Lars Iyer - Dogma

But then, too, there’s something wild about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which reveals the very opposite of control.

There are never well-thought-out tactics, there is never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who’s been locked up for twenty years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won’t the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?

Still, there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There’s a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan were a kind of kite, that’s how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky.

My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books, and series of books, written together! For flurries of articles!

What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it’s all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I do know it. Only, something in me also knows otherwise. Something remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.

There’s no evidence of the rats today, I tell W. on the phone. No digging in the plant pots, no fresh droppings. And no sight of them plunging into the drain, or poking their noses from the black wooden casing built around the pipes in the corner of the yard.

You can hear them at night, I tell W., when the TV is turned off and there’s no music on the stereo. You can hear a kind of background noise, a kind of pattering, as of tiny paws on mud. And scratching, eternal scratching, under the floorboards and, it seems, in the walls, within the very walls themselves …

I have a kind of awe for the rats, he can tell, W. says. They impress me. I approve of them. They seem to be on my side .

W. remembers reading about a Hindu temple dedicated to rats. — ‘It was sacred to a mystic. Karni something’. Karani Mata, I tell him. An avatar of the Goddess. — ‘The rats were supposed to be incarnations of her descendants or something’, W. says. ‘Anyway, the article showed pictures of thousands of rats, swarming all over the temple. Rats everywhere!’

The rats of the temple, W. says, have got no natural predators, so they’re as friendly as anything, W. says. The pilgrims bring them food to eat — sweet things, mostly, but also vegetable curry — and leave out dishes of milk. It’s supposed to be good luck when the rats stream over your feet, he says. It’s good fortune to nibble what they’ve nibbled, and sip what they’ve drunk.

Yes, even he was moved by the sight of the rats, basking on the bronze mesh that serves as a kind of roof to the temple (it’s supposed to keep birds of prey away), and scampering along the rat-runs the temple builders worked into the floor. They’ll climb up visitors as up walking trees, W. says. They’ll climb, and if you hurt them, you have to give the temple a statue of a rat made of pure gold.

Is that what it was like in the Age of Gold? we wonder. Is that what it was like for all creatures, basking together in the sun? And will that time come again, when humankind and its brother and sister creatures will each be an image of the Goddess?

Is that what’s going to happen to my flat? W. wonders. Will it become a Hindu temple?

Plymouth. Dinner time. W. is a systematic cook. On weekend mornings, he goes through his Sainsbury’s magazines deciding what to cook that evening. Then he goes to the supermarket to buy his ingredients, before preparing dinner with meticulousness and love.

He loves to cook, W. says, and enjoys anticipating a good meal. He savours his anticipation. He’s not like me, W. says, who eats only discount sandwiches that go cheap after their sell-by date. He doesn’t march round Eldon Square just before closing time in search of a bargain sandwich or a box of salad for 75p.

W. knows the value of deferred gratification, he says, which I do not. — ‘As soon as you feel any pang of hunger, you have to feed yourself’, W. notes. In fact, W. is not sure I’ve ever felt a pang of hunger. — ‘It’s an addiction with you, isn’t it? If you don’t eat every hour on the hour, you get panicky. You have to have something in your mouth’.

He can see I’m hungry, W. says. — ‘Go on, go and get a slab of beer. Go and get your pork scratchings’.

We speak of our absent friends, over beers. Where are they now? Scattered all over the world! If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable? They would make us great!

Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.

When did it begin, W.’s exalted view of friendship? When did he receive his great vision of comradeship? At his grandmother’s caravan park, he says, as a child. His parents sent him there every summer. He would stay for weeks at a time, playing in the fields by the sea.

It reminded W. of the Canadian wilderness that he had left behind. It reminded him of what he had lost: the breadth of the sky, the virgin earth, and whole days of wandering, with no parents to supervise him. Children should be brought up with benign neglect : isn’t that what W. has always maintained?

W. made a friend at the caravan park, a friend of the kind you might make in Canada, W. says. A working class friend, like me. Except utterly unlike me, because his friend had a sense of loyalty. His friend knew nothing of betrayal! Nothing of treachery!

Open space is good for friendship, W. says. Friendship needs expanses, he says. It needs to fill its lungs. His friend and he looked for adders in the woods, and toads in the marshland at the edge of the dunes. They trespassed on farmland, too, smoking among the hay-bales.

They were chased by farmers, and ran back to the caravan park through the fields. Once, they saw a police car, pulling up the park drive, and knew they were in trouble.

But there was no betrayal. When one stumbled, the other helped him up. When one fell, the other carried him. When one was accused, the other would take the blame … It was like Spartacus , W. says. The cadre was everything. The collective. And hasn’t that been what he’s sought ever since?

If there were a few more of us …, W. says. A few more, living close to us, helping one another think. Helping us, even us. If I lived closer, W. says, instead of hundreds of miles away, something might be possible. We’re islands, he says, stranded at opposite ends of the country.

W. dreams, like Phaedrus, of an army of thinker-friends, thinker-lovers. He dreams of a thought-army, a thought-pack, which would storm the philosophical Houses of Parliament. He dreams of Tartars from the philosophical steppes, of thought-barbarians, thought-outsiders. What distances would shine in their eyes!

Sal is always moved by my response to dinner. A cooked meal! I’m amazed. A whole chicken, steaming on the table! I become quite delirious. I can barely contain my excitement. It’s as if I’ve never eaten before. She can only imagine what kind of life I usually lead.

Sal refuses to visit my flat, of course. It’s too squalid. The plaster dust. The slugs. And there’s rubble in the shower. How do I wash? Do I wash? And there’s no food. Nothing. I can’t have food in my house, I’ve told them, because I eat it all. I binge. I stuff myself. I make myself ill almost immediately. So there’s no food.