W. is going to commence hostilities with scholar-brothers from the old days, when his college was a place of reputation, when the department of theology and philosophy was the jewel in its crown. He’s heading into battle with scholar-sisters from the times when the college was a place of sanctuary for academics from overseas: when they took in scholar-refugees, scholar-survivors from war-torn countries, giving them an office in which to work, and a pass for the library.
W.’s about to skirmish with fellow scholars of ancient civilisations, fellow men and women of the archive, who have spent their lives travelling from place of learning to place of learning. He’s pitted against scholars mesmerised by Old Europe, as he is. Mesmerised by Kafka, mesmerised by Spinoza. Mesmerised by the French and the German and the ancient Greeks …
Krishna comforted Arjuna by granting him a divine vision, W. recalls. Arjuna was allowed to witness Krishna’s celestial form: to see the entire cosmos turning in his body. Arjuna saw the light of God, the Lord of Yoga, as a fire that burns to consume all things. He saw a million divine figures in the fire, and the manifold contours of the universe united as one …
‘What does your celestial form look like?’, says W. ‘Go on, show me’. Actually, he thinks he’s already seen it, W. says, or parts of it. My vast, white belly. My flabby arms. The trousers that billow round my ankles …
And my dancing, my terrible dancing. It’s the end of the cosmos that W. sees in my dancing. He sees the destruction of the divine figures, and of the manifold contours of the universe. He sees primordial chaos, he says. He sees the putting out of the stars. He sees the extinguishing of the sun, and the night swallowing the day. He sees the opposite of the act of creation, the opposite of cosmogony …
‘The floodgates of the sky broke open’, he says, quoting Genesis. He sees ‘the waters of the great Deep’, and ‘the Dragon of the Sea’, he says, quoting Isaiah.
How does the Mahabharata end? W. asks. And darkness fell over India, I remind him. — ‘You Hindus have a great sense of decline. And darkness fell over India …’, he sighs. ‘That’s the way to end an epic’.
Our inaugural Dogma presentation was on Kafka — the room was packed, and W. spoke very movingly of his encounter with The Castle in a Wolverhampton library. I spoke (very ineptly, W. said afterwards) about my encounter with The Castle in a Winnersh Triangle warehouse. — ‘What were you on about?’ But Dogmatists stick together; a question for one is a question for the other. You have to stand back to back and fight to the last. Did we win? We lost, says W., but we did so gloriously.
Our second Dogma presentation concerned friendship as a condition of thought. W. stole half his argument from Paolo Virno, and the other half from Mario Tronti. Virno and Tronti write of their ideas as though they were categories in Aristotle, W. says. He admires that. W. reminds me of the sixth Dogma rule: always claim the ideas of others as your own.
Forming an ultra-Dogmatist splinter group, I spoke not of friendship in general, but of my friendships (my friendships with nutters and weirdos, W. says.)
W. is prompted to add another rule to Dogma: Dogma is personal. Always give examples from your own experience. No: the presentation in its entirety should begin and end with an account of your own experience. Of turning points! Trials! Of great struggles and humiliations! My life lends itself particularly well to such a rule, W. says. — ‘The horror of your life’.
Our third Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear open our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster — with world-historical seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without doubt!
W. spoke of nuns; I, of monks. He spoke about dogs; I, about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.
In our fourth Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. But there can be no love in the modern world, W. says, there can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of agape and eros. And then W. spoke of philein: the greatest kind of love, he said.
We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greek terms that you barely understand.
Sometimes, in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps. Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.
What has he learnt about me through his studies? W. wonders. What’s become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. Here is a man with whom I can think, he told himself. Here is a companion in thought.
Wasn’t I the one he’d been waiting for? Wasn’t I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I had a lower IQ than his, of course, but I was quick. I spoke well. My voice resounded beneath vaulted ceilings. Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W. concluded the same.
W. sought a thought-partner, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay, he says. He saw me spinning into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn’t I? Or perhaps it was never there — W. wonders about that too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely a mirage, being only what W. wanted to see.
A thought-companion, that’s what W. wanted. And instead what has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.
For our fifth Dogma presentation, W. wrote two quotations on the blackboard, and we sat in silence. ‘Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering’, he wrote. ‘Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death’, he wrote.
For our sixth, W. contented himself with a single quotation: the words Sorel was supposed to have said on his deathbed. ‘We have destroyed the validity of all words. Nothing remains but violence’. For the seventh, but a single word was necessary, projected onto the wall behind us: DERELICTION.
Spital Tongues, Newcastle. — ‘God, your flat is filthy’, W. says. ‘You don’t have any idea how to clean, do you?’ W. suspects it’s a Brahminical thing. I can’t do any menial labour! I’m too pure to clean. I can’t get down on my hands and knees.
Detachment, that’s what I’m cultivating, W. says. The maximum possible tension between outside (the squalor of the flat) and inside (the ultimate self, Atman). And this tension is like a drawn bow, ready to shoot me towards enlightenment, W. says.