Dogma (6 page)

We follow the road round to
The Park Hotel
, where we are served by an old waiter in a tuxedo. Chips and mayonnaise in the sun, watched by an old Bassett hound, head on
paws. Two pints of beer arrive on a tray, the waiter with a white towel over his forearm.—‘To the sea!’, W. toasts, as our glasses clink.

We talk of our American adventure, and of what we learned from it. We talk of Marx, and of
Stroszek
. And W. wasn’t arrested! And I didn’t shoot myself! That we survived at all is a miracle, we agree.

What did we learn from our trip? What was its significance? Sometimes W. thinks that our thoughts are too small. That we’re unable to think the
magnitude
of what needs to be thought: its vastness, its ominousness, like the black, heavy clouds that precede a hurricane.

W. dreams of a thought that would move with what it thinks, follow and respond to it, like a surfer his wave. A thought that would inhabit what was to be thought, like a fish the sea—no, a thought that would be only a drop of the sea in the sea, belonging to its object as water does to water.

The thought of God would be made of God, the thought of tears would be wet with tears … And the thought of disaster?

W. remembers the story I told him about the Hindu doctrine of the Four Ages.

In the
Age of Gold
, I told him, everyone was content; there were no differences between human beings—no high born or low born; and there was no hatred, no violence. Everyone lived for a hundred years. Heaven and earth were one. No priests were necessary, for the meaning of holy scripture was clear. All souls lived in truth.

In the
Age of Silver
, W. remembers, unhappiness appeared, along with weariness and nostalgia. Rain fell; it was necessary to take shelter in the trees. And lifespans dropped by a quarter. Morality began to atrophy; heaven and earth came asunder. But the scriptures were studied, although the priests no longer understood all they read, and squabbled over their interpretations.

In the
Age of Bronze
, W. remembers, fear appeared, predation. People sheltered in the cities that had sprung up on the plains. Lifespans fell by a further quarter. Lies became common. Virtue guttered like a candle flame in the draft. Heaven and earth broke apart. Priests could make out only a few words of the ancient tongue of the scriptures, and the
world no longer asked them for their interpretation of the divine word.

In the
Age of Iron
, our age, there is the dominion of power and war: that’s what I told W. Honesty and generosity reside only with the poor, who flee from the cities and hide in the valleys. The rule of virtue gives way to the rule of money. Drought lies upon the land, ashes fill the sky. In our age, I told W., the descendants of priests throw aside the scriptures. What do they understand of the ancient tongue? And what relevance has holy scripture to an age without hope?

But I neglected to tell him about the
Age of Shit
. I didn’t tell him about the shape of the age to come, which is becoming clearer and clearer to him. War will be all, devouring all, W. says. Human beings will be like rats, like vermin. And the skies will burn, W. says. He can see them burning.

That’s when I will come into my own, the last of the great lineage of Brahmin priests, W. says. That’s when I will wear my great grin, as the living abortion of that line, its desecration. That’s when I’ll perform my cosmic dance, like a strutting, overfed chicken …

And then? What comes next? The great flood, W. says. Water and darkness. And then, after many thousands of years, the last avatar of Vishnu—what was his name? Kalkin, I remind him. Kalkin will appear, ready to restore the world, W. says. He’ll ride a white horse and wield a fiery sword. And he’ll perform the sacrifice that destroys the world and lets a new one rise up in its place. And so the whole cycle will begin again.

The Hindu always thinks in cycles, W. says.—‘You’re a cyclical people’. This is where he is furthest from the Hindu, he says. He, as a Jew and a Catholic, is essentially
linear
. The meaning of the end times—our end times—is entirely different for him, W. says.

What does the apocalypse mean for the Hindu?, W. wonders. Not judgement, and not redemption. For the Hindu, with his endless cycles, the apocalypse can be only the prelude to a new beginning.

Can the Hindu really—
really
—understand the horror of the apocalypse?, W. wonders. Can he really—
really
—understand the glory of redemption?’

It’s what he’s long suspected, W. says. We both see horror all around us. We both see chaos and degradation, greed and conflict. But it doesn’t touch me, not really. Even our age, the worst of all, will see the birth of another of God’s avatars, I have that consolation.

He’s alone, W. says. Alone with his despair. But he has the Messiah!, I tell him. Ah, but the Messiah is very different from Kalkin, W. says.—‘Besides, messianism is best understood in terms of
time
, not some idiot on a horse’. He’ll explain that to me another day, he says.

Whitley Bay, walking between the boarded up sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. But at least they haven’t begun the regeneration yet. They’re going to turn it into a
cultural quarter
. Imagine that! A
cultural quarter
, where there was once the funfair and the golden sands.

It was the same in the city. W. was unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called
public art
. Public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It’s inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.

W. is an enemy of art. We ought to
fine
artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He’s never doubted we need some kind of Cultural Revolution.

The real art of the city is
industrial
, of course, W. says. Spiller’s Wharf. The High Bridge. The four storeys of the flax mill in the Ouseburn Valley …

W. likes to imagine the people of the city, the old working class, coming to reclaim the quayside. What need did anchor-smiths and salt-panners have for a
cultural quarter
? Why
can’t the descendants of the keelmen, of the rope-makers and wagon-drivers, come and retake the new
ghettoes for the rich
? In his imagination, W. says, a great army of Geordies storm along the river, smashing the public art and tearing down the new buildings.

A search and rescue helicopter hovers over the sea. Someone must have gone missing. Someone must have disappeared. As we draw closer, we see an ambulance on the beach, and bodysuited lifeguards running into the water, with floats.

