear whining about the world. Zero woe and I’d pay, filling us up so he’d feel fine by the time we got home, both of us beaming with sugars, sodium acids, bisphenol, potassium bromate, calcium sulphate, and mum would be happy again, seeing her son and daughter beaming together, home.
Famously, Heidegger didn’t get knock-knock jokes.
Large billboards blind the landscape from La Linea to Algeciras with Burger King and English language schools and grills, woks, dental clinics, oncology and hair transplants and spas, nightclubs, aquaparks and supermarkets.
Mark was in a hostel, having burned his way down from Barcelona, doing no good on the way, he said. He’d dropped from Catalonia to the bottom like a ball bearing in one of those toys we used to break and hadn’t saved a soul. He didn’t send the hostel’s address, instead he wrote Algeciras and sent a Google image of a plaza.
Mark would have read these all-you-can-eats and tatty Tropicanas as dire signs; he’d been dreaming of such a precipice since he was a kid. Hypnotising incinerators, belching fogspew. Long abandoned houses, allotments with grubby ponies moping along sloping roadsides like they lost their Don Quixotes in Chinese bazars. Ditches either side filled with wrappers and cartons chucked out of cars. Grubby mirages that’d fill him up.
He’d been a teenage snob about gritty reality, holding Mum to account for having lived most of her life in Canterbury which hadn’t, in his estimation, had grit since the Middle Ages. Prodding his juvenilia though, because I’m seven years older, I’d say he only found his grit taking a train to London now and then to walk around Shoreditch, or watching Mike Leigh films, or imagining he’d belong in a New York that didn’t exist anymore, because he’d seen Taxi Driver at least a dozen times. I don’t know if he remembers those arguments as vividly as I do. He’d never hear my arguments about why his grit was as soft to the touch as mum’s Blancmange.
Retuned slightly from the gritty reality coveted in his teenage years, recognising reality was Mark’s big scheme in his twenties, whether marrying Ida to learn to read Heidegger in the original, or coming close to thirty, through Buddha, leading him each time to recognitions he’d soon find too real, too finicky, boring.
Dasein didn’t help Mark’s gallbladder attacks or stop him from being a sleepwalker who’d often wake to find he’d pissed all over his laptop or piles of clean laundry.
Ida thought he’d teach. She went back to Berlin six months after getting her Masters, leaving Mark at mum’s halfway through writing his book of Heidegger haikus, abandoning his thesis altogether.
But he’d arrived, perhaps, punting down to this part of Spain penniless and, as I began picturing him on a roadside, grown out of Buddhism, no longer teetotal and shorn, destined to renounce this latest grit, which was simply tatty, I thought, a landscape with history simple as tilling the land until Taco Bell arrived.
Out of spite, while he’d been gone, I’d seriously dug into Heidegger. I didn’t just read Being and Time, I reread big chunks and made notes, took on lots of secondary reading, listened to Berkeley lectures and studied like I was there in the room and even downloaded and printed course material, as if I was going to hand it in on time, a decade and a half after the late Hubert Dreyfus assigned the work. I wanted to jab Mark with serious Heidegger, use Heidegger to tell him he’s full of shit. Dicking about with Dasein and Triratna hadn’t taught him a thing about being and unbeing unless it’s being a prick, time and time again.
I watched every Terence Malick movie because Malick used to be a big Heidegger nut and translated The Essence of Reasons. I read that too. I think Mark only saw The Thin Red Line, maybe Days of Heaven. I thought obviously Dad had a lot to do with Mark’s monk junk. Dad wasn’t like Brad Pitt in Tree of Life, but he’d been Heidegger’s workman with a hammer, a real-life hammer bearer. Mark couldn’t work anything, while Dad brimmed with Dasein in our garage building rabbit hutches, mending cabinets, sawing, or walking out in the woods, bird-spotting, just being, and he didn’t read a word of Heidegger. Dad read the same couple of books all his life.
Reading Heidegger and listening to Dreyfus also gently blotted those needful nicotine hours.
Being as this wasn’t the first, second or third time I’d bailed my brother out when he’d got stuck abroad, making a holiday of this rescue I’d gone all out, got us a room at the Globales Reina Cristina hotel for two nights, where stars used to go, and Somerset Maugham probably hobnobbed before Franco fucked it all up, then we’d head to Malaga for a few days where I’d got an Airbnb near the Picasso museum, and we’d fling ourselves into the city and feast, I had feasts in mind, to feel full for forty-eight hours and I wouldn’t stop tormenting him with Heidegger either.
