Lars Iyer - Dogma

It’s time for his nap, W. says as we head back to town. Time to go back to his room for his power nap , as he calls it. He learned about power naps from a public lecture at the university. Sleep for twenty minutes, and you fool the mind into thinking you’ve been asleep for much longer. Twenty minutes! That’s all he needs to regain his composure, W. says.

But I never let him nap, W. says. In fact, I scorn his desire to nap and even the very notion of a nap. I keep him up all night with my inanities, W. says, and then I keep him awake all day with more inanities.

Of course, he’s the one who insists that we stay up later than anyone else, that we follow the night through all the way until dawn, W. says. How many nights have ended for us just as dawn was brightening the sky, and the first birds were starting to sing? How many nights, with Stroszek on the TV and The Star of Redemption open on the desk?

W. is a man who wants to see the night through he says. But the afternoon … that’s my time, W. concedes. That’s when I come into my own. When everyone around me is tired and can put up no defence. When everyone’s too tired to make me shut up, that’s Lars-time, W. says. — ‘That’s when you pounce’. The afternoon: it’s when I’m at my strongest and he’s at his weakest, W. says. It’s when I can really get going. It’s when I wear everyone out.

But it’s also when I’m most afraid, of course, that’s what I’ve told him, W. says. He’s always been struck by that: for him, the afternoon is a time of repose, for the gathering of strength, but for me, it’s a time of fear.

It must be my years of unemployment, W. says. Didn’t I tell him my afternoons used to sag like a drooping washing line ? Didn’t I complain of the eternullity of those afternoons, of their infinite wearing away ? It was post-Neighbours time, the afternoon, that’s what I told him. Post This Morning , post Kilroy , and deep into the time of American cop-show repeats.

Columbo-time , W. says, I could never bear that, could I? Instead I’d go out for walk, that’s what I told him. Instead, it was time for a bike ride. Anything to be active! Anything to have something to do! I’d head up to Tesco for discounted sandwiches, wasn’t that it? I’d head into the library for another video, all the time full of fear, all the time anxious about — what? How did I put it? The infinite wearing away , I said, quoting Blanchot. Eternullity , I said, quoting Lefebvre.

It’s no wonder I’m no night-owl, W. says. No wonder that I’m always worn out by dinnertime. I always revive myself, when I visit him, with a slab of Stella and some pork scratchings. That’s my pre-dinner snack.

W., meanwhile, would have been refreshed from his nap, if I’d allowed him to sleep. He would have come downstairs, a man refreshed, reborn, having had a power-nap, he says. But instead, I insist on conversation, W. says. I insist on wearing him out: he lying on the sofa; I, sitting up at the table. I insist we make some wild plan or other, W. says.

For me, the afternoon’s always planning-time, world-conquest-time , as W. calls it. I have to pretend to some kind of hold on the future, W. has noticed. It’s like a climber throwing up a grappling hook, or Spiderman swinging by his squirted webs. I’m never happy in the moment , W. says. I’m never happy in the belly of the afternoon .

St Hilda’s College, looking at the river. Capitalism and religion, W. muses. He hasn’t got much further with his thinking, he says. His notebook’s nearly empty. I flick through it.

Where there is hope there is religion: Bloch , I read. Sometimes God, sometimes nothing: Kafka , I read. I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room: Celan . Beautiful! But there are few thoughts of W.’s own. He’s going through a dry period, W. says.

Maybe he should try his hand at poetry, like me, W. says. He could write haiku: ‘ Half ton friend / in trouble again ’. ‘ Fuckwit in a vest / Friend I love best ’. Or he could draw some pictures. Study for a Divvy. Landscape with Idiot .

Here’s his favourite quotation, W. says. They should put it on his gravestone. It’s by Hermann Müller, he says. It’s called ‘The Luckless Angel’:

The past surges behind him, pouring rubble on his wings and shoulders and thundering like buried drums, while in front of him the future collects, exploding his eyeballs, strangling him with his breath. The luckless angel is silent, waiting for history in the petrification of flight, glance, breath. Until the renewed rush of powerful wings swelling in waves through the stones signals his flight .

Sometimes, W. thinks it’s fallen to us: the great task of preserving the legacy of Old Europe. It’s our task, he thinks, our allotted mission, to keep something alive of continental Europe in our benighted country, W. says.

Ah, how was it coupled in us, the fear and loathing of the present world and the messianic sense of what it might have been? W. wonders. How, in us, are combined the sense that our careers — our lives as so-called thinkers — could only have been the result of some great collapse, and the conviction that we are the preservers of a glorious European past, and that we have a share in that past?

How, in us, was joined the sense that our learning — which is really only an enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophy, for literature — is of complete irrelevance and indifference, and the mad belief that our learning bears upon what is most important and risky of all, upon the great questions of the age?

We’re delusional, W. says. He knows that. We’ve gone wrong, terribly wrong, he knows that, too. But don’t we belong to something important, something greater than us, even if we are only its grotesque parody?

We’re hinderers of thought, W. says. We trip it up, humiliate it. There’s thought, flat on the floor. There it is, drunk as we are drunk and throwing up over the side of the bridge …

But thought is here, right here, very close to us, that’s the thing, W. says. Thought’s here, it must be desperate. There must be no one else for thought to hang out with. We’re its last friends, W. says. We’re the last friends of thought …

In his imagination, W. says, our offices in our cities at the edges of this country are like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, keeping the old knowledge alive. In his imagination, our teaching is samizdat, outlawed because it is dangerous, the secret police infiltrating our lectures and preparing to take us away. In W.’s imagination, the enemies of thought are tracking us even here, even in Oxford. Especially in Oxford. They’re watching. They invited us here to keep us close. To press us close to the bosom of Oxford. To suffocate us. To suck the life out of us …

But in reality, W. knows no one is watching. No one cares anymore, that’s the truth of it, W. says. No one’s on the look out. There was no guard on the door of St Hilda’s College. There’s no one who could regard us as interlopers.

It’s like Rome after it was sacked by the Barbarians, says W. They’ve come and gone, the Barbarians, the wreckers of civilisation. And now there’s no guard; there’s nothing to protect. We’re inside — yes; but that is only a sign that there is no longer a distinction between inside and outside.

We’ve got away with nothing; our stupidity is in plain view. It doesn’t matter; it’s irrelevant to everyone. No one’s worried about our credentials, because there are no credentials. There’s only luck. And opportunism. Were we lucky? I ask him. — ‘Undoubtedly’. And were we opportunists? — ‘We were too stupid to be opportunists’.