Dogma (18 page)

No more, says W. No more. He’s passing through a dead zone, he says, like the ones they are beginning to find in the oceans: blank regions where there is no life. There’s no life in him! It’s all over!

W.’s despairs are like magnetic fields, he says, like great clouds in the air through which he passes. They have nothing to do with his inner states at all. It’s not a matter of emotion. His despairs, W. says, are not even his.

Are we even alive?, asks W. Is this even happening? Are we really talking—right now? Because all he can hear is a great roaring, W. says. He’s falling, W. says, as through the clouds of Jupiter.

When will he ever hit anything real? When will he strike
his head upon the hard shore of the real? Because that’s what he wants, even if it dashes his head to pieces. That’s all he wants, and especially if it dashes his head to pieces …

Only death is real, W. says, and it’s time to die. But death isn’t coming any closer. If anything, he’s
too
healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, eradicated, along with everyone who has known us. Our memory should be wiped from the earth …

Sometimes W. finds the coming disaster a comforting thought. It will be a relief, a blessed relief, the parched earth, the boiling sky. Because won’t it entail
our
annihilation? Won’t it mean, at the very least,
our
complete destruction?

Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn’t that a relief: that there is no future? And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

Our eternal puppet show, says W. Our endless ventriloquy. Who’s speaking through us? Who’s using our voices? Sometimes he swears he hears a voice within our own, W. says. He can hear it, he says, on the threshold of audibility, a little like the grinding of Pythagoras’s celestial spheres. Only this time it’s idiocy itself that grinds itself out. This time it’s the amazing force of idiocy, a solar wind sweeping through empty space.

Where’s it all going? Where’s it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.’s in the dark, and it’s not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun?

It’s come. It’s finally happened. He’s being made redundant. They’re running him out of the college on a rail, W. says. Even I, with my
Hindu fatalism
, couldn’t have predicted this.

He’s been banned from teaching, W. says. They’ve threatened to escort him from the premises, if he engages in any more ‘seditious behaviour’ … But he’s never engaged in seditious behaviour, W. says. He’s only ever
told the truth
.

What’s worse is that no one wants to see him, W. says. No one wants to see a
dead man walking
, W. says. It would remind them of their shame and their lies. It would remind them of the horror of their moral compromise, which even they can feel.

They can’t bear to look at him, W. says. They retreat into doorways as he approaches. They turn away from him. Because he is a dead man walking and it’s all their fault, he says. Because his life has been ruined and it’s all their doing.

He had been waiting for the end, W. says, and still the end surprised him. That’s the lesson, he says: the end will always come too soon. The end will be there, tapping on the window …

They’ll put a sack on your head. They’ll lead you through the forest. They’ll make you kneel … Will you cry out for mercy? Will you accept your fate solemnly, with dignity? Or will you piss and shit yourself in fear? Will you make a run for it, before braining yourself on a tree?

For what cause are you dying? You don’t know. You’ll never understand. It’s beyond you, your role in all this. What is certain is that you must die. Your time has come. You thought you had years—decades—but your time has passed, you’ve outlived your time, this is it …

W. is making a run for it, he says, sack on head. Any moment now, he’ll brain himself on a tree …

W.’s seeking my help, he says. Oh, he knows I will offer him only the most grotesque parody of assistance, but that’s the point. He’s fully aware that I’m the last person who can help him—that bringing me along to the meeting with his employers is the most foolish of ideas.

Why not take a lawyer?, I ask him. He’s allowed to. No, he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape with scabs round his mouth, throwing faeces around the room.

Perhaps it will scare them. Perhaps they’ll look at him in an entirely different light. Did you see who he had with him?, they’ll say.
What
he had with him? My God, we shouldn’t make his life any worse: that’s what they’ll say, W. says. And perhaps then they’ll show mercy.

The kingdom of unemployment is rising to enclose him, W. says. Soon he’ll be lost among the shades and spectres. Will I visit him in his new life? Will I sit with him in the gutter?

Ah, he’ll finally have found the everyday, he says. He’ll finally have met it at its level. He’ll finally know what I know, he says.
Eternullity
, he says.
The infinite wearing away
 …

And will he finally understand religion? Will he finally understand what God means? Will he finally utter a true word?

He knows what will happen, W. says. Gradually, he’ll be forgotten. Gradually, his presence will fade from everyone’s life.—‘Where’s W.?’, they’ll ask at first. But later, they will only have a sense of absence, with no knowledge of its cause. And later still, there will be no absence either. Life will be complete again, without tear.—‘Even you’, W. says. ‘Even you will forget me’. And then, ‘especially you’.

He was like a
mayfly of thought
, W. says. A single day, that’s all he had. A single day—the whole of his life—in the sun.
He spread his wings, rode the thermals upwards, felt the rush of the whole landscape beneath him—all thought, all thinkers … And now that it’s at an end? Now that his life as a thinker has passed into oblivion?

I will have to remember, W. says, that’s my task. He has granted me the great task of memory, of memorialising. I’m to write the introduction to his collected works; I’m to assemble them from his extant notes, his drafts, his marginalia. I’m to leave a record of his table-talk. Because he’s heading out now, onto the ice, W. says.—‘I may be some time’.

‘Tell me a Hindu story’, W. says. ‘A last Hindu story …’

I tell W. of the fate of Bhishma in the
Mahabharata
. This wise and virtuous man had been granted the boon of deciding the hour of his own death. There he lay, on the battlefield, his body filled with arrows.

It was time to die, white-bearded Bhishma thought. He’d lived a long life! He’d seen it all, even the disaster that was the battle on the Kurushetra plains. Even the darkness that was soon to fall over India.

The fighting around him stopped. His great-nephew, Arjuna, sought to slake his uncle’s thirst by firing an arrow into the ground to let cooling spring water arc into his mouth. Silence reigned over the battlefield. And in the time that was left to him, Bhishma spoke.

He spoke of what he’d learnt in his long life. He spoke of his horror at the battle that set uncle against nephew, friend against friend. He spoke of what was to come, and his horror
at what was to come. And then his white-haired head fell back, and death came as a sweetness to him.

What will
he
say, I ask W., now the end has come, the endless end? Will he speak of love? Of friendship? Of the life of thought? He’ll speak about
me
, says W. Of not being able to get rid of me. Of my being here, even now …

It’s time to die, says W. But death does not come.

LARS IYER lectures in philosophy at Newcastle University. He is the author of the novel
Spurious
, two books on Maurice Blanchot (
Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political
and
Blanchot’s Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature and the Ethical
) and his blog Spurious. He is also a contributor to Britain’s leading literary website, Ready Steady Book. Watch for the final book in the trilogy,
Exodus
, coming in 2013.