Dogma (3 page)

Capitalism and religion, W. muses. Capitalism
and
religion.—‘You never were religious’, W. says. I’m a Hindu!, I tell him. ‘But you were never
really
religious, were you?’

My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It brings me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don’t struggle with my faith, or with the idea of God.

W.’s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It’s a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn’t quite know. But at other times he feels as far from religion as could be, and the word
faith
is ashes in his mouth.

Of course, W. was born a Jew—he’s Jewish through his father’s line, but his mother’s family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase at the age of nine!, W. remembers. He demanded to be taken to church. And he was taken, although his family were
lapsed.—‘Nine!’, W. says. That’s when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.

Our hosts’ CD collection. The Golden Gate Quartet, Barbeque Bob, The Hokum Boys, The Mississippi Sheiks: who are these people? Our hosts are opting out of contemporary life, W. says. They’re in internal exile. They’re ransacking the past—a never-existing, arcadian past—to save themselves in the present.

W. puts on the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it
sheeks
, apparently, he says, reading the inlay. W. admires the sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It’s about rhythm, he says, not about melody. W.’s becoming an enemy of melody, he says. He hates
dead syncopations
. He hates
drums
.

But what would any of this mean to me? I’m a Jandek fanatic, for fuck’s sake! He does an impression of Jandek’s singing.—‘
I’m in paaaaaainn
’; ‘No
one liiiiikes
me’. Actually, he respects Jandek, W. says. My instincts were right, for once. We tried to have a
Jandek party
, of course, down in W.’s house. We forced his students and Sal to sit and listen in silence.—‘How long could they stand it?’, W. asks. ‘How long?’ He pauses dramatically. ‘
Three seconds!
’, he says. ‘That’s all they could take. I think Sal shat herself’, he says. She’s never forgiven us for that.

W. laments that I’m no longer open, really open, to music.—‘You only listen to Jandek’, he says. It’s quite impressive. W. has a certain respect for my obsessions, although they’re
absurdly narrowing. My whole life has been nothing other than a series of obsessions, W. says, and this is my latest one.

There’s no point in putting any books in his man bag for our trips, W. says, because he is soon too drunk to read. And there’s no point in carrying his notebook either, because he is soon too drunk to think.

How long have we been away? Two days? Three? But W.’s beginning to forget his former life. Hasn’t he always lived in this way, wandering around America with a moron?

Ah, why did he bring me to America?, W. wonders. What is it, in him, that desires his destruction? There’d be sense in bringing someone along to inspire him, W. says, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless
I’m
his death-drive, for how else can he account for it?

Sometimes, W. thinks that I’m like those people Russell Crowe sees, in
A Beautiful Mind
. A hallucination. A figment of his imagination. But I’m real, quite real, that’s the trouble. You can exorcise a ghost. But how can you rid yourself of an idiot?

My own corner
, that’s where I should stay, W. says.
My own corner
, with my own interests, which are contracting by the day … But W. insists on bringing me into the world, doesn’t he? Why?, he wonders. For what reason?

He had a terrible dream last night, W. says. I was leading him up one of the hills outside Nashville, grim faced and silent. I was much larger than usual, a giant toad, a giant flea with great thick thighs. And W. was much smaller, a wren, a midge. And I was silent: I wasn’t saying a word. I was dragging him up the hill without offering a word of explanation.

‘Tell me, tell me where we’re going!’, W. cried. But I would tell him nothing. On the hill summit, late evening, W. found himself prone, and I had a knife to his throat. I was silent. I was about to cut … W. waited for a voice telling me to stop. He waited for God to intervene, telling me to sacrifice something else in W.’s place. But no voice came.

W.’s dream. It must have been because I was talking about Hindu sacrifice the other night, W. says. About the four hundred kinds of sacrifice detailed in the Vedas. About the
macrocosm
, about
cosmogony
and
anthropogony
.

When the priest pours the offering into the fire—milk or ghee, vegetable cakes or the stalks of the soma plant—he is communicating with the divine realm, I told him. The fire itself is divine, I told him. Destruction itself is godly.

