Dogma (13 page)

The controller told me to smash some glass around the nest. That way, the rats will cut themselves on the shards and bleed to death, their wounds prevented from healing.

Imagine it: rats bleeding inside, their organs compressed all the way to failure. Rats, organs torn, their blood escaped from circulation and pooling inside their bodies. Rats with dark red blood streaming from their arteries and veins …

What a terrible way to die! What a terrible way
not to be able to die!
Because as they run, streaming, screeching in horror, they’ll want only for their lives to end, for their pain to end. What else will they want but for death to finish with them, for the blood to ooze from their capillaries?

That’s how we’ll die, like rats, W. says. Like rats, running along with everyone else, screeching. The flaming sky, the sun come close, and rats like us streaming, screeching across the baking earth …

When will it end?, I ask W.—‘It will never end’, he says. When will it stop?, I ask him.—‘It will never stop’.

Teacakes at a café on the Hoe. A blue-grey destroyer sits flush from us in the harbour, and smaller vessels go back and forth.

The Navy’s pulling out of Plymouth, W. tells me. Five hundred years they’ve been here. They’re moving operations up to Scotland. Plymouth’s finished, of course, W. says. It’s all over.

We take a tour of the dockyards, heading up though Devonport on the Tamar. The largest naval site in Europe, W. says. But soon it will all be gone, he says of the shipyards and the tidal berths, the factories and the dry-docks. They’ll pull it all down. It’ll be as though it was never there. The same will happen when
he
’s expelled from the city, W. says. They’ll pull down
his
house and destroy
his
things, W. says.

They’re going to sack him, he’s sure of it. They’re going to force him out. And when they force him from his job, they’ll force him out of Plymouth. What work will he find in Plymouth, after he’s sacked? None. There’s nothing for him here. There’s nothing for any of them, any of his colleagues, most of whom have already left.

Plymouth minus W., W. minus Plymouth … A man without a city is a terrible thing, W. says. He wonders what I would be without my city. He sees me, in his mind’s eye:
expelled, wandering across the earth. And he sees himself beside me, pushing our shopping cart full of Plymouth Gin through the gathering darkness …

W. tells me of his months as an artist’s model, being painted by Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt. Lenkiewicz only wanted to talk about philosophy, W. says. He was obsessed with philosophy. He bankrupted himself buying philosophy books, W. says.

Lenkiewicz bought a derelict church and filled it with books, piles and piles of them, it was quite extraordinary, W. says. W. would look through the mouldering books with Lenkiewicz, and the painter would pick up a volume here and there to show him. Lenkiewicz had Maimonides’s
Treatise on Logic
in the first English edition. He had Nicholas of Cusa’s
Of Learned Ignorance
. He had the page-proofs of Blanchot’s
The Step Not Beyond
, worth thousands of pounds.

Lenkiewicz was painting W. in a series of works called
Obsession
, W. tells me. He always painted in series, Lenkiewicz—
projects
, he called them. He had a
Vagrancy
project and a
Street Drinking
project. He had a
Mentally Handicapped
project. But W. was part of the
Obsession
project, or he was supposed to be. Lenkiewicz died very suddenly, just like that, and it was all over. They had to sell all his paintings to meet his debts. They sold his books too—they had to sell the whole church full of books …

‘Do you think Lenkiewicz would have painted you?’, W. says. ‘Do you think he would have stuck you in one of his
portraits?’ W. can see it now, he says, Lenkiewicz’s
Study for a Moron
, part of his
Idiocy
project. Lenkiewicz’s
Orang-Utan of Thought
, part of his
Philosophical Apes
project …

Lenkiewicz was going to paint the whole philosophy and theology department of his college, W. says. He was going to execute one of his epic works, modelled on Géricault or something. He can see it in his mind’s eye, W. says: Lenkiewicz’s own
Raft of the Medusa
, heaving with crazed and starving members of the philosophy and theology department …

Ah, but what’s going to happen to it now, the philosophy and theology department? It’s going to be closed, W. says. It will be closed, and its members set adrift, W. says. Who among them will survive, after the
wreck of the humanities
?

A visit to my hometown. To my home
suburbs
, W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong.—‘You started well enough, didn’t you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …’ When did it go wrong?, W. asks.
Where
did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no
expanse
!, W. says. There are no
vistas
! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies
above
the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He’s unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be
without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of
hope
, W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that’s what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation—so-called intellectual conversation—is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

‘This wood, for example. That field. And that—what is that?’ A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it’s only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland—muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths.—‘You were looking for something’, he says. ‘You knew something was missing’.

