Dogma (7 page)

Yes, that’s where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts’ expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.

The Trout
, overlooking the meadows.

Oxford: the very name is a blow to W. It strikes him on the head like a bludgeon. It sounds through him like a depth-charge. Oxford!, Oxford!

Why do we come here year after year?, W. says. Why, to our conference, and to wandering from pub to pub after our conference? Why, lamenting the intellectual state of our country, and
our
intellectual state?

Britain is not a country of thought, we tell ourselves every year. The Anglo-Saxon mentality is opposed to abstraction, to metaphysics, we tell ourselves. It is completely opposed to German profundity and French radicality, to Central European
Weltschmerz
, and to Russian
soulfulness
 … It has nothing to do with Spanish
duende
, or the Greek sense of
fate
.

And above all, the British don’t understand
religion
, W. says. They don’t understand
religious pathos
. The British are too empiricist, W. says. Too literalist. They don’t see that religion’s all around them. Religion is about
this
world, about everyday things. That’s what the continentalist understands, he says. That’s what the new atheist
fails
to understand.

Hasn’t W. tried to set up an
alternative intellectual network
for people like ourselves? Hasn’t he run his famous Plymouth conferences, inviting but a handful of speakers to his college, and allowing them to select their ideal interlocutors? Hasn’t he wheedled money from all kinds of sources to pay for it all?

Ah, it was marvellous, until I ruined it, W. says. Why did he think of inviting me?, he says, shaking his head as we sip our pints. He still remembers it, the whole afternoon devoted to my work, to my so-called work. The thing is, the audience—my invited audience—were on my side to begin with, W. says.—‘They wanted you to do well’. But what happened? He shakes his head.

Why did he invite me?, W. wonders. There’d be sense in bringing people to his college to inspire him, but not to destroy him. Unless it’s his death-drive, W. says. Unless
I’m
his death-drive, for how else could he account for it?

I ruined his conference, there’s no question of that, W. says. I ruined his whole series of conferences. And what choice did he have but to return to Oxford, to our Oxford conference, and with me in tow? What, but to rejoin the would-be Oxonians, who hire out the college of St. Hilda’s when all the real Oxford academics are away?

Philosophy’s like an unrequited love affair, W. says. You get nothing back; there’s only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled. But sometimes he feels he might be capable of philosophy. That
we
might be capable of it, together—together with our friends.

Didn’t he have friends once?, W. says. I drove them away, of course. They ran away in horror. What is W. doing?, they wondered. They wrote him emails. Didn’t he realise he was
ruining his reputation
?

Ah, why does he hang out with me?, W. says. It’s not as if he has no options. He
chooses
to hang out with me, that’s the thing. It’s his choice—or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the
opposite
of an instinct?

Either way, he remains in my labyrinth, W. says. His fear: he’ll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until he’s forgotten he’s
in
a labyrinth. I’m becoming his world, says W. His whole world, and isn’t that the horror?

He’s like an actor who’s forgotten he’s acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that’s it, isn’t it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …

We need a
realitätpunkt
, W. says. A point of absolute certainty, from which everything could begin. But the only thing of which he can be certain is the eternal crumbling of our foundations, the eternal stop sign of our idiocy.

Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves. Every day, the fresh revelation of our limitations and of the absurdity of our ambitions. What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?

What’s happened to them now, his friends?, W. says. They’re scattered to the four winds, he says. They’re fighting their own battles against redundancy, as he is fighting his. And they’re applying, like him, for the tiny number of jobs which appear in the newspapers.

Crowd rats into smaller and smaller spaces, and they turn on one another, devouring one another, W. says, as we pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs. That’s what’ll happen to us, and to our friends, he says. We’ll turn on one another, devouring one another …

It’s the opposite of everything W.’s hoped for. He dreamed we could stand shoulder to shoulder with them all, with all our friends; and that, standing together, we would form a kind of phalanx, stronger than we would be on our own. He dreamed we’d mated for life like swans, and that we could no more betray one another than tear off our own limbs …

We speak of thinker-collectives over our pints in
The Turf
. Of Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling dancing round their freedom tree. Of Novalis and the Schlegels, practicing their
symphilosophical
collaboration on the streets of Jena. We speak of Marx, Engels and other revolutionary émigrés, on the run from the police of continental Europe, holed up in London after the failed revolutions of 1848.

And we speak, coming to the twentieth century, of artistic avant-gardes, of Surrealism and the Situationists, with their manifestos and expulsions. Who was more fierce than André Breton? Who, more demanding than Guy Debord? Antonin Artaud ate too loudly—expel him from the group! Asger Jörn kept picking his nose—excommunicate him at once!

Rules: that’s what we need, W. says. We need to be constrained. We need a
prime mover
. We need a mastermind to crack the whip.—‘Lapdogs’, he’ll shout. ‘Lackeys!’

And if we can find no leader to impose discipline on us, we must impose it on ourselves, W. says. We must become each other’s intellectual conscience. We must become each other’s leader, and each other’s follower.

W. speaks of the
liberating constraint
sought by the members of OULIPO—Perec, Roubaud and the rest—with their famous rules, which they use to compose literary works. Palindromes, lipograms, acrostics and all that … OULIPO’s work is
collaborative
, that’s the point, W. says. Its products are attributed to the group.

Didn’t Queneau call Oulipians ‘
rats who will build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape?
’, W. says. We are those rats, we agree. We need liberation. But first, we need to build a labyrinth.

We speak of the so-called ‘vow of chastity’ of Dogme95—of Lars Von Trier and his friends—who banned all artifice in the making of their films. No stage sets, no blue screen, no CGI dinosaurs or period pieces of any kind. No score; no weeping violins.

