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 withan 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. Andinstead 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