Dogma (16 page)

I’ve never been able to sleep, W. knows that. I can never get a full night’s rest, and this is no surprise. I’m up all night, wandering from bedroom to bathroom, eternally disturbed by my own digestive system, eternally awoken and reawoken.

Something inside me won’t allow me to sleep, W. says. There’s something unsettled, some debt that has to be paid. I’m my own ghost; I haunt myself, looking for some kind of retribution, something that might
bring it all to an end
, though it will never end.

That’s my insomnia, W. says: the endlessness of my guilt. Nothing can end, W. says, and nothing can really begin for
me, either. Every day, the same failure. Every night, the same punishment.

‘How many times do you get up at night? Ten times? Twenty?’ He’s never experienced anything like it, W. says. He hears me when he visits for the weekend. He’s half-asleep in the living room on the blow-up mattress, and there am I, wandering up and down the hall in my vest. Up and down, up and down …

It doesn’t wake him up as such, W. says. He would barely remember my eternal trudging, the eternal flushing of the toilet, if it did not accord with the restlessness
he
feels between the walls of my flat. He wouldn’t wake up at all, W. says, if it weren’t for
his
disturbed stomach, which only happens when he visits me, if it weren’t for
his
insomnia, unknown to him except within the walls of my flat.

Ah, how many times has he sat up bleary-eyed in the morning, as I clear a space amidst the half-finished wine bottles and empty cheese packets to make us coffee? How many mornings has he tried to tell me of the horrors he has undergone, as I brush plaster dust from my dressing gown, and prepare our breakfast?

You have to have a balanced life to have the right perspective on things, W. says. You have to have things in order. What perspective can I possibly have from my flat, which is to say, my pit underground? What valid judgement can I make about the world, given that I spend so much time
below pavement level
?

I’m always
looking up
at things, W. says; I have to. I
look up
to see the plants and the algae in my disgusting yard. I
look up
to the concrete and the rotting bricks. I barely know the sky exists, W. says—and the sun: when was the last time I saw the sun?

Only the rats are below you, W. says. Only the rats can you look down upon.

No, the flat is not a place from which I can be expected to make any kind of valid judgement. It’s set my thoughts askew, permanently askew. I can only have
damp thoughts
and
murine thoughts
. I can only have thoughts that unconsciously
look up
to what they might have been if they were thought by a strong and vigorous thinker.

What will happen the next day—the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. wonders. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear, that the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the
destruction
of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can’t avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it’s all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he’s not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the
depths
of the disaster? It’s my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

‘If you knew, if you really knew’ … but I don’t know, says W. I have intimations, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

A series of jerks and tics, like those of a hanged man in his final death throes; a series of involuntary and grotesque spasms: that will have been my life, W. says.

It’s not even desperation; it’s more basic than that. There’s a rebellion at the level of my
bare existence
, W. says.—‘You shouldn’t exist. You should never have been born’: that’s what my body knows. It’s what
I
know at some abysmal level. And meanwhile, there I am twitching over the void, a man half-hung, neck broken …

My decline is precipitous, W. says. It seems to be increasing, he says. And like a cyclone of stupidity, I seem to be gathering everything up as I pass, him included, his whole life, W. says.

How could I understand what I’ve unleashed?, W. wonders. Does the storm understand that it is a storm? Does the earthquake know that it is an earthquake? I will never understand, says W.; that’s my always appealing innocence.

It’s time for the reckoning, W. says. It’s reached that point. But with whom can he reckon? How to tackle an enemy who has no idea he’s an enemy?

We ought to be content to write ragged books, W. says on the phone. Ragged books for a ragged world. Oh, he forgot, W. says. I already do.

W.’s learning ancient Greek for his new book, he says. It’s going to be on religion. He was going to do a book on
time
, but he’s decided against that. Religion, he says, that’s his topic, and for that he needs Greek. And maths! If he’s going to write about Cohen and God, as he intends to, he’ll have to understand the infinitesimal calculus.

He’s reading
The Logic of Pure Knowledge
, W. says. In German! It’s taken him a year so far, and he’s only on page 50. He sends me his notes:

Leibniz: the differential. The ground of the finite is the infinitely small. It is the infinite that founds the finite, and not the finite the infinite—this is why the infinite is not a negative concept
.

Don’t I see?, W. says, with great excitement. The infinite founds the finite. The infinite is not a negative concept, according to Cohen, W. says. It is an
originary positivity
,
prior to both affirmation and negation. The infinite is the
condition
of the finite, and not the other way round, W. says.

Of course, it’s all in Aristotle, W. says.
Indefinite
judgement, that’s what Aristotle calls it.
Infinite
judgement: that’s what Boethius called it, in his commentary on Aristotle. But it’s all lost in Kant, that’s what Cohen shows, W. says. Kant collapses the difference between kinds of privative judgement. But Cohen remembers!, W. says. Cohen knows!

Ah, but what would I understand of any of this?, W. says.

In a way, W. learned about originary positivity from me, he says. From my example. I’ve taught him a lot, despite myself. In a strange way, he’s been
my
student,
my
protégé.

He was inspired to follow my example the other night, W. says.—‘Oh, it was nothing to do with your
thought
’. What then? He bought a bottle of wine and went home and drank it all. Then he got beneath his bed covers and moaned.—‘Oh, my troubles! Oh, my life! They’re out to get me! I’m going to be next!’—‘That’s how you live, isn’t it?’

And shouldn’t I inspire others, too? W. would like to exhibit me, he says. He’d like to put me on display before a learned society as a living example.