W. shudders. That’s why I’m destroying myself, isn’t it? That’s why I’m setting myself on fire. It’s part of some mad Hindu scheme. My life, the disaster of my career, is only
a spoonful of ghee for the fire
.

But there’s worse, W. says. He’s going to be sacrificed, too. His life, his thought, the disaster of his career will be just another offering for the flames.

Our hosts don’t understand our bickering, W. says. It upsets them. Don’t they see that it’s the only way we can express affection? It’s a British working class thing, W. told them, but they only looked at us blankly.

We’ve become strange, W. says. We’ve spent too much time in each other’s company. Even Sal can’t save us from that. We’re no longer fit for human society, W. says. For
Canadian
society.

How long will it be before our hosts turn us out onto the streets?, W. wonders. We’ve sinned against their hospitality. We’ve desecrated their home. Our bickering (my bickering) … Our hysteria (my hysteria) … Our sense of living in a perpetual emergency (
my
sense of living in a perpetual emergency).

I’m a disgrace, W. says. My table manners! My habit of continually scratching myself.—‘And why are you always touching your chest through your shirt?’, he says.

Isn’t it bad enough that our hosts are imprisoned in Nashville?, W. says. Haven’t they got enough to deal with? The British working class guest is an unruly guest, W. says. It’s been up to him, W., to maintain a certain standard of behaviour. But I always let him down, don’t I? I always drag him into the mire.

Capitalism is the
evil twin
of true religion, said W. in our Nashville presentation. Capitalism is a kind of cult, he said. It’s the mysterious force that sustains our lives. And money is the false God we worship.

Schuld
: the German word for
guilt
also means debt, W. explained. Capitalism functions on credit, so we are all guilty.

Consume!
, that’s the commandment of capitalism, W. told our audience. It sustains the fantasy that the repayment of debt can be endlessly postponed, he said. Hidden by this fantasy is
real material destruction
, he said, which makes limitless debt possible in the short term and impossible over the longer term.

When we were asked what we meant by
real material destruction
, W. pointed to me.—‘Look at him!’ The audience laughed. ‘No, really, look at him!’, W. said.

W. was going to tell them about the end of the world, he says. He was going to tell them about the
real
apocalypse. And he was going to tell them about messianism, too—about
true
religion, which neither the capitalist nor the new atheist will ever understand.

But our audience looked bored, yawning and fidgetting.—‘Six people’, W. says. ‘Six bored people, looking at their watches. Did we come all this way for that?’

Jake’s Bar
, Five Points. W. berates the bartender for the poor range of gin.—‘Bombay Gin is terrible’, he tells her. ‘Tanqueray isn’t bad, especially with tonic, but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick’.

Her customers like it, she says. W. tells her to introduce them to Plymouth Gin.—‘Why haven’t you got any Plymouth Gin? You can get it in America’. Our bartender looks annoyed. She’ll get what her customers want, she says.—‘But how do they know what they want when they haven’t tried Plymouth Gin?’, W. says.

W.’s
flying blind
in America, he says to me. He is not understood over here. W.’s used to explaining
me
to people, but not having to explain himself. He’s a
force for good
—can’t people see that?

Anyway, it’s another sign of the
step change in capitalism
, when Plymouth Gin is taken to be a gin like any other, W. says. It’s a sign of the end, he says, when you can no longer make
real distinctions
.

At night, our open-hearted hosts dream of the Yukon, W.’s sure of that. The mountains, the open spaces … the fawnlike gentleness of the Yukonites … the lakes, beside which
you can pitch your tepee: I can’t imagine it, W. says. Back home, our hosts probably spent whole summers by the Yukon lakes in their teepees.

Canadians are people of the expanses, W. says. They have expansive souls. They come into their own out of doors, taking great strides in the wilderness. They’re only really themselves when they go horse riding or kayaking, W. says, and when singing close harmonies around the fire at night.

