Lars Iyer - Dogma

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.