Dogma (17 page)

Ah, but what does the Hindu understand of speech, of the significance of speech?, W. says. One doesn’t have to understand the meaning of the Vedic mantras for them to do their work, haven’t I told him that? It’s enough just to hear them, an indecipherable murmuring, which is why they pipe them over loudspeakers in Indian hotels. It’s good luck just to be in their presence, W. says. But this means that the Hindu is never
inquired of
, he says. The Hindu is never
interrupted
.

Our
twelfth
Dogma presentation … what can we recall of that? What really happened? W.’s unsure; I’m unsure. Was there shouting? Were we forcibly ejected from the auditorium? Was there a diplomatic incident? Did I expose myself? Did W.? Did
I
expose him? Something happened, we’re sure of that, but we have only screen memories of the whole fiasco. We remember only owls, swooping through the night.

And the
thirteenth
? We skipped the
thirteenth
presentation altogether. W. was always superstitious, he says.

For the
fourteenth
, W. spoke of my shortcomings, I of his. He cursed me and I cursed him. We came to blows. It was a performance piece, we agreed. It was a
gestural
form of Dogma.

The
fifteenth
, the notorious
fifteenth
, was for our benefit only. We gave it in secret, under cover. No one must know! That’s what we said to ourselves. Dogma has to undergo a profound occultation. We had to draw it back to the source. To draw ourselves back! It was like a sweat lodge, we remember.

And the
sixteenth
? It was in the great outdoors, we remember. On one of our walks over Jennycliff to Bovissands. I held forth for over an hour, W. remembers, visibly
moved. The clouds parted. All of nature paused to listen. But I spoke only to myself, W. says. My presentation was inaudible to him.—‘You muttered. You murmured’. I was like a druid, W. says. It was as though I commanded great forces, and was casting a spell.

His presentation was much more sober, W. remembers. It had to be; I needed a counterbalance. He berated and harangued me. He listed my faults, and my many betrayals of him. It took a long time; nearly all the way back to the city. He was still speaking as we crossed the bay in the water taxi, concluding only when we reached
Platters
.

The
seventeenth
? We don’t want to remember the
seventeenth
. It was a misstep, W. says. It was misconceived from the first. We’re not dancers, and we should never try to be. Of course, we were trying to dance as
non-dancers
, but who would know that?

The
eighteenth
was to be an action presentation. It was to be Dogma’s first murder. But we got scared and backed out. It was not yet time for the
Dogma Terror
.

‘
We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head
: that’s Kafka’, W. says. So God, too, wants to die?, he wonders. It’s not just us?

Death, death: W. hears the great bells tolling in the sky. We’re at the end, the very end! There can’t be much more, can there? This is it, isn’t it? The credits are rolling … The game is up …

They’re calling him home, W. says. He sees them as figures filled and flooded with light, the philosophers of the past, the other thinkers. Is that Kant? Is that Schleiermacher? Is that Maimon, made of light?

And meanwhile, what’s happening to me? I’m falling, W. says. I’m heading down, only down, W. says. And who do I see? Is that Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate Messiah? Is that Alcibiades, the betrayer of Athens? Is that the
humanzee
, bred in Soviet research labs?

The rats are dying, I tell W. on the phone. I can hear them squeaking, which they only do when they’re distressed—that’s what the pest controller said. I hear them squeaking at night in agony.

Oh God, the smell! I say to W. on the phone, a week later. It’s so thick, so pungent. It’s almost
sweet
, I tell him. The flat smells of a kind of sweet rotting. Is this what death smells like? Is this what it smells like at the end?

A week later. There’s been a plague of
bluebottles
in the flat, I tell W. They’re coming up from beneath the floorboards, I tell him. They must be hatching in the darkness beneath the flat. They’re huge! They buzz against the window in small swarms, I never know how many there are. And that’s how they die, in small swarms, their curled up bodies littering the sill.

