1.
A ladder leaning against a wall rotated through a full 360 degrees describes the volume of a cone. 

1.2
Or as if a ribbon has been taken once around a maypole. 

1.3
Or the swing ball set outside of the front door of the house of my friend who has children. 

1.4
A circle and a central line which extends at a right angle. A curved plane which extends from the peak of the central line and returns downwards to trace the circumference of the circle.

I’ve been trying to read Wittgenstein in the hope that I might understand something better about what a house is.

 I don’t understand the rules exactly but I am playing along.

There is a calculator you can find on the internet which does the calculations for you.

 2.1
A cone described by mathematical propositions. A circle with a radius of six metres. A cone with a height of twelve metres, double the radius of the circle that forms its base. A hypotenuse of 13.416 metres. A volume of 452.39m2.

2.2
Through a series of calculations it is possible to know things about the cone without building it. 

2.3
A cone this size might be divided into rooms.  Measurements can be made for curtains, radiators, doors, furniture, &c. 

2.4
With the proper calculations it should even be possible to predict the precise ways in which each room will be illuminated for a given date and time.

2.5
The sun’s radiation as it lands on earth also describes a kind of cone, albeit one with a convex base.

My Dad was called Trevor. Soon after he died I read a book called Correction by Thomas Bernhard, it had been a gift from Trev when I was much younger (too young) and I had never read it. In the weeks that I was going back and forth to his house with my brother to try and sort through his belongings I was reading about the literary legacy of a dead Austrian called Roithamer. Roithamer had spent much of his later years trying to design and build a cone shaped house in the middle of an Austrian forest so that his sister could live in it. He seemed to think that he might be able to design a better kind of life for his sister. Better than the one the oppressive family home that they had grown up in. But in his fixation, and conviction, he seems to have built a house which did not save her but instead killed her. And I suppose that is what leads to the Correction of the title, the suicide of Roithamer.

3.1
We can construct an image of a cone shaped house with what Wittgenstein called ‘atomic facts’. Together this forms a set of propositions which either does, or does not coincide with an actually existing cone built in the centre of a large forest. 

3.2
It is convenient to design a house without having to build it. 

3.3
Wittgenstein built a house for his sister in Vienna. Completed in 1928, it was not cone shaped.

3.4
The Haus Wittgenstein is made up of large and precisely designed spaces which do not try to define the way it is inhabited but instead create space for the unknown variable. 

3.5
However, and as Wittgenstein found, when one starts with a space expressed in language, it must then be disassembled and pieced together out of so many component parts so as the image summoned by propositions can become true by the fact that it corresponds with the form of the house you have built for your sister. 

3.6
If you design a house for your sister by making a series of assertions each of which you are confident is both true and not an imposition on your sister, but then you cannot bring it to fruition as you envisaged it, and neither can your godforsaken architects, then what does that mean for your ability to use language accurately? 

This was ten years after he completed the Tractatus in 1918, a work of philosophy which tried to demonstrate the relationship between language and reality. 

He paid special attention to the door handles and the radiators. 

A year later he moved to Cambridge. A period in which his thinking is often thought to shift in the opposite direction to his earlier philosophical writing. Seemingly in contradiction to the Tractatus he begins to argue that the precise relationship between language and reality is immaterial. Much more important is the way that language is put to use.

4.1
If you have the plans for an actually existing house of a given value, say the Haus Wittgenstein made by Ludwig for his sister, could those plans be dissembled into a set of components than were not so small as to be impossible to handle in order that those components could be transported from Vienna and into the heart of the Kobernausser forest and reassembled for the fictional sister of the fictional Roithamer in the Novel Correction by Thomas Bernhard?

4.2
Or would the component parts, the atoms, the Kerne, the facts, be so small as to be impossible to put back together again. Could two such buildings real or imagined be scissors congruent?

4.3
Or am I misreading the book my father gave me years ago which I read after he died. It feels now that he was giving me to prepare for his death. Where Roithamer’s friend must piece together some sense of the folly of Roithamer’s life from the papers that he has left behind. 

4.4
On a scrap of paper my Dad, Trevor, has drawn out a plan for how he might re-organise the main living space of his small flat.

4.5
In a journal from about ten years ago my dad anticipates the flatpack bookshelf that he has bought being assembled. He wonders whether I will be able to help him with it or whether his carer will do it. I am pleased to read it and know that I put it together for him, during a somewhat frustrating afternoon about ten years ago.

4.6
At the time he was hearing voices but he did not tell me. Or was that the time he did tell me almost in passing, was that so long ago? 

4.7
He was reading Gödel, Escher, Bach when I made that bookcase. He has all these notebooks about the I Ching and number theory. There are pages where he demonstrates how you can derive Φ from π. And something about Fibonacci numbers too. He wanted to believe that there was truth in mathematics. And there in his flat, like the Southend Wittgenstein, Trevor was trying to make it all make sense. But the real and the unreal were stacked against him.

Wittgenstein focused largely on fixtures and fittings and the shape and size of the rooms. In door handles and radiators he hoped that he could determine those few elements of the building’s function that it was possible for him to anticipate. He exhausted himself and his architects with a fastidious approach to the specification for parts of the house that most would see as insignificant. Wittgenstein seems to have worked out precisely the architectural gestures he felt he could make with confidence. And that beyond that the house’s appearance would be produced by its inhabitation, not by its design. Did he learn from this project that meaning is use?

When I read Correction I wondered if Trevor saw himself in the life of the Austrian genius modelled after Wittgenstein. Trev also tried to escape the place where he grew up. He also sought out something safer in a world of ideas. And like Roithamer in the end he sequestered himself to a small room, where without the distraction of the world outside he would think, read, and try to understand how he had gotten there. But even there he did not always feel safe.

5.
“From a certain unforeseeable moment on, young men, mostly those getting on toward thirty-five, tend to push an idea and they push that idea so far until they have made it a reality and they themselves have been killed by this idea-turned-reality, I said. I see now, I said, that Roithamer’s life, his entire existence, had aimed at nothing but this creation of the Cone, everyone has an idea that kills him in the end, an idea that surfaces inside him and haunts him and that sooner or later – always under extreme tension – wipes him out, destroys him.” [Bernhard]

I think Trevor was always waiting to find the idea that would motivate him so righteously, the work of art which would justify the sacrifice of so much outside of his own self. If he had experienced such revelation; perhaps his life would have made more sense to him.

Trevor’s flat smelled strongly of incense and cigarette smoke, even though he gave up both a while ago. The patchouli imbued everything. He kept the windows closed and covered at all times and when you came in he would make doubly sure that you had put the draft excluder back against the door because he was afraid of what might come in after you. The last day before I returned his flat to the housing co-op I opened the shutters and removed the curtains from every window and the whole flat was filled with light. Everything was gone and all that was left to show of his being there were the worn down patches beneath his chair and the shadows in the nicotine stains left where his bookshelves had been. Without him there, and with his things gone. I couldn’t tell it was his flat anymore. 

6.
Like Roithamer’s cousin in Correction who is presumed dead after his jacket and shoes are found on the edge of a cliff: ‘there’s no real proof at all, because nobody can get down into the bottom of that cleft’.

6.1
But there is no need for you to take this enumerated and logically consistent series of statements overly to heart. As Wittgenstein has it, once you have ascended the rungs of his Tractatus all that is left to do is kick away the ladder. Is he saying that all his efforts to construct this finely wrought scaffold designed to facilitate accurate and effective thought are senseless? Was there any point building the cone shaped house in the first place? Who could build it anyway?

The Coroner has still not determined the cause of death.

7.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”