We gather with other spectators along the railings of the promenade. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore where the sand gives way to rock. The currents must be very strong, we surmise. You never know where a body might wash up. A teenage boy, head in hands, sits on the steps of the ambulance with a towel around his shoulders.

The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression on the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards spread out over a few hundred meters, paddling out on their floats. Sometimes they dive and then reappear. Much higher up, rising at an angle, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe it has special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.

Two men run onto the beach and take off their clothes. They’re drunk. They splash out into the sea, nude, laughing and shouting, the helicopters hovering above them. But when they turn and see the long line of spectators, they become
suddenly embarrassed. Shamed, they wade back to the beach, hands cupped over their genitals.

W., doleful as we head back to the station. How much time do we have left?, he wonders. A decade? A century? The trouble is, you can’t tell, he says. The conditions for the disaster are here, they’re omnipresent, but when will it actually come?

He reads book after book on the destruction of the world. Book after book on the apocalypse. He reads about the futures market. He reads about storm-surges and dry-belts. Then he reads
my
books, W. says, shaking his head.—‘Your books! My God!’ The conditions for the end are here, W. says, but not the end itself, not yet …

W. is greatly susceptible to changes in weather, he says on the phone. He can feel them coming days in advance, he says of the Westerlies that bombard his city. He knows there’s a low front out over the Atlantic, ready to hit the foot of England with rain and grey clouds and humidity, and another low front behind that. How’s he going to get any work done—any
serious
work?

It’s alright for me, he says. I’m in the east of the country, for a start, which means that the weather doesn’t linger in the same way. Oh it’s much colder, he knows that—he always brings a warm jacket when he stays with me—but it’s fresher too; it’s good for the mind, good for thought.

But W. can’t think, he says. He knows the Westerlies are coming. He knows low pressure’s going to dominate the weather for weeks, if not months. Sometimes whole seasons are dominated by Westerlies, which costs him an immense amount in lost time and missed work.

He’s still up early every morning, of course. He’s still at his desk at dawn. Four AM; five AM—he’s ready for work; he opens his books; he takes notes as the sky brightens over Stonehouse roofs. He’s there at the inception, at the
beginning of everything, even before the pigeons start cooing like maniacs on his window-ledge.

He’s up before anyone else, he knows that, but there’s still no chance of thinking. Not a thought has come to him in recent months; not one. He’s stalled, W. says. There’s been an interregnum. But when wasn’t he stalled? When wasn’t it impossible for him to think? No matter how early he gets up, he misses his
appointment with thought
; no matter how he tries to surprise it by being there before everyone else.

W.’s reading a book of Latin philosophical phrases.—‘Ah, here’s something that applies to you:
Barba non facit philosophum
. A beard does not make a philosopher’. Then he tests me: What does
eo ipso
mean? What’s the difference between
modus tollens
and
modus ponens
?—‘
Tabula rasa
: I know you know that. And
conatus
—even you must know that’.

‘You don’t actually
know
anything, do you?’, W. says. ‘You’ve got no
body of knowledge
’. W. has ancient Hebrew, of course, and he can play classical guitar. And there are whole
oeuvres
with which he is familiar. He’s read his way through Husserl, for example. He’s not entirely bewildered by Leibniz.

Socrates knew he knew nothing: that was his wisdom, and the beginning of all wisdom, W. says. But there’s a difference between knowing nothing and
knowing nothing
, he says. There’s a difference between knowing you know nothing only to sally forth from your ignorance, and wallowing in your ignorance like a hippo in a swamp.

‘You don’t want to know’, W. says. And I’m drinking to
forget what little I
did
know. There’s nothing left for me, he says. Nothing but the empty sky, and the Zen-like emptiness of my head.

I’m always overawed by Oxford, W. knows that. Overawed, and therefore contemptuous. I hate it, W. says, because I love it. It disappoints me, W. says, because I have disappointed it: wasn’t I bussed in from my secondary modern to see what a real university was like? Didn’t I apply to study here as a student?

‘What do you think they made of you?’, W. asks. ‘What did they make of chimp boy, with his delusions of grandeur?’ Did I think I would survive a minute in
Balliol College
? Did I think I’d be punting with the toffs?

W.’s dad, who was very wise, banned him from applying altogether.—You don’t belong there!’, he told him, and he was right. W. has always been free of any
Oxford influence
, he says. He’s free of the
attraction to Oxford
, but also of the
repulsion from Oxford
: he doesn’t hate it as I do.

Oxford brings out the Diogenes in me, W. says. I all but assault passers-by. Truth-telling, that’s what I call it. Drunken abuse, that’s what
he’d
call it, W. says.

The kernel is in Poland, we agree as we walk up the Cowley Road. The secret is in Poland. We run through our memories.
Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? Didn’t it all come together there? Wasn’t it there that it all began?

There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, given a civic reception. Wasn’t it the mayor of Wrocław himself who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wrocław looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer?

‘And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes, over dinner’, W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted Freud’s
primal scene
, on the dancefloor. It’s a British dance move, we told them. It’s what we do on British dancefloors. They looked away from us, appalled.

But, in general, the Poles treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun—that’s what they called it, a
grill party
. There were sausages and beer. We British are a loutish people, we told them. Don’t expect anything from us. We said we’d disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but, after a while, they seemed to find us charming.

W. thinks we won them over, he says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were a race apart, like Neanderthals or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could hope for very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.