Dogma (10 page)

It’s a shame that my Danish genes triumph over my Indian ones, W. says. It’s a shame that umpteen generations of Danish trailer-trash completely overrun the noble line of Brahmin priests.

W. sees my Danish relatives in his mind’s eye. Blonde beasts in vests, W. says, belching in the fjords.

Alcohol ruins us, W. says. Pubs ruin us. Ah, what he might have been if he had never drunk! What he might have been, if he hadn’t discovered the bar in Essex University Student Union!

Of course, once you reach a certain age, once you’re old enough to look round at the world, there’s nothing for you to do but drink, W. says. Once you understand that you live in the
age of shit
, there’s nothing else for you.

W. reminds me of the fragmentary conversation in Dostoevsky’s notebook:

—‘
We drink because there is nothing to do’.—‘You lie! It’s because there’s no morality’.—‘Yes, and there is no morality because for a long time, there has been nothing to do’
.

We’ve
nothing to do
: isn’t that our problem?, W. wonders. There’s no morality: doesn’t that describe our condition? We don’t understand what it is to work. We don’t understand what it means to be
good
 …

There is no
grandeur
to my drinking, that’s what he objects to, W. says, as we nurse our pints in
The Cumberland
. I should be falling off my barstool, like the drunks in the opening shot of Tarr’s
Werckmeister Harmonies
. In some important sense, I haven’t
followed through
, W. says. I’m not consistent. I’m hopeful, despite myself.

I must have some instinct for self-preservation, W. says. I must have something within me that holds me back from the abyss.

What’s my secret?, W. wonders. What sustains my existence from moment to moment, given that my certainty that
life is shit
should give me no such sustenance whatsoever?

An idiot drools: that’s my life, that drooling, W. says. An idiot scratches his head: that’s my life, that scratching.

Do I understand, really understand,
the reality of my situation?
, W. wonders. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I’m not really aware of myself, says W., which is my saving grace. Because if I were …

It’s enough that W. knows. It’s enough that he’s aware of
the reality of my situation
. When he tells others about it, they scarcely believe him; they have to blot it out. When he tells them about
the reality of my situation
, they think only of blue skies and summer days, of childhood holidays and birthday parties …

Glee: that’s what W. always sees on my face. That I’m still alive, that I can still continue, from moment to moment: that’s enough for me, W. says. He supposes it has to be.

If I realised for one moment … If I had any real awareness … But it would be too much, W. says. I couldn’t know
what I was, and continue as I am. I couldn’t come into any real self-knowledge.

‘That’s what saves you’, W. says. ‘Your stupidity’.
If only he knew
…: That’s what everyone thinks when they see me, W. says. That’s what
he
thinks.

Meanwhile, it’s left to him to bear
the terrible fact of my existence
, W. says. It’s
his
problem, not
mine
as it should be, W. says. Everyone blames him for me.—‘What’s he doing here?’, they ask. ‘Why did you bring him?’ He has to find all the excuses, W. says. He has to be sorry in my place.

Our
eighth
Dogma presentation, our first overseas, we gave drunk, hopelessly drunk, and were almost completely incoherent. Only one person attended our
ninth
, so we went to the pub instead. For our
tenth
, we drank steadily through our presentation, cracking open can after can.

The Dogmatist must always be
drunk
, that’s the next rule, W. says. Drunk: yes, of course. We used to think drunkenness might come
after
thought, might
follow
a successful presentation, a fruitful discussion. But now we understand that drunkenness
belongs
to thought. In the current madness, close to the end, who can bear the thoughts that must be thought? Who can bear it—the coming end?

You have to drink, we agree. Drink to think; drink to present the results of thought. It’s a discipline, we decide. You have to start early and continue, steadily. We owe it to ourselves. No: we owe it to thought!

But for our
eleventh
presentation, we drank too much. W. was sick in the toilets before we started. I was green faced. Green lipped! Never again, he says. It should be a new rule: Dogma is sober.
Especially
sober! No, that’s a stupid rule, W. says.

How many rules do we have now?, W. wonders. Dogma
is
collaborative
—he remembers that rule. Dogma is
clear
—did we make that a rule? The presentation must be intelligible to everyone. Anyone must be able to follow its points, its logic. Dogma is fundamentally
democratic
, W. says.

Dogma is
personal
—we’ve agreed on that before, he says. Use anecdotes! Speak of your life and its intersection with thought! Speak of your friends! Speak of your passions and of your misfortunes!

Dogma is
reticent
—that should be a rule, too, W. says. What is spoken is not for publishing. Scorn publication! Publication is for fools! But then Dogma is
studious
: we need to remember that, W. says. Work hard on your presentation. Read everything. Nothing should be left to the last minute. There must be nothing slapdash!

W. names the next rule: Dogma is
apocalyptic
. Dogma accepts that these are the last days. Catastrophe is impending. Bear this in mind as you speak! You must only speak about
what matters most
!

Dogma is on the side of the suffering, we should remember that, W. says. We should think of the poor. We need to keep the memory of the poor before us at all times. Dogma is
advocative
!, W. says.

What next? Oh yes: Dogma is
peripheral
. It avoids famous names. It is shy of fashionable topics. Dogma stays on the outside, with the people of the outside, W. says. It has nothing to do with the centre! Dogma
eschews
the centre, W. says.

But we mustn’t forget: Dogma is
affirmative
. Ignore those with whom you disagree. There’s no point! ‘
Never let the critic teach you the cloth
’, W. says, quoting Burroughs.