I imagine I can hear fly eggs hatching in the darkness, I tell W. I imagine I can hear the maggots writhing. I imagine sticky sounds as I lie in the dark. I imagine the slurp of eyeless, headless maggots melting their food with enzymes. I imagine the low buzzing of bluebottles just hatched from pupae …

The rats will have their revenge, I tell W. I know that.
Rats always come back, the pest controller said, and they’ll have learnt from their mistakes.

I think the rats are coming back in the form of flies, I tell W. I think it’s flies that are going to inflict the
rat-punishment
. I can imagine a swarm of bluebottles boring through my body, I tell him. I can imagine them crawling out of my mouth …

Dogma: why did it chose us, the greatest of idiots?, W. wonders. Why were we singled out? It must be like the balance of electrical charges that produces lightning in clouds. There must be the greatest possible difference between positive and negative ions—and thus, with Dogma, between the highest thought and the basest idiocy. That’s when lightning strikes.

But what did we
think
? What did thought set afire in us? We have no idea, no inkling. How could we? Dogma was greater than us. Dogma was broader, more generous. Weren’t we only swallows in the updraft? Weren’t we leaves swept up in an autumn storm?

Perhaps we didn’t think anything at all: how can we know? Perhaps we simply wandered out into the snow and got lost. Perhaps it was all a dream: the last hallucinations of men dying of frostbite.

We
felt
things. That is undeniable. We set out our coracles on great currents of feeling. We had feelings, we are sure of that. Pathos opened its door to admit us. But did we
think
, too? Did thought take flight in us as feeling did? These are questions we can never answer, says W. It’s for others to judge.

What did they see as our eyes rolled upward? What, as we spoke in tongues and writhed on the floor? They must have thought we were on fire, though they couldn’t see the flames, says W. That we were on fire from thought: did they think that? That thought itself had set us aflame like Olympic torches?

What impression did we leave, as we exited the room? Was the light still dying in their eyes? Had they seen too much? Had they heard much too much? Did an angel with a fiery sword stand behind us?

We felt things. Like great, dumb animals, we were only feeling. We felt, like cattle lowing in the pasture. We felt, like pigs snuffling in the dirt. What could we understand of what we had been called to do?

But we were called, W.’s sure of that. We felt things. We felt the apocalypse approaching. We knew it, as animals know when an earthquake’s coming. We sent up our howls into the night.

Don’t you see?, we said to people. Don’t you feel it?, we said, grabbing them by the lapels. We all but carried placards out into the street.
The end is nigh
: isn’t that what wrote itself across every page of our essays?
Repent
: didn’t that word repeat itself in everything we said?

The signs are coming faster now, we agree. The current’s quickening, as it does when a river approaches the waterfall. And who are we, who can read such tell tale signs? To whom has the secret begun to reveal itself?

The apocalypse will reveal God’s plan for us all, that’s what it says in the Bible. And if there is no God? No plan, either.

The signs are coming faster: my life, W.’s, our friendship, our collaboration. Signs, all signs, which in turn enable us to read signs, as though our friendship was only a fold in the apocalypse, a way for it to sense its own magnitude.

W.’s been moved to a new office, now they’ve closed his department. His corridor’s like death row, he says. It’s where they put the condemned, he says. It’s where they put those they are going to sack. He imagines he can hear screams from the offices adjacent to him, but when he looks out, he sees only people like himself, working at their desks.

Have they told him what he’s meant to do?, I ask him. Not yet, W. says. He has no idea what they want. He’s been stirring up the students, W. says. They’re threatening to demonstrate against the closures. He’s been stirring up the staff, too, with his impromptu speeches. But he doesn’t think that it’s helping his case.

What’s to become of him? What’s to become of
us
? Because it’s no different with me, he says.—‘Of what does your life consist, essentially? Where is it taking you?’, W. asks. ‘Where do you think it’s all going?’ A pause. ‘Nowhere!’, says W. with great vehemence. ‘You’re going nowhere!’

Of course, I have my constant nightmares of unemployment to spur me on, W. says. I have the job pages I read and my ridiculous fantasies about
entering management
or
beginning a new career as a lawyer
. They keep me going, W. says.
They give me the illusion of choice, when in fact I have no choice at all.

