Dogma (4 page)

We’re the only white people in the bus station. Why is that?, we ask the woman in front. Where are the students? Have they all got cars? Where are the
white
poor?—‘They don’t take the bus’, she says. The policeman watches on resignedly, a holstered gun pulled up round his shoulder.

They don’t take the bus
: these words are like a blow to W. Just like the blow of realising that there is no train station in Nashville. A city without a train station!, W. says. He can barely imagine it. A city without trains!

On the big TV screen, they’re showing a documentary on airplane crashes, with footage of one crash after another. Screeching brakes. Metal crunching. Screams.

W.’s becoming hysterical.—‘Why don’t they tell us anything?’, he cries. ‘Are we cattle?’

I sit him on the floor and tell him Hindu stories to calm him down. I tell him how Ganesha came to have the head of an elephant, and Daksha the head of a goat. I tell him of the sage who temporarily substituted a horse’s head for his own, knowing that the secret wisdom he was about to gain would shatter it into a million pieces. (‘That’s what would happen
to you if you ever had an idea’, W. says.) And I tell him how Dadhyanc’s head was lopped off for revealing the secret of the sacrifice to human beings.

‘Hinduism is a bloody religion’, W. says.

On the bus. W. opens his man bag to show me what he’s brought to read on our trip to Memphis. Rosenzweig, of course. You need a volume of Rosenzweig with you at all times, W. says. Polyani’s
The Great Transformation
. And Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
, which dreams of what America might have been, W. says.

We must read if we want to live, W. says. We may have forgotten how to live, but they—the authors of the books in his man bag—have not.

And what have I brought?—‘Maimon’s autobiography. Oh yes, very good. Scholem’s memoir of Benjamin. Very impressive’. But he knows I won’t open my books, W. says. He knows I’ve got a
National Enquirer
concealed somewhere on my person.

W. doesn’t believe I actually read books.—‘They’re like totems to you’, he says. ‘They contain what you lack. You surround yourself with them, but you don’t understand them’.

My office is filled with books, that’s the paradox, W. says. I get a childlike excitement from them, from the
fact
of them, with their heady titles and colourful spines.

Of course, the real reader has no need to surround himself with books, W. says. The real reader lends them to others, without a thought of them being returned. What need has he for a library of books? He prefers to be alone with only the most essential works, like Beckett with his Dante, in his room at the old folks’ home. Beckett with his Dante, and cricket on the TV.

Memphis, unexpectedly, is
cold
. The taxi driver tells us that the weather doesn’t know what it’s doing. We go to
Gap
to buy warm clothes. To Gap! In
Memphis
! Imagine! The last place we wanted to go!

Gap
’s impossibly cheap. How can clothes be so cheap? In what mess of exploitation have we been caught? But we’re cold, we have to compromise.

I buy a hoodie, W. a cardigan. We examine ourselves in the full length mirror. We look
preppy
, we decide, without knowing what this word means. We look like
preppies
.

It’s still cold outside. What are we going to do? We rent a pool table. Preppies play pool, we decide.

We’re being followed, W. observes, and it’s true. The same rough-looking guys we saw earlier are slumped in leather chairs in the pool hall.

They hate preppies and want to rid the world of them, W. says. Which is fine, because he thinks he hates preppies and wants to rid the world of them. They’re going to beat us to death, and he’ll welcome it. But we outlast our would-be assailants, who tire of watching us playing bad pool and drinking.

The word
barbeque
doesn’t mean the same thing over here, says W. over dinner. Nor does the word
ribs
. He’s right. What have we been served? Vast oval plates of red-cooked meat. French fries in great piles. It’s frightening. I must be in heaven with my enormous greed, W. says. My life has peaked at this point, hasn’t it? I’ve finally found a country where I don’t feel perpetually starved to death.

W. has always liked chubby men, he says. We recall the fat singers we admire, who drink wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. Is he angry because he’s fat?, I ask of the singer in Modest Mouse.—‘No, he was angry and then he got fat’, W. says. Do you think he
minds
being fat?, I ask.—‘He has other issues’, W. says.

