Lars Iyer - Dogma

Or perhaps, W. muses, we’re souls waiting to be reborn. Perhaps this is a great waiting room; this, the time before a dentist’s appointment, when nothing very important happens: we leaf through a magazine, we gaze out of the window …

But they’ve forgotten to call our names, haven’t they? They’ve forgotten we are here, in the eternal waiting room. We’ve been left to ourselves, like abandoned children. And our seriousness is only a sham seriousness; our apocalypticism is only a kind of dressing up; and all our books, all our philosophies, are only articles in some gossip magazine …

The ’80s are coming back, we agree with the taxi driver as we pull out of Liverpool Station. The crash is coming. Hasn’t our financial friend told us that? It’ll destroy Liverpool! W. lived in Liverpool in the ’80s, he says. He remembers what it was like. And to think it’s going to happen again! My God, what they did to Liverpool! My God, what they’re going to do to it!

This is the city of Anglican Cathedral , W. wants to tell them. — ‘Have you seen Saint James’s Cemetery ?’, he wants to say. But to them, the wreckers of civilisation, there are no such things as cities. To them, there are only nodes in the global network, only arbitrary nexuses of resources. This is the city of The Philharmonic pub, W. wants to say. This is the city of the urinals of The Philharmonic pub. But capitalism does not listen.

W. feels like the boy in Tarkovsky’s Mirror who cannot follow orders. Turn around! he and the other cadets are told. He turns only half the way round, 180 degrees, ending up faced in the opposite direction to his fellow cadets. — ‘Why can’t you follow orders?’, he’s asked. — ‘You told me to turn!’, he says. And then, ‘I don’t understand’, he says. His parents died in the Siege of Leningrad, another cadet says, off camera.

His parents are dead. He’s turned right round. Later, we see him walking along, whistling. Whistling and weeping. That’s what W. will be doing, he says, walking along like a dazed ox, and whistling, tears running down his face … — ‘I don’t understand’, that’s all he will say. It’s all he will be able to say …

Steel shutters pulled down over shopfronts. Smashed glass and rubbish in the wind. Towns abandoned. Cities. Great walls raised against the world, to keep the migrants out (the rest of the world scorched, baked black …)

Then methane will come steaming up from melting permafrost. Then it will come bubbling up from the ocean floor. Then the Arctic ice will melt away. Then the seas will turn to acid. Then the skies will turn black. Then the lights will go out, and there’ll be darkness everywhere. We’ll die lingering deaths. We’ll die in the sludge, very slowly.

‘I don’t understand’, that’s what W. will be saying, face down in the sludge. ‘I don’t understand’.

The suburbs of Liverpool. Up early, we step out into the sun, out to find a café. Another day, full of possibilities! … — ‘Which we will crush’, says W.

‘Have you had any thoughts yet?’, W. asks me. None, I tell him. — ‘It’s like Zen’, says W. ‘Pure absence’.

I should work more, W. tells me. An hour a day, that’s all he asks. If I can’t work at home, then I should work in the office. And if I can’t work in the office, then I should find a café. And if I can’t find a café, then a bench in the open air, next to the alcoholics. And if I can’t find a bench? — ‘Then lie on the road and let the cars run over you’.

One day, W. says, and this is his hope, his hope against hope, I’m going to surprise everyone with my salmon-leap. One day, catching everyone unawares, there will be my great leap upstream — my leap, flashing the light back from my scales, my sunshine-touched leap against the current of my own idiocy: that’s what he believes, somehow or other. He still believes it, still sees it above the foaming water. Up and forming a great flashing arc …

And where will I be going? In the opposite direction to my dissoluteness and squalor. In the opposite direction to my compromise and half-measures. And where will he be — he, W.? Leaping with me, he says. Leaping, his arching interlinked with my own.

‘You’re less and less able to listen to the presentations of others’, W. says. He can see it on my face. — ‘You can’t hide it’. At one point, he says, I might as well have been lying on the floor and moaning.

What am I thinking about? he wonders. But he knows full well. The expanses of nature. Open stretches of water. Don’t I always demand, in the midst of presentations, to be taken to an open stretch of water ?

There was the lake at Titisee, where we hired a pedallo, W. remembers. There was the trip to the river Ill, when I fully intended to strip down and swim, he says. Then there was our aborted Tamar trip, our boating expedition to the naval dockyards … How disappointed I had been!

Yes, he sees it in me, in one who has no feel for nature at other times. He sees it: a desperate yearning for those expanses that are as empty as my head and across which gust the winds of pure idiocy.

The Mersey Estuary at sunset. The water is red; the other shore, blue. It’s like being at the end of the world, we agree. Or the beginning.

‘Rivers are sacred to Hindus, aren’t they?’, W. says. All rivers are the Ganges to the Hindu, he knows that. All rivers flow from Shiva’s matted locks as he meditates, eyes closed, in the Himalayas, and all rivers flow into the same sea.

The same sea : W. thinks of Plymouth Sound, where the rivers Plym and Tamar come together. The same source : W. thinks of Dartmoor, looming behind his city. Dartmoor is Plymouth’s equivalent of the Himalayas, just as the Cheviots, which I pointed out to him blue and ghostly in the distance from the top of the hill on the Town Moor, are Newcastle’s equivalent of the Himalayas.

The Himalayas: that’s where Shiva caught the goddess-river when she fell from heaven … And that’s where he retreated to meditate when his goddess-wife gave herself up in sacrifice. Will I head to the hill on the Town Moor when I’ve sacrificed him? W. wonders. Will I ascend to commune with my strange gods?

Every year, local Hindus lower an icon of Ganesha into the Mersey, we read in our tourist books. It’s carried by the tide into the open waters, and borne out along the estuary to the sea. That’s where I’m sending him, W. says, he knows that: out to sea. There’s where we’re both heading: into the blue distance …

Liverpool, port of the slave trade, W. muses. — ‘ This has been one of the darkest places on the earth … ’ Liverpool, the seat of empire, the seat of conquest …

W. feels like Conrad’s Marlowe, he says, beginning his great story about the heart of darkness, in a boat marooned in an estuary somewhere.

My trip overseas. My period as a world traveller . It’s W.’s favourite story, he says, as we look across the Mersey. I’d flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn’t I? W. says. I’d flown there as a world traveller , never to return to the suburbs! Did I speak the language? Had I made preparations for my visit? Did I know anything about the culture and mores of the country I was going to? The answer is no in each case, W. says. I just went, didn’t I? Off I went as a world traveller .

What did I expect? What did I think awaited me there? That I’d be recognised for what I was, at last? That the Mediterranean world would carry me off on its shoulders? Was that what I was dreaming of, W. asks, with my plans for world travel ? Is that what I thought awaited me on the other side?