Dogma (14 page)

Of course, he’d have his reading, W. says. And his writing. He’d have his intellectual projects. Couldn’t he get down, really get down, to learning mathematics? Couldn’t he finally master classical Greek, getting past the aorist, which always defeats him?

He’d soon tire of such tasks, I tell him. They would leave him behind; his project would belong to someone else, living another life. The
infinite wearing away
: that’s what W. would have to fear, I tell him.

No more reading and writing, I tell him. Books stranded on a desk, open but with no one to read them. And W. watching raindrops bead and run down the windows …

‘
We are ferociously religious
’, says W., quoting Bataille. Are we?—‘Oh yes’, W. says, ‘especially you. Especially you!’ That’s why he hangs out with me, W. says, he’s sure of it: my
immense religious instinct
, of which I am entirely unaware.

It’s all to do with my intimate relationship with the everyday, W. says. It’s to do with my years of unemployment and menial work, he says.

When he thinks of religion, he immediately thinks of me working in my warehouse, he says. He thinks of me in the warehouse with no hope in my life.

Only the hopeless can truly understand the everyday, W. says. Only they can approach the everyday
at its level
. And only those who can approach the everyday in such a way are really religious, W. says.

Bar queues. Roadies setting up on the stage. Day one of the festival.

What are the kids listening to?, W. wonders as we sip Plymouth Gin from our water bottles. The kids are gentle. They drink, like us, through the morning and the afternoon, through the evening and the night. They sit on the grass outside their chalets, smoking.

We play them
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads
. We tell them about Josh T. Pearson. W. plays them apocalyptic Canadian pop. I play them Jandek. I only listen to Jandek, W. tells them. He admires it in me, that consistency, that obsessiveness.

You have to understand that Jandek plays
non-music
, W. tells the kids. That it has very little to do with music at all. Non-melody, non-competence … in each case, the ‘
non-
’ is not privative, W. explains. Non-melody is
larger
than melody, he says. Non-competence
comprehends
competence. The universe of non-music is
much, much greater
than the universe of music, he says.

Later, in our chalet, Sal passes out drunk. There she is, slumped by the wall, unconscious, and we are too drunk to
get off the bed. We can’t cross the room! We can’t stand up! How else are we going to reach her?

We play her some Jandek, very loud. It’ll reach her reptile brain, we agree. Her reptile brain will react in horror. It does. She opens her eyes.—‘You twats’, she says. ‘Why did you wake me up?’

Sal hates Jandek.—‘Fucking Jandek. I hate him’, she says.—‘Lars loves him’, says W.—‘Well, he would’, says Sal, rolling a cigarette, ‘he’s a fucking twat’.—‘Don’t anger the Sal’, W. says to me. And then, ‘We have to sober up’. We have to sober up! Our leader, Josh T. Pearson, is playing at midnight!

We have to compose ourselves, we tell Sal, because our leader is playing.—‘He’s not
my
leader’, says Sal. And then, ‘He’d better not be like fucking Jandek’. We tell her she has to come, but she’s too drunk to stand.
We’re
too drunk to stand!, we tell her. Look at us!

We need food! We need to metabolise the alcohol. We call out to the kids: Bring us some food! But the kids ignore us. They’re gentle, W. says of the kids, but lazy.—‘Cook something for us, Sal’, W. says.—‘Fuck off’, Sal says.

Day two. The long afternoon. We’ve set up camp at a table in the upstairs hall. It’s dark, the floor’s sticky.

We consider the enigma of Josh T. Pearson as we sip our pints. He’s living in Berlin, we’ve heard, and has no intention of recording anything. He’s given up recording! He’s dreadfully poor, we’ve heard. He can only afford to eat one meal a
day. And he’s an illegal immigrant, which means he can’t get benefits. He can’t afford dental work.

Josh T. Pearson’s beard’s getting longer. His hair’s getting longer. He’s vowed never to cut it, we’ve heard. Not until
the problem of Africa
is solved. He’s an ethical man, W. says. Josh T. Pearson thinks only of the suffering in Africa, that’s what he said in interview. It’s very impressive, W. says.

Josh T. Pearson is a one man band. He doesn’t need his former bandmates, we agree. Not when he can stomp his feet for percussion. Not with his array of effects pedals. He sounds like the Pentecost, we agree.

Last night, he sang of celestial wars, of angels battling demons, of the apocalypse and the end of times. He sang of prophets and messiahs, false and true … He sang of the
messianic epoch
, says W. Josh T. Pearson was dreaming of justice. He was dreaming of the redemption of Africa and the redemption of the world.

Josh T. Pearson! Ah, how can we understand what he’s become? It’s beyond us, we agree. He speaks from inside the burning bush. He speaks from the whirlwind. The battle takes place in his heart. Angels versus devils. Christ versus the Anti-Christ …

And who are we, in our festival afternoon? Devils ourselves, W. says. Anti-Christs ourselves … Ah, when will Josh T. Pearson do battle with
us
? When will Josh T. Pearson wipe
us
from the face of the earth?

Day three. ‘Are you going religious?’, says Sal. ‘I hate it when
you go religious’. We’re having a religious afternoon, we tell her, as we sip our beers in the sun. God’s here, we tell her. God’s everywhere, we tell her. But this only winds her up.

‘You don’t even believe in God!’ We do when we drink, we tell her. We drink to find God, we tell her, well, the Messiah, we tell her. And when we wake up, hungover, we know we’ve lost it again: messianism, the messianic epoch.

