Dogma by Lars Iyer Read Free Book Online

round here somewhere?
    Then we see it: the cabin. It’s almost too late for W. He’s raving. What’s he doing here? How did he end up here? He can’t go another mile! He’s a non-passenger! A non-traveller! Not another mile!
    Later, W. collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: a dying swan, half wrapped in his towels. What’s this country doing to him?, he says. How did he end up here? We talk softly to him, over our Plymouth Gins cut with tapwater.
    When he recovers, W. speaks movingly of the early blues players. Such short lives! But life is short! There’s not much time!
    What need was there to come to America?, W. asks. He’s learnt nothing here. His thought hasn’t advanced. Not one new idea! … The United States of Thought-Robbery , that’s what they should call it, W. says. The United States of Vastation and Waste  …

 
    Newcastle.—‘There’s no sight finer’, W. says of the Tyne Bridge, which skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roof-gardens. The streetlamps, painted the same dark green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher …
    ‘You need a project’, says W. ‘You need something to occupy you’. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He’s even deigned to collaborate with me. But I’ve never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I’ve never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.
    Hadn’t W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn’t he pictured us in his mind as two larks, looping and darting in flight—two larks, wings outstretched, flights interlaced, interwoven, together and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air …
    We were never to rest. We’d live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the heavens …
    To think like a javelin launched into space. To think liketwo javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall, as two bodies would fall—tumbling through space. Thinking would be as inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we’d fall upwards into the sky …  upwards into the heights of thought …
    And instead? There is no flight: not mine, not W.’s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he’d left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion, an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It’s my fault , he can say, even as he knows that nothing would have happened if he were free of me.
    ‘Take me to the sea!’, W. cries every time he visits. He has to see the sea! My North Sea is very different from his Atlantic, he says. It even looks colder, he says, as it comes into view behind the Priory.
    Sometimes we pay to enter the Priory, so W. can see the weathered gravestones, whose inscriptions are no longer legible, and inspect what’s left of the bunkers, which are a kind of cousin to those at Jennycliff, with empty sockets where there were once gun placements. But today we’re on a mission. W. has to get air into his lungs, he says. And he needs a drink!
    We follow the road round to The Park Hotel , where we are served by an old waiter in a tuxedo. Chips and mayonnaise in the sun, watched by an old Bassett hound, head onpaws. Two pints of beer arrive on a tray, the waiter with a white towel over his forearm.—‘To the sea!’, W. toasts, as our glasses clink.
    We talk of our American adventure, and of what we learned from it. We talk of Marx, and of Stroszek . And W. wasn’t arrested! And I didn’t shoot myself! That we survived at all is a miracle, we agree.
    What did we learn from our trip? What was its significance? Sometimes W. thinks