Dogma (9 page)

Our
third
Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear open our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster—with
world-historical
seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without doubt!

W. spoke of nuns; I, of monks. He spoke about dogs; I, about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.

In our
fourth
Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. But there can be no love in the modern world, W. says, there can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of
agape
and
eros
. And then W. spoke of
philein
: the greatest kind of love, he said.

We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greek terms that you barely understand.

Sometimes, in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps. Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.

What has he learnt about me through his studies?, W. wonders. What’s become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. Here is a man with whom I can think, he told himself. Here is a
companion in thought
.

Wasn’t I the one he’d been waiting for? Wasn’t I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I had a lower IQ than his, of course, but I was quick. I spoke well. My voice resounded beneath vaulted ceilings. Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W. concluded the same.

W. sought a
thought-partner
, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay, he says. He saw me spinning into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn’t I? Or perhaps it was never there—W. wonders about that too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely a
mirage
, being only what W. wanted to see.

A
thought-companion
, that’s what W. wanted. And
instead what has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.

For our
fifth
Dogma presentation, W. wrote two quotations on the blackboard, and we sat in silence. ‘
Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering
’, he wrote. ‘
Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death
’, he wrote.

For our
sixth
, W. contented himself with a single quotation: the words Sorel was supposed to have said on his deathbed. ‘
We have destroyed the validity of all words. Nothing remains but violence
’. For the
seventh
, but a single word was necessary, projected onto the wall behind us:
DERELICTION
.

Spital Tongues, Newcastle.—‘God, your flat is filthy’, W. says. ‘You don’t have any idea how to clean, do you?’ W. suspects it’s a Brahminical thing. I can’t do any menial labour! I’m too pure to clean. I can’t
get down on my hands and knees
.

Detachment, that’s what I’m cultivating, W. says. The maximum possible tension between outside (the squalor of the flat) and inside (the ultimate self,
Atman
). And this tension is like a drawn bow, ready to shoot me towards enlightenment, W. says.

‘What’s that noise’, W. asks. ‘Is it squeaking?’ Rats, I tell him. Rats have infested my flat. I point out the rat droppings in the yard—black, elongated pellets, ten or twelve of them, some forming a haphazard pile, others scattered. I point out the soil displaced from the plant pots. The rats have been looking for bulbs to eat.

Another squeak, like strangled birdsong.—‘Where’s it coming from?’, asks W. ‘Inside the flat?’ Beneath it, I tell him. That’s where they live now, the rats.

There’s a five foot gap beneath the floorboards, I tell him,
all the way down to the mud. The other day, I pulled up one of the floorboards and shined a light down there. I saw the rats, I tell W. I don’t know how many there are. I don’t know what they were doing. But I could see them crawling over each other, I tell him. I could see their wet fur glistening.

‘What are they doing down there?’, asks W., shuddering. ‘What do they eat?’ And then, ‘You’re feeding them, aren’t you? You’re
cultivating
them’. He reminds me of the narrator of Trakl’s poem, who feeds rats in a twilit yard, in an act that betrays all of humankind.

He can see it in my face, he says, in the madness of my eyes: the dream of
murine becomings
, of
feral alterity
: of rat packs, alive with fleas, spreading out from my flat, crawling, burrowing, swimming in all directions, bearers of new kinds of plague …

Rats come from the East, W. says. They come from the deserts of Arabia (the black rat) and the shores of Lake Baikal (the brown rat), thriving in periods of war and famine, and spreading epidemics of plague as they move westwards.

They reached Britain in the thirteenth century (the black rat) and in the nineteenth century (the brown rat), being omnivorous, adaptable, fecund. Rats are pitiless, W. says (the brown rat more than the black rat). Merciless. They drive the weak before them. Just as the black rat drove out its natural rivals, so the brown rat drove out the black rat. And no doubt, there are new rat-waves to come …

And they’re intelligent, too. The brown rat is claimed to
show signs of
meta
-intelligence, though W.’s not sure what that means. He thinks it’s got something to do with learning from your mistakes, which is something we’ve never done. Brown rats are more intelligent than us, W. says, that’s the trouble.—‘Well, more intelligent than
you
’.

W. tells me of the rat man of Freud’s case study, who spoke of his greatest fear, which was also his greatest desire: to have a pot placed on his arse, into which a pack of rats was introduced. His fear, his desire, was for the rats to bore their way in, for them to swarm through his body …

Is that what I want?, W. wonders. Am I, too, waiting for the
rat punishment
? Or perhaps that’s why I’ve invited him up, to rat-punish
him
 …

I look ill, W. says. Grey.—‘What do you think is wrong with you?’ Is it the plaster dust, continually falling from the ceiling? Is it the filth on the kitchen counter, or the cans of stale beer? Is it the fact that the whole flat is tilting sideways, like the deck of a ship in a storm?

It’s the yard, W.’s sure of it. The shore of concrete, at the same level as the window, covered in algae.—‘It’s like the end of the world out there’, W. says. Dead plants, no more than sticks in pots. The long crack in the kitchen wall, which lets in the rain. The mould-encrusted hopper, overrunning with water.

Then there’s the damp, the omnipresent damp. It’s no wonder that I cough constantly. Even he, W., has a cough, and he’s only visiting for the weekend. He’s staggering around like Widow Twankey. How can I do it to him? How can I do it to myself?

Why is he drawn back to my flat again and again? Why does he want to see
where it happens
, or fails to happen?

