Lars Iyer - Dogma

He’s too scholarly, W. says. Too concerned with footnotes and references, and appeals to the great names of philosophy. And as for me … W. shakes his head. What can he say? It’s not simply that I’m un scholarly, that I haven’t mastered the protocols, which of course I haven’t. It’s more than that, W. says. I’m non -scholarly, W. says, where the ‘ non- ’ means much more than a simple negation.

I’m a parody of the scholar: of course. I’m a grotesque double of the real philosopher: very true. But it’s more than that … I pay no heed to philosophy whatsoever , W. says. Reason, rigorous argument: none of it means anything to me. In its way, it’s admirable, W. says. But the effect on my audiences has been terrible.

My booming. My near-bellowing … W., as my co-presenter, has to sit beside me as I babble. W. has to field questions for me, and explain me to our fellow conference-goers.

Ostracism, that’s what I’ve brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.’s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth. And there I am beside him.

What do I want from him? W. asks. What does he want from himself? Ah, there’s no way of telling. He’ll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We’re heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pines, to where nothing can survive.

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us? W. wonders. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy?

Who allowed it? Who raised our aspirations to the sky? We want to blame someone. It must be someone else’s fault. Our horizons were opened too widely. We saw too much … But who let us see? Who left the doorway open?

Suicide by Cop , W. reads a newspaper headline. What of suicide by philosophy? he says. What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of one’s stupidity? Because that’s the only way he can account for us, the shortcomings of our thought. It’s the only way he can account for our persistent attempt to think.

There’s something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he’s not quite sure what it is. Shame — is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do.

There’s a short story by Kafka, a fragment really, W. says. A man in a great hurry gets lost on the way to the station and asks a policeman for directions. Gibt sie auf! , says the policeman, Give it up! That’s what we should do, says W. Give it up!

W. never likes to be too far from bodies of water. When he visits me, he always demands to be taken to the sea. And he always takes me directly to the sea, when I visit him. ‘ I’ll meet you at the sea ’, he texts me, when I tell him I’ve arrived. I have to go straight there, straight from the airport to the sea to meet him.

And now, in the middle of America, when the sea’s so far away? We feel drawn to the Mississippi. One of the blue-capped tourist guides points the way. Down Beale Street, cross the road …

We stand by the roadside, trying to figure out how to get across. Cars pass in an endless stream. Lorries, buses, without a break.

We’ll have to run, I tell W. Run! We run, just making the other side. But Sal’s been left behind. There she is, waving to us. There’s nothing we can do, W. says. She’s lost! She’ll never make it! We’ll have to go on without her.

Still one more road to cross. We follow the same technique: a headlong rushing, closing our eyes as we run. We’re madmen! Sal, meanwhile, has found a button you can push to get the traffic lights working. She crosses calmly. Why didn’t we work that out? She crosses the second street. — ‘You twats’, she says, ‘why did you leave me behind?’

The Mississippi: more than half a mile wide. — ‘I think that the river is a strong brown god ’, W. says, quoting Eliot. ‘ Keeping his reasons and rages, destroyer, reminder/ Of what men choose to forget … ’

Destroyer indeed. Periodically, the Mississippi breaks the levees and floods the river bottoms where the poor live and work, W. says. That’s what happened in the great flood of ’27. A million people were displaced. Whole towns were engulfed …

They made the poor blacks pay for their aid, of course. And if they couldn’t pay? They were confined in work camps, and made to do forced labour …

W. presses an earbud into my ear and an earbud into his. We listen to the deep blues of the Delta. Tommy Johnson. Big Joe Williams. We listen to pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and to verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and violent death, of the great flood of ’27 and the great drought of ’29.

It’s the music of life , W. says. Of still being alive. Of being torn apart, of being insulted and injured, of being still alive in the one chord vamp, in a rhythm that precedes melody, that breaks and fragments it, dissolving melody in the waters of its own flood.

What would my blues name be? W. wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.

On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.’s Facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, with the camera set on automatic. And behind us, the muddy brown waters of the Mississippi, surging along.

America’s so big! we agree. How far is it to the coast, east or west? A thousand miles? Two thousand? Some great, improbable distance, we’re agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive.

There’s so much space here. America’s so exposed. We think of the hurricane damage we saw from the Greyhound bus. Houses torn up, trees uprooted and flung about. I took photos. We’d never seen anything like it. America’s in danger, we agree. It’s too big! It’s too vulnerable!

We think of the coming catastrophe, of the winds that will sweep this country, the deserts that will claim it, the skies that will darken over it. Will it be here that the apocalypse rises to its greatest magnitude?

That’s what Josh T. Pearson sings, W. says, tapping his iPod. ‘The USA’s the centre of JerUSAlem … ’

Hope. What is it that keeps us going? W. wonders. Why do we bother, in spite of it all, in the face of it all?

That we know our limitations is our strength, we’re agreed on that. We know we fall short, desperately short. We know our task is too great for us, but at least we have a sense of it, its greatness. At least we know it passes above us, like migratory birds in the autumn sky.

We’re landfill thinkers , W. says. Landfill philosophers . But he doesn’t mind. He has the sense of edging forward in the darkness, he says. He has the sense of digging his burrow, of pushing on in dark times.

And what kind of burrow am I digging? W. wonders. What kind of tunnel can a mole make that is without claws, a mole that’s gone mad underground?

In the end, I excel at only three things, W. says: smut, chimp noises and made-up German. That’s all my scholarship has amounted to.

And isn’t it the same with him? Ah, what does he really know? Of what is he really certain? Biblical Hebrew, of course … The classical guitar … The history of philosophy in the German tradition, in the French tradition … Something of the ancient Greeks, and the language of the ancient Greeks … But it’s nothing, nothing, W. says. He knows nothing at all.

If he’s cruel to me, it is the same cruelty to which he subjects himself, W. says. If he’s cruel, it’s out of love, W. says. It is meant as a sign that he expects better. Would that he had a similar tutor! Would that he had someone to list his betrayals and half-measures!