Lars Iyer - Dogma

Americans don’t go in for gardening, we notice as we near our hosts’ street: the back garden — brown grass, uncut — simply runs out unfenced onto the road behind. It’s exactly the same with the front garden. But Americans are tremendously neighbourly. Didn’t our hosts’ neighbour bake a pie for us, when she heard we were coming to stay?

Hospitality is a great sign of civilisation, W. says. Our houses should be wholly open to our guests. The guest turns the house into an offering … Of course, I have a flat, not a house, but the same thing holds. And my flat has little to offer except squalor and damp, but the same principle applies.

How many guests W. has welcomed! How many great minds have crossed his threshold! He’s opened his drinks cabinet to them, and his enormous fridge. He’s opened every kitchen cupboard, to whip up a midnight snack for some great mind or other. He’s had whole parties of guests, each person staying in another of his many rooms, each for whom W. threw open his airing cupboard anew, for fresh sheets and fresh duvet covers. Fresh towels!

How many times has he projected Stroszek for his guests on the walls of his vast living room? How many times has he danced in his socks with them to apocalyptic Canadian pop?

And what about me? Who have I had to stay? What thinkers have passed through my door? Just him, W. says. Just him, breathing in mould spores and plaster dust. Just him, wondering why the lights don’t work and the TV doesn’t work and the fridge doesn’t work and why the oven is upside down in the living room.

On the porch, with our sipping gin . Joggers and dog-walkers fill the streets. Fireflies hover over the grasses. This is what they should drink, here in the South, W. says: Plymouth Gin, neat, over ice.

Capitalism and religion, W. muses. Capitalism and religion. — ‘You never were religious’, W. says. I’m a Hindu! I tell him. ‘But you were never really religious, were you?’

My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It brings me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don’t struggle with my faith, or with the idea of God.

W.’s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It’s a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn’t quite know. But at other times he feels as far from religion as could be, and the word faith is ashes in his mouth.

Of course, W. was born a Jew — he’s Jewish through his father’s line, but his mother’s family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase at the age of nine! W. remembers. He demanded to be taken to church. And he was taken, although his family were lapsed. — ‘Nine!’, W. says. That’s when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.

Our hosts’ CD collection. The Golden Gate Quartet, Barbeque Bob, The Hokum Boys, The Mississippi Sheiks: who are these people? Our hosts are opting out of contemporary life, W. says. They’re in internal exile. They’re ransacking the past — a never-existing, arcadian past — to save themselves in the present.

W. puts on the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it sheeks , apparently, he says, reading the inlay. W. admires the sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It’s about rhythm, he says, not about melody. W.’s becoming an enemy of melody, he says. He hates dead syncopations . He hates drums .

But what would any of this mean to me? I’m a Jandek fanatic, for fuck’s sake! He does an impression of Jandek’s singing. — ‘ I’m in paaaaaainn ’; ‘No one liiiiikes me’. Actually, he respects Jandek, W. says. My instincts were right, for once. We tried to have a Jandek party , of course, down in W.’s house. We forced his students and Sal to sit and listen in silence. — ‘How long could they stand it?’, W. asks. ‘How long?’ He pauses dramatically. ‘ Three seconds! ’, he says. ‘That’s all they could take. I think Sal shat herself’, he says. She’s never forgiven us for that.

W. laments that I’m no longer open, really open, to music. — ‘You only listen to Jandek’, he says. It’s quite impressive. W. has a certain respect for my obsessions, although they’re absurdly narrowing. My whole life has been nothing other than a series of obsessions, W. says, and this is my latest one.

There’s no point in putting any books in his man bag for our trips, W. says, because he is soon too drunk to read. And there’s no point in carrying his notebook either, because he is soon too drunk to think.

How long have we been away? Two days? Three? But W.’s beginning to forget his former life. Hasn’t he always lived in this way, wandering around America with a moron?

Ah, why did he bring me to America? W. wonders. What is it, in him, that desires his destruction? There’d be sense in bringing someone along to inspire him, W. says, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless I’m his death-drive, for how else can he account for it?

Sometimes, W. thinks that I’m like those people Russell Crowe sees, in A Beautiful Mind . A hallucination. A figment of his imagination. But I’m real, quite real, that’s the trouble. You can exorcise a ghost. But how can you rid yourself of an idiot?

My own corner , that’s where I should stay, W. says. My own corner , with my own interests, which are contracting by the day … But W. insists on bringing me into the world, doesn’t he? Why? he wonders. For what reason?

He had a terrible dream last night, W. says. I was leading him up one of the hills outside Nashville, grim faced and silent. I was much larger than usual, a giant toad, a giant flea with great thick thighs. And W. was much smaller, a wren, a midge. And I was silent: I wasn’t saying a word. I was dragging him up the hill without offering a word of explanation.

‘Tell me, tell me where we’re going!’, W. cried. But I would tell him nothing. On the hill summit, late evening, W. found himself prone, and I had a knife to his throat. I was silent. I was about to cut … W. waited for a voice telling me to stop. He waited for God to intervene, telling me to sacrifice something else in W.’s place. But no voice came.

W.’s dream. It must have been because I was talking about Hindu sacrifice the other night, W. says. About the four hundred kinds of sacrifice detailed in the Vedas. About the macrocosm , about cosmogony and anthropogony .

When the priest pours the offering into the fire — milk or ghee, vegetable cakes or the stalks of the soma plant — he is communicating with the divine realm, I told him. The fire itself is divine, I told him. Destruction itself is godly.

W. shudders. That’s why I’m destroying myself, isn’t it? That’s why I’m setting myself on fire. It’s part of some mad Hindu scheme. My life, the disaster of my career, is only a spoonful of ghee for the fire .

But there’s worse, W. says. He’s going to be sacrificed, too. His life, his thought, the disaster of his career will be just another offering for the flames.

Our hosts don’t understand our bickering, W. says. It upsets them. Don’t they see that it’s the only way we can express affection? It’s a British working class thing, W. told them, but they only looked at us blankly.

We’ve become strange, W. says. We’ve spent too much time in each other’s company. Even Sal can’t save us from that. We’re no longer fit for human society, W. says. For Canadian society.

How long will it be before our hosts turn us out onto the streets? W. wonders. We’ve sinned against their hospitality. We’ve desecrated their home. Our bickering (my bickering) … Our hysteria (my hysteria) … Our sense of living in a perpetual emergency ( my sense of living in a perpetual emergency).