Dogma (11 page)

Is that what it was like in the Age of Gold?, we wonder. Is that what it was like for all creatures, basking together in the sun? And will that time come again, when humankind and its brother and sister creatures will each be an image of the Goddess?

Is that what’s going to happen to my flat?, W. wonders. Will it become a Hindu temple?

Plymouth. Dinner time. W. is a systematic cook. On weekend mornings, he goes through his
Sainsbury’s
magazines deciding what to cook that evening. Then he goes to the supermarket to buy his ingredients, before preparing dinner with meticulousness and love.

He loves to cook, W. says, and enjoys anticipating a good meal. He savours his anticipation. He’s not like me, W. says, who eats only discount sandwiches that go cheap after their sell-by date. He doesn’t march round Eldon Square just before closing time in search of a bargain sandwich or a box of salad for 75p.

W. knows the value of deferred gratification, he says, which I do not.—‘As soon as you feel any pang of hunger, you have to feed yourself’, W. notes. In fact, W. is not sure I’ve ever felt a pang of hunger.—‘It’s an addiction with you, isn’t it? If you don’t eat every hour on the hour, you get panicky. You have to have something in your mouth’.

He can see I’m hungry, W. says.—‘Go on, go and get a slab of beer. Go and get your pork scratchings’.

We speak of our absent friends, over beers. Where are they now? Scattered all over the world! If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable? They would make us great!

Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.

When did it begin, W.’s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother’s caravan park, he says, as a child. His parents sent him there every summer. He would stay for weeks at a time, playing in the fields by the sea.

It reminded W. of the Canadian wilderness that he had left behind. It reminded him of what he had lost: the breadth of the sky, the virgin earth, and whole days of wandering, with no parents to supervise him. Children should be brought up with
benign neglect
: isn’t that what W. has always maintained?

W. made a friend at the caravan park, a friend of the kind you might make in Canada, W. says. A
working class
friend, like me. Except utterly unlike me, because his friend had a sense of loyalty. His friend knew nothing of betrayal! Nothing of treachery!

Open space is good for friendship, W. says. Friendship needs expanses, he says. It needs to fill its lungs. His friend and he looked for adders in the woods, and toads in the marshland at the edge of the dunes. They trespassed on farmland, too, smoking among the hay-bales.

They were chased by farmers, and ran back to the caravan
park through the fields. Once, they saw a police car, pulling up the park drive, and knew they were in trouble.

But there was no betrayal. When one stumbled, the other helped him up. When one fell, the other carried him. When one was accused, the other would take the blame … It was like
Spartacus
, W. says. The
cadre
was everything. The collective. And hasn’t that been what he’s sought ever since?

If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of hundreds of miles away, something might be possible. We’re islands, he says, stranded at opposite ends of the country.

W. dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends, thinker-lovers. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-pack, which would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, of thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I’m amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite delirious. I can barely contain my excitement. It’s as if I’ve never eaten before. She can only
imagine
what kind of life I usually lead.

Sal refuses to visit my flat, of course. It’s too squalid. The plaster dust. The slugs. And there’s rubble in the shower. How do I wash?
Do
I wash? And there’s no food. Nothing. I can’t have food in my house, I’ve told them, because I eat it all. I binge. I stuff myself. I make myself ill almost immediately. So there’s no food.

Then, too, I’ve no fridge, and nowhere to store food. There’s no electricity in the kitchen, and besides, it’s dismantled, ready for another round of damp-proofing. The walls are so wet! It’s like touching the skin of a frog—clammy.

Sal can imagine a terrible plague spreading from the flat. A new kind of illness, which travels by damp spores. And the flat’s so dark! It’s like being buried underground, staying at the flat, she says. It’s like being buried alive.—‘And you haven’t told her about the rats yet’, W. says.

W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes.—‘Your rolls of fat’, says W.

It was like the story of Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen
me
naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.

‘Compare this house to your flat’, W. says. ‘How high are your ceilings? As high as these?’ W.’s ceilings are fifteen feet high. No, they’re not that high, I tell him. My flat’s tiny, which he knows full well.—‘How
dry
is your flat?’, W. says, knowing the answer. It’s not dry at all, I tell him. His house is as
dry as a bone
, W. tells me. It couldn’t be drier. And of course, W.’s house is rat-free, he tells me.

‘Do you think you’ve failed?’, W. says. And then, ‘Was buying your flat the
outcome
of your failure, or did it merely
complete
your failure?’

Why did I buy my flat? What led me to it? W. wants to be taken through the decision-making process step by step, he says. And I really had no idea about the damp when I viewed it? My surveyors didn’t tell me about the underground river? My bank didn’t withhold my loan when they heard that it was built on top of a mineshaft, and was collapsing in the middle?

It’s where I thought I
deserved
to live, W. says. It’s what
I thought I
warranted
. W., of course, ended up in a three storey Georgian townhouse. He’s still amazed by that. How did he end up with this kind of house, and a lecturing job, and a woman who loves him?

Ah, but these are his last days in his house, he’s certain of it. These are his last days in his job. And are these his last days with Sal, too? She would never leave him, W. says. Surely, she would never leave him …

His last days … he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It’s building up out there, W. says, it’s massing like storm clouds over Plymouth Sound.

