Lars Iyer - Dogma

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’.

It’s a shame that my Danish genes triumph over my Indian ones, W. says. It’s a shame that umpteen generations of Danish trailer-trash completely overrun the noble line of Brahmin priests.

W. sees my Danish relatives in his mind’s eye. Blonde beasts in vests, W. says, belching in the fjords.

Alcohol ruins us, W. says. Pubs ruin us. Ah, what he might have been if he had never drunk! What he might have been, if he hadn’t discovered the bar in Essex University Student Union!

Of course, once you reach a certain age, once you’re old enough to look round at the world, there’s nothing for you to do but drink, W. says. Once you understand that you live in the age of shit , there’s nothing else for you.

W. reminds me of the fragmentary conversation in Dostoevsky’s notebook:

—‘ We drink because there is nothing to do’.—‘You lie! It’s because there’s no morality’.—‘Yes, and there is no morality because for a long time, there has been nothing to do’ .

We’ve nothing to do : isn’t that our problem? W. wonders. There’s no morality: doesn’t that describe our condition? We don’t understand what it is to work. We don’t understand what it means to be good …

There is no grandeur to my drinking, that’s what he objects to, W. says, as we nurse our pints in The Cumberland . I should be falling off my barstool, like the drunks in the opening shot of Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies . In some important sense, I haven’t followed through , W. says. I’m not consistent. I’m hopeful, despite myself.

I must have some instinct for self-preservation, W. says. I must have something within me that holds me back from the abyss.

What’s my secret? W. wonders. What sustains my existence from moment to moment, given that my certainty that life is shit should give me no such sustenance whatsoever?

An idiot drools: that’s my life, that drooling, W. says. An idiot scratches his head: that’s my life, that scratching.

Do I understand, really understand, the reality of my situation? , W. wonders. Of course not; it would be quite impossible. I’m not really aware of myself, says W., which is my saving grace. Because if I were …

It’s enough that W. knows. It’s enough that he’s aware of the reality of my situation . When he tells others about it, they scarcely believe him; they have to blot it out. When he tells them about the reality of my situation , they think only of blue skies and summer days, of childhood holidays and birthday parties …

Glee: that’s what W. always sees on my face. That I’m still alive, that I can still continue, from moment to moment: that’s enough for me, W. says. He supposes it has to be.