‘Don’t you see?’, W. would tell our audience, pointing at me with his stick. ‘Isn’t it clear?’ ‘Think!’, he would command, and I would exhibit my non-thinking. ‘Pray’, he would command, I would exhibit my
non
-religiosity. ‘Dance!’, he would command, and I would exhibit my
non
-dancing, my chicken dancing, and our audience would gasp in awe and horror …

We’re dead men, W. says, the walking dead. Oh God, the burden of disgust, of absolute disgust! We’re disgusted with ourselves, we’ll tell anyone who asks us. We’ve become terrible bores, speaking only of our disgust and our self-disgust.

Exiled and wretched, Solomon Maimon—the ever-neglected Maimon—is said to have given accounts of his disgrace for the price of a drink. And us? Who will listen to the story of
our
disgrace?
We
will have to buy
them
drinks, that’s the terrible thing, W. says.
We
will have to pay
them
to listen to
us
. Even our disgrace is uninteresting.

Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only afterwards did God give him
human
life. The latter is an act no human creator can imitate, says W., but the former—merely animating shapeless clay—lies in the power of the great rabbis.

Perhaps I am
his
golem, W. says. Perhaps he conjured me up from a sense of his own failure. Perhaps I am only the
way
in which W. is in the wrong, the incessant embodiment of his error.

Martinis at the
Plymouth Gin Cocktail Bar
. This is the way to spend Saturday afternoon, W. says.

His entrance key to the cocktail bar is his proudest possession. Only the most select Plymouthians are given one, he says. Only those people the bar staff
personally like
.

It’s an especial honour to one, like W., who is not a
native son
of the city, W. says. It means the Plymouthians regard him as one of their own.

‘Do you think the Geordies regard you as one of
their
own?’, W. says. Do they see me as a
man of the toon
? He remembers our afternoon in
The Crown Pasada
, when W. fell into
football conversation
with the people at the next table.

I was silent, as usual, W. says. I said nothing. My inability to talk about football is a major flaw, W. says. My inability to talk about
anything.
—‘Do you consider yourself a man of conversational range?’, W. asks. ‘What
can
you talk about? What topics do you feel comfortable with? Go on, say something interesting’.

I begin to tell him about my troubles at work, but W. stops me. He’s heard it all before, he says. Too many times! And besides, W.’s work troubles are much greater than mine.
I begin to talk of my
romantic
troubles, but W. says he’s heard too much about them, too.—‘You bring them on yourself’.

I begin to tell him about my general
life
troubles, but W.’s never really believed that I am genuinely troubled, he says. I’m a petty man, yes; a troubled man, no. A man who wails and moans at the slightest thing: obviously; a man who knows the meaning of suffering: obviously not.

I begin to tell him of the troubles of my past. This is potentially interesting, W. says. He likes to stare with me into the
plague pit of my memories
. Sometimes he thinks of me as a kind of
martyr
—to what, he doesn’t know.

Anyway, I’m boring him now, W. says, and reads out a passage from Rosenzweig:

Nature and revelation: the same material, but opposite ways of being exposed to the light. The more everyday the material, the more revealing and revealed can it become
.

Religion is only ever about the everyday, W. says with great firmness. That’s what Rosenzweig saw in rejecting mysticism. Revelation is a public affair! It’s about ritual, about ceremony as it is lived between people. And above all, it is about
speech
.

That’s why Rosenzweig abandoned academia, W. says. He was looking for another kind of speech. He was looking to be interrupted. Henceforward, he vowed only to inquire when he found himself
inquired of
, that’s what he said. And
inquired of by
people, ordinary people
rather than scholars.

Ah, have we ever been
inquired of
?, W. says. Would we know what it meant?—‘Interrupt me!’, he cries. ‘Go on, say something!’ But he knows I’ll only arse about, he says. He knows I’ll make the wrong kind of interruption.

Smashed glass on the cobblestones, vomit on the Mayflower Steps: Plymouth quayside, Saturday night.

We’re among the people, W. says as we drink our pints of Bass in
The Dolphin
. We’re in the midst of everyday life. Didn’t Rosenzweig say that
theological problems must be translated into everyday terms, and everyday problems brought into the pale of theology
?, W. says. Didn’t he say that
philosophical problems must be translated into those of everyday life, and everyday life brought into the pale of philosophy
?

Rosenzweig’s task is our task, we agree, looking round the bar. This is where philosophy must begin anew, right here in the pub! This is where theology will be reborn, in the thick of the everyday!

‘My God, they were so drunk, weren’t they?’, W. says in the taxi on the way home.
We
were drunk, I tell him. We
are
drunk. What were we talking about?, W. wonders. Did he really give an impromptu sermon on the apocalypse, on the end of times? He remembers the merchant seamen nodding their heads. The miserable record of Plymouth Argyll FC, W. told them; the threat of the Royal Navy to withdraw from
the city; the colonisation of Plymouth by students: all signs of the apocalypse, W. said. Signs of the End of Times, they all agreed.

The working class know that the end is coming, W. says. They can sense it. And perhaps they have a sense of the messianic, too; W.’s not sure. But we
spoke
, that was the main thing. We spoke to strangers. Was that what it means to be
inquired of
?

Speech, speech. Will we ever understand what is meant by this word? The
old thinking
, as Rosenzweig calls it, is content with abstraction, says W. The
old thinker
is alone, alone before the timeless. But the
new thinking
depends upon speech, which is bound to time and nourished by it. The
new thinker
neither can nor wants to abandon this element, that’s what Rosenzweig thinks, according to W.