Lars Iyer - Dogma

And what do I find as I wheel my bike across the golf course? What, in the carpark of an out of town retail park? What, on the bench outside the supermarket, eating my discounted sandwiches? The everyday , W. says, which is to say, the opposite of the gods.

At the company where I used to work, I tell W., they named their meeting rooms after philosophers. You could book Locke for a meeting, or Kant , or Wittgenstein. — ‘Did they have a Diogenes room?’, W. asks. ‘A Diogenes barrel?’

At lunchtimes, I would photocopy pages from library books by Kafka, I tell him. The Octavo Notebooks . Bits from the diaries and letters. I’d keep them in a folder in my drawer, hidden, I tell him. I was like a fairytale giant, burying his heart in a treasure chest at the bottom of a lake.

In the folder was my heart, or so I thought, I tell W. Kafka was the very opposite of Hewlett Packard. Kafka, my heart, was the very opposite of Bracknell. But what, in the end, could I understand of Kafka? What could the Octavo Notebooks mean to me as I looked out towards the massive hotel at the roundabout, built in the style of a Swiss mountain chalet?

I wandered all day through the company corridors. I drifted from coffee machine to coffee machine. I stared off through the windows. I sat on the leather sofas in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime. And what did I see? What did I know?

Through the golf course. We wait on the path while a golfer hits his ball into the distance. He starts to yell. — ‘Oy, leave it alone!’ Four lads, sauntering onto the fairway, have pocketed the ball. The golfer shouts again. — ‘That’s my ball!’

‘ That is my place in the sun ’, W. quotes from Pascal. ‘ Here is the beginning and prototype of the usurpation of the whole earth … ’

4×4s and Land Rovers lined up by the clubhouse. Golfers in their windshirts and their soft-spiked shoes. The enemy, W. says.

‘They stole it from us, all this’, W. says, looking back over the stream which runs through the golf course, and the footpath which follows its course. ‘It was part of the commonwealth, part of the open land we all shared’, he says.

I’ve read Karl Polyani, W. says. I should know the argument: Capitalism began with the enclosure of land. It began as land was seized by the rich and the powerful.

But for W., capitalism began long before that, he says. He evokes the virgin country which revealed itself as the ice sheet retreated, its shorelines stretching far out from where they lie now, joining our country to Europe, to continental Europe.

The climate was warming, W. says. The tundra turned into steppe, and then scrub, and then forest. And in the forests that covered the country, juniper gave way to birch and hazel, and then to oak and elm. Reindeer thrived in the open spaces for a time, and wild horses. Wolves crossed the landbridge with aurochs and polecats.

Human beings came, W. says, hunter-gatherers, moving nomadically through the landscape. Game was plenty. There were berries and nuts and fruit to gather. They lived from the land, foraging and gleaning …

W. dreams of hunters, basking in the sun. He dreams of gatherers, bathing in a plunge pool. He dreams of feasts in the open air. He dreams of cave paintings in the womb of the earth.

There were no leaders back then, W. says. No hierarchies, no bureaucrats. And there was no surplus of resources for particular individuals to horde, either. They shared everything.

The Paleolithic was a lot like Canada, W. says.

What next? W. shakes his head. No, he won’t talk about it again, he says. He can’t bear it. And then, ‘Agriculture’, he says. ‘The domestication of livestock’.

How long was it before market forces triumphed? W. wonders. How long before competitiveness did away with friendship and community? Ah, it was a short step to money, the commodity, and the market, W. says. A short step to when capitalism subsumed almost every detail of our lives …

And it ends up here, in the suburbs, W. says. It ends up here, on the golf course in the suburbs …

Perhaps we’ve already had our idea, our great chance, W. says, as we climb up the hill towards the church. Perhaps it’s already occurred to us, and we’ve forgotten it: what a terrible thought! Worse still, perhaps it was something we exchanged in conversation, something that passed between us and was immediately lost amidst the general inanity.

That must be my task, W. tells me: remember everything! Write it down! and perhaps then something will shine forth through the pages like a watermark.

Religion is about this world, about the ordinary, the everyday, W. says, over our pints at The Queen’s Oak . Why does no one understand that but him? W. says. Why will no one listen?

But when it comes to the everyday itself, I am the expert, not him, W. says. Only I understand what it means to reach the depths , which is to say the surface , of the everyday?

It has to be felt , the everyday, W. is convinced of that. It has to have defeated you. Humiliated you. A man who hasn’t been brought to his knees by the everyday can have no understanding of the everyday, says W., aphoristically.

I ’ve certainly been brought to my knees, W. says, that much is clear. I’ve spent whole years on my knees.

W. wants to hear about my warehouse years , he says. He wants to hear about my years of unemployment . He never tires of it.

‘What did you do all day?’, he asks me, and when I shrug, he says, ‘Take me through it. Take me through one of your days’. There’s no point, I tell him. He’ll never understand. — ‘Did you drink a lot?’, W. asks. ‘Is that how you got through it?’ Sometimes I drank, I tell him. Sometimes I did nothing at all. I looked out of the window, I tell him. I watched the raindrops bead and run down the glass.

But W. can never understand. Imagine if he lost his job, I say. Imagine, his job lost, if Sal left him (Sal would never leave him, W. says), and he was stranded in a room, a single room, for year after year. He would become a kind of cosmonaut, all lines cut, tumbling into space, head over heels. Tumbling, falling further and further away, utterly lost …

Of course, he’d have his reading, W. says. And his writing. He’d have his intellectual projects. Couldn’t he get down, really get down, to learning mathematics? Couldn’t he finally master classical Greek, getting past the aorist, which always defeats him?

He’d soon tire of such tasks, I tell him. They would leave him behind; his project would belong to someone else, living another life. The infinite wearing away : that’s what W. would have to fear, I tell him.

No more reading and writing, I tell him. Books stranded on a desk, open but with no one to read them. And W. watching raindrops bead and run down the windows …

‘ We are ferociously religious ’, says W., quoting Bataille. Are we? — ‘Oh yes’, W. says, ‘especially you. Especially you!’ That’s why he hangs out with me, W. says, he’s sure of it: my immense religious instinct , of which I am entirely unaware.

It’s all to do with my intimate relationship with the everyday, W. says. It’s to do with my years of unemployment and menial work, he says.

When he thinks of religion, he immediately thinks of me working in my warehouse, he says. He thinks of me in the warehouse with no hope in my life.

Only the hopeless can truly understand the everyday, W. says. Only they can approach the everyday at its level . And only those who can approach the everyday in such a way are really religious, W. says.