Lars Iyer - Dogma

Then, too, I’ve no fridge, and nowhere to store food. There’s no electricity in the kitchen, and besides, it’s dismantled, ready for another round of damp-proofing. The walls are so wet! It’s like touching the skin of a frog — clammy.

Sal can imagine a terrible plague spreading from the flat. A new kind of illness, which travels by damp spores. And the flat’s so dark! It’s like being buried underground, staying at the flat, she says. It’s like being buried alive. — ‘And you haven’t told her about the rats yet’, W. says.

W. remembers the worst, he says. He remembers the green dressing gown with its great holes. He remembers the stretches of white flesh which showed through those holes. — ‘Your rolls of fat’, says W.

It was like the story of Noah over again, when Shem saw his father naked. He might as well have seen me naked, W. says, and shudders. Actually, that would have been better. But the green dressing gown, with its holes … It was the worst of sights, W. says. The very worst.

‘Compare this house to your flat’, W. says. ‘How high are your ceilings? As high as these?’ W.’s ceilings are fifteen feet high. No, they’re not that high, I tell him. My flat’s tiny, which he knows full well. — ‘How dry is your flat?’, W. says, knowing the answer. It’s not dry at all, I tell him. His house is as dry as a bone , W. tells me. It couldn’t be drier. And of course, W.’s house is rat-free, he tells me.

‘Do you think you’ve failed?’, W. says. And then, ‘Was buying your flat the outcome of your failure, or did it merely complete your failure?’

Why did I buy my flat? What led me to it? W. wants to be taken through the decision-making process step by step, he says. And I really had no idea about the damp when I viewed it? My surveyors didn’t tell me about the underground river? My bank didn’t withhold my loan when they heard that it was built on top of a mineshaft, and was collapsing in the middle?

It’s where I thought I deserved to live, W. says. It’s what I thought I warranted . W., of course, ended up in a three storey Georgian townhouse. He’s still amazed by that. How did he end up with this kind of house, and a lecturing job, and a woman who loves him?

Ah, but these are his last days in his house, he’s certain of it. These are his last days in his job. And are these his last days with Sal, too? She would never leave him, W. says. Surely, she would never leave him …

His last days … he feels it in the air, as animals sense a storm. It’s building up out there, W. says, it’s massing like storm clouds over Plymouth Sound.

‘Take some photos’, W. says. ‘It needs to be documented!’ I photograph the wide entrance hall and the stairs to the next floor. I photograph the ground floor living room, with internal shutters over the window and a marble fireplace. I photograph the CDs lined up alphabetically on the shelf, and the pile of CDs without covers by the ghetto blaster.

I photograph full ashtrays and discarded Emmenthal packets. I photograph the great kitchen where sometimes we dance, sliding on our socks, and the tiny toilet on the ground floor, with pictures of their friends on the wall. Why haven’t they got a picture of me? I ask them. No reply.

Upstairs, I document the great living room in a series of photos which, laid edge to edge, would give the whole panorama: the wide floorboards and the high, old skirting; the tall windows, newly restored; the king-sized fireplace, with its resplendent tiles and marble surround …

It’s here we come to listen to Jandek, W. and I, sitting on the couch with great seriousness. I make him listen in silence to Khartoum and Khartoum Variations . W. finds Jandek very disturbing, and needs me in the room to listen to the music with him. Sal never stays for Jandek. — ‘I hate fucking Jandek’, she says. ‘Don’t play Jandek while I’m in the house’, she says.

I document the great bathroom, too — the greatest of bathrooms, we’re all agreed. The lion-footed bath on a raised plinth. The fulsomeness of the airing cupboard, with its many towels, sheets and duvet covers. The pile of Uncuts by the toilet, ready to read. The stained glass window, made by someone famous.

Ah, how will he leave it, his house? W. says. He’ll have to leave it, he knows that. They’ll sack him. They’ll drive him out of his city. It’s coming, the end is coming.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.’s study. His bookshelves — not too many, since W. gives away most of his books (‘I don’t hoard them, like you’, he says), but enough for all the essentials. His Hebrew/English dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His collected Rosenzweigs.

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. pulls out a camp bed and makes it up. He has to fumigate his study after I’ve slept in it, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship.

Then, finally, W.’s and Sal’s room, calm, generous and large-windowed. This is where he recovers from his days of scholarship, W. says. And it’s where he wakes up, before dawn, ready for his studies.

W.’s still reading Rosenzweig, very slowly, in German, every morning, he tells me. — ‘I don’t understand a word’. Still, it’s a good exercise. Every morning, he goes into his study and sits at his desk before he does anything else. Does he have a cup of tea? No, he says, tea has to wait. How about coffee? He doesn’t have coffee, either. I always begin with a cup of coffee, I tell him. — ‘That’s where you go wrong’, he says. ‘Some things take precedence over coffee’.

How does he dress himself for scholarship? I ask him. He wears his dressing gown, W. says. He sits in his dressing gown and reads, looking up difficult German words (which is to say, most of them) in his dictionary. How does he do it? he wonders. Every morning, he leaves Sal lying there in the warm bed, and goes to work. Is she impressed by his commitment? — ‘She thinks I’m an idiot’, W. says.

We admire W.’s edition of the collected Rosenzweig. — ‘What you have to understand is that Rosenzweig was very, very clever’, he says. ‘We’ll never, whatever we do, be as clever as him. We’ll never have a single idea, and he had hundreds of ideas’.

W.’s workfiles mean little to him now, he says. There are dozens of them, saved in a folder called Notes , on every kind of topic. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise , for example. Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason . He saves them to his folder and forgets them immediately, W. says. Why does he bother?

I open one on his computer screen. Notes from Cohen’s Mathematics and the Theory of Platonic Ideas , long out of print. It cost him £130, he sighs. W. makes himself read things by spending very large amounts of money on them. He feels so guilty, he has to read them. Cohen’s The Principle of the Method of Infinitesimals and its History —that cost him £210!

But what would I know of all this? W. says. My reading is done online. I barely know what it means to handle a volume . And besides, old books, with their learning, frighten me, he knows that. Old hardbacks with scholarly footnotes. Old libraries — what do I know of them? I’m a man of the new age , W. says, just as he is a man of the old age . He’s an anachronism, W. says, he knows that; and I am a harbinger.

Stonehouse, morning. — ‘You should always live among the poor’, W. says, as we thread through the crowd of refugees gathered at the end of the road. They’re always standing about outside, the sun on their faces, W. says. He likes that. They’re men of the street , as he is. But where are their womenfolk? Where do they live? It’s a mystery to him, W. says.