Films have to descend to the everyday, and tell stories about the everyday, that’s what Dogme95 demanded, W. says. Films have to concern themselves with reality. With love. With death.—‘Pathos!’, W. says. ‘It’s all about pathos!’

Dogma: that’s what we should call our intellectual movement, we agree. We should make our own ‘vow of chastity’, our own manifesto. On Magdalen Bridge, leaning over the Cherwell, we cry out our rules over the water.

First
rule: Dogma is
spartan
. Speak as clearly as you can. As
simply
as you can. Do not rely on proper names when presenting your thought. Do not quote. Address others.
Really
speak to them, using ordinary language. Ordinary words!

Second
rule: Dogma is full of
pathos
. Rely on emotion as much as on argument. Tear your shirt and pull out your hair! And weep—weep without end!

Third
rule: Dogma is
sincere
. Speak with the greatest of seriousness, and only on topics that
demand
the greatest of seriousness. Aim at maximum sincerity. Burning sincerity.
Rending
sincerity. Be prepared to set yourself on fire before your audience, like those monks in Vietnam.

And the
fourth
rule? Dogma is
collaborative
. Write with your friends. Your very friendship should depend on what you write. It should mean nothing more than what you write!

W. reminds me of the collection,
Radical Thought in Italy
. Paolo Virno! Mario Tronti! They’ve always been a touchstone for him. It’s pure Dogma, he says. They’re all friends. Their essays have no quotations, no references, they all have the same ideas and write about them as though they were
world-historical
. That’s another rule, W. says: always write as though your ideas were world-historical. And always steal from your friends. Steal from everyone! In fact, that should be compulsory: Dogma
plagiarises
. Always steal other people’s ideas and claim them as your own.

A free man should walk slowly, that’s what the Greeks thought, says W. The slave hurries, but the free man can take all day.—‘Slow down!’, he tells me, as we wander out through the meadows to
The Trout
. I know nothing of
the art of the stroll
, W. has always said. I know nothing of the pleasures of the flâneur.

W.’s always had a messianic faith in the walker. No one is more annoyed than he by the channelling that forces the pedestrian through a predetermined route. For this reason, W. has always hated airports. There’s only ever one direction in an airport, he says. And if you’re allowed to wander away, it is only to tempt you to buy things from the innumerable shops.

Doesn’t Newcastle airport channel every traveller through a shop floor? It scandalises him, W. says. He wants to knock every bottle of perfume from the rack. He wants to smash every overpriced bottle of wine. But here, today, in the meadows? Every direction is open to us, he notes. We can walk wherever we like and as slowly as we please.

We remember Mandelstam’s great walks through the streets of St Petersburg, before he was imprisoned for his poem about Stalin, and murdered in the Gulag. He composed
poems in his head as he walked. He wrote them in his head, as he walked along, and then went home to write them out. And when he was betrayed, and his manuscripts destroyed, his wife stowed them in
her
head. A precious cargo.

W. knew I was a would-be
man of culture
when he saw her memoir
Hope Against Hope
on my bookshelf. It didn’t matter to W. whether I’d read it or not, or whether I had any real idea of what it contained. The title itself must have excited me: that was enough for W. The title, and the
myth
of Mandelstam, exiled from his city and murdered in the Gulag: I had a feeling for that; what else could W. ask for in a collaborator, in these fallen times?

Celan, in the midst of his walks, would phone his wife with the poems he had written in his head, W. remembers. And didn’t Celan claim to have seen God under the door of his hotel room? He saw God as a ray of light under his hotel door, W. says, it’s very moving.

Ah, but what sense can we have of Mandelstam, of Celan? What can we understand of poetry, in the
Age of Shit
? In the end, we love only the
myth
of poetry, the myth of the
world-historical importance
of poetry, and the myth of ourselves as readers of poetry …

We love poetry because we have no idea about poetry, W. says. We love religion because we have no idea about religion. We love God because we have no idea of God …

There’s Walser, too, the patron saint of walkers, W. says. Walser, walking in the Swiss Alps. Walser, who’d long since devoted his time to being mad, rather than writing: he knew his priorities. He was mad, and the mad walked. And one
day—fifty years ago, nearly to the day—they found him dead in the snow. He’d walked his way to death. Which is to say, says W., he’d met death on his own terms, far from his mental asylum. And that’s exactly his point, W. says. The walker meets the world on his own terms. The walker—the
slow
walker—meets the world according to his measure, W. says.

Ah, if only we were as wise as Walser, that is to say, as
mad
as Walser. If only we understood that our duty is to walk, not to write, merely to walk and not to think. To give up thinking! To give up writing! To give up our
reading
, which is really only the
shadow
of reading, the search for the world-historical importance that reading once had. But we go on, don’t we? We collect our books. We surround ourselves with them, the names of Old Europe, when we should have been walking, just that, all along.

It’s time for his nap, W. says as we head back to town. Time to go back to his room for his
power nap
, as he calls it. He learned about
power naps
from a public lecture at the university. Sleep for twenty minutes, and you fool the mind into thinking you’ve been asleep for much longer. Twenty minutes! That’s all he needs to regain his composure, W. says.

But I never let him nap, W. says. In fact, I scorn his desire to nap and even the very notion of a nap. I keep him up all night with my inanities, W. says, and then I keep him awake all day with
more
inanities.

Of course, he’s the one who insists that we stay up later than anyone else, that we follow the night through all the way until dawn, W. says. How many nights have ended for us just as dawn was brightening the sky, and the first birds were starting to sing? How many nights, with
Stroszek
on the TV and
The Star of Redemption
open on the desk?