Everyone’s religious nowadays, we tell her. Look at the kids! We look around us at the other festival-goers. The men have long beards, the women have long hair. They look peaceful, serene, sipping their beers in the sun. It’s like a revivalist meeting, we agree. Ah, this is what it will be like after the revolution!

The last day, queuing for the bus.

You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They’re a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad—very bad—and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.

Our generation, he says, still had hope. The residues of hope. Theirs has nothing; hope itself is a luxury. What chance do they have?, W. says.

They don’t want much, W. says. They don’t expect a great deal. As for us … We come from the last of the generations that looked for a great change, for a kind of revolution to occur, W. says.—‘And it might have happened, too’, he says. Didn’t Godard make a film on W.’s university campus?
True, that was long before he arrived. But there were still communists outside the student union in his time. It seemed like the
beginning
of times rather than the end of them, the endless end, W. says.

Hindu pathos is very mysterious to the Jew, W. says. Why, for example, did I send W. the creation hymn from the Vedas?

There was neither non-existence nor existence then
;
there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? Was there death or immortality? Was there a sign of night and day? Who really knows?

Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. Only the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know
.

Where the Hindu finds pathos, W. says, the Jew finds only evasion and vagueness.

In the depths of the night, lying awake while the world is asleep, W. asks himself the great questions. How did it all begin? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything at all? It’s the
fact of existence
that confounds him, as it has confounded so many philosophers.

But above all, it is the fact of
my
existence that confounds him, and that confounds him alone. Why? How? Who put me here? Who’s responsible? Was it a joke? A kind of cosmic trial? And why was I placed before
him
? This is the question, the question of questions, W. says.

It’s time, W. says. No: it’s after time. It’s too late. We’re living a posthumous life.

Perhaps this is already hell, W. muses. Perhaps we already live in hell—is that it? They—the ones we once were—lived out their whole lives somewhere else. No doubt they committed terrible crimes. No doubt they were guilty of the worst. And we’re what’s left, serving out our sentence having been stripped of our memories … Hell, but perhaps it’s heaven, for is life really so bad? Not now, not today, on this pleasant afternoon …

Or perhaps, W. muses, we’re souls waiting to be reborn. Perhaps this is a great waiting room; this, the time before a dentist’s appointment, when nothing very important happens: we leaf through a magazine, we gaze out of the window …

But they’ve forgotten to call our names, haven’t they? They’ve forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room. We’ve been left to ourselves, like abandoned children. And our seriousness is only a sham seriousness; our apocalypticism is only a kind of dressing up; and all our books, all our philosophies, are only articles in some gossip magazine …

The ’80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we pull out of Liverpool Station. The crash is coming. Hasn’t our financial friend told us that? It’ll destroy Liverpool! W. lived in Liverpool in the ’80s, he says. He remembers what it was like. And to think it’s going to happen again! My God, what they did to Liverpool! My God, what they’re going to do to it!

This is the city of
Anglican Cathedral
, W. wants to tell them.—‘Have you seen
Saint James’s Cemetery
?’, he wants to say. But to them, the wreckers of civilisation, there are no such things as cities. To them, there are only nodes in the global network, only arbitrary nexuses of resources. This is the city of
The Philharmonic
pub, W. wants to say. This is the city of the
urinals
of
The Philharmonic
pub. But capitalism does not listen.

W. feels like the boy in Tarkovsky’s
Mirror
who cannot follow orders. Turn around!, he and the other cadets are told. He turns only half the way round, 180 degrees, ending up faced in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets.—‘Why can’t you follow orders?’, he’s asked.—‘You told me to turn!’, he says. And then, ‘I don’t understand’, he says. His
parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, another cadet says, off camera.

His parents are dead. He’s turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That’s what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox, and whistling, tears running down his face …—‘I don’t understand’, that’s all he will say. It’s all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Smashed glass and rubbish in the wind. Towns abandoned. Cities. Great walls raised against the world, to keep the migrants out (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there’ll be darkness everywhere. We’ll die lingering deaths. We’ll die in the sludge, very slowly.

‘I don’t understand’, that’s what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. ‘I don’t understand’.

The suburbs of Liverpool. Up early, we step out into the sun, out to find a café. Another day, full of possibilities! …—‘Which we will crush’, says W.

‘Have you had any thoughts yet?’, W. asks me. None, I tell him.—‘It’s like Zen’, says W. ‘Pure absence’.

I should work more, W. tells me. An hour a day, that’s all he asks. If I can’t work at home, then I should work in the
office. And if I can’t work in the office, then I should find a café. And if I can’t find a café, then a bench in the open air, next to the alcoholics. And if I can’t find a bench?—‘Then lie on the road and let the cars run over you’.

One day, W. says, and this is his hope, his hope against hope, I’m going to surprise everyone with my salmon-leap. One day, catching everyone unawares, there will be my great leap upstream—my leap, flashing the light back from my scales, my sunshine-touched leap against the current of my own idiocy: that’s what he believes, somehow or other. He still believes it, still sees it above the foaming water. Up and forming a great flashing arc …

And where will I be going? In the
opposite direction
to my dissoluteness and squalor. In the
opposite direction
to my compromise and half-measures. And where will he be—he, W.? Leaping with me, he says. Leaping, his arching interlinked with my own.

‘You’re less and less able to listen to the presentations of others’, W. says. He can see it on my face.—‘You can’t hide it’. At one point, he says, I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.

What am I thinking about?, he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don’t I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an
open stretch of water
?

There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the river Ill, when I
fully intended to strip down and swim, he says. Then there was our aborted Tamar trip, our boating expedition to the naval dockyards … How disappointed I had been!