W. admires my sense of persecution.—‘You really think they’re out to get you, don’t you? You really think you’re in trouble’. I may be in trouble, W. says, but it’s nothing to do with what I’ve done.—‘It’s not about you’, W. says. ‘It’s never about you’.

When the end comes, it’ll be nothing personal.—‘Your name will appear on someone’s list. They won’t know who you are. They won’t know anything about you. But they’ll put a line through your name and that will be that’.

The fact that I think it’s personal accounts for my desire to protest. I jump up and down like an angry ape, W. says. I hoot and wail.

One day, I’ll surprise you all. One day, I’ll really surprise you
 … That’s what I mutter to myself in brown pub interiors, isn’t it?, W. says. But drunks are full of a messianic sense of self. They’re full of a sense of a great earthly mission.
Just listen for a moment
, that’s what the drunk says.
Listen—just listen!

And when W. does listen? When he gives me the floor? Nothing, he says. Silence, he says. And the great roar of my stupidity.

Dogma. What did it mean? Should we even say the word aloud? Perhaps it shouldn’t be spoken of, like the name of God. Perhaps saying it only diminishes its glory, and hearing it only lessens its resonance.

Wasn’t it greater than us? Broader, as the sky is broad? It was our measure. It was our ennoblement. When, otherwise, could we have been
borne
by thought,
thought
by it, rather than taking ourselves to have had thoughts of our own?

In truth, we’ve had no thoughts. We were ventriloquised; we spoke, but not with our own voices. We wept, but they weren’t our tears. We felt things, great things, but in what sense were those feelings ours? Dogma touched us without noticing us. Dogma brushed us with its wings.

In the end, we should throw ourselves upon its shore, and ask for mercy. In the end, we should offer ourselves in sacrifice, burning upwards into the great mouth of the sky.

Dogma. What have we learnt? Have we been able, like the famous Chinese artist who vanished into his own painting, to disappear into our thought? But we had no thoughts, not really. We weren’t able to think.

We
felt
things, though, didn’t we? Yes, we felt things. We were moved, weren’t we? Yes, we were moved. And our audience? In the end, we had no audience. We had the sea, the air. We had Plymouth Sound; we had Whitley Bay. We had our great walks and our trips by water taxi.

We had the elements, which we redeemed through our speech … We had each other. But did we really have that, each other?, W. wonders. Didn’t we talk past each other? And didn’t we also talk past ourselves? My God, we could barely understand our own words!

We felt things, to be sure. But weren’t we only vessels to be smashed? Weren’t we messengers to be shot? Weren’t we asked to bare our chests to the bayonets? Who were we, in the end, to understand our significance?

Why can’t we give up? Why press ourselves on? Why, despite everything, do we cling to life? It must be some instinct, W. says. Some residue of natural life. But then, too, our instincts have always been wrong. They’ve always led us in the wrong direction. We’re not just
careless
of our lives, we’ve
wrecked
them.

W. hears the distant sound of sobbing and wonders if it’s him. I hear a distant mewling, and wonder if it’s me.

W.’s impressed: I’m preparing myself, he says. I know what’s to come, and I’ve prioritised rightly. I live each day as though it were the day
after
the last. And I’m drinking my way through it. Numbing myself.

If only death would come cleanly! If only it would fall like a great axe from the sky! But that’s not how it will come, and that’s the horror. We won’t be able to die: isn’t that it? The power to die will be taken from us.

That’s why we have to drink ourselves into a stupor. It’s practice, practice for the coming end. That’s how to meet death: dead drunk, and without a care. That’s how to meet the death that will not come.

‘We tried to tell them, didn’t we?’, says W. Yes, we tried to tell them.—‘We tried to warn them?’ Yes, we tried to warn them. Our lives were living warnings. We all but set ourselves on fire. We all but soiled ourselves in public.—‘Actually, you did soil yourself in public, didn’t you?’, W. says.