Lars Iyer - Dogma

We’re heading to the sea. That’s what Plymouth means to him, W. says: proximity to the sea. He has to see it! W. says. He has to be near it! It’s as essential to him as oxygen. He is a scholar of the coast , W. says, which means he’s bound to end up living inland, far inland, when he loses his job. He’s a scholar of fresh air , which means he’ll end up living somewhere underground and fetid, just like me, W. says.

On the road by the Hoe, the council have stuck little metal pillars into the road, with the names of famous former residents written on them. What traces will we leave? What will be our immortality?

We pay to enter Smeaton Tower, the old lighthouse, and ascend its winding staircase. The lighthouse was moved from the breakwater, W. says when we reach the top. It’s only ornamental now; the real lighthouse is much further out to sea. We squint out over the waves. Yes, there it is, in the far distance.

W. takes me to his favourite café, to see if we can find the young Polish woman who used to serve us. He wants me to have a romantic interest , W. says. He wants to see me stutter and fumble. He wants to see me pucker my lips for a kiss. But she isn’t there, and he has to listen to my caffeine theories instead, as he drinks his coffee.

‘You’ll have to document all this’, W. says, as we walk through the shopping arcades. I need to document his Plymouth years , W. says. He takes me on a pointing tour of his favourite buildings.

I take photos of W. pointing to particular architectural features he admires. He points to the high brown façade of the new university arts building. He points to the decrepit Palace Theatre. He tells me again how the old city was razed by the Luftwaffe, and how it was rebuilt in the ’50s, following the Abercrombie Plan.

I take a picture of him pointing directly up into the sky, from where the Luftwaffe came, and then, standing on a bench, pointing directly at the earth, where the bombs struck. I ask a passerby to take a photo of W. pointing at me, and of me pointing at W., and finally of W. and I pointing at one another.

The Plymouth Gin cocktail bar. My working class credentials are far better than his, W. says over our Martinis. He is invariably moved when he thinks of me leaving school and working in the warehouse, and feels a great urge to protect and encourage me. — ‘How long were you there?’, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps. — ‘That long!’ And then, ‘What did you do there?’, and when I tell him, he gasps again.

‘What was your job title?’, W. always asks me. I was a Transactions Analyst , I tell him. ‘And what were your duties?’ I looked for UTLs, Unable-To-Locates. I checked van manifests and loading bays, looking for missing items. I searched high and low in the racks on my order picker. I quizzed fellow workers about their procedures and made reports to management about how many boxes had been lost and how warehouse procedures might be streamlined.

‘You were so keen at first!’, says W. He can see me, in his mind’s eye, with my overalls and toetectors. He sees my willing stupidity, my sense of wanting to do well and of the British Standards I was brought in to enforce.

But my mouth began to twitch, didn’t it? My eyes began to focus, not on the job at hand, the item I was looking for, but on the middle distance. I grew a beard and looked like a Tartar. He sees me, W. says, wandering back to the station after work, with a vague sense that something was missing in my life.

And from then on, when I found them, my missing items, I only hid them more deeply, didn’t I? W. says. I threw my unable-to-locates into obscure cupboards. I buried them in the racks. I neglected my paperwork. My reports were less artful. My British Standards manuals went unread.

‘That’s when you began to read, isn’t it?’, W. says. This is his favourite part of the story. There was a flight of stairs that led up to the roof, which no one ever used. That’s where I went to read in my lunch hour. It’s where I began to work my way through the books I found in the library.

What was the book I started with? he asks. Oh yes: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy , he could never forget that. I began with The Mammoth Book of Fantasy , W. says, and read my way up to Kafka. ‘You put down The Mammoth Book of Fantasy , and picked up The Castle ’, W. remembers. ‘That’s when it began, isn’t it?’

W. finds it very poignant, he says. I might have spent the rest of my life reading The Mammoth Book of Fantasy , and books like The Mammoth Book of Fantasy , but there I was with my Kafka.

W. began with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library (‘We had a school library’, he says, ‘unlike you’). They had orange dustcovers, W. says. Why he was attracted by that colour, he’ll never know. But there it was: The Castle .

The Castle , W. says. He didn’t have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn’t have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of me sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof, The Mammoth Book of Fantasy already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters T-H-E — C-A-S-T-L-E to himself.

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says. Broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! I love it, of course. I’m at it all day in my office. How do I even begin? W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense?

I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from day to day? W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He’s seen too much! He knows where it’s heading! He’s seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He can imagine it, W. says: I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … What am I thinking about? What thought has struck me? But he knows I am full only of administrative anxieties , and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

W.’s college has become a vale of tears , he says. It’s a bit like Werckmeister Harmonies , after the arrival of the whale, W. says. Chaos everywhere. Petty vandalism. Dead bodies, face down in the quadrangle, with knives in their backs.

It’ll go up in flames, soon, the college, W. says. There’ll be black smoke rising from the lecture halls. And after that, who knows? Cannibalism, probably. Human sacrifice.

What would I do in his situation? W. asks. What’s the Hindu solution ? Oh, he remembers my advice: he should apply for that job in the Lebanon, I told W. That lectureship in philosophy in Beirut. He’s not going to Beirut, W. says. Forget it. People are kidnapped in Beirut! They end up in solitary confinement for years and years! Actually, he’d make quite a good hostage, W. says. He would sit in his manacles in the dark, thinking about the Stoics …

He should go straight to the Lebanon, and become a scholar of Arabic, I told him. — ‘Oh yes, is that what you’d do?’, he asked me. He should become a scholar of Averroes, I told him, and write on the board from right to left. He’s not going to become a scholar of Averroes, W. says.