Lars Iyer - Dogma

Rosenzweig’s task is our task, we agree, looking round the bar. This is where philosophy must begin anew, right here in the pub! This is where theology will be reborn, in the thick of the everyday!

‘My God, they were so drunk, weren’t they?’, W. says in the taxi on the way home. We were drunk, I tell him. We are drunk. What were we talking about? W. wonders. Did he really give an impromptu sermon on the apocalypse, on the end of times? He remembers the merchant seamen nodding their heads. The miserable record of Plymouth Argyll FC, W. told them; the threat of the Royal Navy to withdraw from the city; the colonisation of Plymouth by students: all signs of the apocalypse, W. said. Signs of the End of Times, they all agreed.

The working class know that the end is coming, W. says. They can sense it. And perhaps they have a sense of the messianic, too; W.’s not sure. But we spoke , that was the main thing. We spoke to strangers. Was that what it means to be inquired of ?

Speech, speech. Will we ever understand what is meant by this word? The old thinking , as Rosenzweig calls it, is content with abstraction, says W. The old thinker is alone, alone before the timeless. But the new thinking depends upon speech, which is bound to time and nourished by it. The new thinker neither can nor wants to abandon this element, that’s what Rosenzweig thinks, according to W.

Ah, but what does the Hindu understand of speech, of the significance of speech? W. says. One doesn’t have to understand the meaning of the Vedic mantras for them to do their work, haven’t I told him that? It’s enough just to hear them, an indecipherable murmuring, which is why they pipe them over loudspeakers in Indian hotels. It’s good luck just to be in their presence, W. says. But this means that the Hindu is never inquired of , he says. The Hindu is never interrupted .

Our twelfth Dogma presentation … what can we recall of that? What really happened? W.’s unsure; I’m unsure. Was there shouting? Were we forcibly ejected from the auditorium? Was there a diplomatic incident? Did I expose myself? Did W.? Did I expose him? Something happened, we’re sure of that, but we have only screen memories of the whole fiasco. We remember only owls, swooping through the night.

And the thirteenth ? We skipped the thirteenth presentation altogether. W. was always superstitious, he says.

For the fourteenth , W. spoke of my shortcomings, I of his. He cursed me and I cursed him. We came to blows. It was a performance piece, we agreed. It was a gestural form of Dogma.

The fifteenth , the notorious fifteenth , was for our benefit only. We gave it in secret, under cover. No one must know! That’s what we said to ourselves. Dogma has to undergo a profound occultation. We had to draw it back to the source. To draw ourselves back! It was like a sweat lodge, we remember.

And the sixteenth ? It was in the great outdoors, we remember. On one of our walks over Jennycliff to Bovissands. I held forth for over an hour, W. remembers, visibly moved. The clouds parted. All of nature paused to listen. But I spoke only to myself, W. says. My presentation was inaudible to him. — ‘You muttered. You murmured’. I was like a druid, W. says. It was as though I commanded great forces, and was casting a spell.

His presentation was much more sober, W. remembers. It had to be; I needed a counterbalance. He berated and harangued me. He listed my faults, and my many betrayals of him. It took a long time; nearly all the way back to the city. He was still speaking as we crossed the bay in the water taxi, concluding only when we reached Platters .

The seventeenth ? We don’t want to remember the seventeenth . It was a misstep, W. says. It was misconceived from the first. We’re not dancers, and we should never try to be. Of course, we were trying to dance as non-dancers , but who would know that?

The eighteenth was to be an action presentation. It was to be Dogma’s first murder. But we got scared and backed out. It was not yet time for the Dogma Terror .

‘ We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head : that’s Kafka’, W. says. So God, too, wants to die? he wonders. It’s not just us?

Death, death: W. hears the great bells tolling in the sky. We’re at the end, the very end! There can’t be much more, can there? This is it, isn’t it? The credits are rolling … The game is up …

They’re calling him home, W. says. He sees them as figures filled and flooded with light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light?

And meanwhile, what’s happening to me? I’m falling, W. says. I’m heading down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the betrayer of Athens? Is that the humanzee , bred in Soviet research labs?

The rats are dying, I tell W. on the phone. I can hear them squeaking, which they only do when they’re distressed — that’s what the pest controller said. I hear them squeaking at night in agony.

Oh God, the smell! I say to W. on the phone, a week later. It’s so thick, so pungent. It’s almost sweet , I tell him. The flat smells of a kind of sweet rotting. Is this what death smells like? Is this what it smells like at the end?

A week later. There’s been a plague of bluebottles in the flat, I tell W. They’re coming up from beneath the floorboards, I tell him. They must be hatching in the darkness beneath the flat. They’re huge! They buzz against the window in small swarms, I never know how many there are. And that’s how they die, in small swarms, their curled up bodies littering the sill.

I imagine I can hear fly eggs hatching in the darkness, I tell W. I imagine I can hear the maggots writhing. I imagine sticky sounds as I lie in the dark. I imagine the slurp of eyeless, headless maggots melting their food with enzymes. I imagine the low buzzing of bluebottles just hatched from pupae …

The rats will have their revenge, I tell W. I know that. Rats always come back, the pest controller said, and they’ll have learnt from their mistakes.

I think the rats are coming back in the form of flies, I tell W. I think it’s flies that are going to inflict the rat-punishment . I can imagine a swarm of bluebottles boring through my body, I tell him. I can imagine them crawling out of my mouth …

Dogma: why did it chose us, the greatest of idiots? W. wonders. Why were we singled out? It must be like the balance of electrical charges that produces lightning in clouds. There must be the greatest possible difference between positive and negative ions — and thus, with Dogma, between the highest thought and the basest idiocy. That’s when lightning strikes.

But what did we think ? What did thought set afire in us? We have no idea, no inkling. How could we? Dogma was greater than us. Dogma was broader, more generous. Weren’t we only swallows in the updraft? Weren’t we leaves swept up in an autumn storm?

Perhaps we didn’t think anything at all: how can we know? Perhaps we simply wandered out into the snow and got lost. Perhaps it was all a dream: the last hallucinations of men dying of frostbite.

We felt things. That is undeniable. We set out our coracles on great currents of feeling. We had feelings, we are sure of that. Pathos opened its door to admit us. But did we think , too? Did thought take flight in us as feeling did? These are questions we can never answer, says W. It’s for others to judge.