Lars Iyer - Dogma

‘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.

Yes, that’s where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts’ expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.

The Trout , overlooking the meadows.

Oxford: the very name is a blow to W. It strikes him on the head like a bludgeon. It sounds through him like a depth-charge. Oxford! Oxford!

Why do we come here year after year? W. says. Why, to our conference, and to wandering from pub to pub after our conference? Why, lamenting the intellectual state of our country, and our intellectual state?

Britain is not a country of thought, we tell ourselves every year. The Anglo-Saxon mentality is opposed to abstraction, to metaphysics, we tell ourselves. It is completely opposed to German profundity and French radicality, to Central European Weltschmerz , and to Russian soulfulness … It has nothing to do with Spanish duende , or the Greek sense of fate .

And above all, the British don’t understand religion , W. says. They don’t understand religious pathos . The British are too empiricist, W. says. Too literalist. They don’t see that religion’s all around them. Religion is about this world, about everyday things. That’s what the continentalist understands, he says. That’s what the new atheist fails to understand.

Hasn’t W. tried to set up an alternative intellectual network for people like ourselves? Hasn’t he run his famous Plymouth conferences, inviting but a handful of speakers to his college, and allowing them to select their ideal interlocutors? Hasn’t he wheedled money from all kinds of sources to pay for it all?

Ah, it was marvellous, until I ruined it, W. says. Why did he think of inviting me? he says, shaking his head as we sip our pints. He still remembers it, the whole afternoon devoted to my work, to my so-called work. The thing is, the audience — my invited audience — were on my side to begin with, W. says. — ‘They wanted you to do well’. But what happened? He shakes his head.

Why did he invite me? W. wonders. There’d be sense in bringing people to his college to inspire him, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless I’m his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

I ruined his conference, there’s no question of that, W. says. I ruined his whole series of conferences. And what choice did he have but to return to Oxford, to our Oxford conference, and with me in tow? What, but to rejoin the would-be Oxonians, who hire out the college of St. Hilda’s when all the real Oxford academics are away?

Philosophy’s like an unrequited love affair, W. says. You get nothing back; there’s only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled. But sometimes he feels he might be capable of philosophy. That we might be capable of it, together — together with our friends.

Didn’t he have friends once? W. says. I drove them away, of course. They ran away in horror. What is W. doing? they wondered. They wrote him emails. Didn’t he realise he was ruining his reputation ?

Ah, why does he hang out with me? W. says. It’s not as if he has no options. He chooses to hang out with me, that’s the thing. It’s his choice — or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?

Either way, he remains in my labyrinth, W. says. His fear: he’ll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until he’s forgotten he’s in a labyrinth. I’m becoming his world, says W. His whole world, and isn’t that the horror?

He’s like an actor who’s forgotten he’s acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that’s it, isn’t it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …

We need a realitätpunkt , W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.

Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?

What’s happened to them now, his friends? W. says. They’re scattered to the four winds, he says. They’re fighting their own battles against redundancy, as he is fighting his. And they’re applying, like him, for the tiny number of jobs which appear in the newspapers.

Crowd rats into smaller and smaller spaces, and they turn on one another, devouring one another, W. says, as we pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs. That’s what’ll happen to us, and to our friends, he says. We’ll turn on one another, devouring one another …