Of course, Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. Yes, but he was ill. Blanchot was thin, too, says W. But he was ill as well.—‘I bet Brod was fat’. Definitely, I agree. He drank too much, that’s why he got fat.—‘Why do you think he drank?’, W. asks. Because he knew he wasn’t Kafka, I tell him.

We watch a band on Beale Street playing for tips. There are preppies everywhere, all around us. W. hates them. What are we doing here?, he says. Between songs, the singer comes round the crowd with a hat.

People have to promote themselves in America, we’ve noticed that. They’re not ashamed of it, as they would be back home. There’s no welfare state, that’s what does it, W. says. But playing for preppies! It’s the ultimate indignity, W. says, over our pints of Big Ass Beer.

It’s my birthday today
, reads the sign on the windshield of the taxi carrying us home. We ask our driver to tell us about the old Beale Street, before it became a tourist trap.—‘It was a rough place. People getting stabbed.
Pee Wee’s … The Panama … The Hole in the Wall
. They’re long gone’, he says. ‘The gambling houses, too. Even the pool rooms … Beale Street was torn down after Dr King was assassinated … They rebuilt it in the ’80s for the tourists …’

He tells us about how he saw Howlin’ Wolf play one of the bars of old Beale Street, back in the ’50s.—‘Wolf’d crawl around the stage on all fours, howling’, he says. ‘That’s how he got his name. And then, ‘Wolf’d get women to ride up on his back. And then he’d go round the crowd. He had an extra-long microphone cord, see. Sometimes he’d go out and sing in the street. He’d howl at the moon …’ He laughs.

‘Is it really your birthday?’, W. asks him. ‘Every day’s my birthday’, he says.

In the hotel bar, W. muses on our lecture tour. It’s not going well, is it?, he says. It’s going badly, I agree. Worse than ever. But why does it surprise us?, W. wonders. What did we expect? Some Kant-like resurgence, late in life? Some late awakening from our dogmatic slumbers?

Our presentations are so
polite
, he says. So conventional. We should learn from Howlin’ Wolf, he says. We need more
pathos
in our presentations. More
fire
. We need to
howl at the moon
 …

Isn’t that what W. has always hoped to hear in our
presentations: my howling at the moon? The great cry of non-thinking: isn’t that what he’s waiting for? But all I’ve ever managed is the
mewling of the imbecile
, W. says.

Ah, when will we learn how to speak like
real
philosophers?, W. says. When will philosophy itself sing through our presentations?

Philosophy itself. W. imagines us like the Delphic Pythia, speaking for the Oracle, interpreting what it said. He imagines us like the hierophants of the Eleusian Mysteries, bringing congregants into the presence of the holy.

Philosophy
itself
would speak, W. says, and we would interpret what it said for our audiences. Philosophy itself would sound through our presentations, like the wind through a wind harp.

He’s too scholarly, W. says. Too concerned with footnotes and references, and appeals to the great names of philosophy. And as for me … W. shakes his head. What can he say? It’s not simply that I’m
un
scholarly, that I haven’t mastered the protocols, which of course I haven’t. It’s more than that, W. says. I’m
non
-scholarly, W. says, where the ‘
non-
’ means much more than a simple negation.

I’m a parody of the scholar: of course. I’m a grotesque double of the real philosopher: very true. But it’s more than that … 
I pay no heed to philosophy whatsoever
, W. says. Reason, rigorous argument: none of it means anything to me. In its way, it’s admirable, W. says. But the effect on my audiences has been terrible.

My booming. My near-bellowing … W., as my co-presenter, has to sit beside me as I babble. W. has to field
questions for me, and explain me to our fellow conference-goers.

Ostracism, that’s what I’ve brought him, W. says. Derision. Every door that was open to him is now closed. The shutters have been slammed on the windows, and W.’s out in the cold, stamping his feet for warmth. And there I am beside him.

What do I want from him?, W. asks. What does he want from himself? Ah, there’s no way of telling. He’ll simply have to follow where I lead, and listen to what I say. We’re heading out, out into the wilderness, he knows that. Out beneath the flashing stars and the silvery pines, to where nothing can survive.

