Lars Iyer - Dogma

I come from a long line of Hindus, he knows that, W. says. Generations of Brahmin priests, performing rites and ceremonies! Generations of descendants of the great sages, full of sacred knowledge, trained in reading the holy scriptures.

But what do I actually know about Hinduism? W. wonders. If he drew a Venn diagram with the set Hinduism and the set Lars , where would they intersect?

But capitalism , now, W. says, as we find our seats. There I might know something. Didn’t I come into contact with the essence of capitalism during my long periods of warehouse work and unemployment? Didn’t I learn what it was really about, as I stapled gaudy pictures of Hindu gods to the walls of my work cubicle?

W. has always been in awe of my years in the world , as he calls them. — ‘How did you survive out there?’ I barely survived, of course, W. says. I nearly didn’t survive … But that makes my experiences even more valuable, W. says.

Capitalism and religion , W. says. Or, in my case, failed capitalism and failed religion. Somehow, I’m the key to his project, W. says. Somehow I’m the key to the copula, though he’s not sure how.

At Whitsand, the bus stops to let on some of the famous Poles of Plymouth . There are hundreds of them working in the bars and cafés, W. says. Thousands of Poles with shining faces! They’ve brought grace to his city, he says. Grace and refinement.

W. muses upon the troubled history of Poland — how, over centuries, the borders of the country have moved outward and inward like a concertina, accompanying the melancholy music of war, genocide and occupation, the great lament of Old Europe. He hears it still, W. says. It sounds through his blood. Didn’t his father’s family come to England, generations ago, because of old European pogroms? Isn’t W., too, a Polish immigrant?

As we stretch our legs on the ferry to Devonport, we remember the Polish waitress who served us at W.’s favourite café. How gentle she was! How generous ! She had everything we lacked, he says. A delicate intelligence … Wit … Poise … I was moved, W. says, he could see that. I blushed. I fumbled for words.

I should find myself a Plymouth Pole, W. says. That might be my path to redemption. But even a Plymouth Pole would need to be courted, W. says.

You have to court women, W. says. You can’t just jump into bed with them. He courted Sal for eight months, he says. He plied her with gin, and she burned CDs for him. Those were the best of times, W. says. The uncertainty. The intoxication. They were drunk six nights out of seven.

But what would I know of all that? There’s no tenderness in me, W. says. Lust, yes. A kind of animal craving. Foam on the lips. I’m like one of those monkeys in the zoo with an inflamed arse — what are they called? Oh yes, mandrills . I’m the mandrill of romance, W. says.

‘Watch!’, says W. It’s the famous sequence of the chicken dancing in an amusement arcade booth, from Herzog’s film Stroszek . Bruno, the film’s protagonist, puts a few quarters in the slot and wanders off to shoot himself. The chicken dances, bobbing on its claws. The chicken dances, its comb wobbling, its wattle swinging, its black eyes manic …

Bruno and the others have come to America to escape the old world. They’ve come to escape the past! And what does Bruno find? The dancing chicken, W. says.

Herzog speaks of finding images adequate to the world, to the state of the world, W. says. — ‘The chicken is one of those images, don’t you see?’ I see.

Stroszek : didn’t Ian Curtis watch the film just before he killed himself? He saw the chicken, W. says. He really saw it, and it was too much for him. Perhaps it’ll be the same with us. Perhaps America will be too much for us.

Ah, why do we get invited on these lecture tours? W. says. What do people expect? In truth, we should refuse all invitations. We shouldn’t go anywhere! Isn’t Bruno’s fate a warning to us all, that we should go nowhere near America?

The chicken is cosmic , that’s what we have to understand, W. says. It’s a bit like that statue I have in my flat. Who is it supposed to be again? Lord Shiva as Nataraja, I tell him. The cosmic dancer. Ah yes, he remembers, W. says. The dance of the cosmos, the cosmos as a dance, all that sort of thing.

‘What’s your cosmic dance like?’, W. asks. ‘It’s the funky chicken, isn’t it? Go on, fat boy. Dance’.

W. likes to watch me dance, he says. It’s so improbable. So graceless. W. admires my non-dancing , as he calls it. I am a non-dancer, he says. But the ‘ non- ’ of my non-dancing is not privative, that’s the secret, he says. It’s liberatory! I’m not like the others, who only dance in their chains. I’m not a victim of choreography .

Of course, I’m also a non-thinker , W. says, which is in no way liberatory. — ‘You seem to think. You look like you’re thinking, but in fact you’re doing nothing of the sort’. He grants that I feel a great deal — I am subject to great waves of pathos — but that’s not the same as thinking. ‘You’re a pathetic man, but not a thinking man’, W. says.

Still, W. suspects that the power of thinking— his thinking — might be joined to my non-thinking. Might the attempt to think messianism , the current stage of W.’s Denkweg , his thought-path, require a kind of pathos ? Perhaps there’s something like a messianic mood , W. muses.

The chicken won’t stop . That’s what’s etched into the runoff groove of the last Joy Division album. The chicken won’t stop : it’s like a mantra to W. — ‘You won’t stop, will you?’, he says. That’s part of the horror: I show no signs of stopping. But it’s part of my glory, too. Who am I amusing? Not even him. And certainly not anyone else.

Innocence … artlessness … a kind of childlike simplicity … In my best moments, I really do resemble Bruno Stroszek, W. says. In my best moments, he emphasises. Otherwise I resemble no one but myself, more’s the pity.

But sometimes I achieve a kind of pathetic grandeur , W. says, almost despite myself. There I sit, in the squalor. There I am, a squalid man amidst the squalor, beer cans and discounted sandwich boxes lying empty around me, plaster dust in my hair, and I say something truly striking. I make some pronouncement. — ‘You’re like a savant’, W. says.

If I resemble Bruno Stroszek, W. supposes that he can only resemble Bruno’s elderly neighbour—‘what was his name? Scheitzer? Scheitzerhund?’ Just Scheitz, I tell him, Mr Scheitz. Mr Scheitz had an interest in animal magnetism , W. remembers. He bothered people with it. He confused them. That’s how it is with his interests, W. says, which are equally improbable, equally irrelevant.

Heathrow. W. has a horror of airports, he says. Herded through corridors! Driven, like cattle in a slaughterhouse! You can smell the panic, W. says.

Krasznahorkai writes about the horror of airports, W. says. About the way they need all of your concentration. Every bit of it. About the dreadful din, the chaos, the constant flow of people. About the stony-faced guards, hands on their machine guns, looking in thirty-six directions at once.

We mustn’t joke in the security queues, W. says. We mustn’t laugh, or they’ll beat us with their rubber truncheons. They blind us with tear gas and then they’ll gun us down, like dogs.

But I’m at home in an airport, he can see that. I like the fear. I like being driven, herded, forced along. It’s because I’m fundamentally bureaucratic , W. says. I’m an administrator of the spirit .