‘Take some photos’, W. says. ‘It needs to be documented!’ I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with internal shutters over the window and a marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.

I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of their friends on the wall. Why haven’t they got a picture of me?, I ask them. No reply.

Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high, old skirting; the tall windows, newly restored; the king-sized fireplace, with its resplendent tiles and marble surround …

It’s here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I, sitting on the couch with great seriousness. I make him listen in silence to
Khartoum
and
Khartoum Variations
. W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to the music with him. Sal never stays for Jandek.—‘I hate fucking Jandek’, she says. ‘Don’t play Jandek while I’m in the house’, she says.

I document the great bathroom, too—the greatest of bathrooms, we’re all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The fulsomeness of the airing cupboard, with its many towels, sheets and duvet covers. The pile of
Uncuts
by the toilet, ready to read. The stained glass window, made by someone famous.

Ah, how will he leave it, his house?, W. says. He’ll have to leave it, he knows that. They’ll sack him. They’ll drive him out of his city. It’s coming, the end is coming.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.’s study. His bookshelves—not too many, since W. gives away most of his books (‘I don’t hoard them, like you’, he says), but enough for all the essentials. His Hebrew/English dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His collected Rosenzweigs.

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. pulls out a camp bed and makes it up. He has to fumigate his study after I’ve slept in it, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship.

Then, finally, W.’s and Sal’s room, calm, generous and large-windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. And it’s where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.

W.’s still reading Rosenzweig, very slowly, in German, every morning, he tells me.—‘I don’t understand a word’. Still, it’s a good exercise. Every morning, he goes into his study and sits at his desk before he does anything else. Does he have a cup of tea? No, he says, tea has to wait. How about coffee? He doesn’t have coffee, either. I always begin with a cup of coffee, I tell him.—‘That’s where you go wrong’, he says. ‘Some things take precedence over coffee’.

How does he dress himself for scholarship?, I ask him. He wears his dressing gown, W. says. He sits in his dressing gown and reads, looking up difficult German words (which is to say, most of them) in his dictionary. How does he do it?, he wonders. Every morning, he leaves Sal lying there in the warm bed, and goes to work. Is she impressed by his commitment?—‘She thinks I’m an idiot’, W. says.

We admire W.’s edition of the collected Rosenzweig.—‘What you have to understand is that Rosenzweig was very, very clever’, he says. ‘We’ll never, whatever we do, be as clever as him. We’ll never have a single idea, and he had hundreds of ideas’.

W.’s workfiles mean little to him now, he says. There are dozens of them, saved in a folder called
Notes
, on every kind of topic. Spinoza’s
Theologico-Political Treatise
, for example. Hermann Cohen’s
Religion of Reason
. He saves them to his folder and forgets them immediately, W. says. Why does he bother?

I open one on his computer screen. Notes from Cohen’s
Mathematics and the Theory of Platonic Ideas
, long out of print. It cost him £130, he sighs. W. makes himself read things by spending very large amounts of money on them. He feels so guilty, he
has
to read them. Cohen’s
The Principle of the Method of Infinitesimals and its History
—that cost him £210!

But what would I know of all this?, W. says. My reading is done online. I barely know what it means to
handle a volume
. And besides, old books, with their learning, frighten me, he knows that. Old hardbacks with scholarly footnotes. Old libraries—what do I know of them? I’m a man of the
new age
, W. says, just as he is a man of the
old age
. He’s an anachronism, W. says, he knows that; and I am a harbinger.

Stonehouse, morning.—‘You should always live among the poor’, W. says, as we thread through the crowd of refugees gathered at the end of the road. They’re always standing about outside, the sun on their faces, W. says. He likes that. They’re
men of the street
, as he is. But where are their womenfolk? Where do they live? It’s a mystery to him, W. says.

We’re heading to the sea. That’s what Plymouth means to him, W. says: proximity to the sea. He has to see it!, W. says. He has to be near it! It’s as essential to him as oxygen. He is a
scholar of the coast
, W. says, which means he’s bound to end up living inland, far inland, when he loses his job. He’s a
scholar of fresh air
, which means he’ll end up living somewhere underground and fetid, just like me, W. says.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck little metal pillars into the road, with the names of famous former residents written on them. What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality?

We pay to enter Smeaton Tower, the old lighthouse, and ascend its winding staircase. The lighthouse was moved from the breakwater, W. says when we reach the top. It’s only ornamental now; the real lighthouse is much further out to
sea. We squint out over the waves. Yes, there it is, in the far distance.

W. takes me to his favourite café, to see if we can find the young Polish woman who used to serve us. He wants me to have a
romantic interest
, W. says. He wants to see me stutter and fumble. He wants to see me pucker my lips for a kiss. But she isn’t there, and he has to listen to my
caffeine theories
instead, as he drinks his coffee.

‘You’ll have to document all this’, W. says, as we walk through the shopping arcades. I need to document his
Plymouth years
, W. says. He takes me on a
pointing tour
of his favourite buildings.

I take photos of W. pointing to particular architectural features he admires. He points to the high brown façade of the new university arts building. He points to the decrepit Palace Theatre. He tells me again how the old city was razed by the Luftwaffe, and how it was rebuilt in the ’50s, following the Abercrombie Plan.