Lars Iyer - Dogma

The pelican of mythology feeds its young by tearing strips of its own flesh from its breast, W. says. And isn’t that how he’s fed me: by tearing strips of flesh from his own breast?

How generous he’s been! How unselfish! But in the end, it’s left him even more alone, his generosity. In the end, a great, overfed chick is no company.

The bus back to Nashville. Sounds of screaming. A roaring two-stroke engine. The passenger in front of us is playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his laptop.

W. yearns for his study, he says. He yearns for his bookshelves. He yearns for the tranquillity of his mornings, when he leaves a sleeping Sal in bed so that he can do a few hours of work before breakfast.

I understand nothing of the rhythms of scholarship, W. says, I know nothing of its seasons : of the time of sowing, of tending and caring, and of the harvest, the gathering in of the crops of thought.

Isn’t it that of which he dreams, at the beginning of the summer: of the coming autumn, which will see his thought-crops ripe and ready, bowing in the breeze? Of carrying back the harvest of his ideas, so carefully tended, in his sun-browned arms?

There must be a process of thought-threshing, too, W. says. Of thought-winnowing! The wheat must be separated from the chaff. And there will be chaff, he says. Even the greatest of thinkers cannot avoid chaff. But there is still wheat. Still the evidence of a year’s long labour …

But what would he know of this? His crops have failed, W. says, as they have always failed, and he stands in the empty field, weeping.

Ah, when will we discover the rhythm that will let us work, really work? W. wonders. When, that steady pressure that will make every day a work day, every day launched with a forward push from the day before …

Momentum: to be thrown by thought, loosed, like a stone from thought’s sling … And work, then, will not be mundane, but celestial. We will work as the stars work, as the planets turn in their orbits. Our work will be as one with the slow turning of galaxies, and the steady expansion of the universe out into the infinite … Our work will be indistinguishable from inactivity, from the resting of a God.

Perhaps it is really a kind of Sabbath that we’re looking for, W. says. A time to close our eyes; but not only to rest, to recuperate. We need to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within : who was it who said that? he wonders. We need to let ourselves be touched by a greater work, by a divine labour. Isn’t it only then that we’ll truly begin to work, as though drawn by a hidden current into the centre of our channel?

We must work until we bleed, W. says. We must write until our eyes turn red, and blood runs from our nostrils. Because that’s what’s going to happen to us when we find our idea: blood will flow from our nostrils. Drops of blood, splashing onto the pages on which we are writing …

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood . Nietzsche wrote that. With blood, but not our blood. We’ll write with God ’s blood, says W., mystically. It will be the blood of God that runs from our nostrils.

Bored on the bus. W. seizes my notebook. He wants to see how America has advanced my thinking. — ‘Ah! Drawings! Who’s that supposed to be?’ Huckleberry Finn, I tell him. There’s the raft. — ‘And what’s that in the water next to him?’ It’s Moby Dick, I tell him. And that’s the Pequod. W. admires my classics of American literature series.

And what is this? A poem? Preppies , it’s called.

Tall / sand in the hair / white teeth / pullovers / deck shoes / white shirts and blouses / yachts with white sails / fuckers

Very perceptive, says W. Here’s another. Cabin Boys , it’s called.

Upstairs, on deck / The preppies are dancing / with their caps worn backwards. / We are the cabin boys / scrubbing their things. / We are angry

He likes that, W. says. It’s very terse.

And what are these? More poems?’, W. asks, turning my notebook upside down and squinting. Lyrics, I tell him. They’re lyrics from Jandek.

I don’t care about philosophy / Even if it’s right.

I could always go drinking / and never come back …

Ah, Jandek, W. says. Who else? Sal has thrown away all the Jandek CDs I burned for him. The Humility of Pain. — ‘That was his forty-fifth LP, wasn’t it?’ His forty-sixth, I tell him.

The Humility of Pain : now there’s an album title, W. says. Jandek has seen things, experienced things, of which we can have no understanding, he says. He is a man of despair, of complete despair. But he is a man of God, too. Doesn’t Jandek always gather his musicians for a moment of prayer before going on stage? ‘Lord give us strength … Lord protect us’. We’re not capable of God, W. says.

In the end, W. doesn’t understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by the word. He doesn’t have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists , W. says. He doesn’t know what that word means.

When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he’s come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It’s not because he thinks there’s some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach — on the contrary — but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and all because of his personal stupidity.

Sometimes, W. dreams of collaborating with me, on a book on God. He dreams of a great outpouring of his intellect and passion. He dreams of honouring the legacies of Pascal and Weil, and uncovering the meaning of God in Cohen and Rosenzweig. He dreams of making Kierkegaardian leaps, and of foaming at the mouth in Dostoevskian fervour.

And what would I contribute? What would I bring to the project? — ‘You could explain your indifference’, W. says. ‘And then you could draw some cocks’.

A rest break in Jackson, in the early hours. Through the bus window, we admire our fellow passengers, standing about in the open air, their breath frosty. Who are they, our fellow travellers? Where are they heading? We are tired, travel-weary, but they’re fresh, expectant, ready for the world.

Distance means nothing to the American, W. says. Uprooting! The American rolls across the earth like dice, he says. One minute, the American’s married; the next, divorced. Then married again, then divorced again … Then starting a new career. Leaving one job, and beginning another on the other side of the state, on the other side of the continent …

Americans pack up and go! They move from state to state just like that! They think nothing of travelling vast distances, of relocating themselves, of starting new lives!

W. speaks movingly of the first migrants to America, who crossed via the vanished land bridge from Siberia. Of course, they were hunter-gatherers, he says. The disaster of agriculture , to which he traces the origins of capitalism, had not yet happened.

The mid-Neolithic: perhaps that’s when it all went wrong, W. muses. Once you have agriculture, you have concentrations of wealth. You have military specialisation! Predation! Man becomes a wolf to man! That’s what he’s learnt from playing Civilization 4 , W. says.

Maybe we should become foragers, like our early ancestors. Maybe we should just go forth , living on berries and roadkill and whatever else we find. We dream for a moment of wandering across America, like the first wave of migrants who crossed the great landbridge. We dream of living on the fruits of America, on American generosity, the land spreading before us in all its bounty and the pair of us like idiot Whitmans in our blousy shirts.