W. speaks of the Canadian summer, of days that go on forever, and of the Canadian autumn, when the aurora borealis flashes out above the frosts. And he speaks of the Canadian winter, when your breath freezes in the air and the absolute clarity of the Milky Way crowns you with stars, pinprick sharp in the frozen sky.

The Canadian is a friend of the bear, and of the wolf, W. explains. The Canadian is a friend of his fellow Canadian
by way
of his friendship with the bear and the wolf. The wilderness opens between them, Canadians. They safeguard it; they inhale it and they exhale it; it’s the element of their lives, W. says.

It was the element of his life, too, he says, before his family returned from Canada. Ah, his Canadian years! He knows something of teepee life. He knows something of close harmonies sung in the Canadian night. But now, like me, he has trouble imagining himself in a teepee.

W.’s tried to explain England to our hosts.—‘You can’t imagine what it’s like’, he’s said. He’s spoken of tight corners and narrow corridors, of rats crawling over rats. He’s spoken of class war, and of the triumph of
opportunism and cynicism.
—‘Look at us!’, he has cried. ‘Look at him!’, he has said, pointing to me. ‘Can’t you see?’

The
circle of my obsessions
has become narrower, W. says. That’s the essential change he’s seen over the years.

Once, they encompassed the whole world, my obsessions. I took them for ambition, genuine ambition. I wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, I even took myself for a philosopher.

‘You studied, didn’t you? You read. You even
wrote
. You—wrote! It’s amazing’, W. says. ‘You wrote and published’.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, I’d deluded myself completely, it was quite magnificent. I’d taken myself for a scholar, a man of letters. I wrote learned articles. I spoke with learned people on learned topics …

I thought I was part of something, didn’t I?—I walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges, with my hands behind my back and my chin tilted upwards. My voice resounded beneath the vaulted ceilings. Ambition—that’s what I thought I had, isn’t it?

Everyone laughed.—‘We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn’t notice, did you?’ The
circle of my obsessions
had not closed tight around my neck. I wasn’t yet being strangled. It wasn’t yet a garrotte …

And then what happened? He saw it, W. says. He was there. My obsessions didn’t range as freely. My horizons shrank. Once, philosophy and literature; once, the great ideas of Europe: and now? A squalid room in a squalid flat. A pile of Jandek CDs. A cheap bottle of wine …

It’s growing tighter, isn’t it, the circle of my obsessions?, W. says. Tighter, until it’s begun to strangle me. Tighter, and now my face is turning blue. I’m gasping for breath, aren’t I?

At the bus station, an armed policeman behind the counter watches us menacingly. What have we done? Something very wrong, we feel. There’s something very wrong with us.—‘With
you
’, W. says.

Sal’s keeping our tickets safe, which is the best thing, we agree. We’re lucky to have her on our side. What would we do if it weren’t for her? Who would see us safely onto the Greyhound?—‘She’s our eyes’, says W. ‘And our ears. And our sense’. We’re idiots in America, W. says.

We think back to Herzog’s film: W. is the elderly neighbour, Mr Scheitz, and I’m Bruno. Without Sal, America would overwhelm us. It’d be just like the film, W. says. Without Sal, we’d buy a rifle from somewhere, like the characters in the film, and go to rob a bank. The bank would be closed, of course, just like in
Stroszek
, and we’d rob the barber shop next door. Then we’d head across to the supermarket with our thirty-two dollars, to spend our loot.

Then what would happen? W. would be arrested, just as Mr Scheitz is arrested, and I would run into the amusement arcade, feeding quarters into the various stalls, to set the rabbit climbing up on his fire truck, the duck playing his bass drum, and the chicken dancing …

And then what? Then I would ride off on the ski-lift with my rifle, just like Bruno, and shoot myself in the head …

Our bus is delayed.—‘It’s always late’, says the woman standing in front of us. She’s heading to a funeral, several states away.—‘Won’t make it now’, she says. There’s no information anywhere about the delay. There’s no information booth, no one to ask.