Lars Iyer - Dogma

We’re the only white people in the bus station. Why is that? we ask the woman in front. Where are the students? Have they all got cars? Where are the white poor? — ‘They don’t take the bus’, she says. The policeman watches on resignedly, a holstered gun pulled up round his shoulder.

They don’t take the bus : these words are like a blow to W. Just like the blow of realising that there is no train station in Nashville. A city without a train station! W. says. He can barely imagine it. A city without trains!

On the big TV screen, they’re showing a documentary on airplane crashes, with footage of one crash after another. Screeching brakes. Metal crunching. Screams.

W.’s becoming hysterical. — ‘Why don’t they tell us anything?’, he cries. ‘Are we cattle?’

I sit him on the floor and tell him Hindu stories to calm him down. I tell him how Ganesha came to have the head of an elephant, and Daksha the head of a goat. I tell him of the sage who temporarily substituted a horse’s head for his own, knowing that the secret wisdom he was about to gain would shatter it into a million pieces. (‘That’s what would happen to you if you ever had an idea’, W. says.) And I tell him how Dadhyanc’s head was lopped off for revealing the secret of the sacrifice to human beings.

‘Hinduism is a bloody religion’, W. says.

On the bus. W. opens his man bag to show me what he’s brought to read on our trip to Memphis. Rosenzweig, of course. You need a volume of Rosenzweig with you at all times, W. says. Polyani’s The Great Transformation . And Whitman’s Leaves of Grass , which dreams of what America might have been, W. says.

We must read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they — the authors of the books in his man bag — have not.

And what have I brought? — ‘Maimon’s autobiography. Oh yes, very good. Scholem’s memoir of Benjamin. Very impressive’. But he knows I won’t open my books, W. says. He knows I’ve got a National Enquirer concealed somewhere on my person.

W. doesn’t believe I actually read books. — ‘They’re like totems to you’, he says. ‘They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don’t understand them’.

My office is filled with books, that’s the paradox, W. says. I get a childlike excitement from them, from the fact of them, with their heady titles and colourful spines.

Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader lends them to others, without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He prefers to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante, in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold . The taxi driver tells us that the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing. We go to Gap to buy warm clothes. To Gap! In Memphis ! Imagine! The last place we wanted to go!

Gap ’s impossibly cheap. How can clothes be so cheap? In what mess of exploitation have we been caught? But we’re cold, we have to compromise.

I buy a hoodie, W. a cardigan. We examine ourselves in the full length mirror. We look preppy , we decide, without knowing what this word means. We look like preppies .

It’s still cold outside. What are we going to do? We rent a pool table. Preppies play pool, we decide.

We’re being followed, W. observes, and it’s true. The same rough-looking guys we saw earlier are slumped in leather chairs in the pool hall.

They hate preppies and want to rid the world of them, W. says. Which is fine, because he thinks he hates preppies and wants to rid the world of them. They’re going to beat us to death, and he’ll welcome it. But we outlast our would-be assailants, who tire of watching us playing bad pool and drinking.

The word barbeque doesn’t mean the same thing over here, says W. over dinner. Nor does the word ribs . He’s right. What have we been served? Vast oval plates of red-cooked meat. French fries in great piles. It’s frightening. I must be in heaven with my enormous greed, W. says. My life has peaked at this point, hasn’t it? I’ve finally found a country where I don’t feel perpetually starved to death.

W. has always liked chubby men, he says. We recall the fat singers we admire, who drink wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. Is he angry because he’s fat? I ask of the singer in Modest Mouse. — ‘No, he was angry and then he got fat’, W. says. Do you think he minds being fat? I ask. — ‘He has other issues’, W. says.

Of course, Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. Yes, but he was ill. Blanchot was thin, too, says W. But he was ill as well. — ‘I bet Brod was fat’. Definitely, I agree. He drank too much, that’s why he got fat. — ‘Why do you think he drank?’, W. asks. Because he knew he wasn’t Kafka, I tell him.

We watch a band on Beale Street playing for tips. There are preppies everywhere, all around us. W. hates them. What are we doing here? he says. Between songs, the singer comes round the crowd with a hat.

People have to promote themselves in America, we’ve noticed that. They’re not ashamed of it, as they would be back home. There’s no welfare state, that’s what does it, W. says. But playing for preppies! It’s the ultimate indignity, W. says, over our pints of Big Ass Beer.

It’s my birthday today , reads the sign on the windshield of the taxi carrying us home. We ask our driver to tell us about the old Beale Street, before it became a tourist trap. — ‘It was a rough place. People getting stabbed. Pee Wee’s … The Panama … The Hole in the Wall . They’re long gone’, he says. ‘The gambling houses, too. Even the pool rooms … Beale Street was torn down after Dr King was assassinated … They rebuilt it in the ’80s for the tourists …’

He tells us about how he saw Howlin’ Wolf play one of the bars of old Beale Street, back in the ’50s. — ‘Wolf’d crawl around the stage on all fours, howling’, he says. ‘That’s how he got his name. And then, ‘Wolf’d get women to ride up on his back. And then he’d go round the crowd. He had an extra-long microphone cord, see. Sometimes he’d go out and sing in the street. He’d howl at the moon …’ He laughs.

‘Is it really your birthday?’, W. asks him. ‘Every day’s my birthday’, he says.

In the hotel bar, W. muses on our lecture tour. It’s not going well, is it? he says. It’s going badly, I agree. Worse than ever. But why does it surprise us? W. wonders. What did we expect? Some Kant-like resurgence, late in life? Some late awakening from our dogmatic slumbers?

Our presentations are so polite , he says. So conventional. We should learn from Howlin’ Wolf, he says. We need more pathos in our presentations. More fire . We need to howl at the moon …

Isn’t that what W. has always hoped to hear in our presentations: my howling at the moon? The great cry of non-thinking: isn’t that what he’s waiting for? But all I’ve ever managed is the mewling of the imbecile , W. says.

Ah, when will we learn how to speak like real philosophers? W. says. When will philosophy itself sing through our presentations?

Philosophy itself. W. imagines us like the Delphic Pythia, speaking for the Oracle, interpreting what it said. He imagines us like the hierophants of the Eleusian Mysteries, bringing congregants into the presence of the holy.

Philosophy itself would speak, W. says, and we would interpret what it said for our audiences. Philosophy itself would sound through our presentations, like the wind through a wind harp.