A final rule, a kind of meta-rule, W. says: Dogma is
experimental
. More rules can be added, but only through the
experience of Dogma
.

We should shoot ourselves, W. says. Or maybe he should shoot me, and I him, in a kind of Mexican standoff. Then we would lie there under the sun, bullets in our heads, flies buzzing around us, and there would be a great rejoicing. But that’s just it, isn’t it: there would be no rejoicing. No one would see, no one would know what the world had been delivered from.

How is it that we’ve escaped detection?, W. wonders. How is it we’ve got away with what we have? It would restore faith in the world if we were hunted down and shot. At the last moment, the gun held to our temples, we would laugh in gladness because we would know that justice had been done. It would all make sense! The world would be restored!

That we’re still alive, W. says, is a sign of the nearness of the end.

Zeno of Citium strangled himself, W. says. Imagine! He was already an old man by then, and felt he’d missed his appointment with death. Why had it overlooked him? Very well,
he would bring death to himself. He would make his own appointment with the end.

And what about us? Should we strangle ourselves? Should I strangle W., and W. me? But that’s just it: death doesn’t want us, W. says.

If we die, it will be from some stupid accident, the most absurd of illnesses, an ingrowing toenail, for example. It will not be a matter of integrity, or an act of martyrdom. We’ll die for nothing, for no purpose. How could we
presume
to take our own lives?

Loving is stronger than death
, muses W.—‘What do you think that means? Do you have any idea?’ For Rosenzweig, W. explains, with love you leave behind the natural order, the boundaries of self and ego.
Immanence is broken
: that’s what it means to love. Love is stronger than death, stronger than solitude, stronger than autonomy: that’s what Rosenzweig says, it’s very moving.

Are we capable of love?, W. muses. Is he? Am I?—‘Have you ever been in love with anyone, I mean, really in love?’ W. doubts it. I read too many gossip magazines, for one thing. Love’s not based on fantasy, as I seem to think. It’s an ethical act.—‘But you’re not capable of that, are you?’ I’m fundamentally a
fantasiser
, says W., and know nothing about the living reality of other human beings.

Broken immanence
. Wouldn’t that be an altogether better
name for our intellectual movement? Or for an ’80s style band, like Flock of Seagulls, W. says.

‘
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born
’. W. is reading from his notebooks. ‘In
this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears
’. That’s Gramsci, he says. It’s from the
Prison Notebooks
.

Morbid symptoms—is that what we are? Is that our significance? Then we need to see it all the way through, W. says. We have to press towards the new, and all the way to death. We have to
live
the crisis, W. says. We have to
become
the crisis.

Sometimes W. feels like one of the pillar saints, like Simon Stylites in Syria in the first century AD, waiting for the Messiah to return. When’s he coming, the anointed one? When will W. be redeemed?

W.’s perched on his pillar, reading his books in the great languages of Europe. He’s reading, he’s taking notes in the great languages, ancient and modern, and there I am at the base, masturbating in the dust.

Omoi
, that’s what W. wants to say. Or
oy vey!
Or
yoy!
What sound should you make at the end, to acknowledge the end?
Yoy!
It’s all over.
Oy vey!
We’re done for.
Omoi, omoi
:
the lament of Antigone and her siblings as their father was taken away. No, that was
popoi. Popoi, popoi, popoi
, they said.—‘Are you listening down there?’, W. says.

‘You’re never happier than when you make plans’, W. says. ‘Why is that?’ I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of
fort-da
like that of Freud’s grandchild.

But then, too, there’s something
wild
about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which reveals the very opposite of control.

There are never well-thought-out tactics, there is never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who’s been locked up for twenty years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won’t the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?

Still, there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There’s a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan were a kind of kite, that’s how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky.

My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of
us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books, and series of books, written together! For flurries of articles!

What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it’s all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I
do
know it. Only, something in me also knows otherwise. Something remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.

There’s no evidence of the rats today, I tell W. on the phone. No digging in the plant pots, no fresh droppings. And no sight of them plunging into the drain, or poking their noses from the black wooden casing built around the pipes in the corner of the yard.

You can hear them at night, I tell W., when the TV is turned off and there’s no music on the stereo. You can hear a kind of background noise, a kind of pattering, as of tiny paws on mud. And scratching, eternal scratching, under the floorboards and, it seems, in the walls, within the very walls themselves …

I have a kind of awe for the rats, he can tell, W. says. They
impress
me. I approve of them. They seem to be
on my side
.

W. remembers reading about a Hindu temple dedicated to rats.—‘It was sacred to a mystic. Karni something’. Karani Mata, I tell him. An avatar of the Goddess.—‘The rats were supposed to be incarnations of her descendants or something’, W. says. ‘Anyway, the article showed pictures of thousands of rats, swarming all over the temple. Rats everywhere!’

The rats of the temple, W. says, have got no natural
predators, so they’re as friendly as anything, W. says. The pilgrims bring them food to eat—sweet things, mostly, but also vegetable curry—and leave out dishes of milk. It’s supposed to be good luck when the rats stream over your feet, he says. It’s good fortune to nibble what they’ve nibbled, and sip what they’ve drunk.

Yes, even he was moved by the sight of the rats, basking on the bronze mesh that serves as a kind of roof to the temple (it’s supposed to keep birds of prey away), and scampering along the rat-runs the temple builders worked into the floor. They’ll climb up visitors as up walking trees, W. says. They’ll climb, and if you hurt them, you have to give the temple a statue of a rat made of pure gold.