He sees it in his mind’s eye: I’m carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I’m cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I’m following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I’m looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I’m looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The
everyday
, W. says, which is to say, the opposite of the gods.

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book
Locke
for a meeting, or
Kant
, or
Wittgenstein.
—‘Did they have a Diogenes room?’, W. asks. ‘A Diogenes barrel?’

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The
Octavo Notebooks
. Bits from the diaries and letters. I’d keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the
very opposite
of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the
very opposite
of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the
Octavo Notebooks
mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

Through the golf course. We wait on the path while a golfer hits his ball into the distance. He starts to yell.—‘Oy, leave it alone!’ Four lads, sauntering onto the fairway, have pocketed the ball. The golfer shouts again.—‘That’s my ball!’

‘
That is my place in the sun
’, W. quotes from Pascal. ‘
Here is the beginning and prototype of the usurpation of the whole earth …
’

4×4s and Land Rovers lined up by the clubhouse. Golfers in their windshirts and their soft-spiked shoes. The enemy, W. says.

‘They stole it from us, all this’, W. says, looking back over the stream which runs through the golf course, and the footpath which follows its course. ‘It was part of the commonwealth, part of the open land we all shared’, he says.

I’ve read Karl Polyani, W. says. I should know the argument: Capitalism began with the enclosure of land. It began as land was seized by the rich and the powerful.

But for W., capitalism began long before that, he says. He evokes the virgin country which revealed itself as the ice sheet retreated, its shorelines stretching far out from where they lie now, joining our country to Europe, to continental Europe.

The climate was warming, W. says. The tundra turned into steppe, and then scrub, and then forest. And in the forests that covered the country, juniper gave way to birch and hazel, and then to oak and elm. Reindeer thrived in the open spaces for a time, and wild horses. Wolves crossed the landbridge with aurochs and polecats.

Human beings came, W. says, hunter-gatherers, moving nomadically through the landscape. Game was plenty. There were berries and nuts and fruit to gather. They lived from the land, foraging and gleaning …

W. dreams of hunters, basking in the sun. He dreams of gatherers, bathing in a plunge pool. He dreams of feasts in the open air. He dreams of cave paintings in the womb of the earth.

There were no leaders back then, W. says. No hierarchies, no bureaucrats. And there was no surplus of resources for particular individuals to horde, either. They shared everything.

The Paleolithic was a lot like Canada, W. says.

What next? W. shakes his head. No, he won’t talk about it again, he says. He can’t bear it. And then, ‘Agriculture’, he says. ‘The domestication of livestock’.

How long was it before market forces triumphed?, W. wonders. How long before competitiveness did away with friendship and community? Ah, it was a short step to money, the commodity, and the market, W. says. A short step to when capitalism subsumed almost every detail of our lives …

And it ends up here, in the suburbs, W. says. It ends up here, on the golf course in the suburbs …

Perhaps we’ve already had our idea, our great chance, W. says, as we climb up the hill towards the church. Perhaps it’s already occurred to us, and we’ve forgotten it: what a terrible thought! Worse still, perhaps it was something we exchanged in conversation, something that passed between us and was immediately lost amidst the general inanity.

That must be my task, W. tells me: remember everything! Write it down!, and perhaps then something will shine forth through the pages like a watermark.

Religion is about
this
world, about the ordinary, the everyday, W. says, over our pints at
The Queen’s Oak
. Why does no one understand that but him?, W. says. Why will no one listen?

But when it comes to the everyday itself, I am the expert, not him, W. says. Only I understand what it means to reach the
depths
, which is to say the
surface
, of the everyday?

It has to be
felt
, the everyday, W. is convinced of that. It has to have defeated you. Humiliated you. A man who hasn’t been brought to his knees by the everyday can have no understanding of the everyday, says W., aphoristically.

I
’ve certainly been brought to my knees, W. says, that much is clear. I’ve spent whole
years
on my knees.

W. wants to hear about my
warehouse years
, he says. He wants to hear about my
years of unemployment
. He never tires of it.

‘What did you do all day?’, he asks me, and when I shrug, he says, ‘Take me through it. Take me through one of your days’. There’s no point, I tell him. He’ll never understand.—‘Did you drink a lot?’, W. asks. ‘Is that how you got through it?’ Sometimes I drank, I tell him. Sometimes I did nothing at all. I looked out of the window, I tell him. I watched the raindrops bead and run down the glass.

But W. can never understand. Imagine if he lost his job, I say. Imagine, his job lost, if Sal left him (Sal would never leave him, W. says), and he was stranded in a room, a single room, for year after year. He would become a kind of cosmonaut, all lines cut, tumbling into space, head over heels. Tumbling, falling further and further away, utterly lost …