Lars Iyer - Dogma

‘ Stretches of water ’, W. reads. A crude picture of a boat on the waves. — ‘You must have been very bored’, W. says. He knows I dream of great stretches of water when I’m bored. Hadn’t I demanded to be taken to the Mersey when we were in Liverpool? And what about the lake at Titisee when we were in Freiburg?

W. comes to my poems, the ones I read to him when I’m drunk.

The wrong venue / the wrong city / the wrong time / the wrong conference / We are the wrong people / We are wrong

It has a marvellous simplicity, he says. And it’s so true. Another:

Why do we fail at the level of the banal / It’s not about thought, or whether we can think / but about not being able to have a shit / or being locked out of our bedrooms

That’s more like an aphorism than a poem, W. says. And then,

General incompetence is what will defeat capitalism / that’s why our general incompetence should make us laugh / even though it makes us cry

Very deep, W. says. There are several drawings too. — ‘They’re from your David Shrigley phase, aren’t they?’

And something W. himself wrote: ‘ Your sin is the punishment of my life ’. When did he write that? W. wonders. Sounds about right, though.

On the train, leaving Liverpool. Luckily, the bar sells Plymouth Gin. We pour our little bottles into plastic cups and toast our stupidity, as the rain runs diagonally down the windows.

W.’s hair is piled up in a great quiff. Does he pomade his hair? I ask. No, he says, it’s naturally like that. What is pomade, anyway? He’s got no idea, he says.

W. looks like Gary Glitter, post-disgrace, I tell him. I look like a thug, W. says. A monkey thug with great dangling arms. — ‘Who could suspect you of any delicacy of thought ?’, W. says. ‘You look like what you are. You can’t pretend otherwise’. What about him, then? Was Gary Glitter a philosopher? Did Solomon Maimon have a quiff?

I should grow my hair, W. says. He’s always said that. He’s never liked my suedehead. But at least I’ve stopped wearing vests. W.’s seen the bags of vests in my flat, he says. Primark vests in military green, which cost no more than two pounds each, made by some third world child. It’s a scandal, he says.

You should never try and buy your own clothes, W. learned that long ago, he says. Sal buys his clothes for him, which is why he looks so natty.

‘You need a woman in your life’, W. says. ‘No woman would have permitted your vest phase ’. And then, ‘Your vest phase ’, W. says, and shudders. — ‘What were you thinking?’ And then, ‘It’s not as if you have a body worth showing off. You’re fat, not muscly. And you’re pale, you have that dreadful northern European pallor, for all your Hindu genes’.

The Dane in me is always ascendant, W. says. I’m Scandotrash, I can’t help it.

W. wants to nap, he says, but he knows I won’t let him. He slouches down in his seat, moaning softly. He wants to nap now so he can be up early tomorrow. He has to work. He’s got reading to do! he says, but he knows this won’t sway me.

If he’s quiet for a moment, W. says, I’ll start sharing my ideas with him, my mad ideas, which he would never usually give me a chance to share. He’s weak, he says, he’s at his lowest, but the last thing he wants to hear are my caffeine theories , or my musings on the way I will be sacked.

I’ve never been able to sleep, W. knows that. I can never get a full night’s rest, and this is no surprise. I’m up all night, wandering from bedroom to bathroom, eternally disturbed by my own digestive system, eternally awoken and reawoken.

Something inside me won’t allow me to sleep, W. says. There’s something unsettled, some debt that has to be paid. I’m my own ghost; I haunt myself, looking for some kind of retribution, something that might bring it all to an end , though it will never end.

That’s my insomnia, W. says: the endlessness of my guilt. Nothing can end, W. says, and nothing can really begin for me, either. Every day, the same failure. Every night, the same punishment.

‘How many times do you get up at night? Ten times? Twenty?’ He’s never experienced anything like it, W. says. He hears me when he visits for the weekend. He’s half-asleep in the living room on the blow-up mattress, and there am I, wandering up and down the hall in my vest. Up and down, up and down …

It doesn’t wake him up as such, W. says. He would barely remember my eternal trudging, the eternal flushing of the toilet, if it did not accord with the restlessness he feels between the walls of my flat. He wouldn’t wake up at all, W. says, if it weren’t for his disturbed stomach, which only happens when he visits me, if it weren’t for his insomnia, unknown to him except within the walls of my flat.

Ah, how many times has he sat up bleary-eyed in the morning, as I clear a space amidst the half-finished wine bottles and empty cheese packets to make us coffee? How many mornings has he tried to tell me of the horrors he has undergone, as I brush plaster dust from my dressing gown, and prepare our breakfast?

You have to have a balanced life to have the right perspective on things, W. says. You have to have things in order. What perspective can I possibly have from my flat, which is to say, my pit underground? What valid judgement can I make about the world, given that I spend so much time below pavement level ?

I’m always looking up at things, W. says; I have to. I look up to see the plants and the algae in my disgusting yard. I look up to the concrete and the rotting bricks. I barely know the sky exists, W. says — and the sun: when was the last time I saw the sun?

Only the rats are below you, W. says. Only the rats can you look down upon.

No, the flat is not a place from which I can be expected to make any kind of valid judgement. It’s set my thoughts askew, permanently askew. I can only have damp thoughts and murine thoughts . I can only have thoughts that unconsciously look up to what they might have been if they were thought by a strong and vigorous thinker.

What will happen the next day — the day after we destroy ourselves? W. wonders. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear, that the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can’t avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it’s all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he’s not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It’s my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

‘If you knew, if you really knew’ … but I don’t know, says W. I have intimations, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

A series of jerks and tics, like those of a hanged man in his final death throes; a series of involuntary and grotesque spasms: that will have been my life, W. says.

It’s not even desperation; it’s more basic than that. There’s a rebellion at the level of my bare existence , W. says. — ‘You shouldn’t exist. You should never have been born’: that’s what my body knows. It’s what I know at some abysmal level. And meanwhile, there I am twitching over the void, a man half-hung, neck broken …

My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.