Lars Iyer - Dogma

The controller told me to smash some glass around the nest. That way, the rats will cut themselves on the shards and bleed to death, their wounds prevented from healing.

Imagine it: rats bleeding inside, their organs compressed all the way to failure. Rats, organs torn, their blood escaped from circulation and pooling inside their bodies. Rats with dark red blood streaming from their arteries and veins …

What a terrible way to die! What a terrible way not to be able to die! Because as they run, streaming, screeching in horror, they’ll want only for their lives to end, for their pain to end. What else will they want but for death to finish with them, for the blood to ooze from their capillaries?

That’s how we’ll die, like rats, W. says. Like rats, running along with everyone else, screeching. The flaming sky, the sun come close, and rats like us streaming, screeching across the baking earth …

When will it end? I ask W. — ‘It will never end’, he says. When will it stop? I ask him. — ‘It will never stop’.

Teacakes at a café on the Hoe. A blue-grey destroyer sits flush from us in the harbour, and smaller vessels go back and forth.

The Navy’s pulling out of Plymouth, W. tells me. Five hundred years they’ve been here. They’re moving operations up to Scotland. Plymouth’s finished, of course, W. says. It’s all over.

We take a tour of the dockyards, heading up though Devonport on the Tamar. The largest naval site in Europe, W. says. But soon it will all be gone, he says of the shipyards and the tidal berths, the factories and the dry-docks. They’ll pull it all down. It’ll be as though it was never there. The same will happen when he ’s expelled from the city, W. says. They’ll pull down his house and destroy his things, W. says.

They’re going to sack him, he’s sure of it. They’re going to force him out. And when they force him from his job, they’ll force him out of Plymouth. What work will he find in Plymouth, after he’s sacked? None. There’s nothing for him here. There’s nothing for any of them, any of his colleagues, most of whom have already left.

Plymouth minus W., W. minus Plymouth … A man without a city is a terrible thing, W. says. He wonders what I would be without my city. He sees me, in his mind’s eye: expelled, wandering across the earth. And he sees himself beside me, pushing our shopping cart full of Plymouth Gin through the gathering darkness …

W. tells me of his months as an artist’s model, being painted by Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt. Lenkiewicz only wanted to talk about philosophy, W. says. He was obsessed with philosophy. He bankrupted himself buying philosophy books, W. says.

Lenkiewicz bought a derelict church and filled it with books, piles and piles of them, it was quite extraordinary, W. says. W. would look through the mouldering books with Lenkiewicz, and the painter would pick up a volume here and there to show him. Lenkiewicz had Maimonides’s Treatise on Logic in the first English edition. He had Nicholas of Cusa’s Of Learned Ignorance . He had the page-proofs of Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond , worth thousands of pounds.

Lenkiewicz was painting W. in a series of works called Obsession , W. tells me. He always painted in series, Lenkiewicz— projects , he called them. He had a Vagrancy project and a Street Drinking project. He had a Mentally Handicapped project. But W. was part of the Obsession project, or he was supposed to be. Lenkiewicz died very suddenly, just like that, and it was all over. They had to sell all his paintings to meet his debts. They sold his books too — they had to sell the whole church full of books …

‘Do you think Lenkiewicz would have painted you?’, W. says. ‘Do you think he would have stuck you in one of his portraits?’ W. can see it now, he says, Lenkiewicz’s Study for a Moron , part of his Idiocy project. Lenkiewicz’s Orang-Utan of Thought , part of his Philosophical Apes project …

Lenkiewicz was going to paint the whole philosophy and theology department of his college, W. says. He was going to execute one of his epic works, modelled on Géricault or something. He can see it in his mind’s eye, W. says: Lenkiewicz’s own Raft of the Medusa , heaving with crazed and starving members of the philosophy and theology department …

Ah, but what’s going to happen to it now, the philosophy and theology department? It’s going to be closed, W. says. It will be closed, and its members set adrift, W. says. Who among them will survive, after the wreck of the humanities ?

A visit to my hometown. To my home suburbs , W. says. He wants to know where it all went wrong. — ‘You started well enough, didn’t you? You had advantages in life. You weren’t starving. You weren’t brought up in a war zone …’ When did it go wrong? W. asks. Where did it go wrong?

He sees it immediately. Houses jammed together. Cars packing the driveways. There’s no expanse ! W. says. There are no vistas ! Every single bit of land is accounted for. Everything is owned, used, put to work …

This is the way the world will end: as a gigantic suburb, that’s what W. used to think, he says. But now he knows the world will end in the skies above the suburbs. That’s where they’ll ride, the four horsemen of our apocalypse.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He’s unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes, W. thinks I’m glad I live in the End Times. Isn’t the coming apocalypse the perfect correlate of my desire for ruination? Isn’t the destruction of the world only the macrocosmic version of my self-destruction? What would I be without the End? A man whose madness signified nothing, spoke of nothing. A symptom without a disease …

It’s different with him, of course. He was made for the beginning of the world, not the end of it. He is a man of hope , W. says. Of the youth of the world. Ah, but that’s not true, not really, he grants. He is a man of the end who yearns for the beginning, yearns for innocence, as I do not. He looks back, into the vanished glory of the past, and I look forward, into the storm clouds of catastrophe.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation, he says, as we head out for our walk. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that’s what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation — so-called intellectual conversation — is inappropriate at any time, W. says. It’s a ruse. An excuse. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

‘This wood, for example. That field. And that — what is that?’ A barrow, I tell him. An ancient burial mound. But W. says that it’s only a refuse heap. A pile of rubbish abandoned among the trees.

He can imagine me as a boy, W. says, cycling out through the new housing estates, and through what remained of the woodland — muddy tracks along field-edges, fenced-in bridleways and overgrown footpaths. — ‘You were looking for something’, he says. ‘You knew something was missing’.

He sees it in his mind’s eye: I’m carrying my bike over the railway bridge. I’m cycling through glades of tree stumps in the forestry plantations. I’m following private roads past posh schools and riding academies. I’m looking for barrows and ley lines, W. says. I’m looking for Celtic gods and gods of any kind.