Lars Iyer - Dogma

Pigeon Forge. The end is nigh.

With every mini-golf course or water ride we pass, W. sinks lower. With every giant golden cross on a hilltop, every novelty motel and advert for apocalyptically-themed shows for all the family ( Revelations: the Musical; The Seven Seals On Ice …), W.’s cries grow louder. Kroger’s, The Old Time Country Shop , more huge crosses looming over nowhere …

They’ve made a theme park of the End of Times! W. says. They’ve made a Disneyland of Armageddon!

W. hears laughter, but he doesn’t know from where. He hears laughter filling the air. Are they laughing at him, the Americans? They laughed at Mr Scheitz, and his mad ideas, W. says. They put him in jail. Is that where W.’s going to end up: in jail? And they laughed at Bruno, until he shot himself. Is that what I’m going to do, shoot myself? W. wonders. — ‘Don’t do it, fat boy!’

Night falls and we’re lost in the Smokies, looking for our cabin. Precipices to the left and the right. Our driver-host is edgy. The car’s too heavy! We passengers get out and walk — there’s ice everywhere, and the road’s too steep for the car.

The mountains tower above us. Starlight glitters on the icy road. Are we going to survive? Will we be lost forever in the wilderness? Doesn’t Dolly Parton live round here somewhere?

Then we see it: the cabin. It’s almost too late for W. He’s raving. What’s he doing here? How did he end up here? He can’t go another mile! He’s a non-passenger! A non-traveller! Not another mile!

Later, W. collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: a dying swan, half wrapped in his towels. What’s this country doing to him? he says. How did he end up here? We talk softly to him, over our Plymouth Gins cut with tapwater.

When he recovers, W. speaks movingly of the early blues players. Such short lives! But life is short! There’s not much time!

What need was there to come to America? W. asks. He’s learnt nothing here. His thought hasn’t advanced. Not one new idea! … The United States of Thought-Robbery , that’s what they should call it, W. says. The United States of Vastation and Waste …

Newcastle. — ‘There’s no sight finer’, W. says of the Tyne Bridge, which skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roof-gardens. The streetlamps, painted the same dark green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher …

‘You need a project’, says W. ‘You need something to occupy you’. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He’s even deigned to collaborate with me. But I’ve never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I’ve never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.

Hadn’t W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn’t he pictured us in his mind as two larks, looping and darting in flight — two larks, wings outstretched, flights interlaced, interwoven, together and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air …

We were never to rest. We’d live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the heavens …

To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall, as two bodies would fall — tumbling through space. Thinking would be as inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we’d fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …

And instead? There is no flight: not mine, not W.’s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he’d left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion, an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It’s my fault , he can say, even as he knows that nothing would have happened if he were free of me.

‘Take me to the sea!’, W. cries every time he visits. He has to see the sea! My North Sea is very different from his Atlantic, he says. It even looks colder, he says, as it comes into view behind the Priory.

Sometimes we pay to enter the Priory, so W. can see the weathered gravestones, whose inscriptions are no longer legible, and inspect what’s left of the bunkers, which are a kind of cousin to those at Jennycliff, with empty sockets where there were once gun placements. But today we’re on a mission. W. has to get air into his lungs, he says. And he needs a drink!

We follow the road round to The Park Hotel , where we are served by an old waiter in a tuxedo. Chips and mayonnaise in the sun, watched by an old Bassett hound, head on paws. Two pints of beer arrive on a tray, the waiter with a white towel over his forearm. — ‘To the sea!’, W. toasts, as our glasses clink.

We talk of our American adventure, and of what we learned from it. We talk of Marx, and of Stroszek . And W. wasn’t arrested! And I didn’t shoot myself! That we survived at all is a miracle, we agree.

What did we learn from our trip? What was its significance? Sometimes W. thinks that our thoughts are too small. That we’re unable to think the magnitude of what needs to be thought: its vastness, its ominousness, like the black, heavy clouds that precede a hurricane.

W. dreams of a thought that would move with what it thinks, follow and respond to it, like a surfer his wave. A thought that would inhabit what was to be thought, like a fish the sea — no, a thought that would be only a drop of the sea in the sea, belonging to its object as water does to water.

The thought of God would be made of God, the thought of tears would be wet with tears … And the thought of disaster?

W. remembers the story I told him about the Hindu doctrine of the Four Ages.

In the Age of Gold , I told him, everyone was content; there were no differences between human beings — no high born or low born; and there was no hatred, no violence. Everyone lived for a hundred years. Heaven and earth were one. No priests were necessary, for the meaning of holy scripture was clear. All souls lived in truth.

In the Age of Silver , W. remembers, unhappiness appeared, along with weariness and nostalgia. Rain fell; it was necessary to take shelter in the trees. And lifespans dropped by a quarter. Morality began to atrophy; heaven and earth came asunder. But the scriptures were studied, although the priests no longer understood all they read, and squabbled over their interpretations.

In the Age of Bronze , W. remembers, fear appeared, predation. People sheltered in the cities that had sprung up on the plains. Lifespans fell by a further quarter. Lies became common. Virtue guttered like a candle flame in the draft. Heaven and earth broke apart. Priests could make out only a few words of the ancient tongue of the scriptures, and the world no longer asked them for their interpretation of the divine word.

In the Age of Iron , our age, there is the dominion of power and war: that’s what I told W. Honesty and generosity reside only with the poor, who flee from the cities and hide in the valleys. The rule of virtue gives way to the rule of money. Drought lies upon the land, ashes fill the sky. In our age, I told W., the descendants of priests throw aside the scriptures. What do they understand of the ancient tongue? And what relevance has holy scripture to an age without hope?

But I neglected to tell him about the Age of Shit . I didn’t tell him about the shape of the age to come, which is becoming clearer and clearer to him. War will be all, devouring all, W. says. Human beings will be like rats, like vermin. And the skies will burn, W. says. He can see them burning.