How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, W. wonders. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy?

Who allowed it? Who raised our aspirations to the sky? We want to blame someone. It must be someone else’s fault. Our horizons were opened too widely. We saw too much … But who let us see? Who left the doorway open?

Suicide by Cop
, W. reads a newspaper headline. What of suicide by philosophy?, he says. What of the attempt to incite murder through the extent of one’s stupidity? Because that’s the only way he can account for us, the shortcomings of our thought. It’s the only way he can account for our persistent attempt to think.

There’s something entirely lacking in us, W. says, although he’s not quite sure what it is. Shame—is that the word? Anyone else would have stopped doing what we do.

There’s a short story by Kafka, a fragment really, W. says. A man in a great hurry gets lost on the way to the
station and asks a policeman for directions.
Gibt sie auf!
, says the policeman,
Give it up!
That’s what we should do, says W. Give it up!

W. never likes to be too far from bodies of water. When he visits me, he always demands to be taken to the sea. And he always takes me directly to the sea, when I visit him. ‘
I’ll meet you at the sea
’, he texts me, when I tell him I’ve arrived. I have to go straight there, straight from the airport to the sea to meet him.

And now, in the middle of America, when the sea’s so far away? We feel drawn to the Mississippi. One of the blue-capped tourist guides points the way. Down Beale Street, cross the road …

We stand by the roadside, trying to figure out how to get across. Cars pass in an endless stream. Lorries, buses, without a break.

We’ll have to run, I tell W. Run! We run, just making the other side. But Sal’s been left behind. There she is, waving to us. There’s nothing we can do, W. says. She’s lost! She’ll never make it! We’ll have to go on without her.

Still one more road to cross. We follow the same technique: a headlong rushing, closing our eyes as we run. We’re madmen! Sal, meanwhile, has found a button you can push to get the traffic lights working. She crosses calmly. Why didn’t
we work that out? She crosses the second street.—‘You twats’, she says, ‘why did you leave me behind?’

The Mississippi: more than half a mile wide.—‘I
think that the river is a strong brown god
’, W. says, quoting Eliot. ‘
Keeping his reasons and rages, destroyer, reminder/ Of what men choose to forget …
’

Destroyer indeed. Periodically, the Mississippi breaks the levees and floods the river bottoms where the poor live and work, W. says. That’s what happened in the great flood of ’27. A million people were displaced. Whole towns were engulfed …

They made the poor blacks pay for their aid, of course. And if they couldn’t pay? They were confined in work camps, and made to do forced labour …

W. presses an earbud into my ear and an earbud into his. We listen to the deep blues of the Delta. Tommy Johnson. Big Joe Williams. We listen to pulsating grooves, barely songs, with no distinct beginning or end, and to verses that speak of turbulence and dislocation, of rootlessness and violent death, of the great flood of ’27 and the great drought of ’29.

It’s the
music of life
, W. says. Of still being alive. Of being torn apart, of being insulted and injured, of being still alive in the one chord vamp, in a rhythm that precedes melody, that breaks and fragments it, dissolving melody in the waters of its own flood.

What would my blues name be?, W. wonders. Hindu Fats, he says. Hindu Fat Boy.

On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.’s Facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses, with the camera set on automatic. And behind us, the muddy brown waters of the Mississippi, surging along.

America’s so big!, we agree. How far is it to the coast, east or west? A thousand miles? Two thousand? Some great, improbable distance, we’re agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive.

There’s so much space here. America’s so exposed. We think of the hurricane damage we saw from the Greyhound bus. Houses torn up, trees uprooted and flung about. I took photos. We’d never seen anything like it. America’s in danger, we agree. It’s too big! It’s too vulnerable!

We think of the coming catastrophe, of the winds that will sweep this country, the deserts that will claim it, the skies that will darken over it. Will it be here that the apocalypse rises to its greatest magnitude?

That’s what Josh T. Pearson sings, W. says, tapping his iPod. ‘The
USA’s the centre of JerUSAlem …
’