Heidegger, this might be more accurate, rather than saying he didn’t like, or didn’t get knock-knock jokes, to say he wasn’t a funny man overall and wasn’t prone to laughing. I’d bet Heidegger hardly ever told a joke at the dinner table either at home in Messkirch or with his colleagues in Marburg, especially not during those long faculty dinners, being so concerned all the time with what’s be-ing eaten, even while he’s eat-ing peaches and syrup he’s hyphenating the whole meal to death, so as to hardly taste a thing, Heidegger’s hardly tasting how good his strudel is he’s being so hard. Whoever cooked Heidegger’s strudels couldn’t have felt much satisfaction. I’d have hated cooking for Heidegger. I’d have hated Heidegger, don’t know what Hannah Arendt was thinking, but she was only 17 and I hope she never cooked him eggs. Poor Hannah Arendt, not in the end I mean, just having to remember Heidegger in bed.
I loitered in a square for hours waiting for Mark to call. He called me in his old voice slightly drop-tuned and told me his hostel wouldn’t let him leave because he was short on the bill, they were charging him for food he’d never eaten, he said. When Mark swallowed Triratna Buddhism his voice changed overnight, lowered to a droning register designed to soothe, though it was the pitch of phone creeps, and he should’ve known better, but now I heard his old frantic voice, telling me to walk towards the train station and look out for a hostel with a blue sign and missing letters.
Heidegger’s erections weren’t a mouthful like his metaphysics, so I’ve read. His Poiesis, in other words, was puny.
Mark should’ve been thinner, I told him. I’d been picturing a brother thinned by walking in the sun and all that spiritual salesmanship, surviving on soup, itchy in hemp clobber. But Mark was chubbier than I’d seen him since he was a kid. He got skinny as a teenager and I hadn’t seen him big since then, until there in the hostel reception, smoking a cigarette, fatter around the face, wearing a grey T-shirt and shorts, disrobed of his orange shawl; his hair grown out into its natural kinks he never had to brush. I didn’t argue with the receptionist and paid thirty euros Mark said he didn’t owe. He had on the same shoes. Hastening us towards our feast, I told him to take his case and we waited for a taxi while he teased me with cigarettes.
Spain had made him sad. Landing in Barcelona, he diagnosed his sadness as an adjustment going from one life to another and he went straight from the airport to the Triratna Centre.
In a taxi on the way, he saw a woman scale three levels of balconies, while a dozen bystanders watched filming from the pavement opposite and there were firemen, noises, an event; the taxi driver said she’d seen an almost identical incident just days before, a man threatening to jump, who wouldn’t jump, she said, as though she’d wanted him to.
The Centre was compassionate and almost empty and smelled of sandalwood and coffee. He had landed, he realised, and his sadness was the landing.
That’s how long it took, he told me in the hotel bar, renovated but weary like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, for him to reconvert from Buddhism, a taxi ride and machine coffee and he was ready to sabotage his Dharma tools. But he did go out onto streets selling devotional texts he hadn’t read and nudged slowly south until he had none left then worked in a bar for a few weeks before emailing me, his sister of mercy.
Couldn’t you be happy subscribing to a kind of Heideggerian Zen? I said, and be its leader, leading the way with your Haikus? And I wasn’t actually being facetious, this seemed a sounder path than many. Heidegger powwows in a community centre. Newsletters. I’d head up marketing, I said, serious.
He said not a sentence of Heidegger had stuck. All he remembered was a vague sense of feeling very self-conscious holding a pen, and going crazy thinking about thinking and trying so, so hard not to think while doing, only to overthink undoing, being no cabinetmaker, and how could I teach that? he said, remembering Ida.
Ida turned into Heidegger, he said. Imagine, going out for a meal, whatever I’d say to Ida, that Nazi’s there between us interpreting. I wanted to switch to only ever reading Aristotle. She said I’d gone too far into my thesis on Heidegger and the Monstrousness of Human Resources to stop.
When Heidegger’s longest bit on the side, Elisabeth Blochmann, asked him in a lakeside Göttingen retreat, if he fancied trying something new (this was 1968, he was 78, she was 50 and died the following year), her hand enframing his Poiesis shrunken from cold water and age, Heidegger presented her with a copy of What is Called Thinking? in Japanese translation. Elfriede Heidegger had her own flings, and she must have thanked Blochmann, you’d think.
After dinner at the hotel, I said he should inaugurate me into the gritty realism of Algeciras, which has a Loteria kiosk listed on TripAdvisor as a historical site, one listing above a train station, so you can escape, one below a photo of beach litter, I said scrolling on my big bed. All Mark wanted for one night though was to watch a film where killing, righteously killing, was the main theme.
In Days of Heaven Richard Gere, I started saying, but I saw Mark feeding on Jason Bourne. Overdubbed, but how could it matter? Mark returning to a world of sugars and sulphates and sodium where Dasein deferred to the immediacy of Burger King, and I left Heidegger where he belonged for the night, desperate to pee, lamely not getting the joke.