Ruination, W. says. Living destruction. The Jews have a name for it, W. says: the
tohu vavohu
. The chaos that preceded the
act of creation. He supposes the Hindus have a name for it, too, W. says. Actually, he supposes Hinduism
is
a name for it.

‘You drink too much, that’s your problem’, W. says. ‘Mind you, I’d drink if I had your life’.

My instincts are wrong, W. says. They always have been. How else can I account for the horror of my life, with its lurches and shudders? How else can I account for that
desire for ruination
that has marked every one of my relationships?

It’s going to end in a stabbing, W.’s always said. Someone’s going to stab me. But if not him, then who?—‘One of your nutters and weirdoes’, he says. I know enough of them.—‘You’ve been stabbed before, haven’t you?’ Nearly, I tell him.—‘Well, next time, they’ll really get you’.

‘My God, your friends’, W. says, though he would hardly call them friends. Outpatients. Case studies.—‘What do you think they see in you? What do you see in them?’ I draw them to me, my nutters and weirdoes. I can never get rid of them.—‘You’re too weak. Too passive’. I regard myself as
an object to which things happen
, W. says. I call it fate. He calls it idiocy.

Is he one of them, one of my nutters and weirdoes? It’s his greatest fear, W. says.

You ought to know everything about your home city, W. says, if only to know what you’re about to lose. It makes it more poignant, more mournful, W. says: your loss of your city. Because we will both lose our cities, W. says, it’s inevitable. Just as he will be forced out of Plymouth, I will be forced out of Newcastle. Just as he will be kicked out of the city he loves, I will be expelled from the city I
profess
to love, despite the fact that I know nothing about it.

W. had to piece together the history of Newcastle for himself, he says. Perpetually hungover, perpetually dazed, I can scarcely navigate my way to my office. But W. read tour guides and websites; he consulted plaques on our walks. He traced the course of the culvetted rivers that run beneath the streets and speculated upon where they flow out into the Tyne. He consulted Ordinance Survey maps of the riverbanks and insisted upon reconstructing the medieval city in his own mind, walking the route where he thought the city walls must once have run.

Crossing Warwick Street, W. demands we stop at a plaque detailing the construction of the culvert that runs beneath
our feet. Heaton once meant ‘high-town’, we discover, being separated from the city by a steep valley. They filled in the valley and culvetted the river. Why are they always culvetting rivers in Newcastle?, W. wonders.

W.’s decline is getting worse, he says, as we cross the stadium. He doesn’t work at night any more, but watches trash TV instead. And now, like me, he’s downloaded
Civilization 4
. What appals him, he says, is that he plays
Civilization 4
with more seriousness than he works.

Of course, W. knew that the last thing he should ever do is buy
Civilization 4
. Which meant that he went straight out and bought
Civilization 4
, W. says. Then he destroyed
Civilization 4
; he snapped the CD in two. Then the next morning, he went out and bought it again, he says, but he threw the whole package in the bin before he even got home.

Then, in a weak moment, despairing of his many years of intellectual work and convinced he’d taken a
fundamentally wrong turn in his philosophy
, he downloaded
Civilization 4
from a torrent site, W. says, and has been playing it ever since.

Having Leonard Nimoy as a narrator is an attraction, of course, W. says. Whenever you discover a new technology in
Civilization 4
, it’s Leonard Nimoy who speaks some apposite quotation. It’s edifying, W. says. He hears Leonard Nimoy’s voice now whenever he reads philosophy, he says. ‘
It is necessary to know whether we are being duped by morality
,’ W. reads, in Leonard Nimoy’s voice. ‘
It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity
,’ W. reads, in Leonard Nimoy’s voice.

The great philosophers we’ve heard have always had unfeasibly
high
voices, we agree. Think of Heidegger, on that CD W. bought in Freiburg, going on about Hölderlin. He sounded like a castrati, W. says, and does an impression. ‘
Sein und Schiesse. Ich bin ein Scheissekopf
’.

Then there was Levinas. Didn’t W. phone him once, from a Paris phonebooth? He was going to ask about attending the Talmudic reading classes. But he had to put the phone down when Levinas answered, W. says. His voice was so high! The receiver fell from his hand, with Levinas saying, ‘
allo? allo?
’ in his very high voice.

We find the spot where the Ouseburn re-emerges from the wooded cliff of the filled-in valley. It’s not much of a river, W. says, but it’s a river nonetheless.

We admire the factory buildings that line the river, and the gaily-coloured boats marooned on the mud banks.
The Toon-tanic
, W. reads on the side of one of the boats.

‘You’re not one of those happy fat men, are you?’, W. says in
The Cumberland
. He always thought being fat made you happy, he says, but I just look sulky.

W. is cheerful and full of bonhomie. Why shouldn’t he be? The apocalypse is imminent, things are coming to an end, but in the meantime …? It’s always the meantime in the pub, W. says. There’s always time enough, when you’re drinking.

We stop for another pint at
The Tyne
, and for another in the garden of
The Free Trade
, looking upriver to the city.

W. admires the view. Of course, they’ll put up some
great building to spoil it, it’s inevitable, just as new flats are planned for the empty lot behind us.—‘Flats for yuppies’, W. says. Flats for yuppies and preppies, spawning like rats in pastel sweaters …

But W. is reassured when I take him through Byker Wall—the legendary Byker Wall—where the city planners tried to make a
Scandinavia
of Newcastle, building social housing in the Danish style.—‘Scandinavian social democracy!’, W. says, in admiration. ‘It’s the one positive contribution your people have made to the world’.